MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA L-VrvTRSITY LIBR.\RIES VEW YORK as pait of the "Foundations of Western Ci\-ilization Preserv'ation Projecr ' NATION. Funded bv die ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Librar\' COP^^IGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 1'". United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copynghted material... 'arv' accept a copy order if, m its judgement, fulfillmient of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUfHOR: HARRIS, SAMUEL TITLE : PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM... PLACE: NEW YORK DA TE : 1899 COLUMBIA UNTVERSTTY il BR ARIES rRESERVAnON DEPARTiMHNr Master Negative # Restrictions on Use: 11 IBLI OCRA PH I CMICR OFOEM F' ARGET Origm.i! XLiturial as r-ihiujd - }\xistiiig I'Ubliographic Record 211 H24 D211 1124 L ■■■- >..'■" Tin, Ganuel, 1C14^-1C:'C' . ll.u philosophical basic of theism; an exanina- tion c£ !/..•• • ..'.'Jonalit;; c-^ nan \q ascertain his capacity to ^.i;;^^; and s rvo uod, and the validity of the ] riaiciplos underlying the defence of theis by Canuel Harris... Ilcy. ed. llew York, Gcribner, 1899. xxii, 577 p. 24 en.. ^ ;; ' in Butler Libr^u-'y of Philor^ophy. 1884- iJ!)7l)7 \ -^ { J TFCIINICAI. MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE:_,,3^i:!?J^ RiiDUCTION RATIO: IMAGE PLACHMnXT: lA ^. IB TIB .^ DATE FILMED: ,^^_Z?:"' '' _._^_ INITIALS ^' ^J FILMED BY: Rt-SEARCl I PUIM JCATIONS, INJC \ViX)r)BK!iX ,L, CT c Association for Information and Image Management 1 1 00 Wayne Avenue. 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THE SELF-REVELATION OF GOD. 8vo, 3.50 AN EXAMINATION OF THE PERSONALITY OF MAN TO ASCERTAIN HIS CAPACITY TO KNOW AND SERVE GOD, AND THE VALIDITY OF THE PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THE DEFENCE OF THEISM BY SAMUEL HAEEIS, D.D., LL.D, ""• X, Nh PBOFESSOB OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN THE THEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT OF YALE COLLBOE P REVISED EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SOirS 1899 «D COFYMGHT BY OBABLES SCRIBN££'&80Ha issa. WHO IK SUCCESSIVE CLASSES HAVE BEKII ITNDE6 MY INSTRUCTION PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY IN BOWDOIN COLLBGB AND IN BANGOB AND YALE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOLS THIS BOOK IS EBSPKCTFULLY DEDICATED 3 282591 PREFACE. yvi When I began to give instruction in systematic theology, the discussions in the class-room were continually forcing us back to preliminary philosophical questions, pertaining to the reality, pro- cesses and limits of human knowledge, and to the constitution of man as a personal being. I thus found it would facilitate our work to treat these questions together in a course of preliminary lectures on the Philosophical Basis of Theism. Students in successive classes have found these lectures and discussions helpful both in their studies of Apologetics, Theodicy and the Philosophy of Religion and in the clear and intelligent apprehension of the Christian truth and life. Many of them, from year to year, have assured me that they had been greatly helped by them and have expressed their earnest desire for their publication. From these annual lectures and discussions this volume has grown up. I publish it, partly because, with the volume before us as a text book to refer to, I shall have more time for examining with my classes the subjects which belong more distinctively to systematic theology; and also with the hope that discussions, which have already been helpful to many young men, may be of service to others who are striving to solve the great theological and religious problems of our times. Yale Dwinity School, June 23, 1883. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. § 1. Design of the Book 1 g 2. Need of it. — I. The question being, does a personal God exist, we must first ascertain what personality is.— II. The ultimate question with the atheist pertains to the reality of knowledge. Atheism denies that man can know God. Atheism rests its denial on false theories of know- ledge. Every atheistic theory of knowledge involves agnosticism. The real question with the atheist.— III. False positions of Christian theo- logians.— IV. Results to be attained 3-9 CHAPTER II. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. ? 3. What knowledge is.— Implies subject, object and knowledge. Is always the intellectual equivalent of reality. Is a primitive act, incapable of definition. Known in the act of knowing 10 § 4. Agnosticism. — Partial agnosticism involves complete 10-11 g 5. Reality OF Knowledge. — I. A primitive datum of consciousness. 1. Man's knowledge of himself and his environment. Objection that this is not a demonstration answered. 2. Knowledge of first principles. 3. Know- ledge of God. 4. The Ego, the World, and God. 5. In what sense from experience. — II. Agnosticism not tenable. Denies the trustworthiness of human intelligence. Contradicts universal consciousness. Not defen- sible by argument. Is self-contradictory— Hegel's maxim. Continuous equipoise of thought impossible. — III. Any theory of knowledge in- volving agnosticism is false 11-20 § 6. Knowledge and Fallibility.— Objection stated.— I. Answer that it involves agnosticism. — II. Assumes as fact what is contrary to uni- versal experience. — III. The rational ground for persistent belief — IV. A nucleus of knowledge within a zone of probability. — V. A great mass of knowledge persists. Changes in the progress of physical science. Changes in the progress of philosophy. Changes in the progress of religious belief. • 20-26 vii VIU CONTENTS. § 7. Criteria of Primitive Knowledge.— I. Self-evidence.— II. Impossi- bility of thinking the contrary. Applicable both to Rational and Pre- eentative Intuition. Primitive belief not the result of mental impo- tence. The unthinkable distinguished from the inconceivable. Objec- tion that God is unknowable because inconceivable.— III. Persistence. — IV. Consistency with all knowledge. Use in science and all reflective thought. Applied to test primitive knowledge 26-31 { 8. Knowing, Feeling and Willing.— I. Are distinct, not separate.— II. True philosophy must recognize the distinctness and the inseparable- ness. 1. Present tendency to overlook the inseparableness. Exempli- fied in Theology. 2. Errors from overlooking their distinctness. In what sense feeling is said to be a kind of knowing. Feeling and willing not ultimate criteria.— III. In what sense feeling and willing test and verify knowledge. 1. In rebutting Spencerian agnosticism. 2. In im- plying objective reality. 8. In finding scope for realizing the highest ends. 4. The action of the individual and of mankind tests what is true.— IV. Errors of skepticism and materialism from overlooking the relations of knowing, feeling and willing. 1. Final causes. 2. Wrong conception of love of truth. 3. Right moral character favorable to the investigation of truth. 4. Explains the fact that knowledge is advanced by the growth or development of the man 31-43 CHAx^ER 111. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 5 9. Classification.- Intellect, Sensibility and Will. Intuition, Representa- tion, Reflection.— I. Faculties.— II. The Mind active in knowing.— III. Element of intelligence contributed by the mind.— IV. How acts of knowledge are distinguished • . . 44-45 2 10. Intuition or Primitive Knowledge.— I. Definition.— IT. Presenta- tive Intuition and Rational. 1 . Presentative intuition defined. Includes sense-perception and self-consciousness. 2. Rational Intuition defined. 3. Intuition is primitive knowledge. 4. Intuition the common name of both.— III. The mind considered as capable of Rational intuition is the Reason 45-47 § 11. Representative Knowledge.— Definition: representation and memory. Self-evident knowledge in memory. Relation to other knowledge. Theories of Huxley and Mill. Physiological Explanation 47-48 § 12. Knowledge by Reflection on Thought.— I. Definition. 1. Pre- requisite that the object and regulative principles be given. 2. Pre- sented indeterminate. Not minima visibilia. Nebulous matter of in- tuition. S. Apprehension, Difftrentiation, Integration.— II. These three the processes of all human thinking.— III. Thought merely dis- covers. — IV. Subsidiary objects of Thought 48-54 § 13. Thought Distinguished by its Objects.— I. Abstract or Formal.— II. Concrete or realistic— III. Creative or Imagination. 1. Fancy its lower form. 2. Its higher form, creates ideals. 3. Leads in every sphere of intellectual activity.— IV. Science advanced chiefly by con- crete thought. 1. Formal thought inadequate because it stops in words. CONTENTS. « 2. Inadequate for synthetic processes and judgments. 