But it is not merely in the evolutionary process that we need to reinterpret the spiritual factor; it is urgently called for in our dealing with the whole of nature. We must learn how to interpret the fundamental spiritual implications involved in the nature of beauty, of moral goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of personality itself.
In an impressive way Arthur Balfour in his Theism and Humanism has pointed out that it is impossible to find any adequate rational basis for our experience of beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of goodness, or for our confidence in the validity of knowledge or truth, unless we assume the reality of an underlying spiritual universe as the root and ground both of nature without us and of mind within us. “Æsthetic values,” Balfour says, “are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world in which we live.”[7] “Ethics,” again he says, “must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it must find its consummation”[8] and, finally, he says that if rational values are to remain undimmed and unimpaired, God must be treated as real—“He is Himself the condition of scientific knowledge.”[9]—“We must hold that reason and the works of reason have their source in God: that from Him they draw their inspiration, and that if they repudiate their origin, by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency.”[10]
Personality carries in all its larger aspects inevitable implications of a spiritual universe. In the first place, it is forever utterly impossible to find a materialistic or naturalistic origin for personality. Whenever we deal with “matter” or with “nature,” consciousness is always presupposed, and the “matter” we talk about, or the “nature” we talk about, is “matter” or “nature” as existing for consciousness or as conceived by consciousness. It is impossible to get any world at all without a uniting, connecting principle of consciousness which binds fact to fact, item to item, event to event, into a whole which is known to us through the action of our organizing consciousness. Since it is through consciousness that a connected universe of experience is possible it seems absurd to suppose that consciousness is a product of matter or of any natural, mechanical process. Every effort to find a genesis of knowledge in any other source than spirit, derived in turn from self-existing Spirit, has always failed and from the logical nature of the case must fail. There is no answer to the question, how did we begin to be persons? which does not refer the genesis to an eternal spiritual Principle in the universe, transcending space and time, life and death, matter and motion, cause and effect—a Principle which itself is the condition of temporal beginnings and temporal changes or ends.
Normal human experience is, too, heavily loaded with further inevitable implications of an environing spiritual world. The consciousness of finiteness with which we are haunted presupposes something infinite already in consciousness, just as our knowledge of “spaces” presupposes space, of which definite spaces are determinate parts. That we are oppressed with our own littleness, that we revolt from our meannesses, that we “look before and after, and sigh for what is not,” that we are never satisfied with any achievement, that each attainment inaugurates a new drive, that we feel “the glory of the imperfect,” means that in some way we partake of an infinite revealed in us by an inherent necessity of self-consciousness. We are made for something which does not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to the perfect that always draws and attracts us. We are forever seeking God because, in some sense, however fragmentary, we have found Him.
“Here sits he shaping wings to fly;
His heart forbodes a mystery:
He names the name Eternity.
“That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find.
He sows himself on every wind.