Philosophy and Religion / Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

by Hastings Rashdall

Once more to distant ages of the world
Let us revert, and place before our thoughts
The face which rural solitude might wear
To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece.
—In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
(Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave),
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Swept in the storm of chace; as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked
His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked
The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly.
The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings,
Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side;
And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns
Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard,—
These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood
Of gamesome Deities; or Pan himself,
The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God![3]

Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the interdependence of all the various forces and departments of Nature, have made such a view of it impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the cause of any one phenomenon (at least in inanimate nature), must be the cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the undesigned concurrence of a number of {44} independent agencies: and perhaps we may go on further to argue that this one cause must be the ultimate cause even of those events which are directly and immediately caused by our own wills. But that is a question which I will put aside for the present. At least for the events of physical nature there must be one Cause. And if the only sort of cause we know is a conscious and rational being, then we have another most powerful reason for believing that the ultimate reality, from which all other reality is derived, is Mind—a single conscious Mind which we may now further describe as not only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.[4]

Let me add this additional consideration in support of the conclusion that the world is not merely thought by God but is also willed by God. When we talk about thought without will, we are talking about something that we know absolutely nothing about. In all the consciousness that we know of, in every moment of our own immediate waking experience, we find thought, feeling, willing. Even in the consciousness of animals there appears to be something analogous to these three sides or aspects of consciousness: but at all events in developed human consciousness we know of no such thing as thinking without willing. All thought involves attention, and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds {45} suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian Idealists, we have been led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought and—I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to insist upon that—Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like Schopenhauer and Edouard von Hartmann,[5] we are conducted by the appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless abstraction, and that (as indeed even Hartmann saw) Schopenhauer's Will without Reason was as impossible an abstraction as the apparently will-less universal Thinker of the Hegelian:[6] while against Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of them, exactly {46} half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.

And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too involves generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. Bradley has shown us) much that was present in the living experience of actual perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of reproduction—and a very imperfect reproduction—of actual, living, sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the same distinction between actual present experience and the universal concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again, willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not cause and the tiny fragment {47} of the Universe which by means of this knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and Feeling—emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind—that we shall attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge? Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters—of what goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not so with our knowledge of God? The Gnosticism which forgets the immensity of the difference between the Divine Mind and the human is not less unreasonable—not {48} less opposed to the principles on which we conduct our thinking in every other department of life—than the Agnosticism which rejects probabilities because we cannot have immediate certainties, and insists on knowing nothing because we cannot know everything.

The argument which infers that God is Will from the analogy of our own consciousness is one which is in itself independent of Idealism. It has been used by many philosophers who are Realists, such as Reid or Dr. Martineau, as well as by Idealists like Berkeley, or Pfleiderer, or Lotze. It does not necessarily presuppose Idealism; but it does, to my mind, fit in infinitely better with the idealistic mode of thought than with the realistic. If you hold that there is no difficulty in supposing dead, inert matter to exist without any mind to think it or know it, but that only a Mind can be supposed to cause change or motion, you are assuming a hard and fast distinction between matter and force which the whole trend of modern Science is tending to break down. It seems to imply the old Greek conception of an inert, passive, characterless hule which can only be acted upon from without. The modern Physicist, I imagine, knows nothing of an inert matter which can neither attract nor repel, even if he does not definitely embark on the more speculative theory which actually defines the atom or the electron {49} as a centre of force. Activity belongs to the very essence of matter as understood by modern Science. If matter can exist without mind, there is (from the scientific point of view) some difficulty in contending that it cannot likewise move or act without being influenced by an extraneous Mind. If, on the other hand, with the Idealist we treat the notion of matter without mind as an unintelligible abstraction, that line of thought would prepare us to see in force nothing but a mode of mental action. The Idealist who has already identified matter with the object of thought will find no difficulty in going on to see in force simply the activity or expression or object of Will. And if he learns from the Physicist that we cannot in the last resort—from the physical point of view—distinguish matter from force, that will fit in very well with the metaphysical position which regards thought and will as simply two inseparable aspects of the life of mind.

And now I will return once more for a moment to the idealistic argument. I have no doubt that many of you will have felt a difficulty in accepting the position that the world with which we come in contact is merely a state of our own or anybody else's consciousness. It is so obvious that in our experience we are in contact with a world which we do not create; which is what it is whether we like it or not; which opposes itself at every turn to our desires and {50} inclinations. You may have been convinced that we know nothing of any external world except the effects which it produces upon consciousness. But, you will say to yourselves, there must have been something to cause these effects. You are perfectly right in so thinking. Certainly in our experience of the world we are in contact with a Reality which is not any state of our own mind, a Reality which we do not create but simply discover, a Reality from which are derived the sensations which we cannot help feeling, and the objects which we cannot help thinking. So far you are quite right. But very often, when the Realist insists that there must be something to cause in my mind this appearance, which I call my consciousness of a table, he assumes all the while that this something—the real table, the table in itself—is there, inside or behind the phenomenal table that I actually see and feel; out there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis of space, if we were right in arguing that space is made up of intellectual relations[7] and that {51} intellectual relations can have no being and no meaning except in and for a mind which apprehends them, then it is obvious that you must not think of this Reality which is the cause of our experience of external objects, as being there, as occupying space, as being 'external.' If space be a form of our thought, or (in Kantian language) a form of our sensibility, then the Reality which is to have an existence in itself, cannot be in space. A reality which is not in space can no longer be thought of as matter: whatever else matter (as commonly conceived) means, it is certainly something which occupies space. Now we know of no kind of existence which is not in space except Mind. On the idealistic view to which I have been endeavouring to lead you, we are, indeed, justified in saying that there is a Reality which is the underlying cause or ground of our experiences, but that that Reality is one which we may describe as Thought no less than as Will.

It may interest some of you to know how near one who is often considered the typical representative of naturalistic, if not materialistic, modes of thought, ultimately came to accepting this identification. Let me read to you a passage from one of Mr. Spencer's later works—the third volume of his Sociology:—

'This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists continually increase, is aided by that other {52} transfiguration resulting from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present, are expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas—are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though analysis afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there is always a nexus, which is the reality that remains fixed amid appearances which are variable;[1] yet we are shown that this nexus of reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorously bounded, cannot bring in among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential nature; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe: further thought, however, obliging us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is.'[8]

Now, I think this is one of the passages which would justify Mr. Bradley's well-known epigram, that Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more about the Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has ever ventured to tell us about God.

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