3. The three axioms of formal logic insuflScient. 4. Leibnitz' Sufficient Reason. Prof. Bo wen's three principles. 5. Principles underlying concrete thought. 6. These last principles at the basis of all scientific thought. 7. All science empirical, philosophical and theological, advanced chiefly by concrete thought 54-61 ^ 14. Induction and the Newtonian Method. — I. Simple or Baconian In- duction. 1. Extends knowledge beyond observation. 2. The principle on which it rests. Known by rational intuition. Indefinite statements of the principle. The uniformity of Nature defined. 3. Distinguished from erroneous conceptions of it. 4. This brings no discredit on Induc- tion. 5. Induction and Hume's objection to miracles. — II. The hypo- thetical, or Newtonian Method. 1. Differs from induction in data, meth- ods and results. 2. Illustrated from common life; the lost camel. 3. The hypothesis created by imagination. 4. Aided by previous know- ledge, habits of observation, analogy. 5. Verification: two requisites; a third way sometimes. 6. The intuitive principle on which it rests. 7. Importance and general use of this method. 8. Now called induc- tion; improperly so. 9. Neither method peculiar to physical science. 10. Anticipations 61-72 J 15. Relation of Reflective Thought to Intuition.— I. Reflection gives no elemental material for thought. 1. True only when intuition in- cludes presentative and rational. 2. True only of primitive or elemen- tal realities. — II. Within these limits knowledge enlarged by thought. — III. Can discover the unknown only by the known. — IV. Reflective knowledge always preceded by spontaneous knowledge. 1. In what sense faith precedes knowledge. Not peculiarly applicable to religious knowledge. 2. No Faith-faculty as the distinctive organ of religious belief. 3. Various meanings of faith. 4. Belief of Testimony. — V. Reflection and experience become spontaneous in common sense, . . 72-81 I 16. Relation of Reflective Thought to Universal Reason.— The universe is grounded in and the manifestation of Reason. — I. This the ultimate ground of knowledge by inference and by induction. — II. Only by this can thought solve its ultimate problem. 1. Thought culminates in finding the unity of the manifold. 2. Must be the unity of rational system. 3. Possible only in recognizing a personal God. — III. Primary motive of scientific investigation. Kant's three questions of philosophy.81-85 § 17. Probability. — I. Assent according to degree of evidence. — II. When the improbability is slight, it is unnoticed. — III. Assent on probable evi- dence a guide to conduct. — IV. No peculiar significance in application to religious belief. 85-87 CHAPTER IV. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH PRESENTATIVE INTUITION. ? 18. What is Known Through Sense-Perception 88-91 § 19. What is Known Through Self-Consciousness.— I. Object, subject and knowledge known simultaneously. Essential in every act of know- ing. Object and subject are two realities known in one intellectual act. X CONTENTS. Implicit or virtual consciousness. Formulas expressing direct and in- verse knowledge. — II. Knowledge of our own mental operations. Comte's objection. Answer.— III. The mind has knowledge of itself. 1. The error that the operations may be known, not the mind. 2. Error that we are more certain of the operations of the mind. 3. Error that mind is a series of states of consciousness. 4. Mind conscious of self only in its operations.— IV. Individuality and identity known in con- sciousness. — V. Rationality and Freedom known in consciousness. At- tributes of Personality. Knowledge of persosality positive not negative. Can know others as persons. Knowledge of self as person prerequisite to knowing God 91-99 § 20. Kant's Thing m Itself.— Statement of his doctrine.— I. Phenomenal- ism his fundamental error.— II. Error of presenting noumenon and phenomenon in an antithesis and reciprocally exclusive. Origin of two incompatible types of thought.— III. Misinterprets and contradicts con- sciousness.— IV. Not a noumenon or necessary idea of reason. 1. Is an attempt to conceive of substance without properties. 2. The postula- tion contrary to reason. 3. Assumes creation in thought of an element not given in intuition. — V. Discredits Reason by making its ideas fictitious.— VI. Involves absurdity. No knowledge if a mind knowing. Knowledge of the unknowable the condition of knowing. Implies a faculty above reason to criticise it. The only way in which Reason can bediscredited.— VII. Issues in agnosticism 99-109 g 21. Relativity of Knowledge.— I. Objection stated. First form. Seoond form. Third form.— II. Answer to Third form. 1. Answered by ^3 18, 19, 20. 2. The statement of the objection implies knowledge of reality. 3. Involves absurdity. 4. Issues in agnosticism. , . . 109-113 CHAPTER V. WHAT IS KNOWN TllHOUCJIi RATIONAL INTUITION. I 22. Universal Principles not Particular Realities 114-115 I 23. Rise and Development in Consciousness.— I. Are constituent ele- ments of reason.— II. Appear in consciousness on occasion in experi- ence.— III. Regulate thought and action before they are recognized in thought.— IV. Not innate ideas. Dr. Buchner's mistake. . . . 115-llT § 24. Significance as Regulative.— I. Significant only as applied to beings. Distinguished from Mysticism.— II. Do not guarantee correctness of judgment. Objection that the ancients believed antipodes impossible. Objection by Helmholz.— III. Determine the possible and the impos- sible. 1. What is possible to thought. 2. What is possible for will- power to efiect. 3. What is possible in nature 117-121 §'25. Validity of Rational Intuitions.— I. Sustain all the criteria of pri- mitive knowledge.— II. Indispensable in Reasoning.— III. Verified in experience. In common sense. In physical science. Exemplified in Mathematics. Prof. Clifford's objection. This verification continually going on.— IV. Essential to interpret sense-perception.— V. Objection that not universally believed. 1. Unknown to infants and savages. 2. CONTENTS. xi Not necessarily believed by the cultivated; J. S. Mill's objection. Inane objections.— VI. Objection that they are self-contradictory; 1. Kant's Antinomies explained; Prof. Clifford's use of them. Hamilton's use of them. Mansel's use of them. 2. If the objector's assertion is true the objection is fatal; but it is the only objection. The objection itself appeals to the authority of reason. 3. The antinomies rightly un- derstood are not contradictions but complemental truths; examples. 4 The true argument from the antinomies. Kant's explanation of it; and whv inadequate. 5. H. Spencer's Antinomy and agnosticism. 6. Kant's admission as to his phenomenalism.— VII. Objection that ra- tional intuitions arise from the experience of the individual by associ- ation of ideas. Statement of Mill. Statement of Diderot. 1. Individual experience inadequate to account for them. 2. If thus arising, they would be inveterate prejudices. 3. Falls into subjective idealism and agnosti- cism. 4. Has been found inadequate and is abandoned.— VIII. Objection that they are the result of the experience of the race in its evolution. 1. Admits they are now constitutional and a priori to the individual. 2. Admits they are valid and give real knowledge. 3. If so, their origin is of minor consequence. 4. Evolution does not account for them. 5. Ob- jection that evolution reaches back of the primitive man. 6. Laws of thought not in continuous flux.— IX. Objection that rational intuitions are subjective and illusive. 1. Is a specific application of the theory of relativity of knowledge. 2. Incompatible with the theory of ancestral experience. 3. Without rational intuitions knowledge is disintegrated into subjective impressions. 4. Reason is everywhere and always the same.— X. The validity of rational intuitions involves the existence of su- preme and absolute Reason. 1. Truth has no significance except as a mind is its subject. 2. These principles not peculiar to an individual. 3. They have reality only as truths of absolute Reason. 4. Reason in man the same as in God. 5. Christian Theism explains and confirms them by the truth that man is in the image of God. 6. Objection ; this is anthropomorphism. 7. Objection ; this involves Pantheism.— XI. The only reasonable explanation is that the intuitive principles are truths of Reason. Failure of the three empirical positions exhausts the resources of empiricism.— XII. Three conditions of the possibility of science.— XIII. Atheism rests on some theory involving agnosticism. . . 121-151 CHAPTER VI. THE ULTIMATE REALITIES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. } 26. Meaning OF Ultimate Realities.— Categories : Aristotle's use of the 152 word and Kant's i 27. Matter and Form.— Plato's " Ideas."