THE GIFFORD LECTURES FO'i 1903-19G4 THE PATHWAY TC EEALITY R.B.HALDANE fyxmll W^mxmii^ Jtotg \..»-JlJ*jCjl!lrf»-ajLj^....f!*U!v:....'\iX ....'^.O.ULJU.....^.fi3L.Aril^....«^..SSS!»^^ ..'^..U.o.s, .^a^ii^TvXci,... 8817 Cornell University Library BD 331.H1S 1904 The pathway to reality :stage the second 3 1924 008 061 180 WW Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924008061180 THE PATHWAY TO REALITY s^tt^^u^ THE PATHWAY TO REALITY STAGE THE SECOND BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS IN THE SESSION 1903-1904 BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EICHARD BUEDON HALDANE M.P., LL.D., K.O. "~ :/,' NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 1904 Prititea in Great Britain, PREFACE The lectui'es which this volume contains were delivered consecutively, the first six in October 1903, and the last four in the following January. As in the case of the earlier series, published last year, they were, for the most part, not written. It had been suggested to me from the first that the plan of talking instead of reading, with the aid of a note just sufficient to fix the general sequence, was likely to prove less burdensome to the audience than an endeavoiir to rivet their attention to written and therefore rigid discourses on topics which were largely technical. The proposal suited my own cir- cumstances, and, at least in the case of a layman, seemed admissible. The scheme of the lectures I had for some time past been thinking out, in the in- tervals of different avocations. But binding engage- ments, public and private, did not facilitate writing. Indeed, the delivery of the lectures contained in this volume had to take place in the intervals of utterances of other kinds. Possibly there has, as a consequence, been carried into what follows something of an atmosphere which is not strictly academic. At all events, by the terms of my vii viii PEEFACE engagement to the Gifford Trastees, I was bound to publish the lectures as I gave them, and on reading over the transcript I felt that it contained things which I wanted to say, and which I was not likely to have another opportunity of saying. What is here printed is simply a carefully corrected copy of what a most competent shorthand writer took down day by day. To the lady who under- took this duty I must here express my gratitude for the skill with which she spared me much of what is often a wearisome burden of correction. Here and there I wrote out passages, and these I used where I could. But in the main I relied on the capacity of the reporter, even where the points were technical and obscure. The only exception to this was in the last part of the first lecture, and in the whole of that which comes seventh in order. These were written during a holiday in Germany. Such a method of producing a metaphysical book has defects. Stern critics may say that no man has the right to publish anything of this kind put together in such a fashion. I admit the weight of the criticism, and I throw myself on the mercy of the critics. I also plead that the GiflFord Trustees insisted, somewhat against my will, on my accepting their Lectureship, and then bound me to publish what I should say. I am not by profession a philosopher, and as I had no reputation to lose, I agreed to do what they wished. They allowed me time — and time, as has been observed by persons of great authority, is infinitely long. Then there PEEFACE ix were some things to be considered on the other side. I had spent in these investigations a good deal of my life, and it seemed to be permissible for me, finding myself in such a situation, to try to say how the world seemed to one whose occupa- tions necessitated his living in it. Again, my plan, the only possible one for a busy person, was not wholly without its advantages. In the first place, he who is going to speak ex tempore has to make a determined effort not to allow the trees to prevent him from seeing the wood as a whole. I think I may say that I have not spared myself in the effort to do this. The writer who shuts himself up with his lamp in his study is sometimes in peril of getting lost in his details. He is tempted to think as he expresses himself, instead of thinking before he expresses himself. He does not easily, such is the force of habit, reflect as he walks through the market place. And yet the market place has its own kind of stimulus for those who have to be constantly striving to pull themselves together, a stimulus which is not to be felt to the same extent either in the pulpit or the chair. Moreover, upon the whole, experience shows that the spoken word is better for teaching purposes than the written manu- script. It leaves the lecturer free to follow into their perplexities the minds of those who are his hearers. Finally, the circumstance that he has but talked, leaves the talker with a sense of liberty remaining to him. It was, I think, Eenan who somewhere declared that to write a book was to limit oneself. If, however, the author has but expressed his thought in language which owed its form to the audience and the hour, the sense of self-limitation is less oppressive. In my earlier volume the chief topic was the complete relativity of our knowledge, in everyday life and in physical science. The nature of reality was subjected to a scrutiny which ended in the recognition of a boundary line to such knowledge. Beyond that boundary line it appeared to be im- possible to pass in the absence of an interpretation of mind, and of its relation to the Universe, more definite and more extensive than that which is current in everyday usage. In this volume I have done what I could to find the interpretation needed, and, with its aid, to cross the line. I have tried to find the answer to the question what we are really striving to express when we speak of God and of Freedom and of Immortality. It has seemed to me that, in the two thousand years which have passed since Aristotle taught on these topics, progress in our knowledge has been made, but progress in the main on certain lines which he laid down. The first volume of this book had a reception more generous than one who is to be reckoned with laymen was entitled to look for. Only of two criticisms which were made on it, do I wish to say anything. One was that the book Was a mere reproduction in modern form of what had PREFACE xi before been taught by Aristotle and by Hegel, On this I will merely observe that the criticism cannot carry the critic far. I believe it to be true, and have already said so. But my assertion depends for its validity on the accuracy of my interpretation of the doctrine of these great men. Now of what is a very diflBcult doctrine the in- terpreters have been many, and as various as they were many. They have not seldom reproached each other with liberties taken with their gospel. Accordingly I will endeavour to disarm hostility by frankly confessing here that in both voliunes I have freely used the method of what theologians call exe- gesis. Some, for whose judgment and authority I have the deepest respect, have shaken their heads, and have told me that, whether or not I have inter- preted Aristotle aright, I have not truly followed the teaching of Hegel, I have laid, as they think, too little stress on the abstract element in knowledge and on the dialectical character of knowledge as a system of universals. I can only answer that what I have done has been done after deliberation, and that in the present volume I have sought to justify it. I have thought for long that metaphysical investigation has had its credit seriously impaired, not only in Germany but in this country, by a too narrow view taken of the nature of mind. This word has been used by certain writers as meaning either the process of relational or discursive thought, in its essence of the character of what is universal, or else something — no one seems quite to know xii PREFACE what — considered somehow to exist apart from time, and to be that of which thought is the activity. The next step has been to put the process (or the activity, as the case may be) in contrast with feel- ing. Thereupon has come the splitting of the philosophers into camps, in some of which it is sought to reduce feeling to thought, and in others to reduce thought to feeling. In short, people have fallen into the way of insisting on construing the concrete riches of the world of the actual, as if they must be reduced either to universals of reflec- tion or to particulars of sense. To me the dilemma appears to rest on too narrow a view of the nature of mind. With mind, if there be any truth in the doctrine of these lectures, we must begin. It is the actual, what lies nearest to hand, and it is also the ultimate, beyond which we cannot get, and which can only be described in terms of itself. Universal and particillar seem to me, following Aristotle, to be but abstractions, made in the process in which it is actual by the subject which has before and within it its experience and itself. That subject, with its experience and its self-consciousness, is the actual concrete fact in which all knowledge has its starting point. Such a starting point is concerned with what is singular and individual, and it is within what is thus in its actuality singular and individual that the universal and particular, which can emerge only as abstractions, have reality. The grounds for this opinion, which appears to me to have been that of Aristotle and Hegel, and to have been PREFACE xiii dropped out of sight by some of their interpreters, I partly set forth in the earlier lectures. In this series I have returned to the attack from another side. I am unable to assent to a narrow use of the word which would confine thought to a par- ticular mode of thinking that is itself the mere outcome of abstraction. Yet this identification seems to me to be frequently made by writers whose aim it is to interpret from the standpoint of idealism. That Hegel himself (of Aristotle it is hardly necessary to speak) would have repudi- ated this form of idealism, appears from his express declarations.* The warnings have been disregarded, and the result has been something of a breach and much of confusion in the camp of the idealists. A striking incident has been the departure of Mr F. H. Bradley from the headquarters of orthodox idealism, and his adoption of a separate position. He has intimated his decision that thought, rela- tional and discursive as, in the sense in which the late Mr Green and others have used the word, he finds it to be, has no capacity to reach final truth or to penetrate beyond appearance. Yet is Mr Bradley's view of thought sufficiently wide 1 One asks how, if thought be merely what he takes it to be, he gets as far as he does. Is not his scepticism self-destructive ! And is his Absolute any better than "the night in which all cows look black"; an unknowable substance of which we may say, * See Werhe, Band vi., p. 5, and also the final part of his Religions-Philosopkie, passim. xiv PREFACE "De non apparentibus et de rum existentibtis, eadem est ratio ? " Mr Green himself seems to have had misgivings about this use of the word thought. In one passage he even protests against it, blaming Hegel, as I think, not quite justly.* For myself I prefer to believe, what the facts seem to me to demonstrate, that the scope of the activity which is of the essence of mind, is wider than the limits of relational or discursive thinking. It follows that abstract reason has no monopoly of the means of access to reality, although I hold it to be the only competent guardian of the pathway. It seems to me that relational thought and feeling are alike aspects which arise by distinctions which are really abstract, within the ultimate reality which we call Self-consciousness or Mind or Spirit, and which is in its nature singular and all-embracing. In this volume I have accordingly pressed the point that if by the word thought we wish to indicate the activity in which mind consists, we must interpret it as extending to every form of that activity, and not in the contracted sense in which it is some- times used. For these and other reasons which are set out in the lectures that follow, I have assigned to Art and to Religion parts as important as that of Philosophy in the search after truth. That, like Philosophy, Art and Religion can aim at reaching nothing short of the reality that is ultimate, I cannot doubt. The difference is one of method and * See Works of T. H. Green, vol. ili., p. 142. PEEFACE XV of symbol. It is no function of Art or of Eeligion to bring us to scientific results. It is just because the scientific aspect of the truth is the aim of Philosophy that its language is abstract and that its methods have the defect of their quahty. Its results can never be for our minds wholly sufficing. At our plane of intelligence the tendency to frame abstractions, and so to separate what are but aspects in a single reality, the Beautiful, the Good, and the True, is too powerful. Yet the content of our minds will not the less on this account always be more than abstract thought. And this leads me to add a final observation to this preface. If any one should say that the name of Goethe occurs too frequently in the pages of what purports to be a metaphysical book, my answer will be, that my way of looking at things made it impossible not to turn frequently, in the course of an investi- gation such as this, to the greatest critic of life that has spoken in modem times. Should I, in the course of these lectures, have succeeded in helping any one to realise more fully the depth of meaning in the precept of that great genius : — ". . . Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen Resolut zu leben," I shall feel that I have been well repaid for the little that I have been capable of doing. CU>ANDEN, AUCHTERARDER, 1904. TABLE OF CONTENTS EREATA On p. xiii., line 27, for "self-destructive! " read "self-destructive? " On pp. 19 and 21, for " Glaneon " read " Glaueon." On p. 59, in footnote, ^/or "Glaubens-lehre" read " Glaubenslehre." On p. 126, in third line of third stanza, /"or "zients"' read "ziemt's." On p. 145, line 28, for "Boland" read "Bolland." On p. 158, line 20, for "nnity" read "unity." On p. 240, in fifth line of first stanza, _/or "last 'gem" read "last 'gem." On p. 240, in last line of first stanza, for " Geniiss " read " GenuSs." On p. 273, in Index,/or "Boland" read "Bolland." of categories ; (3) the absurdity and self-contradiction of the notion that abstract thought could either be a product of things, or itself create them. Neither Aristotle nor Hegel sought to deduce nature from logical forms, though it is a common superstition to believe that they did. They held that self-consciousness was the ultimate fact behind which it was logically impossible to go ; that it was no net-work of abstract universals, but concrete and living subject, not substance ; that within it arose and were contained, as the outcome of its own distinctions, the entire universe of thought and things. For them this ultimate reality was individual, unique, and singular, as an ultimate fact must be. Outside of it nothing could, with any intelligible meaning, be said to exist, and within it the two xyU b TABLE OF CONTENTS BOOK III. ABSOLUTE MIND Lecture 1. . - . . Pages 3 to 38 Retrospect Throughout these Lectures what has been meant by the ■word " God " is nothing short of the Highest and most Real. The images and metaphors of everyday theology are inadequate in an inquiry of the character prescribed by Lord GifFord. Ultimate Reality was, as the result of the first series of lectures, found to be Mind, and within Mind the whole of experience, possible as well as actual, was found to fall. In the course of the first part of the inquiry three things became apparent : — (1) Peril of going oiF the track through the use of metaphors ; (2) the necessity for careful criticism of the limits and validity of categories ; (3) the absurdity and self-contradiction of the notion that abstract thought could either be a product of things, or itself create them. Neither Aristotle nor Hegel sought to deduce nature from logical forms, though it is a common superstition to believe that they did. They held that self-consciousness was the ultimate fact behind which it was logically impossible to go ; that it was no net-work of abstract universals, but concrete and living subject, not substance ; that within it arose and were contained, as the outcome of its own distinctions, the entire universe of thought and things. For them this ultimate reality was individual, unique, and singular, as an ultimate fact must be. Outside of it nothing could, with any intelligible meaning, be said to exist, and within it the two xviii CONTENTS aspects or moments of its nature as Intelligence, the universals of thought and the particulars of feeling, were separable in logical analysis but not in fact. Among the further topics which must engage our attention are the question in what sense mind so conceived can be described as a Person, and what is the relation to such mind of the finite forms In which self- consciousness appears — e.g., in man. Lecture II. -P^g^* 39 to 70 Further examination of what is implied in self-conscious mind. Metaphors more than usually out of place here. To call mind a "thing" is utterly wrong. To call it "subject" is better, but is still misleading, for the distinction from the object, though essential for self-consciousness, is made by and falls within it. Again, to look upon mind as resoluble into feeling, out of which what is higher has become evolved by differentiation, is for the purpose of a metaphysical inquiry quite insufficient, for such evolution presupposes time, and time has itself to be accounted for. Nor, as we have already seen, can it be described as a system of universals, for, as Aristotle showed, such a system is nothing apart from the particulars in which it realises itself. It must be described in terms of itself, as a final and imique fact, the nature of which is to be disclosed only by the study of its own movement. The meaning of " finiteness " in relation to the self. Comparison with Berke- leianism. With the rejection of the conception of mind as substance, solipsism becomes meaningless, for it is apparent that to try to think of a finite self as the ultimate form of reality is to try to think what is self-contradictory. The forms of finitude are the outcome of the limited ends and purposes by which our intelligence is in everyday life dominated. Meaning of Understanding as distinguished from Reason. Illustration from space and time. The categories of thought are the forms of Reason, and they constitute a system in which each link logically implies every other link. The whole system is implicit in and presupposed by the earliest link. From the days of Plato onwards the method of the greatest thinkers has more or less explicitly been to try to comprehend and set out the nature and interrelation of categories. Meaning and nature of Dialectic. The Hegelian " Notion " and " Idea." CONTENTS xix The nature of mind is to posit itself in distinction, and to comprehend and pass beyond the distinctions. What is called Pantheism is a misunderstanding of the nature of God. Lecture III. ... - . Pages 71 to 94 The result of the inquiry so far has been to insist, with Bradley and Royce, as against Green, that stress must not be laid exclusively on intelligible relations. But Bradley holds thought to be at once capable of raising the problem of reality and incapable of adequately solving it. His reason is that to him thought appears to be relational or finite. It is difficult to see how his scepticism can escape from the reproach of in- consistency. For if thought is adequate to the comprehension of its own limits, it must be able to go beyond these limits. Royce's work is valuable because of his insistence on the concrete and ethical character of the activity of intelligence. But it is open to the criticism that it is only in the systematic exposition of its own forms that intelligence can at all adequately set forth its nature as the ultimate reality. Notwithstanding the freshness of Royce's method, it therefore appears to be unsatisfying. One is driven back to the Hegelian system, not because one believes that it contains the final word, but because of its unflinching thoroughness. The value of Hegel's attempt at a dialectical explanation of the relationship of the distinctions which self-consciousness makes is that it leaves no gaps. He declared that all that is actual is rational, and all that is rational is actual, and, again, that the spiritual alone is the real, but he certainly did not mean that nature could be dis- played in terms of intelligible relations. He insisted, on the contrary, that the appearances which make up the realm of nature have the characteristic of contingency and foreignness to reason, and he explains that this is so because the system of these appearances is a system of abstract separations, made by intelligence dominated by purposes which do not lead to full comprehension, and which operate under finite forms of thought. So far from being rational, nature is rather for him unreal, excepting as comprehended at a higher level than that of thinking under finite forms of self-consciousness, a comprehen- sion which would change its appearance. Such a line of criticism leads back to the conception of God as the mind of XX CONTENTS which ours is a manifestation on a lower plane. The Hegelian Logic is no ordinary logic, but the system of categories in which the notion, the characteristic movement of thought, displays itself. This system, as exhibited in the Logic, is but one aspect of Ultimate Reality, of the Absolute Mind, and it is reached by abstraction. The philosophy of nature deals with another aspect which is abstract in another way, and is the outcome of intelligence operating after the fashion of the understanding, which separates and isolates, as in the forms of sense perception, in space and time. The standpoint of such particularism is the outcome of abstraction, and, like that of the Logic, finds its correction and completion in the self- consciousness of concrete spirit, which is described in the Philosophy of Mind. Lecture IV. ------ Pages 95 to 116 It is the elusiveness of the subject-matter that makes philosophy difficult. Hard thinking is the only instrument with which we can break through the misleading images and metaphors of daily use, misleading because they furnish views which, while sufficient for the purpose in hand, and in that sense representative of truth, are inadequate for those who want light on the nature of Ultimate Reality. Art and religion demonstrate the fact of this inadequacy, and, after aU, the diffi- culty appears in the same fashion in other studies — for example, those of the higher mathematics. Having found that the apparently hidden nature of Reality is self-conscious mind which contains within itself all the appearances which go to make up the world as it seems, we have now to ascertain how and why it is that the distinctions exist to which these appearances at their various grades are due. That self-consciousness is the final form of mind cannot be doubted, for the very doubt really implies the principle as its basis. To speak of absolute mind as unconscious is to use words without meaning. In some sense, accordingly, God is a Person, and we have to inquire in what sense ! The fact of self-consciousness implies a distinction of subject from object, of self from not self. The nature of mind is to make distinctions and to exist in and through them. It is no inert simultaneum, but, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is active reason, life and more than life, intelligence which com- CONTENTS xxi prebends, and in its comprehension is present in every form of the content of its self-consciousness. The end which deter- mines its activity is the end of making itself explicit to itself, and this end seems to be implicit even in the lowest forms of mind. In its lower forms, as mere understanding, mind lays stress on the reaUty of its distinctions and the self-subsistence and isolation of what is distinguished. In its higher forms, as reason, mind interprets and comprehends what is distinguished and the acts of distinction as having meaning only as links or moments in a series. Examination of the nature of time. Time is continuous just as much as it is discrete, and, when taken as a final form of reality, proves to be self-contradictory in its conception, and unreal in appearance. The meaning of the expression " comprehension sub specie ceternitatis." The world as it must appear in the mind of God. The degrees of reaUty in appearance. Lecture V. - - - Pages 117 to 142 In this lecture we must not pass by the next problem that confronts the inquirer, that of the nature of finite mind. The ground of finiteness lies in distinctions made within the Absolute Mind, whereby it appears as object to and other than itself. But these distinctions and what results from