Philosophy and Religion / Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

by Hastings Rashdall

{93}

(3) The creation of spirits. It may seem to some of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world cannot be explained without the assumption of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will. But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls. Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis—sometimes spoken of as Pluralism[3]—has many attractions: from the time of Origen onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature. If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an independent and original nature of their own capable of offering resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and independent beings not forming a part of the divine scheme. At all events, the result of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, within the psychical sphere as much as within the purely physical sphere. And in particular the body is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. We never find the intellect of a Shakespeare in connexion with the facial angle of a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance of being really the fruit of that union. Further, before birth the souls must be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of the kind, so as to rid them of all memory of their previous experiences. Such a conception seems to {96} me to belong to the region of Mythology rather than of sober philosophical thought. I do not deny that Mythology may sometimes be a means of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to which Philosophy vaguely points but which it cannot express in clearly apprehensible detail. But such a Mythology as this seems to be intellectually unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to explain the facts: there is nothing in our experience to suggest it, and much which is prima facie opposed to it. It really removes no single difficulty: for one difficulty which it presents some appearance of removing, it creates a dozen greater ones. It is a hypothesis which we shall do well to dismiss as otiose.

(4) Non-theistic Idealism. Somewhat less unmotived, if we look upon it from a merely intellectual point of view, is the theory of pre-existent souls without a personal God. Many, if not most, of you probably possess more or less acquaintance with the views of my friend, Dr. McTaggart. I cannot here undertake a full exposition or criticism of one of the ablest thinkers of our day—one of the very few English thinkers who is the author of a truly original metaphysical system. I can only touch—and that most inadequately—upon the particular side of it which directly bears upon our present enquiry. Dr. McTaggart is an Idealist; he recognizes the {97} impossibility of matter without mind. For him nothing exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the necessity for any one all-embracing or controlling Spirit: the only spirits in his Universe are limited minds like those of men and animals. He differs, then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned in getting rid of the hypothesis of a personal God side by side with and yet controlling the uncreated spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists in not treating the separate spirits as so many centres of consciousness quite independent of, and possibly at war with, all the rest: the spirits form part of an ordered system: the world is a unity, though that unity is not the unity which belongs to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the traditional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this Absolute is not a single spiritual Being but a Society: or, if it is to be called a single spiritual Being, it is a Being which exists or manifests itself only in a plurality of limited consciousnesses.

This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does, nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that we can regard it as an orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore, if part of the system is non-existent, the whole system—the system as a whole—must be treated as non-existent. The world is, we are told, a system; and yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real existence. The systematic whole does not exist in matter, for to Dr. McTaggart matter is merely the experience of Mind. What sort of existence, then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is {99} discovered? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided any mind or minds in and for which it is to exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now seem disposed to insist upon that point, I will say no more about it except that to my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual grasp. It can be stated; it cannot be thought.

Further, I would remind you, the theory is open to all the objections which I urged against the Pre-existence theory in its pluralistic form. I have suggested the difficulties involved in the facts of heredity—the difficulty of understanding how souls whose real intellectual and moral characteristics are uncaused and eternal should be assigned to parents so far resembling them as to lead almost inevitably to the inference that the characteristics of the children are to some extent causally connected with those of the parents.[4] Now the Pluralist can {100} at least urge that for this purpose ingenious arrangements are contrived by God—by the One Spirit whom he regards as incomparably the wisest and most powerful in the Universe. Dr. McTaggart recognizes no intelligence capable of grappling with such a problem or succession of problems. But this particular matter of the assignment of souls to bodies is only a particular application of a wider difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends that the Universe constitutes not merely a physical but a moral order. He would not deny that the Universe means something; that the series of events tends towards an end, an end which is also a good; that it has a purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose exists in no mind whatever, and is due to no will whatever—except to the very small extent to which the processes of physical nature can be consciously directed to an end by the volitions of men and similarly limited intelligences. As a whole, the Universe is purposed and willed by no single will or combination of wills. I confess I do not understand the idea of a purpose which operates, but is not the purpose of a Mind which is also a Will. All the considerations upon which I dwelt to show the necessity of such a Will to account for the Universe which we know, are so many arguments against Dr. McTaggart's scheme. The events of Dr. McTaggart's Universe are, upon the view of Causality which I {101} attempted to defend in my second lecture, uncaused events.

Nevertheless, as a Philosopher, I am deeply grateful to Dr. McTaggart. Not only does his scheme on its practical side seem to me preferable to many systems which sound more orthodox—systems of vague pantheistic Theism in which Morality is treated as mere 'appearance' and personal Immortality deliberately rejected—but it has done much intellectually to clear the air. Dr. McTaggart seems to me right in holding that, if God or the Absolute is to include in itself all other spirits, and yet the personality or self-consciousness of those spirits is not to be denied, then this Absolute in which they are to be included cannot reasonably be thought of as a conscious being, or invested with the other attributes usually implied by the term God.