— Kant's error as to forms and categories. The true position lo^-io^ • • I 28. Classification.— The two classes and their subdi\nsions, and why. Aristotle's classification of categories. Knowledge begins as knowledge of particular beings ; issues in knowledge of the Absolute Being. 153-154 xu CONTENTS. CONTENTS. XlU CHAPTER VII. ULTIMATE REALITIES PRIMARILY KNOWN IN PERCEPTIVE INTUL TION; BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. I 29. Being.— I. Known in perceptive intuition and cannot be defined other- wise. — II. Is a particular or determinate being. — III. In perceptive intui- tion known as existing in various modes ; in rational intuition known by reason in its true significance and reality. — IV. Known in its whole reality as substance and quality. The Greek usage. Does everything flow ? substance, persistence, existence. Not essential to being that it be eternal, self-existent, etc. Synthesis of being and phenomenon. — V. Being is fundamental ; all other realities pertain to being. Aristotle's genera of Being. The concrete determinate Being is the unit of know- ledge 155-168 ^ 30. Modes of Existence.— I. Power. Power in motion ; intellectual power; will-power. Quality. Substance and cause. Power hypostasized. James Mill's denial of power. Cause : agent, transitive, reactive, free. Object or recipient. — II. One and many. 1. Individuality and identity; origin of the ideas. Does not imply simplicity. In what sense indivisible. Belief in existence after death from belief of personal individuality and identity, not from shadows and dreams. 2. The individual and other beings. Knowledge of the outward object. Things and persons. 3. Number; origin of the idea. — III. Extension in space. Origin of the idea. Not a subjective form of sense but a form of things. The fourth dimension of space. — IV. Duration in time. — V. Quantity. — VI. Differ- ence and relation 158-167 f 31. Inferences. — I. Knowledge ontological in its beginning. Critical point against agnosticism. — II. Knowledge begins as knowledge of personal beings and impersonal. Mansel's objection. Excludes materialism and idealism. Kant's phenomenalism. J. G. Fichte's attempt to avoid it by knowledge of self. Hegel's attempt to avoid it. His near approach to the true philosophy and his failure. These failures prove that knowledge must begin ontological if it ever becomes so. — III. Knowledge begins as knowledge of determinate being. 1. Excludes the error that being is primarily in the genus or the universal. 2. Being is not the one only sub- stance of pantheism. 3. Finite persons and things are real beings. — IV. Being is not an attribute but the subject of attributes. Not the sum total of all attributes. Affirmation of being not the weakest of affirma- tions. Attributes common to all beings. — V. Determinateness of being is not limitation. Omnia detemiinatio negatio est. The fallacy of ag- nostics and pantheists in reasoning from this maxim. God determinate but not limited. — VI. Origin and necessity in perceptive intuition of the distinction of science into physical and metaphysical 167-179 CHAPTEK VIII. THE TRUE: THE FIRST ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON. f 32. The Five Ultimate Ideas of Reason.— Meaning. Nouraena. The Five Realities of rational Intuition named and defined. Rational Intui- tion does not give knowledge of being 180-182 a 33. The True: The First Norm or Standard of Reason.— I. Defini- tion.— II. Are principles of things as well as of thought. Are archety- oal in Absolute Reason; Plato's Ideas. Rational beings know the su- preme reason xo^ lot CHAPTER IX. THE RIGHT, OR LAW : THE SECOND ULTIMATE REALITY OF REASON. a 34. General Significance of Right or Law.— Definition of Law.— I. Law to intellectual and physical power. 1. Determine what it is possi- ble for power to effect. Laws of thought. Laws of Physical Power. 2. Definition of Right. 3. Law of nature as commonly used, distinguished from Rational Law. 4. Some so called laws of nature are laws of rea- son.— II. Principles of Reason are laws to Will. 1. Declare what the will ought to do. 2. Right denotes conformity of action of will with law. 3. Truth as Law to will is moral law.— III. Common characteris- tics of Law to thought, force, and will 185-187 § 35. Ethical Significance of Right and Law.— I. Origin.— II. Signifi- cance of Ethical Terras. 1. Ought, Obligation, Duty. 2. Right. 3. Law. 4. Authority. 5. Government. Moral Law distinguished from statute law.— III. Ethical principles are of the highest certainty . 187-190 ? 36. Moral Law Universal, Immutable, Imperative.— I. Because it is truth of Reason known as law to action. -II. Implies the existence of God, the Absolute Reason.— 1 1 1. Falsehood and absurdity the intellectual basis of wrong doing.— IV. Law requires conformity to the constitution of things.— V. Transgression must issue in failure and loss.— VI. En- forced by penalty.— VII. Answer to the objection that intuitive ethics is void of significance. 190-193 { 37. Intuitive Ethics Distinguished from False Theories.—!. Theories of association of ideas.— II. Theories attempting to derive the idea of right from happiness.— III. That moral distinctions originate in the feel- ings.— IV. Hutcheson's theory of the Moral Sense.— V. That moral dis- tinctions rest on the will of God.— VI. That truth and law are eternal in the nature of things independent of God. 193-203 ^ 38. The Formal Principle of the Law and the Real.— I. The formal principle of the Law.-II. The Real Principle.— III. The significance and necessity of the formal principle. 1. Gives the distinctively ethical ideas. 2. Declares the real principle to be law. 3. Gives the aspect of virtue as obedience to law or doing duty. 4. Gives the aspect of virtue as harmony of the will with reason. 5. Recognizes virtue as harmony with God and the constitution of the universe.— IV. Significance and necessity of the real principle. Without it no knowledge what the law requires. Without it duty, if known, would be done without love. So done it is debasing as a blind obedience. The will consents to the formal principle only in the act of love 203-207 jf 39. Evidence that the real principle of the law is the law of love. I. So declared by Christ.— II. The rational ground is that man exists in a ,^ tv, XIV CONTENTS. CONTENTS. XV rational system. In such a system selfishness is absurd. — III. Know- ledge of the moral system being presupposed the knowledge of the law of love is by rational intuition. 1. Arises on occasion in experience in a particular case and is operative before it is recognized or formulated. 2. The application varies with the conception of the system. 3. Its full Christian meaning presupposes the idea of a universal moral system under one God. 4. Sin and evil in self-isolation. — IV. Man's subjection to the law of love indicated in his constitutional sensibilities. Egoistic and altruistic sensibilities.— V. Verified in experience. 1. The solidarity of mankind a fact known in experience. 2. That obedience to law of love promotes the highest good is verified by experience. 3. The theory that the good is attained in selfishness logically issues in pessimism. VI. Confirmed by the common consent of mankind. 1. Practically re- cognized when not formulated. 2. Acknowledged by thinkers whose principles it contradicts. 3. Attested by deniers of Christianity. 4. Confirmed by scholarly investigation of religion, philosophy and liter- ture. — VII. Objections: 1. No agreement in moral sentiments. Agree in principle differ as to its application. The same act of different signifi- cance in different cases. 2. Savage tribes destitute of moral ideas. If so, undeveloped ; children of larger growth. No evidence sufficient to establish it. Testimony of Anthropologists 207-226 CHAPTER X. THE PERFECT : THIRD ULTIMATE REALITY OR IDEA OF REASON. § 40. Origin and Significance of the Idea.— Implies a rational standard. Is the Norm for the realization of all creations of mind 227 § 41. Ideals. — I. Definition. Distinguished from a conceit of fancy. — II. The material given in experience, the creation guided by Reason; a crea- tion not a copy. — III. Nearer to perfection than the object. Truth to nature. — IV. Possible only by virtue of reason. — V. Practical import- ance of ideals 227-230 I 42. Beauty as known by the Reason, or Principles of ^Esthetics. — L Beauty defined. 1. Is perfection revealed. 2. Revealed in some con- crete object. 3. Revealed in a finite object. 4. Objects are beautiful in dif- ferent degrees. — II. Beauty the outshining of truth. — III. Beauty dis- tinguished by the modes of existence in which it is revealed. — IV. All beauty is spiritual beauty. 1. Reveals a spiritual ideal. 