them presuppose, as their logical foundation, the notion of a mind that is absolute. It is a misconception of the teaching of Hegel to imagine that he identified the Absolute Mind with mind as it appears in History. ■ For there the forms in which mind displays itself are never more than finite, i.e., relative to what has gone before or is to come after. What we are dealing with is not the relations of substances derived from substance, but stages or planes in the comprehension of its own appearances by all-embracing mind. Indeed there may well be higher planes of comprehen- sion than that which characterises the mind of man or the world-spirit, and such planes may yet be finite. Man is at once in separation from and in union with God, because the founda- tion of his existence is Intelligence, the essential characteristic of which is Dialectic, difference in unity and unity in difference. Thus man has a double nature, out of which arises for him, on the one hand, the consciousness of separation from God, or evil; and, on the other hand, the consciousness of potential union with God, or religion. Though finite spirit, man is none xxii CONTENTS the less spirit, consequently he is essentially free, and therefore responsible. The relational character of the finite, insistence on which is the mark of the understanding, and the quality of dialectic, because of which spirit, even though it be finite, has to distinguish itself from what is other than it, and yet to find itself in that other, is the explanation of man's relation to nature. It is also the reason why he appears to himself as emerging out of nature, and as one among many others. The doctrine of degrees of reality in appearance is important in this connection. It is because man, though spirit, is finite spirit, and because what is typical of his knowledge of his every-day woiild is the separation and isolation which the understanding seeks to make, that for his plane of comprehension the universe with himself in it appears as it does. As Hegel points out, nature cannot be taken as appearing to God in the abstract externalities of space and time, and indeed stands to Him in no direct relation, for the plane of appearance which is distinctive of it pertains merely to the finite mind of man. Nature is in the mind of God only in as much as the mind of man is compre- hended as a degree in the absolute mind of God. Bosanquet's analysis of the relation of the " universal self " to the actual individual consciousness. Lecture VI. - - - Pages 143 to 170 The problem of the nature of God. Retrospect. In His nature there can be conceived no difference between Thought and Thinker, for we have passed beyond the category of sub- stance. With Him to create must mean to think, and to think to create. Thus intelligence and volition fall together. Because self-consciousness turns out to be the highest of all categories, and to be the basis of all intelligence and therefore the pre- supposition of our reasoning about the nature of ultimate reality, God must be self-conscious. He must have ends which are realised in the mere fact of their being proposed. The character of His activity cannot be represented in images drawn from the world of appearance in space and time. Yet because His nature is to posit and realise Himself in forms which are the forms of otherness, in difference, and yet be self- identical, that nature cannot resemble the Spinozistic simuUaneum of Pantheism, which lands us in a lifeless identity without difference. Here it is more than usually necessary to study CONTENTS xxiii critically the categories we employ, and to guard against the anthropomorphism which is natural and comparatively harmless in other spheres of inquiry. Inasmuch as mind conceived as Absolute must be self-conscious, it must have an object through distinction of itself from which it is so. As it is all-embracing that object can be no other than itself, distinguished by itself from itself. It must be for itself, and comprehend itself in the utmost fulness — compare the voTjo-ts voijcretus of Aristotle, and his doctrine of the Active Reason. Because what appears for the mind of God as its other is just itself, that other is self- conscious, and because its essential characteristic is to be far God, to stand in relation to and depend on Him, it is finite, and the forms of its knowledge are throughout marked by finiteness. While potentially those of reason, they are actually those of understanding. Thus in the mind of man, which, like the mind of God, seeks to distinguish itself from its other or not-self, as the very condition of self-consciousness, there arises a world of appearances in relations of isolation. Space and time are fundamental among such forms, but nature presents many others less strikingly characterised by apparent irration- ality and contingency, and these forms of knowledge ultimately turn out to be comprehended and to have their truth in self- knowledge, in which mind, having found nature to be only for itself, and thus its not-self to be really itself, is at a higher plane of comprehension than that in- which nature is given. The forms of finite mind and the differences which are thus created have their value, meaning, and justification as stages in the dialectical movement in which Absolute Mind is con- scious of, and so realises and enriches, itself. Without them God were not perfect. In Him they are comprehended and transformed. Only by the free choice of finite Spirit in select- ing its ends have they assumed the aspect of hard-and-fast separation from God, and in the spirit that knows itself as one with Him and His ends this aspect is comprehended and put past. For the scope of the Divine Intelligence is not contracted by finite ends as is ours. Yet even in man such ends and purposes are not the only ones, nor are his comprehension and nature wholly limited by them. In Art and in Religion he passes beyond his finiteness. This is what is meant to be illustrated by such phrases as " Dying to Live." The medium of Religion is, like that of Art, not abstract thought. Religion is a practical matter ; it belongs to the will and it expresses xxiv CONTENTS itself emotionally, as a " new heart." It is the consciousness of a direct relation to God, but in forms that belong to the region of feeling, and are consequently describable only sjrmbolically. Under its own forms it grasps the presence of God as here and now in the object world ; it is the sense that He is immediately manifested, and this feeling is expressed in the sjonbols and pictorial manifestations of the creeds. The metaphysical theory is that Absolute Mind is conscious of itself in Another which is just itself, and that these, its two aspects, are only distinguish- able by abstraction in the entirety of self-conscious Spirit of which they are the moments. This Christianity expresses in the well-known symbolical form of a Father who sends His Only Begotten Son into otherness, the world, to return to Him with the otherness overcome and the redemption of the world accomplished. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity, which is by no means peculiar to Christianity, embodies a profound truth. It is an analysis in symbolical form of the three aspects or moments in the self-consciousness of God, in Hegelian termin- ology, Logic, Finite Intelligence (including Nature and Finite Spirit), and Absolute Spirit ; the realisation of the Universal and the Particular in the Individual. We are neither to con- found Persons nor divide Substances. The Athanasian Creed, which owed its origin to the influence of Neo-Platonic meta- physics in the Church of Alexandria, has been too little appreciated. The analysis also throws light on the origin of evil, the responsibility for which rests with the finite spirit which is free to prefer the good. Because man can transcend his separation from God he is responsible. In order to be finite man he must be separated, and his duty is to overcome his separation. The choice of a higher plane impUes the surrender of the self, with its particularism. Thus evU arises and is a necessary moment in the Universe. But it is in finite spirit that it arises, and, like nature generally, it stands in no direct relation with God. Because man is thus separate from God, and must surrender his finite nature in order to gain union with Him, he worships. The love of God is just the con- sciousness of the potential unity of the finite and the absolute self. This completes the examination in outline of the theoretical aspect of the nature of Ultimate Reality. The succeeding lectures will deal with concrete questions which arise out of the relation of man to God, CONTENTS XXV BOOK IV. FINITE MIND Lecture I. - - - - Pages 173 to 200 As we have seen, the mind as human is finite ; knows itself as known, and as known yet knows. It comprehends itself in time-distinctions, the characteristic of which is relativity. But even in presentation knowledge is aware of its own limits, and in comprehending transcends them. The recognition of beauty, however, is not abstract knowledge. It is in the immediacy of feeling that we are conscious of beauty, although it is only for the mind that is capable of thought. The object of Art must be expressive. The beautiful in Art is higher in its kind than the beautiful in Nature. Schopenhauer's view of music. The true meaning of poetry. Goethe on the study of Art. Art never really expounds abstract conceptions, yet the world as it is for Art is what it is in virtue of Reason, which shines, as it were, through a sensuous garment. The difference between the artist and the man of science. Kant's Critique of Judgment. Schiller and Carlyle. Beauty is the middle term between sense and thought. Lecture II. - - - Pages 201 to 225 In Art mind stands revealed to itself in sensuous form, but as freed from the trammels of finitude. In Religion we. have a similar deliverance. Religion is a phase of the will, and belongs to the region of practice. As in the case of Art its certainty is immediate, and assumes the form of feeling. In Philosophy also the mind transcends the limits of the finite in comprehending theoi. But its medium is not concrete, as in the case of the other two. Its procedure is like that of the sciences, for it concentrates on that aspect of mind in which mind appears as an abstract system, and thus Philosophy gets. xxvi CONTENTS beyond the limits of what is immediate. One of its problems is the deeper meaning of the contrast between life and death. The aspects in which the self presents itself as body and soul belong to time, and are in their nature transitory. Explanation of this. For these aspects death is a necessary and natural part of their history. Illustrations of how death is natural in the case of animals and human beings. But this is only ».part of the meaning of death. It has been said to be superseded in a higher stage of the reality of self-consciousness ; considera- tion of this opinion. The antithesis between life and death is the work of understanding, and is not a final view. The real significance of what is called eternal life. Is it for us more than an abstraction .'' Consideration of this question. Lecture III. - - - Pe^es 226 to 253 It is clear that as subject the mind is directly conscious of possessing an infinite and non-sensuous character, and is con- tinuously yielding up the particularity of its forms. This infinite quality cannot be exhaustively given in any temporal present, and hence, as expressive of the limit of that temporal present, the mind determines itself as realised in a future. In this attempt to present as a temporal picture the infinite quality of the mind, an antinomy arises, which, like other antinomies, can only be solved by a deeper and more thinking considera- tion. Reason why the difficulty does not arise in Art or Religion. The pictures of Art are symbolical. The faith which characterises the self-surrender of the will in Religion is a sense of reality above and beyond what is seen. In its doctrines of the eternal nature of the self and of degrees in reality Metaphysics teaches the same truth in scientific form. The true relation of spirit to spirit, and the meaning of Love in its highest and most general sense. The understanding can never solve the problem of another life, for it is hampered by a dilemma based on the finality of the idea of duration. A direct presentation of the unreality of death can never be accomplished in our picture world, and yet the recognition of that unreality is necessitated. For a