Religion must be cosmic.
Religion ought to be not only human but cosmic, and such it will be by the very nature of the case as the result of reflection. Theism will be obliged, if it is to subsist at all, to confine itself to the vaguest possible affirmation of a principle analogous to the soul as the mysterious origin of the world and of its development. The essential character of this principle must be that it is not really separate from the world nor opposed to its determinism. Beliefs in the creation and in a special Providence will give place more and more to belief in some spontaneous action, which is essential to beings generally, and in especial to those who are endowed with consciousness. Religion has gradually come to be a metaphysics of immanent finality, consisting in the single general proposition: the world possesses a significance, and is making toward an end and aim of its own;[133] the world is a society of beings who may come to discover in themselves an identity of moral impulse.[134] God is the term by which we designate what renders the movement of the world toward a state of peace, concord, and harmony possible. And since for human intelligence the possible and the real[135] are confused, a belief in the possibility of a better world becomes the belief in something divine which is immanent in this world.
Theism and atheism insensibly pass into each other.
Between idealistic theism and atheism the distance may be diminished ad infinitum. Many atheists, language to the contrary notwithstanding, are already at one with theists, intoxicated with God. If the actual existence of God be called in question, at least His progressive existence, the progressive realization of an ideal, the gradual descent of Christ from heaven to earth, may be admitted. The presentiment of progress thus becomes merged in a sense of the actual presence of the divine. The ideal seems to live and palpitate in the world about one; it is as if an artist’s vision of his work should be so intense that it should seem to float out of his brain and take its place upon the untouched canvass before him.
Theism must be furnished with a new vocabulary.
The power of words is limited; there are shades and subtleties of thought that cannot be expressed in language. What possible verbal reply can be given to questions like those that Marguerite asks of Faust? “It is a long time since thou wert at mass ... dost thou believe in God?” “My beloved,” replies Faust, “who would dare to say I believe in God?” ... “So thou dost not believe in Him?... Who would dare to say that he does not believe when he listens to the voice of his heart, when a sense of tenderness and happiness fills his soul? Pronounce the first words that occur to thee. What difference what thou callest it: happiness, heart, love, God? The feeling is everything, the word is vain.” The deist philosopher who holds words cheap seems to the superficial multitude to be simply a hypocritical sceptic; whereas the rigid atheist displays the narrowness of a sectary. What is certain is that the name of God has sometimes been associated with the greatest of human conceptions, sometimes with the most barbarous. The theistic hypothesis cannot continue to subsist unless it be freed once for all from puerile and gross associations.
Rational religion.
It is toward this consummation that theism, at its best, and in particular what Kant calls religion, within the limits presented by reason, is tending. It merits a special examination.
Neo-Kantianism.
The neo-Kantian religion ascribes the supreme place to moral goodness as the directing principle of every reasonable will. From that premise the neo-Kantians deduce “moral liberty” as the condition of goodness. For goodness, in their judgment, is simply freedom conceived as appearing to itself in its intellectual purity, and dominating the phenomenal self. Freedom thus conceived occupies a place above phenomena, which belong essentially to necessity and to determinism. Kantians found also implied in the notion of absolute liberty, subject to the condition of time, the attribute of eternity. They say, with Spinoza: “I feel, and I know that I am eternal; eternity is one with divinity.” Is it not the eternal that all the nations of men have adored? I feel God therefore present in myself. He reveals himself to me in the moral ideal. But is this God that my conscience reveals to me really myself? Is he each of us, and must one believe that the universe in the last resort is, as has been said, a republic of free-wills—that there are thus as many Gods as individuals, and that we are all Gods? Or does this multiplicity of individuals and of personalities exist only in appearance, and is the universe at bottom the expression of a single will? Theism may choose between these two hypotheses—between a sort of metaphysical and moral polytheism and a sort of monotheism, and may subsequently arrange to its liking the relations which it may suppose to exist between the absolute will and the world of phenomenon. But a belief in a moral ideal does not in the least involve anything more than a belief in something eternal and divine, as shaping the universal course of things. One cannot bend it to the service of any one determinate religion, rather than of any other. Within certain limits, however, it may lend some support to the moral and religious sentiments. The most acceptable form of theistic doctrine in the future will, no doubt, be some moral philosophy analagous to that of Kant. Kantianism itself, however, is too closely bound up with the notion of duty, properly so called, and with the categorical imperative. It, like Judaism, is a religion of law. Instead of the law, one will content one’s self, in all probability, in the future, with an ideal conceived as supreme above all things, and as exercising upon our thought and will the highest attraction that can be exercised by what has been called the power of an ideal.[136]