2. True of beauty of nature as well as of beauty of art. Nature a medium for the expression of spiritual ideals. 3. Beauty of the human form analogous to that of natural objects. 4. Higher type of beauty of the human form. 5. The Cosmos beautiful as the expression of a pervasive spiritual pre- sence. 6. Admission of Evolutionists compared with the rational phil- osophy. — V. Beauty has objective reality. — VI. Beauty manifested only to rational beings. In what sense the mind creates the beauty which it perceives. — VII. Universal standard of beauty. 1. Authority : Goethe, Plato, Geo. Eliot 2. Inferred from principles already stated. Ana- logous recognition of the universal reason in all science. Unity of specu- lative, ethical, and sesthetical philosophy. 3. Models. 4. Objections. — VIII. Sublimity. — IX. The ugly. — X. iEsthetic emotion consequent on intellectual idea 230-243 a 43 JESTHETIC EM0TI0NS.-I. Distinguished from other feelings, natural or ' rational.— II. Prompts to share with others.— III. The mind is in the attitude of a seer; emotion in view of the expressiveness of things. IV. Emotions with which sesthetic anotions are often improperly confounded. 1. Wonder. 2. Certain merely agreeable sensations. 3. Pleasure of excitement.— V. Emotions of sublimity.— VI. Emotions awakened by the ugly 243-248 g 44. iESTHETic Culture , 248-250 g 45. ^Esthetics and Theism 250-251 Z 46 Erroneous Theories.-I. Variety of them. Burke's.-II. Theory of * A8sociation.-III. Theory of Prof A. Bain 251-255 CHAPTER XL THE GOOD : THE FOURTH ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH THE REASON. 3 47 The Question Stated.— I. Definition of terms : happiness, well-being. II. Occasion of the rise of the idea of good and evil.— III. Necessity of a criterion.- IV. Two answers as to what is the good and its criterion. 1. Hedonism: good is enjoyment measured by quantity. 2. Good is worth estimated by rational standard.— V. The empirical and rational elements.— VI. The greatest good and the true good 256-258 2 48. Hedonism is False.— Various ethical theories more or less Hedonistic. I. Necessary outcome of Sensationalism ; incompatible with Rational- ism.— II. False maxim that the ultimate motive is the desire of happi- ness. 1. Every desire has its specific object. 2. Motives are many, not merely one. 3. Any one passion may gain ascendency. 4. Incompati- ble with free-will. 5. Incompatible with subjectivity of happiness. III. False maxim that all pleasures are of the same kind. 1. Enjoy- ments discriminated : by their sources ; by their tendencies. 2. Enjoy- ments not essentially good and may be evil. 3. Enjoyments distin- guished as to essential worth. 4. Common sense rejects the Hedon- istic maxim.— IV. Hedonism gives no test to discriminate superior good from inferior, as to degree.— V. Incompatible with distinction of right and wrong 258-266 ^ 49. The Good Estimated by Reason.— I. The rational standard defined.— II. The rational idea is that of worthiness or worth.— III. Presupposes the ideas of the true, the right, the perfect— IV. Distinction of good from evil, eternal and immutable.— V. Error of Ethics confounding the good and the right.— VI. The question as to the true good distinguished from that as to the highest good.— VII. Worth estimated by reason distinguished from value in political economy.— VIII. Good is the ob- ject acquired, not the object served. Teleology 266-271 ? 60. In what the Good Rationally Estimated Consists.— I. In what the essential good consists. 1. Personal perfection. Inference from the foregoing. Begins in right moral character. Right choice the essential germ of character is good in itself. Development of all the powers to perfection. Realized only by action in love. No absolute perfection to the finite but progressive. 2. Harmony with himself, with God, and if XVI CONTENTS the constitution of things. 3. The happiness necessarily resulting. 4. These three distinguishable but inseparable. 5. Stoicism excluding hap- piness is false. False ethics resulting. Objections of Hedonism are against this error. Hedonism excludes the rational element of good; Christian Ethics recognizes both elements— II. Relative good.— III. The evil. Essential. Relative.— IV. A man's good is in his own power. 271-28t ^ 51. Merit and Demerit.— I, Definition.— II. He that merits true good attains it. 1. Because reason is supreme in the universe. 2. Every right act receives immediate reward. 3. Answer to objection from the inequalities of this life. 4. The true good is the highest good 281-283 ? 52. The Feelings Pertaining to the Idea of the Good.— I. The feel- ings presuppose the idea.— II. Subdivisions: 1. Self-respect. 2. Pru- dential. The two are called self-love 283-284 § 53. Practical Importance in the Conduct of Life 284-285 CHAPTER XII. FIFTH ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON. g 54. The Absolute.— I. Definition.— 11. Known by rational intuition arising in the effort to complete the process of thought in any line of investiga- tion. In the back -ground of human consciousness and at the basis of knowledge. Opens a new sphere of reality.— III. What the absolute is, is known not a priori, but only in its accounting for man and nature. The absolute is the All-conditioning. Kant's objection. Significance if explained as the registeced experience of the race transmitted by ^^'•e^ity 286-288 ^ 55. The Pseudo-absolute.— I. The Pseudo-absolute; some forms originate in attempting to develop the idea a priori; others from developing it em- pirically; the sum total of all things mistaken for the Absolute ; also the largest logical concept.— 11. Current objections founded on false ideas of the Absolute. 1. The Absolute is "pure being" "the thing in itself," "out of all relations." 2. Objections founded on the false idea of the Absolute as " the ALL," or sum total of all things. 3. Agnostic objec- tion that personality is incompatible with the absolute, • . . . 289-291 I 56. Personality of the Absolute.— L The Absolute may be a person.— II. The Absolute must be a person 291-292 CHAPTER XIII. THREE GRADES OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. ? 57. Definition of Science 293-294 I 58. The Three Grades Defined — I. First Grade: Empirical Science. Its two divisions.— II. The Second Grade : Noetic or Rationalistic science. Why called Noetic. Three divisions of it. 1. Mathematics. J. S. Mill that Mathematical axioms learned by experience. 2. Logic. 3. Phi- losophy. Subdivisions : Speculative, Ethical, Esthetic, Teleological.— III. Third Grade: Theology.— IV. Must pass through all three in the complete knowledge of any being.— V. Knowledge in each grade is sci- ence. Appropriation of "science" to natural science only. . . . 294-301 CONTENTS. XYli * I 69. Proof of the Doctrine.— I. From the constitution of the mind. 1. Why it begins as Empirical science. 2. Why two spheres of mind and matter opened in perceptive infuition. 3. Rational intuition necessitates noetic and theological.— II. Common recognition in history of thought. III. Reciprocal dependence. ... * 301-304 3 60. Harmony of the three.— I. Science in a lower grade, depends on the principles of the higher. I. Empirical science depends on rational in- tuitions. 2. Noetic science depends on Theology. 3. Theology contains its principles in itself.— II. Science in a higher grade depends on the lower for content. 1. Noetic science depends on empirical for content. Also for discipline in empirical methods. 2. Theology depends on noetic and empirical science. Cannot develop the idea of the absolute a priori. Misrepresentation of Theological method. 3. Source of contents of Em- pirical.— III. Science in a lower grade raises questions for science in a higher grade to answer. 1. Empirical. 2. Noetic. Theology ulti- mate.— IV. Also depends on the higher grade, to complete the unity of thought and things.— V. Scientific thought legitimately culminates in Theology.— VI. Science in a higher grade stimulates inquiry in the lower.— VII. Claim that empirical natural science alone is science.— VIII. Science in the three grades must be in harmony with itself. 304-319 ^ 61. The Alleged Conflict of Natural Science and Theology.— I. Arises only from error or ignorance. 1. From incompleteness of know- ledge incidental to its progressiveness. 2. From error of method. 3. From the claim of science in one grade to be the whole of knowledge.— II. Reconciliation possible only by correcting error and attaining know- ledge of truth. 1. How to meet the exclusive claim of natural science. 2. The alleged error of method. 3. How to treat conflict arising from ignorance or error.— III. The alleged historical antagonism exagger- ated. 1. The great natural scientists have been believers. 