Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the mistakes about Causality against which this lecture has been a protest—I mean the tendency to resolve it into necessary connexion—did in the end come to admit that in the large resort we come into contact with Causality only in our own Wills. I owe the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the paragraph in which he introduces it:—
'Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one inseparable whole, and advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is especially interesting to find that even Kant at length—in his latest work, the posthumous treatise on the Connexion of Physics and Metaphysics, only recently discovered and published—came to see the fundamental character of voluntary movement. I will venture to quote one sentence: "We should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not even through experience, if we were not conscious of our own activity in ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, approximation, etc." But to Maine de Biran, often called the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to our own British psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, Bain, Spencer, is especially due the merit of seeing the paramount importance of the active side of experience. To this then primarily, and not to any merely {54} intellectual function, we may safely refer the category of causality.'[9]
I may add that Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, from which I have quoted, constitutes the most brilliant and important modern defence of the doctrine which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set before you in this lecture.
It is a remarkable fact that the typical exponent of popular so-called 'scientific' Agnosticism, and the founder of that higher metaphysical Agnosticism which has played so large a part in the history of modern Philosophy, should before their deaths have both made confessions which really amount to an abjuration of all Agnosticism. If the ultimate Reality is to be thought of as a rational Will, analogous to the will which each of us is conscious of himself having or being, he is no longer the Unknown or the Unknowable, but the God of Religion, who has revealed Himself in the consciousness of man, 'made in the image of God.' What more about Himself we may also hold to be revealed in the human spirit, I hope to consider in our next lecture. But, meanwhile, a word may be uttered in answer to the question which may very probably be asked—Is God a Person? A complete answer to the question would involve elaborate discussions, but for our present purpose the question may be answered very {55} briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of a human soul—if we are justified in thinking of Him as a self-conscious Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover (if I may a little anticipate the subject of our next lecture) in relation with, capable of loving and being loved by other such beings—then it seems most natural to speak of God's existence as personal. For to be a self-conscious being—conscious of itself and other beings, thinking, willing, feeling, loving—is what we mean by being a person. If any one prefers to speak of God as 'super-personal,' there is no great objection to so doing, provided that phrase is not made (as it often is) an excuse for really thinking of God after the analogy of some kind of existence lower than that of persons—as a force, an unconscious substance, or merely a name for the totality of things. But for myself, I prefer to say that our own self-consciousness gives us only an ideal of the highest type of existence which it nevertheless very imperfectly satisfies, and therefore I would rather think God is a Person in a far truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which any human being can be a person. God alone fully realizes the ideal of Personality. The essence of Personality is something positive: it signifies to us the highest kind of being within our knowledge—not (as is too often supposed) the mere limitations {56} and restraints which characterize human conscious life as we know it in ourselves. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest existence within our knowledge, we had better call Him a Person. The word is no doubt inadequate to the reality, as is all the language that we can employ about God; but it is at least more adequate than the terms employed by those who scruple to speak of God as a Person. It is at least more adequate and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force, a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' Things do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere totality of minds like our own.[10]
LITERATURE
As has been explained in this Lecture, many idealistic writers who insist upon the necessity of God as a universal, knowing Mind to explain both the existence of the world and our knowledge of it, are more or less ambiguous about the question whether the divine Mind is to be thought of as willing or causing the world, though passages occur in the writings of most of them which tend in this direction. 'God {57} must be thought of as creating the objects of his own thought' is a perfectly orthodox Hegelian formula. Among the idealistic writers (besides Berkeley) who correct this—as it seems to me—one-sided tendency, and who accept on the whole the view of the divine Causality taken in this Lecture, may be mentioned Lotze, the 9th Book of whose Microcosmus (translated by Miss Elizabeth Hamilton and Miss Constance Jones) or the third Book of his Logic (translation ed. by Prof. Bosanquet), may very well be read by themselves (his views may also be studied in his short Philosophy of Religion—two translations, by the late Mrs. Conybeare and by Professor Ladd); Pfleiderer, Philosophy and Development of Religion, especially chapter v.; and Professor Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism.
Among the non-idealistic writers who have based their argument for the existence of God mainly or largely upon the consideration that Causality is unintelligible apart from a rational Will, may be mentioned—among older writers Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Essay I. (especially chapter v.), and among more recent ones Martineau, A Study of Religion. Flint's Theism may be recommended as one of the best attempts to state the theistic case with a minimum of technical Metaphysic.
Two little books by Professor Andrew Seth (now Seth Pringle-Pattison), though not primarily occupied with the religious problem, may be mentioned as very useful introductions to Philosophy—The Scottish Philosophers and Hegelianism and Personality.
[1] Of course deeply religious men like Green who have held this view did not admit, or did not realize, such consequences. The tendency here criticized is undoubtedly derived from Hegel, but passages suggestive of the opposite view can be extracted from his writings, e.g.: 'God, however, as subjective Power, is not simply will, intention, etc., but rather immediate Cause' (Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., ii. p. 129).
[2] The idea of Causality was by Kant identified with the idea of logical connexion, i.e. the relation of the premisses of a syllogism to its conclusion; but this does not involve time at all, and time is essential to the idea of Causality. For an admirable vindication of our immediate consciousness of Causality see Professor Stout's chapter on 'The Concept of Mental Activity' in Analytic Psychology (Book II. chap. i.).