higher degree of know- ledge, though short of absolute knowledge, such recognition may present no difficulty. For ordinary knowledge it appears only in the symbolical representations of Art and Religion. CONTENTS xxvii Lecture IV. Pages 254 to 272 Characteristics of the doctrine of the mind of man as set out in the preceding lectures. The teaching of what is called " Spiritualism " has no bearing on it. Place of Spiritualism, as expoimded by Mr Myers and others, in anthropology. Survey of the ground covered in the twenty Gifford Lectures now delivered, and of the results reached. Conclusion. BOOK III ABSOLUTE MIND LECTURE I I HAVE to resume these lectures at the point at which I laid down the thread in January last. My task, as prescribed by Lord Giflford, is to inquire into the nature of God. For that task he also prescribed the spirit in which its execution was to be carried out. It was to be executed impartially, and in a scientific fashion, without fear and without favour. I have endeavoured in the course of the lectures which I have already delivered to look to the truth and the truth only as my goal, and I shall seek in the course which I have now to commence to observe the same principle. In the last series I began by pointing out that to inquire into the nature of God must be to inquire into the nature of Reality, and I examined at some length the meaning of such words as Reality and Trwth. These lectures, which have since been published, were of necessity critical rather than constructive. I had to prepare to build, and for that purpose it was necessary that I should clear the ground before I could endeavour to place upon it a structure. I have now to try to carry out the constructive portion of my undertaking ; but before 4 ABSOLUTE MIND l^^- '• I enter upon it I wish to remind you of the sub- stance of what has already been done. We were confronted in the beginning of our in- quiry into the nature and meaning of Keality with this fact, a fact which looked formidable, that the world as it seems around us presents an aspect which is apparently alien to mind and impenetrable by thought. We had to consider what I called the hard-and-fastness of that world as it is presented to us, and to endeavour to trace to its source the reason of that characteristic. You will recall that I traced that characteristic back to its source in the limited ends and purposes which govern us men and women in thinking our experience, I pointed out to you that this hard-and-fastness, this impene- trability of the object world, owed its significance to a certain " setting " in which our knowledge was placed by the dominating influence upon that knowledge of ends and purposes of a limited character, necessary for our social lives, but which yet were not of a nature sufficiently far-reaching to guide us in the search after ultimate truth. Analysis showed that these ends and purposes were neither final nor exhaustive, and in this conclusion we found ourselves in the company of a number of people who had approached the subject from differ- ent points of view, but who had converged on something like the same result ! Men so different as Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the later Germans, had all pointed out that it is the way in which we think things that gives rise to RETEOSPECT 5 much of what we take to be the objective universe in which we live. Put shortly, it may be said that it is ends and not causes which fashion that universe, and thus we get to the conclusion that knowledge is, in a deeper sense than that in which the expression is commonly used, relative. The relativity of all our knowledge is a relativity which depends, not upon the fact that there is something hidden behind, for there is no warrant for the belief in any hidden thing-in-itself, but upon this, that the ends and purposes which dominate and control our thinking are not final or ultimate ends and purposes. Now the inquiry which I have summarised, and which occupied the last ten lectures, led us to take warning against certain perils which beset the searcher after truth. One of these perils arises from the habit into which we readily fall of using, in such an investigation as we are engaged in, metaphors and similes which are appropriate for everyday purposes, but which are wholly out of place in regions which are not akin to the regions from which they are drawn. Thus men and women have been led to torture themselves and to cause themselves endless perplexity by trying to conceive the mind as a thing. If it be a thing, how natural to look upon it as operated upon by mechanical causes, and as incapable of freedom, in any sense in which meaning can be given to the word ! Yet we found that the notion of the mind being a thing, was a notion which rested upon metaphors which 6 ABSOLUTE MIND [l=ct. i. were wholly inapplicable when we were treating of the nature of the mind. Let me take a second danger which the last course of lectures was designed to illustrate. We are, as I have just said, prone to bring to bear upon the subject matter into which we are inquiring conceptions or categories which are wholly out of place, and that is a danger which besets not only philosophers but people whose work is, in the special sense of the word, scientific. For example, as we saw in the last series, in physiology the in- sistence upon a mechanical way of looking at things has aflPected the researches which from time to time have been undertaken, in such a fashion as to lead, not only to confusion of thought, but to a good deal of deflection of experiment into channels which are not the natural channels. And this carries with it further consequences which arise from the misuse of categories. We are very apt, when we get a view of experience and fix it as a particular aspect, to take that view, that aspect, as exhaustive of the whole. But such a conclusion speedily carries Nemesis in its train, because we find, as I showed you in detail in the last four lectures of the former course, that we fall into endless contradictions when we do anything of the sort. Therefore a criticism of categories is essential in philosophy. We must know what is the relation to one another of the conceptions of which we make use, and what is the limit of their validity. PERILS OF THE EOAD 7 Then there is a third peril to which I had to allude in some detail before, and which is of quite a different character, although in its source it is akin to the two others. Philosophy has got into disrepute by the carelessness of philosophers in the use of language. It is not possible to be always accurate in language, especially when you are carrying into a region of research which is quite different from other regions of research, words and phrases which are taken from the usages of every- day life. But still it was not necessary for thinkers — and even very great thinkers have been to blame here — to have led the world to suppose that philosophy tries to do what it ought never to try to do. For example, it has been common to suppose that idealism meant that somehow the professor of idealism would show how thought made a thing, instead of simply showing what the meaning of being a thing is, and in what its reality consists. Even the great Kant has not been wholly free from this reproach. But I pointed out to you that thought cannot properly be said to make things. The word " make " is a metaphor, drawn from the regions of space and time, and is wholly inade- quate to express the relation of thought to its object. None of the great thinkers have really preached the heresy in question, particularly not those whose names are, in the popular imagination, most associated with the doctrine. Aristotle and Hegel are really wholly free from the imputation} 8 ABSOLUTE MIND l^^- '■ nor does their language, when properly scanned, lend countenance to the notion that they taught the heresy. Well, so much for the negative part of the earlier set of lectures. The conclusion at which I asked you to arrive with me was this, that God's nature could not be of a quality less than the quality of Ultimate Reality, and that the meta- phors and images of ordinary theology are wholly inadequate as a description of God's nature. Now it is useless to do what a considerable, and, I fancy, for the moment, a growing school of theologians are seeking to accomplish. They are trying to bring us back to an everyday view of the nature of God, away from the regions in which metaphysics has taught us to search. Those who imagine that they are rendering a service to the permanent character of theology by going back to feeling, by limiting what ought to be accurate description to the ordinary metaphors of everyday life, are really rendering no service. They are sowing no seed. They can expect no fruit. They are ploughing the sands. If the nature of God is to be investigated, it must be investigated in the light of a searching criticism of the categories implied, otherwise we shall encounter the danger expressed in the now trite saying of Goethe, "Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is." While the analysis of the last set of lectures began with the view of things which we traced to the domination of those various limited purposes of FINITE ENDS IN KNOWLEDGE 9 which I have spoken as the source of a considerable amount of error, I pointed out that the ends and purposes which dominate have their origin in the necessities of everyday life ; that they come from this, that we men and women, in our intercourse with one another, must speak on the basis of a common foundation. That common foundation comes to be largely expressed in phrases which owe their origin to the social ends which we have in view, ends which by degrees pass in our minds into the appearance of being the only ends with which we are concerned. I pointed out that this was so in the sciences, just as much as in everyday life, only that in the sciences what is done is done consciously. In the sciences what we do is to take an aspect of things, a particular aspect ; to con- centrate on it to the exclusion of other aspects, and, by the clearness of thought which we thus obtain, to get, by means of reasoning, beyond what is immediately present to the senses. In geometry, for example, we abstract from everything excepting the relations of space, and we construct figures with a clearness and a concentration of mind which enables us to get far beyond what the senses could tell us. But these figures are ideal. The concrete riches of the universe have, for the purposes of the inquiry of the geometer, been put out of account — rightly put out of account — for they are not relevant to that inquiry, but yet put out of account in a fashion which makes the investigations of geometry a guide to only a partial aspect of the truth. Now, 10 ABSOLUTE MIND [L^ct. i. what is true of the abstract conceptions of geometry is true in a varying degree of every other science. We traced the process, in our account of the special sciences, down to the abstractions of psychology in the method of what is called Presentationism, It is the procedure of science to exclude those aspects which are not germane to the ends which the man of science has in view, in order to con- centrate with greater clearness and greater insight on the particular aspect which does concern him. In that fashion the man of science reminds one of the procedure of everyday life, where the ends and purposes which guide us in thinking our experience are ends and purposes which often shut us out from what may prove to be a deeper insight into its character. As the result we found that all that is or can be conceived has meaning only as expressing distinc- tions which fall within the mind itself. Even space and time are distinctions, have meaning and exist- ence only as distinctions, which fall within self- consciousness. These distinctions are distinctions which are before or for the mind, and in them phenomena get their setting and their significance. The Ultimate Eeality we therefore found to be mind and nothing else, to be subject rather than substance, although even the expression "subject" is one which we cannot use without a certain amount of explanation. For the word "subject" suggests what is called subjective idealism, suggests the return to the notion of the mind as a thing MY CONSCIOUSNESS 11 constructing or building up its experience — a view which got some countenance in Kant's division of the mind into faculties, a division which suggested that the mind could be put, as it were, upon the