2. Theo- logical antagonism to scientific discovery comparatively rare. The real influence of Christianity on civilization. 3. Discoveries more opposed by scientists than by theologians.— IV. Correction of theological opinion to meet discoveries in science.— V. Principle as to the competence of non scientists to reason on scientific discoveries.— VI. Legitimate to oppose atheism and agnosticism promulgated under the guise of science. I. Because the promulgator transcends empirical science. 2. Danger of a scientific hierarchy. 3. Legitimate moral interest in opposing atheism. 4. Is not opposition to science but to atheism.— VII. No extraordinary reason for alarm now. 1. Overlooking God's action in it. 2. Skepticism not more prevalent now than in former epochs of skepticism. 3. Epochs of skepticism incidental to the progress of Christianity. 4. Christian progress destroys no truth. 5. Common representation of existing decay of faith exaggerated 319-344 CHAPTER XIV. THE SENSIBILITIES. } «2. Definition and Classification. I. Definition : motives and emotions. II. Classification : Natural or Psychical and Rational III. Natural or Psychical exemplified. 1. Instincts. 2. Radical impulse to exertion. 3. Appetites and desires. 4. Natural affections ; sympathetic and repellent. IV. Rational sensibilities ; five classes 345-347 XVlll CONTENTS. 2 63. The Desire of Happiness as a Motive.— How it may be so. So far as it ■"" is a ruling motive, it is morbid and hurtful , . • . . 347-348 J 64. Feeling as a Source of Knowledge. 348 CHAPTER XV. THE WILL. g 65. Definition.— I. Definition of the will.— IL The determinations of the wiU. 1. Determinations of two tiinds: choice and volition. Self-directive and self-exertive. 2. Distinguished from causal efficiency. 3. Distinguished from sensibilities. 4. Distinguished from determinations by the intellect. III. Power constituted will by being endowed with rationality. Name of the mind itself. Energizing or practical reason 349-351 I 66. Choice and Volition. — Determinations self-directive and self-exertive. I. The distinction is real. 1. Recognized in consciousness. 2. Essen- tial to freedom and responsibility.— II. Choice further explained. 1. The object chosen always the object of action. 2. Choice presupposes com- parison. The choice a simple indefinable determination, known directly in consciousness. Error of Hazard and Bowen that the comparison is all. Signs or manifestations of choice are volition and complacency. 3. Choice is an abiding determination. 4. Choices ; supreme and subordi- nate.— III. Volition further explained : Exertive or executive. Resolu- tion, purpose, intention, immanent volition. — IV. Volition not a com- plete determination but is the expression of a clioice 351-357 g 67. Ethical Application.— I. Object of supreme choice always a person or persons. Two spheres : Object to get, persons to trust and serve. In the former the good is the ultimate end. This- cannot be the supreme object: further question, for whom. A person is an end in himself of trust and service. The good is nothing real except as the good of a per- son— II. Object of right supreme choice is God in the moral system. Objection that the right supreme choice is consent to reason. The ob- ject of a wrong supreme choice. Trust and service of persons the entire activity of man.— III. The love required in the law is a free choice. Distinguished from love in popular use.— IV. Moral character primarily in the supreme choice, and secondarily, state of the intellect, sensibilities, habits.— V. Christian ethics contraste<:l with modern illuminism. 357-361 f 68. Freedom of Will.— I. Definition. 1. Inherent in rationality. 2. Does not imply consent of will to reason. 3. Freedom as inherent in ration- ality difi*erent from Edwards.— II. Determination distinguished from strongest impulse.— III. Knowledge of free-will of the highest certainty. 1. xVppeal to consciousness. 2. Has the criteria of primitive knowledge. 3. Proof from human history. 4. Involved in being endowed with rea- son. 5. Denial of free-will is the denial of moral responsibility. 6. As an hypothesis free-will accounts for the facts.— IV. Objection to free- will commonly founded on false theories of knowledge.— V. Objection that man is determined by Cosmic aerencies. 1. Countries under similar cosmic agencies develop unlike civilizations. 2. The same country in ditferent periods has unlike civilizations. 3. The true progress. 361-37^ J CONTENTS. XIX B 69 FBEE-WILL AND Man'S IMPLICATION IN Natttre.-I. In what sense im- * plicated in nature.— II. Also endowed with reason and therefore free. Ill Freedom from control of circumstances a matter of fact. 1. May resist natural impulses or concur. Plato's chariot. 2. Under any cir- cumstances may do right. 3. May reverse the motive. 4. May change his circumstances. 6. May avail himself of aid from men. 6. May avail himself of aid from God. 7- A limited power to control the effects of Cosmic force on the body. 8. Controls the forces of nature to effect results. Natural selection displaced by man's selection. Man the Lord of nature. Psalm viii.— IV. Implication in nature indicates him above nature. Nature not a boundary but a sphere. Senses open the realm of nature to perception. This the occasion of rational intuition. Reveals his reason to himself and the universe to his reason. Similar thoughts as to will, reveals sphere of action and power to act. Death a liberation. Man the end of nature. The spiritual body and the power of mind. 376-386 a 70. Different meanings of FREEDOM.-Moral, physical, real and formal * /.I 38b-389 freedom 2 71 The influence of Motives.— The question stated.— I. Definition of motive.— II. The motive not the efficient cause of determination. The will is the cause. No causative act between the will and its determina- tion. The argument of Edwards. Hamilton's argument from antino- mies —III. The motive does not determine the will.— IV. The action of motives on'the will is influence. V. Determinations always made under the influences of motives.— VI. The common formulas of the influence of motives ambiguous and worthless.-VII. The uniformity of human action not thus explicable 389-39« I 72. Character in the Will.— I. A choice constitutes character.- 11^ De- terminations influence subsequent determinations.— III. Voluntary ac- tion a continual formation of character.— IV. Man always free to change his supreme choice.— V. After a character is acquired determinations are not transition from complete indetermination 396-399 a 73. The uniformity of Human Action.— I. Uniformity sufficient to be the basis of confidence.— II. Law of averages cannot explain it.— III. The uniformity actually existing is consistent with free will. . . 399-402 § 74. Sociology and Free-will.— Sociology may be consistent with free- will.— I. Sociology denying free will cannot be science.— II. Sociology wil! never reduce human acts to mechanical and chemical laws.— III. Sphere for Sociology compatible with free will 402-407 CHAPTER XVI. PERSONALITY. a 75. Definitions.— I. Person and Impersonal.— II. Moral Agent.— III. Na- ture and the supernatural. Man personal though implicated in nature. Lotze's explanation. Duke of Argyll's objection. Different uses of the words nature and supernatural.— IV. Spirit. Theological conception of its relation to space. May act through material organisms. Matter and Spirit not antagonistic. Matter ; its old use and its use now. Material- ism of this day defined. The doctrine of spirit 408-414 CONTENTS. { 76. Mak is a Person.— Certainty of the knowledge. 414 J 77. Max is Spirit. Conditions of possibility of materialism. — I. Spirit ne- cessary to account for facts of personality. 1. Difference of properties. 2. Accords with methods of physical science. 3. More evidence of Spirit than of atoms, etc. 4. Accords with dynamic tendencies. — II. Necessary to account for the physical universe. It is not mere mechanism. Grav- itation not explained by persistence of force. Similar difl5culties in cohesion and chemical affinity and all interaction of bodies molar or molecular. — III. Scientists recognize need of some power above matter. Universe more analogous to an organism than to a machine. — 1 V. Ma- terialism . aiiFi'ir ;i. • nunr, for and explain the facts either of matter and force or personality. — V. Conclusion tliat man is spirit 414-427 CHAinKi: W'H. MATERIALISTIC OBJECTIONS !< . THE EXISTENCE OF PERSONAL r.iJNuS. ^ 78. FiRsr Matkkialisti.' on.iix'TioN; EfioM Sensationalism.— Subjec- tive Materialism. — I. 1 iii-<>iim iiiron>istent with Spencer's Agnos- tici-sm. These theories eomnioiily cont'ounded. — II. Inconsistent with physical scieiu'e. — III. Is self-eontradictory. Matter o])ular unscientitic impressions 428-434 f 79. Second Materialistic Objection that Mental Piienomi.na ake Correlated with Mole("ULar Action.