If you call the process evolution, then no more has been evolved than was involved. If you prefer direct creation, then nothing is seen in the creature that was not built into him by the Creator. Either way, if a self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active man appears on one side of nature, a self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active personal God is, we may know, on the other.
I.
The importance of a correct first principle, and of a right idea of the nature of that first principle, cannot be urged too strongly. In the right solution of the question we are considering, everything depends on it. If we start with water, as Thales did, we will be forced to conclude that individual lives, like bubbles, will eventually fall back and mingle with the waves of the sea.
If we start with the unknowable, as Spencer did, we shall be led to see that human spirits will lose themselves at death, as candles lose their light when the wicks are consumed.
It is not left us, however, arbitrarily to assume such a first principle as comports with the particular theory of life it is our purpose to establish. The first principle that corresponds to reality is already implicit in the facts, the origin, and purpose, and end of which we wish to know. The law of gravity is implicit in falling bodies, and in the revolving stars. The sunbeam is implicit in the growing tree. All that happens when one posits a first principle that is not implicit in the facts he is considering, is that his first principle will fail to account for the facts. Matthew Arnold had a perfect right to assume as a first principle, “The Stream of Tendency, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” This looked poetic and impersonal, and in his esteem served him as a working hypothesis.
It never seemed to occur to him that his principle implied the same elements and attributes the theologians regarded as uniting in God; the elements and attributes he was so anxious to get rid of. Herbert Spencer, with a theory to work out, and a particular system to buttress and bolster, devised and adopted a first principle that seemed to promise most to his peculiar views. This he had a right to do. But he had no right to take as a first principle the unknowable, with which to destroy the Christian’s God; and just as soon as he had accomplished this to his entire satisfaction, to turn deliberately and take nearly every attribute of the Christian’s God to bestow upon his unknowable. It is hardly to be supposed that Mr. Spencer, with malice aforethought planned the death of God in order to steal his attributes. The more charitable view is to suppose that at the outset his intention was to erect an absolutely new philosophic edifice, upon a new and original foundation. To do this, it was necessary to clear the ground of everything in sight. So in a high moment of philosophic self-confidence, he determined on the obliteration of all previous and time-honored first principles, that he might posit one of his own making and to his own liking.
This was the destructive stage of his mental movement, and it did not occur to him that many of the elements he was clearing away in such wholesale fashion would be necessary to carry up his new philosophic temple. When he got through with the period of preparation, he had nothing to start with but a plain, simple, empty, unknowable. But it soon became evident that the unknowable must have some content, in order to support a decent and orderly structure. At this point he took the attributes of the Christian’s God, Being, Power, Activity, Causal Energy, Omnipresence, and filled up his empty unknowable with them. Then he proceeded with his work.
II.
In starting with a self-conscious, self-determining and personal God, then, as a first principle that accommodates and insures the immortality of the individual spirit, we are only beginning with what is implicit in the facts of nature and human life. Let it be clearly apprehended that the ground of the self-conscious, self-determining, personal God is thought. That the fundamental and first thing in this universe is mind. That the being of God is secondary to the mind, or thought of God. God has being, because he has thought, and not thought, because he has being. The trouble with the pantheistic system of Spinoza was that he looked upon God, first as infinite substance or being, while thought was only one of the modes of this being, and extension was the other. The root of all doubt and skepticism is to be traced to a confused notion of the nature of God. Many speak of God as the Supreme Being, and advertise by their language that in their esteem God is diffused nebulosity, or universally extended externality. There never was a skeptic in the world who had come to the rational and tenable position, that God is primarily, and fundamentally, and essentially thought. We may properly speak of his being, his wisdom, his justice, his truth, his love; but these are different determinations of his thought. God’s being is the externality of his thought. His wisdom is his thought devising means to ends. His justice is his thought balancing and regulating. His truth is his thought in realization. His love is his thought in sacrifice. “In the beginning was the Word.” A word is an expressed thought. “The Word was with God.” The realized thought or word was with God, the Eternal Thinker, or Thought. “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Light was thus the expression of thought. Nearly all materialism and pantheism look upon things as an emanation from something. Vapor emanates from the surface of a river, and is only the river in diffusion. But the universe does not emanate from God; it is the direct creation and expression of his thought. Potentially the universe was always in the thought of God.