table, and dissected into component elements. Now, there is no making of things by thought in that sense. The " window " theory of the mind represents one extreme of untruth, the theory, namely, that things have an independent existence, and that somehow knowledge is a streaming from them into the interior of the mind as into a vacant chamber. On the other hand, it is equally untrue, as I showed you, to try to exhibit experience as a piecing or putting together by the mind of what is to be thought of as a magic lantern picture which the mind projects, and which, compared with what projects it, is unreal. My self-consciousness is not a thing that makes its object, for object and subject equally fall within it. My self-consciousness is feeling just as much as thought, and thought just as much as feeling, and the separation of the two arises from a distinction which falls within it. Self- consciousness is in form reflection, within which the whole meaning of existence falls, and within which all existence emerges. Later on in these lectures we shall have to consider what is the meaning of the word " my " in this connection, and to ask whether it is not true that there too we have a distinction which falls within self-consciousness. But feeling and thought — this is the point of my observation — are not two elements which exist separately, the one 12 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lw=t. i. from the other. They are rather related as the particular and the universal which have no inde- pendent existences, but are merely moments of con- crete reality in the individual, actual, and concrete singular of direct experience, within which they are only separable by abstraction. Behind conscious- ness I can neither go nor find meaning in trying to go. That consciousness is before itself as my con- sciousness is a fact which, as we shall find later on, makes no difference. If one has to characterise reality one must characterise it as, in the sense I have indicated, individual. The real is always something singular, unique, having nothing else like it. It is always a "this." So is self-consciousness itself And it is equally true that self-consciousness, when I reflect that time is itself but a relation or dis- tinction falling within self-consciousness, may be characterised as having for the form of its exist- ence an eternal "now." There is a great phrase of Hegel : " Dem Begriffe nach einmal ist allemal," "In the notion once is always," and that is a saying on the significance of which I shall have to dwell a good deal in the course of these lectures. My point is just now that, as all existence falls within self-consciousness, and as all existence emerges within self-consciousness, a thesis which I developed at length in the earlier course of lectures, so self-consciousness is not in the nature of a set of abstract universals, nor yet in the nature of any particular of feelmg, but is itself just an indi- THE NATURE OF THE PEOBLEM 13 vidual "this," the centre to which all else, falls, unique and singular in its character, and eternal in the sense of being that for which time is. All know- ledge is accordingly nothing else in its real nature than the making explicit what is implicit. It is true that when we think in time distinctions, as the ends which fashion our intelligence force us men and women to think, sense seems to come first, and completed knowledge last. But when you scrutinise reflectively and more deeply the nature of what you there have, you find that in the earlier and simpler stages of knowledge, even in the particulars of sense, there is implicit the whole of what comes into clear consciousness later on in time, but is in reality implied from the first. That is the necessary consequence of the nature of self- consciousness. The Ultimate Eeality is Mind, and the nature of God cannot be less than that of the Ultimate Eeality. God must be Mind. Is He personal? What is His relation to the finite forms in which self-consciousness appears, for example, in man ? These are questions which I shall have to consider with you in what follows. Well, I have sketched the idea of the ten lectures on which I am now entering, and I have summarised what has already been acdomplished. I fear that many of you have found the pathway to reality, so far as we have yet trodden it, hard and stony. It is beset with many difficulties, and in the region upon which we are now entering, as we 14 ABSOLUTE MIND l^^-^- '• cross the borderland, we shall find the pathway that lies before us not less hard and not less stony. We have to ascend precipitous places ; we have to go along the very brink of abysses of thought ; but yet, if we have faith in the great teachers, the half- dozen great teachers who, in the two thousand years which embrace what is greatest in the history of the human mind, have trodden the road before us, we shall find that they have cut steps in the rock which are of an enduring character, footholds which will enable us to get from point to point. As the out- come of their work, they have left us certain great results which form their common contribution, results which they have expressed in varying language, and which are our inheritance and our strength and our guide in our toil. I have so far brought you to a point at which it is evident that what we have to do is to build upon the ground which we have cleared, to get some definite notion of the nature of Mind. For if God be the Ultimate Reality, and if the Ultimate Reality be Mind, the problem with which we have to deal is obviously. What is the nature of Mind ? Now the great difficulty in lecturing upon a topic of this kind is not a difficulty which applies only to the lecturer. There is a difficulty which rests with the audience. There are many of the points in an inquiry of this kind which have not emerged in the minds of some of you, and yet, until these points emerge, until you become conscious that there are problems that have to be solved, and realise the NECESSITY FOR WONDER 15 nature of these problems, it is hard for you to make progress. That is why we read a book so much better when it deals with some topic on which we have reflected and about which we have much con- cerned ourselves, until the book has, so to speak, come to our rescue. And so it is in the most pre- eminent degree with the study of metaphysics. It seems barren, it seems in the air, unless you have realised the intensity of the difficulty with which the metaphysician sets himself to grapple, and this has always been so in the history of philosophical teaching. That is what the Greeks meant when they used to talk two thousand years ago of wonder as a necessity for the beginner in philosophy. He must have learned to ponder over the difficulties which beset him, and, before he has learned that, he must have become conscious of these difficulties. And it is not merely wonder as to abstract theory, but it is moral wonder which is essential in the undertaking. There is a saying of Erdmann which I will quote, making the preliminary observation that it is not until we have passed a certain point in the evolution of the spiritual as well as the moral natiu-e of man, that such an inquiry as is the subject of the Gifford Lectures attains the fascina- tion that is characteristic of it. " The task," writes Erdmann at the beginning of his History of Philo- sophy, " of apprehending its own nature in thought can only tempt the human mind, and, indeed, it is then only equal to it, when it is conscious of its intrinsic dignity." We may add that it was only 16 ABSOLUTE MIND i^^^- «• after Christianity had raised humanity to the full consciousness of the infinite worth and importance of the individual that these inquiries attained their deepest meaning, and that the old commandment " Know thyself" got its full significance. Well, we have to try to find light upon a problem that is of supreme importance to all of us, and our conclusions about which must profoundly influence our conduct. I cannot undertake always to succeed in using the language which is most apt, or to be always clear and lucid. That will be partly my fault, but it will be in a yet greater measure the fault of the topic with which I have to deal. It is, indeed, a reproach often directed against those who speak about philosophy that their language is obscure. The complaint is almost in- variably directed at some supposed shortcoming of the speaker. Those who make it rarely pause to ask whether it be not possible that the nature of the subject is the real reason of the obscurity. Philosophy has to deal with the meaning and nature of Ultimate Reality, and what is ultimate is rarely easy to get at. You and I can readily see through the water of a babbling brook when we cannot see to the bottom of the lake into which the waters flow. If the waters of philosophic reflection had resembled those of the brook we should have long ago known what underlay them. Lord Gifibrd would not have founded a Trust; libraries would not have been filled with volumes of controversy. SOURCES OF OBSCUEITY 17 The obscurity lies really in the topic of dis- course. Feeble as may be the capacity of the lecturer, it is not his feebleness that is the chief head of offending. There have been those who have attempted, with the aid of great gifts of exposition, to set forth solutions of the problems of metaphysics in language that was apparently clear as noonday. But one after another t eir attempts have failed. The language was clear, because it was the language of everyday life where the prob- lems in question had simply been ignored. The pictorial images of this language were admirably adapted for the display of that which they resembled. . But the region of philosophy is not a region of pictorial images. Eather, as I showed you in the lectures of the last series, is it a region where such similes and metaphors have sadly misled those who have set out on the search after truth in its deeper meaning. It is just because it has to get rid of the misleading associations of language which belongs to a plane of reflection other than that at which it has to place itself, that philosophy requires its own special and technical terminology. Therein it resembles mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and, indeed, every science which has to try to get beyond appearances to their significations. Why these other sciences should escape the reproach in question, and philosophy have to encounter it, is not apparent. Yet the reproach against philosophy is common even from the lips of educated people. " It is," observes Hegel in the Introduction to the B 18 ABSOLUTE MIND [L=ct. i. Encyclopsedia, "the generally accepted view that to make a shoe requires study and experience, notwithstanding that every man has a model in the shape of his own foot, and has in his hands the natural instruments for the work which he has to do. It is only in the case of philosophy that learn- ing and study and hard work are taken to be unnecessary. This comfortable opinion has, in recent times, been strengthened by doctrines about immediate or intuitive knowledge." Had Hegel lived to-day he would have added to these strength- ening causes the easy avenues to truth, which our popular writers on science and on theology seem never to tire of describing. But in point of fact there are no royal roads to this kind of learning any more than to other kinds. If philosophy is to be studied to any purpose, and especially to the purpose of enabling the student to work out his own intellectual salvation, it must be studied in systematic form. The pathway is hard and stony. Lectures like the present may help you over the slough of preliminary despond and through the wicket gate. They may lead you to a place from which you may have some view of new regions. But more than this they cannot do. When you reach these regions you must pursue your own way, and nothing short of hard toil will bring you any distance into these unfamiliar places. When you get to them the only guides that can help you are the great thinkers, those who have been great, not merely in the history of speculative NO EOYAL ROAD 19 philosophy, but in the history of science, of litera- ture, of art, of religion, of all that has raised the intellectual level of mankind. There is no short cut. There is no epigram in which it is practicable to shut up what can be set forth only in a system. The language, too, must be language which has expressions for metaphysical conceptions. That is why French is a poor medium for this