3. Mistaken Passion for Construing Everything.—Natural science, with its sole problem of the tracing of immediate causal connections, naturally provokes a persistent, but nevertheless thoroughly mistaken, "passion," as Lotze calls it,[14] "for construing everything,"—even the most real and final reality, spirit; which wishes to see even this real and final reality explained as the mechanical result of the combination of simpler elements, themselves, it is to be noted, finally absolutely inexplicable. Such perverse attempts will be widely hailed, by many who do not understand themselves, as highly scientific. And one who refuses to enter upon such investigations will be criticized by such minds as "hardly getting into grips with his subject."
But it is a false application of the scientific instinct that leads one to seek mechanical explanation for the final reality, or that urges to precision of formulation beyond that warranted by the data. It is from exactly this falsely scientific bias that theology needs deliverance. "For," as Aristotle reminds us, "it is the mark of a man of culture to try to attain exactness in each kind of knowledge just so far as the nature of the subject allows." There is a wise agnosticism that is violated alike by negative and by positive dogmatism. It is often overlooked that there is an over-wise radicalism that assumes a knowledge of the depth of the finite and infinite, quite as insistent and dogmatic as the view it supposes itself to be opposing. "I know it is not so," it ought not to need to be said, is not agnosticism.
The guiding principle in a truly scientific theology is this, as Lotze suggests: Just so far as changing action depends upon altering conditions, we have explanatory and constructive problems to solve, and no farther. No philosophical view can do without a simply given reality. And we shall never succeed in understanding by what machinery reality is manufactured—in "deducing the whole positive content of reality from mere modifications of formal conditions."[15]
We shall not allow ourselves to be misled, therefore, by the scientific sound of the detailed application of the analogy of the organism to the facts of the social consciousness. And it is a satisfaction to see that the clearest sociological writers are coming to agree that there is strictly no "social mind" that can be affirmed to exist as a separate reality, supposed to answer to society conceived in its totality as an organism.
III. THE ANALOGY TESTED BY THE DEFINITION
OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
When, now, we test the analogy of the organism by its competency to express the full meaning of the social consciousness, as it has been defined, we must say that the analogy but feebly expresses the likeness of men; it best expresses the inevitableness of mutual influence, though even here there is no understandable ultimate explanation; it fairly expresses the desirableness and indispensableness of mutual influence, but, of course, with entire lack of ethical meaning; and it quite fails to express the sense of the value and the sacredness of the person, the sense of obligation, and the sense of love. We need to see and feel exactly these shortcomings, if we are not to abuse the analogy. There is no social consciousness that will hold water that does not rest on what Phillips Brooks called "a healthy and ineradicable individualism," in the sense of the recognition of the fully personal. We are spirits, not organisms, and society is a society of persons, not an organism, in a strict sense. Why should we wish to make society less significant than it is?
[12] Cf. King, Op. cit., pp. 92 ff., 179.
[13] Introduction to Philosophy, p. 373.
[14] The Microcosmus, Vol. I, p. 262.
[15] Lotze, The Microcosmus, Vol. II, pp. 649 ff.