It is this open acknowledgment of our ignorance of the highest things which makes this system of philosophy distasteful to many minds: it is the absence of any similar acknowledgment which forms the attraction and the seductiveness of Pantheism in one way, and of Positivism in another. The pantheist is not troubled with the difficulty of reconciling the philosophy of the absolute with belief in a personal God; for belief in a personal God is no part of his creed. Like the Christian, he may profess to acknowledge a first principle, one, and simple, and indivisible, and unconditioned; but he has no need to give to this principle the name of God, or to invest it with such attributes as are necessary to satisfy man’s religious wants. His God (so far as he acknowledges one at all) is not the first principle and cause of all things, but the aggregate of the whole—an universal substance underlying the world of phenomena, or an universal process, carried on in and by the changes of things. Hence, as Aristotle said of the Eleatics, that, by asserting all things to be one, they annihilated causation, which is the production of one thing from another, so it may be said of the various schools of Pantheism, that, by maintaining all things to be God, they evade rather than solve the great problem of philosophy, that of the relation between God and His creatures. The positivist, on the other hand, escapes the difficulty by an opposite course. He declines all inquiry into reality and causation, and maintains that the only office of philosophy is to observe and register the invariable relations of succession and similitude in phenomena. He does not necessarily deny the existence of God; but his personal belief, be it what it may, is a matter of utter indifference to his system. Religion and philosophy may perhaps go on side by side; but their provinces are wholly distinct, and therefore there is no need to attempt a reconciliation between them. God, as a first cause, lives like an Epicurean deity in undisturbed ease, apart from the world of phenomena, of which alone philosophy can take cognisance: philosophy, as the science of phenomena, contents itself with observing the actual state of things, without troubling itself to inquire how that state of things came into existence. Hence, neither Pantheism nor Positivism is troubled to explain the relation of the One to the Many; for the former acknowledges only the One, and the latter acknowledges only the Many.
It is between these two systems, both seductive from their apparent simplicity, and both simple only by mutilation, that the Philosophy of the Conditioned, of which Sir William Hamilton is the representative, endeavours to steer a middle course, at the risk of sharing the fate of most mediators in a quarrel,—being repudiated and denounced by both combatants, because it declares them to be both in the wrong. Against Pantheism, which is the natural development of the principle of Indifferentism, it enters a solemn protest, by asserting that the Absolute must be accepted in philosophy, not as a problem to be solved by reason, but as a reality to be believed in, though above reason; and that the pseudo-absolute, which Pantheism professes to exhibit in a positive conception, is shown, by the very fact of its being so conceived, not to be the true Absolute. Against Positivism, which is virtually Materialism, it protests no less strongly, maintaining that the philosophy which professes to explain the whole of nature by the aid of material laws alone, proceeds upon an assumption which does not merely dispense with God as a scientific hypothesis, but logically involves consequences which lead to a denial of His very existence. Between both extremes, it holds an intermediate position, neither aspiring, with Pantheism, to solve the problems of the Absolute, nor neglecting them, with Positivism, as altogether remote from the field of philosophical inquiry; but maintaining that such problems must necessarily arise, and must necessarily be taken into account in every adequate survey of human nature and human thought, and that philosophy, if it cannot solve them, is bound to show why they are insoluble.
Let us hear Hamilton’s own words in relation to both the systems which he opposes. Against Pantheism, and the Philosophy of the Unconditioned in general, he says:—
“The Conditioned is the mean between two extremes,—two inconditionates, exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible,[K] but of which, on the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, one must be admitted as necessary. On this opinion, therefore, our faculties are shown to be weak, but not deceitful. The mind is not represented as conceiving two propositions, subversive of each other, as equally possible; but only as unable to understand as possible either of the two extremes; one of which, however, on the ground of their mutual repugnance, it is compelled to recognise as true. We are thus taught the salutary lesson, that the capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence; and are warned from recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful revelation, we are thus, in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all comprehensible reality.”—Discussions, p. 15.
It must be remembered that, to conceive a thing as possible, we must conceive the manner in which it is possible, but that we may believe in the fact without being able to conceive the manner. Had Hamilton distinctly expressed this, he might have avoided some very groundless criticisms, with which he has been assailed for maintaining a distinction between the provinces of conception and belief.
Against Materialism, and virtually against Positivism in general, he says:—
“If in man, intelligence be a free power,—in so far as its liberty extends, intelligence must be independent of necessity and matter; and a power independent of matter necessarily implies the existence of an immaterial subject—that is, a spirit. If, then, the original independence of intelligence on matter in the human constitution—in other words, if the spirituality of mind in man be supposed a datum of observation, in this datum is also given both the condition and the proof of a God. For we have only to infer, what analogy entitles us to do, that intelligence holds the same relative supremacy in the universe which it holds in us, and the first positive condition of a Deity is established, in the establishment of the absolute priority of a free creative intelligence. On the other hand, let us suppose the result of our study of man to be, that intelligence is only a product of matter, only a reflex of organization, such a doctrine would not only not afford no basis on which to rest any argument for a God, but, on the contrary, would positively warrant the atheist in denying His existence. For if, as the materialist maintains, the only intelligence of which we have any experience be a consequent of matter,—on this hypothesis, he not only cannot assume this order to be reversed in the relations of an intelligence beyond his observation, but, if he argue logically, he must positively conclude that, as in man, so in the universe, the phenomena of intelligence or design are only in their last analysis the products of a brute necessity. Psychological Materialism, if carried out fully and fairly to its conclusions, thus inevitably results in theological Atheism; as it has been well expressed by Dr. Henry More, Nullus in microcosmo spiritus, nullus in macrocosmo Deus. I do not, of course, mean to assert that all materialists deny or actually disbelieve a God. For, in very many cases, this would be at once an unmerited compliment to their reasoning, and an unmerited reproach to their faith.”—Lectures, vol. i, p. 31.[L]
This part of Hamilton’s teaching is altogether repudiated by a recent writer, who, strangely enough, professes to be his disciple, while rejecting all that is really characteristic of his philosophy. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his work on First Principles, endeavours to press Sir W. Hamilton into the service of Pantheism and Positivism together, by adopting the negative portion only of his philosophy—in which, in common with many other writers, he declares the absolute to be inconceivable by the mere intellect,—and rejecting the positive portions, in which he most emphatically maintains that the belief in a personal God is imperatively demanded by the facts of our moral and emotional consciousness. Mr. Spencer regards religion as nothing more than a consciousness of natural facts as being in their ultimate genesis unaccountable—a theory which is simply a combination of the positivist doctrine, that we know only the relations of phenomena, with the pantheist assumption of the name of God to denote the substance or power which lies beyond phenomena. No theory can be more opposed to the philosophy of the conditioned than this. Sir W. Hamilton’s fundamental principle is, that consciousness must be accepted entire, and that the moral and religious feelings, which are the primary source of our belief in a personal God, are in no way invalidated by the merely negative inferences which have deluded men into the assumption of an impersonal absolute; the latter not being legitimate deductions from consciousness rightly interpreted. Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, takes these negative inferences as the only basis of religion, and abandons Hamilton’s great principle of the distinction between knowledge and belief, by quietly dropping out of his system the facts of consciousness which make such a distinction necessary. His whole system is, in fact, a pertinent illustration of Hamilton’s remark, that “the phenomena of matter” [and of mind, he might add, treated by materialistic methods], “taken by themselves (you will observe the qualification, taken by themselves), so far from warranting any inference to the existence of a God, would, on the contrary, ground even an argument to his negation.” Mr. Spencer, like Mr. Mill, denies the freedom of the will; and this, according to Hamilton, leads by logical consequence to Atheism.