— I. The objection .stated. II. Explanations. 1. That mental action is aec<)mi)anieart from a material or<,'an. 3. Not neces.sary to deny that vitality is correlated with motor-force. — 111. The correlation not sustained by physical science. 1. Mental jihenomena cannot be identified with motion. 2. If enerrry is transformed into thought it dis- appears. 3. The energy in the molecular action transformed into physi- cal movements. A "closed circuit" with mental phenomena excluded. 4. This refutes tnaterialism. — IV. Physical explanations of mental phenomena inconceivable. 1. Registration of sensations in memory. 2. Unity of consciousness and identity. .3. The multitude of registrations. 4. Explanation V»y rei]:istration transmitted by heredity. — V. Physical science has no ex})lanation of mental phenomena. Dogmatic material- ism impossible. — VI. The exi.stence of sjiirit ex})lains the phenomena and avoids the difficulties. 1. Physical science limited in two directions. 2. Existence of spirit transcends the limits. Energizing Reason. 3. Ne- cessity of a.'ssuming the existence of personal sj)irit. 4. Elements of the idea given in the knowledge of self. 5. Objection that we have no ex- perience of disembodied spirit. 6. Objection that mental phenomena must be resolved into molecular motion in order to be cognizable by science. — VII. Correlation of facts of personality with motion is incompatible with the facts themselves ,, 434-4,54 \ ■ii .'1 '4 I CONTENTS. ( 80. Third Materialistic Objection : from Evolution.— The Objection stated. — I. Distinguish materialistic evolution from scientific. — II. Evo- lution as a law of nature not scientifically established. 1. The law con- ditions all other laws. 2. The four subordinate theories not scientifically proved. 3. Laws of Evolution not scientifically exact. 4. Evolutionists while regarding the universe as mechanism, substitute the idea of or- ganic growth in carrying out their theory. — III, Scientific Evolution consistent with personality of man and God. 1, It does not involve ma- terialism. 2. Not inconsistent with personality of men. 3. Not incon- sistent with moral law. 4. Consistent with Theism.— IV. Scientific Evolution no help to materialism and itself discredited if held as neces- sarily materialistic. 1. Evolution factual, Materialism metaphysical. 2. Evolution removes no difficulnes ot materialism in accounting for physi- cal universe ; proves them irremovable. 3. No aid to materialism in making mind a function of matter. Leads to the contrary conclusion. 4. Materialistic evolution gives no basis of good morals. First: No data for constructing an ethical theory. Secondly : Only law deducil)le for determining conduct is immoral, viz: Might makes right. Thirdly : No basis for rights of individuals in relation to the State. Fourthly : No practically efiective motives to virtue. Fifthly : Immoral tendency. Sixthly : Contradicts moral intuitions. 5. Issues in the extinction of per- sonality ; lapsed intelligence. 6. Materialistic evolution unscientific. — V. Scientific Evolution at every stage reveals a stipernatural power. 1. Implied in the meaning of it as scientists use it. Incompatible with materialistic evolution. 2. If mind is to act through matter, the matter must be prepared to be its organ. Analogy of generation. 3. Accords with a universal law of the elaboration of matter in preparation for man- ifesting a higher power. The elaboration not yet completed. Existence after death. 4. Planes or grades manifesting successively higher powers. First, manifesting mechanical force. Second, chemical force. Third, vital force. Fourth, sentient life. Fifth, personality. Are distinct. Higher power acts on next below ; not on still lower grades. 5. Force in a lower grade does not create force in a higher. Beginning of motion. Every interaction. Beginning of elemental or chemical force. Begin- ning or life. Conditioned on previous life. Beginning of sensitivity, and of human personality. Lower force held in abeyance by the higher. 6. Matter in the higher grades does not originate but reveals the higher power. 7. Evolution a continual revelation of hypermaterial power. Concurrence of diffiirent schools of thought. Evolution incompatible with materialism. 8. Appearance of Personality. 9. Conclusion. — VI. Evolution, if true, demands a personal God. Evolution emphasizes the teleological argument. 1. Presupposes always a higher power revealing itself. 2. In this higher power the powers evolved exist potentially. 3. The Absolute Being is a rational or personal being ; is the Absolute Rea- son. 4. Finite beings have real exi.stence distinct from the Absolute. 5. In what sense the universe created by God. Evolution presents no peculiar objection to creation. Evolution requires creation. 6. God im- manent in the universe. 7. God's action in creating, sustaining and evolving is individuating. 8. God's action the continuous realization in the finite of an ideal eternal in the Absolute Reason. 9. God's action expressing the ideal or plan of Reason is progressive. 10. God's action in the universe uniform and continuous according to law. Objection that theism supposes capricious will in nature. 11. The Moral system XXI ^'' CONTENTS. xxn gives a sphere for endless progress wliich is impossible to materialism. 12. Objections by Spencer and others 4oo-537 I 81. FOURTH Materialistic Objection, from Attributes of Brutes.- I. All the mental qualities of brutes are qualities of men.— II. Man has also the attributes of personality which brutes have not in any degree. 1. Different qualities in intellect, sensitivity and will. 2. Brutes lack these attributes of personality. 3. The higher attainments of man im- possible to brutes. --HI. If any animals have attributes of personality it would prove oulv that those animals are persons, not that men are brutes, nor that ail animals are per.sons.-IV. Man though imidieated in nature, is supernatural. 1. Objection tiiat brute sensitivity not corre- lated with motion. J. Unscientitic to affirm that life is merely a mode of motion. 3. The ditficulties removed by theistic evolution.— V. Man is spirit ; the brute is not. Objection that all brutes, even the infusoria, mu'^t have souls. Threefold classification of man as body, soul, spirit unnecessary. Lewes' objection that the spiritual hypothesis unscientific^ ^ Spencer's objection from babes and savages o3/-554 CHAPTER XVIII. THE TWO SYSTEMS OF NATTRE AND PERSONALITY. i 82 A Person's Knowledge of other Pkrsons.-I. What person or spirit is is known onlv in consci<.usness of self. Empty speculations as to the origin of the idea.-II. Man has knowledge of personal beings other than himself. 1. The denial of this involves agnosticism. 2. Basis for this knowledge in Kant's philosophy. 3. Involved in perceptive in- tuition. 4. When personality is known in self it can be recognized in others. 5. Mistakes of savages as to the Supernatural no objection. 6. ^^ Objection from anthropomorphism 5oo-oo9 I 83. The Two Systems. -Man knows himself in tach -J^O d 84 Existence of the Personal God a Necessary Datum of Scien- tific Knowledge.— The key-stone in the arch cf rational knowledge. —I Necessary to trustworthiness of human reason.— II. Necessary to the'communitv of knowl.Hlge.-lIl. Necessary to the completeness of human thought. To solve the ultimate and necessary problem. To the unity of the"system of nature. To the unity of the natural and moral system No antagonism between the two systems. Sin the only evil and onlv es.-ential antagonism. Contiict not between spirit and matter. The good progre>sively prevails over the evil. The new birth of the 560-r>64 creation • THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY, Jl. Design of the Book. A Christian man knows God in his own experience ; all that is of highest worth to man in life rests on his experience of God's gracious presence and power in his own moral and spiritual development. In the strength of such knowledge many a Christian has lived a life of Clirist-like love or gone to a martyr's stake, who never attempted to define or defend the articles of his belief. And the spontaneous reli- gious beliefs of ruder men rest on what they have felt and known of the presence and power of the supernatural in and about them. Thus the knowledge of God begins, like the knowledge of nature and of man, in experience. But since man is rational he cannot rest permanently in this spontaneous belief. As he advances in intelligence and intellectual development, he must reflect on what he thus believes, must define to himself what it is, and interpret and vindicate it to his reason as reasonable belief and real knowledge. This must be done if religious belief is to conmiend itself to thinking persons ; it must be done anew from generation to generation if, in every period of intellectual ac- tivity and of advance in knowledge and culture, Christianity is to retain its preeminence as the light and inspiration of human life and the universal religion of mankind. The knowledge of God, like the knowledge of man and nature, begins in experience, and is ascer- tained, defined and systemized in thought. Even where God tran- scends our knowledge, we at least mark definitely the limits of the known. In this transition from spontaneous to reflective knowledge, questions of two classes arise. First are the questions: Have we TIIK Pil W, 1 ) ' ICAL BASIS OF THEISM. k[!