kind of science, and English not very much better. There is a story which is sometimes told of Cousin and Hegel, but, I think, it is properly told of Madame de Stael and Fichte. The brilliant lady is said to have called on Fichte in Berlin, and asked that he should sum up for her his system succinctly and in French. " Ces choses ne se laissent pas dire succincte- ment, surtout en Jrangais" is said to have been Fichte's response. But our generation is not the only one that has suffered from a widespread desire to take short cuts in philosophy. The Greeks had to protest against the same illusion. In the Seventh Book of the Eepublic, Glancon says to Socrates, " Say then what is the nature and what are the divisions of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither ; for these paths will also lead to our final rest." " Dear Glancon," I said, " you will not be able to follow me here, though I would do my best, and you should behold, not an image only, but the absolute truth, according to my notion. Although I am not confident that I could tell you the exact 20 ABSOLUTE MIND [L«ct. i. truth, I am certain that you would behold some- thing like the truth." "Doubtless," he replied. "But I must add that the power of dialectic alone can reveal this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences." " Of that assertion you may be as certain as of the last." " And certainly no one will argue that there is any other method or way of comprehending all true existence; for the arts in general are concerned with the wants or opinions of men, or are cultivated for the sake of production and construction ; and, as to the mathematical arts which, as we were saying, have some apprehension of true beings — geometry and the like — they only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a conventional state- ment will ever become science ? " " Impossible," he said. "Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle, and so £he only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make certain of them ; the eye of the soul, which is literally buried in an outlandish slough, is by her taught to look upwards ; and she uses as hand- SOCRATES AND DIALECTIC 21 maids, in the work of conversion, the sciences we have been discussing. Custom terms them sciences, but they ought to have some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion, and less clearness than science." . . . "Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is placed over them ; no other science can be placed higher — the nature of knowledge can no further go." Glancon then asks who ought to study dialectic, which in this context means just philosophy, and what qualifications he should have. Socrates replies, " Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition ; for the mind more often faints from the severity of study, than frOm the severity of gymnastics." "Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be an unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line, or he will never be able to undergo the double toil and trouble of body and mind. The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no vocation, and this, as I was saying before, is the reason why she has fallen into disrepute ; her true sons should study her, and not bastards. Her votary should hot have a lame or one- legged industry — I mean that he should not be half industrious and half idle ; as, for example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting and all other bodily exercises, but a hater, rather than a lover, of the labour of learning, or hearing, or inquiring." 22 ABSOLUTE MIND [L«t. i. It seems, then, as though it had been recognised since Plato's time, that philosophy must remain the most difficult of sciences, and as though the fact were one which it were useless to try to disguise by using language which lacks in precision and meaning, in proportion as it gains in popularity. Such language is no help but rather a hindrance. It is not really lucid. It is better to keep boldly and without apology to the well-worn terminology, clumsy as much of it is. As Seneca says : " Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et consuetude sermonis antiqui qusedam efficacissimis notis signat." Bearing this in mind let us once more, before recommencing our journey, take stock of our equipment for it. I will begin by summing up, in fresh language, the conclusion of the first set of lectures. From the point at which they concluded I have to try to carry you yet a stage further, a stage which we must travel if we are to get a clear grasp of the theory, not merely of knowledge, but of practice. And this we cannot get unless we keep before our minds the result of the analysis of Ultimate Eeality. That analysis brings us to the conception of Mind, present to itself in changing aspects, but, under whatever aspect, as the sole reality within which distinctions fall and change takes place, as singular, as individual, as unique, as all-embracing. Knowledge is a supreme and ultimate fact. It is not to be explained as a phenomenon brought about by physical and physiological causes. The NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE 23 facts of physics and physiology arise through dis- tinctions drawn in knowledge. We ascend from matter to mind only to discover that it was in mind that matter first of all attained to meaning and existence. ^ The real world within and without me is indi- vidual, is always the unique, singular "this," and the individual, in which thought rests, is reality. Thought never passes beyond the singular, all- containing fact of reality, however it may transform it. Even when I pronounce one fact in experience to be different from that other, what I have done is to make a distinction within the subject of my judgment. The individual immediacy has been so far transformed by reflection that within it has been established a numerical distinction, and the true individual, the subject to which my next judgment will attach a predicate, of which it will proclaim a fresh "what," is the whole of that reality inside which a separation of a really abstract character has been established as a qualification of the original aspect of reality. If my experience is of myself as contrasted with what is not self, in like manner it is within the unique, all-inclusive, self- sustaining totality of the presentation by the mind of itself to itself that the contrast is established. A new aspect has emerged, that is all. Because the individual of experience is mind, and its nature is to be activity, it is never still, and the only fashion in which the varying aspects are fixed and held still is, as philosophers from the time of 24 ABSOLUTE MIND [L^ct. t. Heraclitus to that of Mill have pointed out, through the abstractions of reflection. So only is the system evolved in which we must think our experience — so only does our Universe rise before us. It is not in so-called causes, but in the ends or purposes which the mind has before it in so reflecting, and in nothing short of these, that the reason is to be sought of the fixity of the appear- ance of the world as it seems, and of us as part of it. We are what we are in virtue of ends set before it by the Mind in which we live and move and have our being. Therein lies the reason why reality presents itself as set in just these and no other aspects. With the ends the aspects vary. As each end is real for mind, so does each aspect equally belong to reality. If ends co-exist, so must aspects co-exist. Every aspect of the world as it seems is real, if and so far as the end which is realised in it is real. The degrees of reality depend on the relation of the ends. If an ^ end is super- seded by a deeper purpose, the aspect to which the former gave being sinks to the level of mere appearance, I know how hard all this is to grasp, and those of you who find it unintelligible I must refer back to the first six of the old lectures, where you have it worked out up to the point to which I now come. This point is that just as when we want to find out the nature of a particular science and the meaning of what it teaches, we must inquire into its method and categories, so it is in the BEAUTY 25 case of practice also. If we would know what the artist really says and does, or the good man, or the godly man, we must find out what his method is, and what are his dominating con- ceptions, and the ends which move him to act under them. Beauty, goodness, godliness, are all aspects in the world as it seems, aspects under which mind presents itself, aspects forming varying phases in which its individuality discloses itself to itself in what we call experience. The beautiful, for example, is an aspect in which experi- ence comes to us, an aspect which we fix and preserve in universals of reflection. Can we then hope to be able to resolve it into such universals 1 Certainly not ! Beauty is an aspect in which reality, always in form individual, discloses itself, and this unique individuality cannot be resolved into the universals which exist only in it and are separated out merely in abstraction. Beauty is one of the forms in which Mind recognises itself, and it belongs to the region of fact. Before reflection had played its part in isolating and fixing it, beauty was without meaning. A pig or a dog seems to know nothing of beauty. As Hegel has pointed out, it is only in so far as we think that we are capable of art, or morality, or religion. The extent to which each of us is capable of appreciating beauty depends on our capacity for conceptions and for the ends which lead us to choose them. The height to which mankind in general can rise in grasping the true, the beautiful, the good, depends on what 26 ABSOLUTE MIND [L«c^- 1- are the ends and capacity for conceptions of man- kind. That is why the Universe appears as it does to us human beings, and not otherwise. The limited character of the ends which, in practice as in theory, our nature leads us to choose, divides us not only from God but from the world as it is for God. If we would get as near as we can to Him we must seek the highest forms of which human experience is capable. For these will point us beyond themselves, not to other human forms, for of these there will be none beyond, but to reality that lies beyond and gives them deeper meaning as stages towards such reality. We may be satisfied if we find that, in the light of a deeper understanding, what has troubled us, what has separated us from God, has been nothing that separated us wholly from Him, nothing with a self-subsisting and inde- pendent nature, but a set of distinctions which fall within our own selves, which have their hard-and- fast appearance because of our mental and spiritual limits, and which, whether they assume the aspect of our weakness or that of the grave that closes on us, are but appearance relatively to the reality which comprehension of the deeper meaning dis- closes. In the Ultimate Reality such appearances can be but transient, and it is only the finiteness of our powers of reflection that has made us fix them into a system from which we see no escape. This system is the system of what we call the actual. What is actual is experience. Experience is neither the universal nor the particular, but the combination THOUGHT AND FEELING 27 of the two in the individual presentation. Presenta- tion gives us the actual. Now in presentation, and therefore in the actual, the transforming work of reflection, without which the individual presentation cannot be fixed for thought, operates in varying degrees. At times, as when we see colour or feel pleasure, the particular element of sensation pre- dominates. At other times, as when we recognise as facts confrontijig us the institutions of the family or the state, the element of sense recedes, and what gives its meaning to reality is the domi- nating conception. Objectivity is here very plainly what we are forced to think. It is the feeling which is highly qualified through reflection that binds the parent to the child, and the citizen to the state. A family and a state may be objects in experience, actual individuals in direct presentation, but it is only for a thinking being that they are so. For a low type of intelligence and among low types of intelligence they are meaningless and do not exist. A cow may conceivably have some sort of self-consciousness, but watch the expression of its face and you will readily satisfy yourself that it has no religion, no sense of citizenship. The higher the capacity for thought, the