The point is of vital importance to theism. As Kant has well said, "the conception of God involves not merely a blindly operating Nature as the eternal root of things, but a Supreme Being that shall be the author of all things by free and understanding action; and it is this conception which alone has any interest for us." It will be observed that Kant says nothing here about "contrivance." By the phrase "free and understanding action" he doubtless means much the same that is here meant by ascribing to God a quasi-psychical nature. And thus alone, he says, can we feel any interest in theism. The thought goes deep, yet is plain enough to every one. The teleological instinct in Man cannot be suppressed or ignored. The human soul shrinks from the thought that it is without kith or kin in all this wide universe. Our reason demands that there shall be a reasonableness in the constitution of things. This demand is a fact in our psychical nature as positive and irrepressible as our acceptance of geometrical axioms and our rejection of whatever controverts such axioms. No ingenuity of argument can bring us to believe that the infinite Sustainer of the universe will "put us to permanent intellectual confusion." There is in every earnest thinker a craving after a final cause; and this craving can no more be extinguished than our belief in objective reality. Nothing can persuade us that the universe is a farrago of nonsense. Our belief in what we call the evidence of our senses is less strong than our faith that in the orderly sequence of events there is a meaning which our minds could fathom were they only vast enough. Doubtless in our own age, of which it is a most healthful symptom that it questions everything, there are many who, through inability to assign the grounds for such a faith, have persuaded themselves that it must be a mere superstition which ought not to be cherished; but it is not likely that any one of these has ever really succeeded in ridding himself of it.
According to Mr. Spencer, the only ultimate test of reality is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our primary beliefs is the success with which they resist all efforts to change them. Let us see, then, how it is with the belief in the essential reasonableness of the universe. Does this belief answer to any outward reality? Is there, in the scheme of things, aught that justifies Man in claiming kinship of any sort with the God that is immanent in the world?
The difficulty in answering such questions has its root in the impossibility of framing a representative conception of Deity; but it is a difficulty which may, for all practical purposes, be surmounted by the aid of a symbolic conception.
[XII.]
Symbolic Conceptions.
Observe the meaning of this distinction. Of any simple object which can be grasped in a single act of perception, such as a knife or a book, an egg or an orange, a circle or a triangle, you can frame a conception which almost or quite exactly represents the object. The picture or visual image in your mind when the orange is present to the senses is almost exactly reproduced when it is absent. The distinction between the two lies chiefly in the relative vividness of the former as contrasted with the relative faintness of the latter. But as the objects of thought increase in size and in complexity of detail, the case soon comes to be very different. You cannot frame a truly representative conception of the town in which you live, however familiar you may be with its streets and houses, its parks and trees, and the looks and demeanour of the townsmen; it is impossible to embrace so many details in a single mental picture. The mind must range to and fro among the phenomena in order to represent the town in a series of conceptions. But practically what you have in mind when you speak of the town is a fragmentary conception in which some portion of the object is represented, while you are well aware that with sufficient pains a series of mental pictures could be formed which would approximately correspond to the object. That is to say, this fragmentary conception stands in your mind as a symbol of the town. To some extent the conception is representative, but to a great degree it is symbolic. With a further increase in the size and complexity of the objects of thought, our conceptions gradually lose their representative character, and at length become purely symbolic. No one can form a mental picture that answers even approximately to the earth. Even a homogeneous ball eight thousand miles in diameter is too vast an object to be conceived otherwise than symbolically, and much more is this true of the ball upon which we live, with all its endless multiformity of detail. We imagine a globe and clothe it with a few terrestrial attributes, and in our minds this fragmentary notion does duty as a symbol of the earth.