\\ ledge of God? Wliai ;n. ihe sources of thi- knowledge? How t;iii \M' v\]v\\i'ii\v h< vviiiiiy aii.i 'validity against objections? Then cuiiitj iiLicsLiuiij ui a second class: Admitting that Uud txiotc?, what do wo Ivimw of him, an\vers the questions of the second class. Bnt in nn^wrrinir thr^o questions we find underlying them funda- menial question- \\iirn must be answered and fundamental principles whicli nuist be ascertained. If the student begins with askinir, Why am I a i"\ir\-\i:\ii ': he is forced back on the question, Why am I a Uitist? Fur Ciiiistianity presupposes the existence of God, and de- chro< that ho hn- rrvoalffi himself in redemptive action coursing tin nil huiiKUi history, and especially in Jesus the Christ. And when he asks, Wliy am I a t heist? he is forced back on questions which reach to the profoundest depths of human thought. Among these are questioiii u:; lu lLc reality, the processes and the possible sphere of human kimv-ledge; the principles and laws of thought; the capacity of man to know God ; the distinction between empirical science, philo- sophy and theology, ml their necessary harmony; the basis and na[iire of moral distinctions and of moral law and government; the ca[ a !ty of man as a free agent to be a subject of moral government and to love, trust and obey God; the distinction of the personal and tke impersonal, the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter ; the real existence of personal beings and the materialistic objections thereto ; the synthesis of the personal with the absolute ; the reality of the two systems, the physical and the moral, and their harmony and unity in the univei-se of God. These and similar questions necessarily arise in the attempt to translate our spontaneous, indeterminate, unreasoned knowledge of God into knowledge rationally defined, interpreted and vindicated ; for God is the absolute Ground of the uh! verse, and the rational setting forth of our knowledge of him and ifi< vindication of it as real knowledge must bring us down to the principles which are at the foundation alike of all thought and of all things. Christian faith in God may exist without answering or even asking these questions. But when skepticism forces them on the thought, it is necessary to investigate and answer them in order that the intellect naiy thrta i its way through the labyrinth, into which it finds itself thrust, of doubts, perplexities and objections confused in tortuous and mazy ways, and may come, with faith now illumined through and through with intelligence, to the presence and vision INTRODUCTOKY. of God, to an mtelligent and restful conviction that the universe is grounded in Absolute Reason energizing in perfect wisdom and love, and that this Energizing Reason is God. The examination of the personality of man is necessary also in answering theological questions of the second class and setting forth what we know of God and of his relations to the universe. Accord- ingly theologians in their system of doctrine have their chapters of anthropology not less than of theology. Communion between God and man is of the essence of religion. Therefore the knowledge of man, not less than the knowledge of God, is necessary to the right under- standing of religious truth. Misapprehension of the personality of man and of the rational principles involved in it has always been a fruitful source of erroneous theological doctrine. This volume is not designed to present in detail the evidence of the existence of God ; it is designed to examine the constitution of man as a personal being in order to ascertain his capacity to know and serve God, to answer the philosophical questions involved in the controversy with skepticism, agnosticism and materialism, and to set forth, clear from misapprehension, and vindicate the principles on which the de- fence of theism must rest. It is not intended to be a treatise on psychology, ethics or metaphysics. I have given psychological defini- tions and classifications so fiir as they are necessary to explain my use of terms. Aside from this I have confined myself to those topics, the right exposition of which is of critical significance in deciding the controversies now rife between Christian theism and unbelief in its various forms, and in the discussion of which I have hoped to contri- bute something to the clear and exact apprehension and the true and convincing answer of the questions at issue. ^2. Necessity of this Investigation. In what has been already said we see urgent reasons for this investi- gation. Its necessity is further evident from the following consid- erations. I. The fundamental question of theology is, does a personal God exist ? Preparatory to even asking the question the theologian must ascertain what personality is. But man cannot have even the idea of personality unless he has first found the elements of it in his own being. Therefore he cannot inquire respecting the personality of God, till, by studying the constitution of man, he has found out that man is a person, and thus has ascertained what personality is and what is the distinction between persons and impersonal beings. II. The question with the atheist is ultimately the question as to the reality of knowledge. Atheism, in its usual forms, is founded on the THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. denial of the capacity of the human mind to know God. It does not assert positively, There is no God ; but only that man is incapable of knowinu that God exists. Some atheists have indeed asserted positively that God does not exist. This was asserted by Chaumette and Clootz in the first French Revolu- tion. It is not only asserted, but the assertion is made the basis of a pru|K)^Ld political and social revolution and reorganization, by the Niliili^ts and by many of the Communists. This assertion, however, involves the assumption that man has capacity to know God, has also the true idea of him, knows also all the evidence of his existence which the universe contains now or ever has contained or ever will cuiiuiiii, ail. I knows also that the evidence is inadequate and that God does not exist. This form of atheism assumes as its basis the omni- science of the atheist ; for if he does not know everything, that which he does not know mav be God, or the evidence of God's existence which would convince the atheist. A negation involving such ab- surdity cannot enter the field of intelligent debate. It is the atheism of ijnorance, prejudice and passion. Aiiieism, which rests on intelligence suflSciently to admit debate, can go no further than to deny the capacity of man to know God, to decLuv that therefore the existence of God is not a legitimate object of inqiiit V ti investieration. We are met at the threshold and warned off from theolog}^ ii^ inaccessible to knowledge and shut against explora- tion. When we discuss a question of history or astronomy, both parties appeal i • Knowledge, examine facts, and decide according to evidence. Vy\\\ II! ossible. For if man finds not in himself the image of that Energizing Reason which is at the basis of the universe and gives it its unity under law and in systematic order, the discovery and declaration of which constitute science, then he does not find it anywhere. But if unreason and not Reason is at the basis < t the universe, then science is impossible, and nothing is left but a fragmentary observation of what appears to happen, with total ignor- at! ' of what lies beyond our senses in the past, or in the future, or at the present moment in the distances of space. Hence we truly say that the consciousness of God lies in the background of man's con- Bciousness of himself; that the true knowledge of himself involves the kiiuwledge of God. As the late Professor T. H. Green, of Oxford, ex- * Gott uad die Natur, s. 7. INTRODUCTORY. 