wider the limits of what is actual, and the more apparently is it rational. There appears to be also a varying limit at the other boundary, in the region of feeling. The capacity of our senses, the field of consciousness, may be much enlarged by sufiicient suggestion to the subliminal self. Many of the phenomena of 28 ABSOLUTE MIND [l«=ct- '• hypnotism illustrate this. Such experiences as those of telepathy and thought-reading seem to depend on the relaxation of the normal inhibitions which restrain the capacity of the self for sensation. Yet the records of these phenomena and the little they assist us towards knowledge of the higher kinds, strikingly suggest that what we are over- stepping is only the lower limit of feeling, within which the normal inhibitions of the self confine it, and not the upper limit of capacity to think. It is the shortcoming of mysticism that it takes feeling as such, with its barrenness of intellectual effort, to be sufficient as a form of reality. The strength of mysticism is its directly present particular of feel- ing. But this yields at best but the emotion which is no guide to truth, which has no basis in reflec- tion or justification in reason. Mysticism has the defects of its qualities. Its power lies in its simplicity, the readiness to hand of its material. But valuable as is the sense of reality which that material brings, it is wanting in the depth and solidity which only a systematic form can give. And a systematic form can be the outcome of reason alone. The great fact of family life has its foundation in passion, passion transfigured, but yet in its origin sexual and sensual. It develops on a basis that is largely one of feeling and of instinct. But its deeper meaning, the form which pervades and moulds it, is one which depends upon a dominating end and conception, the organisation of the family in which parents and children alike RELATIVITY 29 realise their lives in a social whole that is itself individual, as real as the individuals which are the members, as real as the cells for which the body- forms the organic whole. To the eye which possesses sight, as well as to the eye of faith, the family is just as real a phenomenon as is the human body. Both are directly presented. When I say that I have met the Fairchild family, I mean some- thing that I have seen, and not a mere succession or group of particular people. In the same way, when I say I have seen a living body, I mean more than a mere aggregate of cells. It is only relatively that the one is less directly presented than the other. The senses of a gnat might see in a human body only an aggregate of cells appearing to work in mechanical harmony of purpose. The coarse senses of the inhabitants of Brobdignag, directed upon Lilliput, might find the family more difficult to break up into its constituent members than a gnat may find the human body. Here, as in an infinity of other instances, the distinctions which occur in the field of perception, and which separate what appears as immediately given from what appears othei"wise, depend on our particular measure of space and time. There is no hard-and-fast line of demarcation between what is directly and what is indirectly given. Nevertheless, there is for each of us a practical working line. Taking two pheno- mena, both of which lie on one side of it, the human family and the human body, while both are pre- sented directly, they are presented with differing 30 ABSOLUTE MIND l^^- '• degrees of distinctness. The former owes most to reflection, the latter most to sense, for beings at the same plane of intelligence. There comes, indeed, not a definite point, for that never comes, but a region where we get from feeling the merest with which we start, to abstract universals of reflection which are never themselves presented as individual wholes, or as single or unique facts of experience. Such, as we saw before, are atoms and energy at the one end of the scale, and the Universe as a totality at the other end. Such are the past and the future by contrast with which the present is made definite in reflection. We become conscious even of our limits as individuals, and we thereby transcend them, by contrasting our presenta- tion of ourselves as objects for ourselves with what we can construct in thought, but cannot directly experience. That which is so constructed is con- structed abstractly, in universals only. Never does it present for us the universal combining with the particular to form the fact that is individual, unless, indeed, our inhibitions have been in some fashion and measure removed, and the region within which our faculty of presentation is confined has been ex- tended. Why we are limited as we are we cannot tell further than this, that it is in virtue of our occupying just this definite plane in the self-com- prehension of the absolute mind which is the founda- tion and final form of our reality, The ends which are in course of realising themselves, and in the self-realisation of which the plane of our intelligence RELATIVITY 31 is a stage, are ends which our finite methods always hold out as lying beyond us, as to be reached by inference only, and when we do reach them thus inferentially we can describe what we reach only in either the abstract rmiversals of speculative philosophy, or halting metaphors drawn from a lower sphere. We are what we are, and it is only at a level of intelligence that is incrusted with limitations arising from the finiteness of the pur- poses of our everyday life as men and women, that we reason at all. And yet reason takes us beyond ourselves, and in the highest phases of human self- consciousness tells us of much that lies beyond. Could we directly view the Universe svb specie ceternitatis we should see beyond these limits. But if we could so view we should have become as God is. Such is the conception, to which philosophy seems to have brought man, of the inmost nature of the content of his self-consciousness, of the world as it seems. That world lies between two limits, neither of which is, for man, reality. At the one extreme is what comes earliest in the time-history of our intelligence — feehng, feeling that cannot be defined, that is but material for the activity of in- telligence to further fashion into the individual of sense. At the other extreme is what seems to be a sphere of mere reflection, the creatures of which exist only for abstract thought. Between these two limits lies the individual world of reality, never still and ever self-transforming, just because its 32 ABSOLUTE MIND [l^^t. i. reality is mind the essence of which is spontaneous and self-originating activity. The aspects under which this world discloses itself vary in character according as they approach to the one limit or the other. But just because they are not self-subsist- ing things, numerically distinct, like marbles in a heap, but are aspects under which the real presents itself, they fall actually or potentially within the complex standpoint of human experience. Every phase of the world as it seems is real, though relatively to each other these phases are graded and possess degrees of reality. In the next five lectures we shall try to see something of their nature in such detail as space permits. To set out that nature fully would require a book no less great than the entire book of Life. But the out- lines must disclose themselves, if the task of these lectures is to be accomplished. It is for Philosophy to pm-sue her narrow path to the summit, and there to join hands vidth Art, and Morality, and Eeligion. The accomplishment of this is for her the test of success. It is only when he finds that the world as it seems to the artist, to the good man, to the godly man, seems real to him also, that the philo- sopher has done his work. In the first and second books of these lectures I showed you how the various ends after which knowledge in its different forms is striving, trans- form the real world. I carried the account down to the process of selective attention in the conscious human being. Now, just as in our consciousness ENDS IN THE SPHERE OF PRACTICE 33 the appearance of our world is determined by our ends, so are we determined in our characters and actions as individuals by the ends which we seek to realise. The artist, the good man, the religious man, are what they are in virtue of the purposes which are constantly being embodied in their practice. On the distinction between these pur- poses depends the distinction between the worlds of these men. Just as when we know, what we know is fashioned by the conceptions under which we have organised our knowledge, so, when we act, what we do takes its character and significance from the ends which we have striven to realise in our actions. Mind which is free in its choice acts under con- ceptions which it freely chooses, just as it reflects under such conceptions. " By their works ye shall know them." It is in works that Faith attains to life. It is in action that the spirit realises itself In such action man may be an intelligent being as completely as in his thinking. Just in so far as his action is the embodiment of thought does it disclose itself as the individual in which reality is attained in the union of what is universal, so long as it remains in the region of mere purpose, with what is particular in the concrete execution of that purpose. Conduct which is moral embodies both end and means. It is not the having an idea that is wrong, it is the giving effect to it, even if such giving effect assumes only the form of allowing the mind to dwell on it c 34 ABSOLUTE MIND [l=ct. i. It is of the nature of man as a thinking being to realise himself in a twofold fashion. The first of these fashions is theoretical. He seeks to organise the world of experience, as we saw in the first series of lectures, under conceptions in such a fashion as in the end to abolish its foreignness. He endeavours to find its reality in the law, which lies behind and gives meaning to phenomena, by dragging to light the universal which gives the individual its meaning and existence, and enables the mind to find itself even in the apparent externality of nature. The second fashion is that in which he alters his surroundings by what he does, and so stamps on them the impression of his personality. He may do this by making his surroundings, including his fellow-men, subordinate to his purpose of accumu- lating riches. He does it when he turns the material that is to his hand into clothes for himself, or makes others clothe him. Or he may do it, as the artist does, by making marble, or colour, or musical sound, or language the medium in which his self bodies itself forth. In all such cases the essential feature which gives its character to reality is the embodiment of purpose, the realisation of mind in the transformation of its material, its object world, into forms which are its own. In practice as in theory the task of mind is to find itself. In practice as in theory the com- pleteness with which this is done depends on the capacity for thinking. It is, therefore, in their purposes, or the ends which they seek to realise, THE AETIST 35 that the distinctions between the various forms of practical activity must be sought. And these purposes or ends must be investigated, and their relations to each other established, by reference to the conceptions which govern them. In the world of action, no less than in the world of science, a criticism of categories is essential for clear know- ledge. We have an illustration of this truth in Art. The artist is essentially practical. What he wills and what he accomplishes is just a transformation of experience. His mastery over the sensuous forms, whether of sound, or of outline and colour, or of bronze and marble, or of language, enables him to set individual reality before us in new aspects. In these aspects we have the work of his will. He gives us an experience which he has himself fashioned, and its importance is that in it he enables us to have before us the individual as it is presented at the plane of his own mind. A scene in nature has in it an infinity of detail which is far beyond the reach of the brush, even of a Turner. But the artist does not copy nature. He presents nature as he has comprehended and set it in his own mind, and thereby he lifts us for the moment to his own level, a level at which the greatness of his mind becomes apparent to us. Again, in a moral action we are conscious, as before us, of a plane of purpose which goes beyond that of the brute — ^purpose, it may be, which goes beyond that of the brute just in so far as it inspires 36 ABSOLUTE MIND [l=ct. i. man to act on the footing of being more than a mere isolated and self-regarding individual, and as finding reality in a social whole of which he is a member. So again in religion attention is concentrated on the relation of man to God, and the religious man is he whose will is constantly striving to give effect to purposes which are fashioned by this relationship. It is the old problem that confronts us, the problem of how the various aspects of life as it seems stand to one another. Just as in the earlier lectures I had, after defining the nature of Ultimate Eeality, to set forth its phases as they appeared in the various sciences, so, later on, I shall have to try to touch upon its phases as they appear in the region of practice. But, as was pointed out in the tenth of the earlier lectures, the distinction between theory and practice is only a' relative one, and its importance becomes less the deeper we penetrate into the meaning and nature of reality. For certain practical purposes we contrast thinking and willing, knowing and being. But the contrast exists for practical purposes only. That is to say, in thought as in action, the essence of what we do is to alter the individual fact of experience from which we start by giving it a new form, by introducing through the judgment, of which, in practice as well as theory, it is always the subject, a new qualification within its limits. The task of philosophy, in this stage of the search after truth, is to express in language which THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY 37 is as nearly as possible scientific what is implicitly present to the mind that reflects, but has been obscured by the incrustations that arise from habitual immersion in the language and metaphors of a lower plane. Even at that lower plane the man of the world finds himself confronted by : — " Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings. Blank misgivings of a Creature, Moving about in worlds not realised. High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. But for those first affections. Those shadowy recollections. Which, be they what they may. Are yet the fountain light of all our day. Are yet a master light of all our seeing. Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of that eternal Silence ; truths that wake. To perish never ; Which neither listlessness, nor rude endeavour. Nor man nor boy, nor all that is at enmity with joy. Can utterly abolish or destroy." Deep down in the hearts and brains of even those who seem to be most of all of the earth earthy, lie the impulses that make them men and women in a higher sense than any they express in words. In the surroundings that have slowly but surely grown up about us, in the manifestations of our corporate life as a nation, in the institutions with- out which no race of human beings counts itself civilised, we have the intimations of the existence that is more than one of rivalry in the assertion of 38 ABSOLUTE MIND [l«ct. i. the individual will to live. The picture galleries, the schools, the hospitals, the Courts of Justice, the Parliament Houses, these and the like bear witness to the larger meaning of the life that is ours, and the deeper meaning that gives form to its experience. It is the Mind which is the foundation of that experience, and the various forms which that experience assumes under control by categories of thought which we have not yet examined, that must be the subject of the next five lectures. LECTUEE II To-day I have to start from the position that the Ultimate Reality is mind, and I have to ask you to go with me in an investigation of what the nature of mind is. Now this is perhaps the very hardest part of our task, and this lecture may prove the most diflBcult to follow. But it is a part of the undertaking which must be faced, and through which I must carry you as well as I can. Let us try to get together our materials, and let us begin by doing, what is always a useful thing when you want to find the meaning of a word, by trying to see what mind is not. Now mind is not — this is perfectly clear if the reasoning up to this stage be right — a thing. It is not a thing that is somewhere in the brain and is worked by the nerves or works the nerves. It is nothing with a locality, because it is that to which everything, not excepting the forms of space and time, presents itself. If we were to assume that mind was a thing having a locality in space and a place in time we should be driven to one of two conclusions. We should either end in materialism, or, at the other extreme, we should fall into what is even more difficult to 89 40 ABSOLUTE MIND [Le«=t. h. get out of than materialism, that which is called solipsism, the doctrine that existence is merely the being a set of the impressions or ideas of a par- ticular individual object called the self. Bishop Berkeley, as Hume afterwards showed, got very near to this position. For him the mind was some- thing which was acted upon by God, a mechanical God really, who operated upon it ab eactra, and produced the impressions which made up the Universe of which the self was conscious. Well, it is clear that mind cannot be a thing with a locality in space and time. Again an equally imperfect account of it is to describe it as a subject with an object of a foreign nature confronting it. By an object of a foreign nature I mean an object which does not fall within the mind itself If you take that point of view, you will find it wholly impossible to explain how mind and its object ever get together, or how the object can have any meaning excepting in virtue of distinctions which obviously are the work of the mind itself. The characteristic of the mind is to be self-conscious, is to be active, is to be more like a life than like an inert substance. Its nature is self-conscious activity, and it is within that activity that all that is and all that can be falls. Now, another misapprehension which we have to avoid is the exclusive identification of mind with any particular phase of mind, for instance, feeling. It is only by abstraction that feeling is put on one side and thought is put on the other. Mind is just THE NATUEE OF MIND 41 as much feeling as it is thought, and it is just as much thought as it is feeling, because thought and feeling, as here distinguished, are merely two of the aspects in which the living self-conscious individual mind manifests itself as activity. It is in reflection only and for purposes that are special that we break up the activity in which mind consists, activity that is final and ultimate, into the con- trasted aspects of the discursive thought which relates terms, and the supposed immediacy of particular feeling. Idealism has been brought at times into disrepute by want of attention to the fact that the distinction is an artificial one. Now we come to another point. AH the phenomena which are before the mind appear before it as successive and so in time, and many of them appear also as in space. But it is plain that these phenomena present that aspect only for the mind. In our everyday conversation we ignore the relation of the mind as subject to its object. We speak of the object world as if it were something self-subsisting, and that is how we come to talk of time and space as if they were self-subsisting and finite forms of reality. It is quite right that we should do that for everyday practical purposes. You and I live in this world, and we have to deal with each other as human beings, as citizens of a state, as members of a family, as lecturer and audience. In these relations we have to contemplate ourselves from a standpoint where it is necessary to make clear the distinction between our personalities, and 42 ABSOLUTE MIND [^^<^- »• so it is that for social purposes we come to make distinctions which lead us to treat ourselves as if we were so many different minds and so many different living things. That is a standpoint which represents truth, measured by the piu-poses which we have in view, but it is not a standpoint from which the final word can be said about the nature of reality. The phenomena of the mind are phenomena which are there for the mind, and the general relations in which they appear, space and time, are just rela- tions of what comes before the mind, and are therefore themselves distinctions which the mind itself makes, and which exist only in so far as the mind presents things to itself. Now, to some extent we see that this is so when we look at even very familiar illustrations. What is called the " tempo " of different kinds of mind, the measure of time, is different. We can conceive beings for whom a thousand years is as one day, and beings for whom one day is as a thousand years. Take an animal with very fine senses ; for example, a gnat in all probability possesses such senses. To a gnat an explosion may seem to occupy a definite time, whereas to a creature with a less finely organised sense of hearing the explosion may seem to occupy but an instant. There are some in- genious calculations by Von Baer on the effect of differences in the amount of duration felt, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. If we were able, within the length of a second, to note ten thousand events distinctly instead of ten as RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 43 now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be one thou- sand times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If bom in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of our carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred; not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. And now reverse the hypothesis, and suppose a being to get only 1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000th times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations ; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs ; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him.* Now I come to another point. ' If time be a relation in which things are presented for the mind, if it be, as it were, just the form of such presenta- tion, then thought must take account of another relation in which the contents of the mind stand to one another. It is conceivable, for instance, that what is first in time may, in a deeper view of * See James' Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 639. 44 ABSOLUTE MIND [Lect. h. reality, become logically last, and conversely that what is logically last may become, in the deeper sense, first in time. Take the notion of the mind in comprehending phenomena as successive. One phenomenon comes after another, and we trace the connection, and if we are psychologists we trace the succession of forms back to their origin as suggestions of the senses and as constructions of the intelligence. But it is plain that, although in this way we get last of all to the mind, the mind must have been presupposed as the very condition without which that succession of phenomena, which are there as its object, could not have taken place. Our very psychological analysis leads us to see that the mind must be presupposed before there can be any possibility of such succession ; and, therefore, in the deeper meaning of things, in the fuller view of truth, the mind must come logically first, although it is reached last as a presentation in the psycho- logical analysis which only takes account of the history in time. In that way there comes to be a fuller view of things, and a view of things in which we see mind as the ultimate truth, and the ultimate truth in the sense that things presuppose mind instead of mind presupposing things. If the activity of thought be the condition without which it is impossible to attach any meaning to the notion of the object world of phenomena, presented as arranged in space and as successive in time, then mind must be logically first, whatever the nature of the time series, and the final view of things must be the ILLUSTRATION FROM CARLYLE 45 view in which they owe the very meaning of their reality to the mind. In the course of these lectures I have tried from time to time to illustrate to you metaphysical truths from the insight — and often it is very great — of the poets and the artists, and I have quoted to you various illustrations of how the poets in particular have seen, as it were by an intuition of genius, into the very metaphysical conclusions which we have been straining after with so much difficulty. Thi