And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view of the relation between God and human or other souls. To me, as I have already intimated, it seems simply meaningless to speak of one consciousness as included in another consciousness. The essence of a consciousness is to be for itself: whether it be a thought, a feeling, or an emotion, the essence of that consciousness is what it is for me. Every moment of consciousness is unique. Another being may have a {102} similar feeling: in that case there are two feelings, and not one. Another mind may know what I feel, but the knowledge of another's agony is (fortunately) a very different thing from the agony itself. It is fashionable in some quarters to ridicule the idea of 'impenetrable' souls. If 'impenetrable' means that another soul cannot know what goes on in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe that God knows what occurs in my soul in an infinitely completer way than that in which any human being can know it. Further, I believe that every soul is kept in existence from moment to moment by a continuous act of the divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon that Will, and forms part of one system with Him. On the other hand I believe that (through the analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the moral consciousness) I do know, imperfectly and inadequately, 'as in a mirror darkly,' what goes on in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean identity, the theory that souls are penetrable seems to me mainly unintelligible. The acceptance which it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, wholly to the influence of that most fertile source of philosophical confusion—misapplied spacial metaphor.[5] It seems easy to talk about a mind being {103} something in itself, and yet part of another mind, because we are familiar with the idea of things in space forming part of larger things in space—Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are not in space at all. Space is in the mind: the mind is not in space. A mind is not a thing which can be round or square: you can't say that the intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so many inches by so many: equally impossible is it to talk about such an intellect being a part of a more extensive intellect.

The theory of an all-inclusive Deity has recently been adopted and popularized by Mr. Campbell,[6] who has done all that rhetorical skill combined with genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in an attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same Logic which leads to the assertion that the Saint is part of God, leads also to the assertion that Caesar Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and all the wicked Popes who have ever been white-washed by episcopal or other historians are also parts of God. How can I worship, how can I strive to be like, how can I be the better for believing in or revering {104} a Being of whom Caesar Borgia is a part as completely and entirely as St. Paul or our Lord himself? Hindoo Theology is consistent in this matter. It worships the destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I confess I do not see what is left of Christianity. There is only one way out of the difficulty. If we are all parts of God, we can only call God good or perfect by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral consciousness have no validity for God, and therefore can tell us nothing about him. That has been done deliberately and explicitly by some Philosophers:[7] the distinguished Theologians who echo the language of this Philosophy have fortunately for their own religious life and experience, but unfortunately for their philosophical consistency, declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 'beyond good and evil,' can be no fitting object of {105} worship to men who wish to become good, just, merciful. If the cosmic process be indifferent to these ethical considerations, we had better (with honest Agnostics like Professor Huxley) make up our minds to defy it, whether it call itself God or not.

But it is not so much on account of its consequences as on account of its essential unmeaningness and intellectual unintelligibility that I would invite you to reject this formula 'God is all.' Certainly, the Universe is an ordered system: there is nothing in it that is not done by the Will of God. And some parts of this Universe—the spiritual parts of it and particularly the higher spirits—are not mere creations of God's will. They have a resemblance of nature to Him. I do not object to your saying that at bottom there is but one Substance in the Universe, if you will only keep clear of the materialistic and spacial association of the word Substance: but it is a Substance which reveals itself in many different consciousnesses. The theory of an all-inclusive Consciousness is not necessary to make possible the idea of close and intimate communion between God and men, or of the revelation in and to Humanity of the thought of God. On the contrary, it is the idea of Identity which destroys the possibility of communion. Communion implies two minds: a mind cannot have communion with itself or with part of itself. The two may also in a {106} sense be one; of course all beings are ultimately part of one Universe or Reality: but that Reality is not one Consciousness. The Universe is a unity, but the unity is not of the kind which constitutes a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr. McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a Society (as I have attempted to argue) which emanates from, and is controlled by and guided to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.[8]

(5) The intuitive theory of religious knowledge. In other quarters objection will probably be taken to my not having recognized the possibility of an immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of God to be inferred by intellectual processes which, when fully thought out, amount to a Metaphysic. It will be suggested that to make religious belief dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible to any but trained Philosophers or Theologians. Now there is no doubt a great attractiveness in the theory which makes belief in God depend simply upon the immediate affirmation of the individual's own consciousness. It would be more difficult to argue against such a theory of immediate knowledge or intuition if we found that the consciousness of all or most individuals does actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God: though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or implicitly a believer in such a Deity.