9 presses it, " know yourself as you truly are, and you will know the truth of God, freedom and immortality." And we shall reach the conclusion that the reality of scientific knowledge depends ultimately on the reality of the existence of God as the Absolute Reason energizing in the universe, and the primary ground of all that is ; that the knowledge of God is not merely a ques- tionable belief to be remanded to the feelings and the imagination because it cannot be vindicated to the reason ; but that the existence of Reason, universal, unconditioned and supreme, the same every- where and always, never in contradiction to the ultimate principles regulative of all human thought, the ultimate ground of the universe and ever energizing in it, is essential to all scientific knowledge, the key-stone of the arch of all rational thought ; and that ultimately the question with the atheist is not whether man can know God but whether he can know anything rationally and scientifically. We thus reach the synthesis of faith and reason. In our spontane- ous religiousness the whole man, intellect, sensibility and will, responds to the contact of the supernatural and the divine. In reflective thought the intellectual is distinguished from the emotional, the motive and the voluntary. We find that we know, not merely what we have subjectively experienced, but also that what we have experienced rests on truths and laws which are not subjective and peculiar to our experi- ence, but are universal truths regulative of all thought and laws to all action ; and thus that our faith is veritable knowledge and itself the utterance of reason. Even the primitive religiousness of savage men is an utterance of reason though not recognized as such, and though distorted by ignorance, and false judgments and fear. The richer experience of the Christian is a consciousness of God manifesting itself in the spiritual life, transcending, illuminating and enriching the most advanced knowledge, culture and civilization. This also is the utter- ance of reason, though it may be still unrecognized as such. It is only because man is endowed with reason that he is susceptible of religion and conscious of the presence and influence of God. The knowledge that the thoughts set forth in this volume have already been helpful to some, the hope that they will throw light into some dark places, will make some difficult subjects more intelligible by presenting them from a new point of view, will remove some misappre- hensions as to what Christian theism truly is, and so may help some Btill mazed in the labyrinth of doubt, are the motives for publishini^ this book : " Non ignarus mali, miseris succurrere disco." KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 11 CHAPTER II. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM, I '=^ vJ. What Knowledge is. Knowledge implies a subject knowing and a reality known (objec- tive or subjective). The knowledge is the relation between them. Both a subject knowing and a reality known are essential to know- ledge ; if either is wanting, knowledge is impossible. This is the first law of thought. Knowledge is always the knowledge of reality. This is of its essence ; if it is not the knowledge of reality, it is not knowledge. The validity or reality of knowledge is essential in the idea of know- ledge. Knowledge is the intellectual equivalent of some reality. The act of the mind in knowing is a primitive act incapable of analytical definition. It cannot be explained any more than light can be illuminated. It is the inexplicable act by which the mind takes up a reality into itself in an intuition, an apprehension, an idea, in some intellectual equivalent, and knows it. We can declare the conditions, physiological or others, under which knowledge arises; we can analyze the processes by which the mind attains it. But the mental act itself by which an object, external and unknown, suddenly stands clear and definite within the intelligence, remains a mystery. And all physiolo- gical facts as to its connection with molecular action of the brain leave it as mvsterious as ever. What knowledge is, is known in the act of knowing and known only in the act of knowing. That it is knowledge is also know n in the act of knowing. ^ly certainty of a reality is simply my consciousness of knowinsr, which, whether attended to or not, is essential in every act of knowledtre. "I know that I know" means no more than " I know." Otherwise every act of knowledge would be conditioned on an act preceding and knowledge would fail in a vain regression along an infinite series. § 4. Agnosticism. Agnosticism is the doctrine that the human intellect in its normal exercise is untrustworthy and incompetent to attain knowledge; and 10 that therefore knowledge is impossible to man. The doctrine has also been known in philosophy by the names Pyrrhonism, Nihilism and Universal Skepticism. It is not the denial of the possibility of knowledge m a particular case for lack of evidence, or on account of the limitation of the human mind. In affirming that man's knowledge is real we do not affirm that it is omniscience. Reality may exist known to minds of a superior order, but entirely beyond the range of the human mind in its present development. It is one important aim of philosophy to determine the necessary limits of human knowledge and so to prevent the waste of intellect in vain attempts to know the unknowable. Agnosticism is a denial that the human intellect is trustworthy ; it is the consequent denial that man is competent to attain knowledge within the range of his faculties and in the normal exercise of all his powers. He may have necessary beliefs in accordance with which he must think ; but he can never have confidence that his necessary belief is trustworthy or that by any intuition or any reasoning he attains knowledge of reality. It follows that a partial agnosticism necessarily involves complete agnosticism, and is therefore self-contradictory and untenable. If at one point the intellect is found to be false and untrustworthy, that is the discovery at that point of a falsity and untrustwo^-^hiness which discredit the intellect at every point and invalidate all tHat is called knowledge. For example, if the intellect in the normal exercise of its powers persistently and necessarily believes a certaiv^ self-evident prin- ciple or axiom, and yet with equal persistence and necessity believes another self-evident principle contradictory to the fir^t, it is exposed as false and self-contradictory and discredited in all its action. ^ The agnostic may assert a partial agnosticism while admiring the reailtv of knowledge in other particulars; but it is only because he has not thought far enough to see the reach of his denial. The partial necessi- tates the complete agnosticism. ^ 5. The Reality of Knowledge. This topic is sometimes designated " The Validity of Knowledge," and the discussion is of the question "Is Knowledge Valid?" But validity is of the essence of knowledge ; invalid knowledge is no know- ledge. The question, therefore, resolves itself into this: "Is know- ledge real? Does man know anything?" This form of statement clears away irrelevant matter and holds attention to the precise point in question. I. The reality of knowledge is a primitive datum of consciousness 12 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 13 underlying and conditioning all human experience and essential in all human intelligence. 1. The reality of man's knowledge of himself and his environment is a primitive datum of consciousness. This is implied in the first law or primordial postulate of thought: knowledge implies a subject know- ing and an object known, and is the relation between them. When I say knowledge is real, I simply formulate in thought the primitive consciousn(?ss, " I know." But this primitive consciousness, " I know," declares alike, " It is I who know," and " I know something." Thus the primitive datum of consciousness that knowledge is real involves, as of the essence of knowledge, the reality of the Ego or subject knowing, and the reality of the object known ; for if either is unreal the knowledge does not exist ; and thus it involves the reality of the knowledge in its essential significance. In every act of knowledge, man's knowledge of himself as knowing is an essential element, and without this there can be no knowledge. Thus his whole conscious activity in experience is a continuous revelation of the man to himself. It is the same with the object known. In every moment of conscious- ness man finds himself knowing something that is not himself The existence of an outward object is a datum in all his consciousness ; and his whole conscious experience k a continuous revelation to him of the outwiirl reality; and if this is not real all knowledge vanishes. H. Spencer says, " The co-existence of the subject and object is a deliver- ance of consciousness which, taking precedence of all analytic exami- nation, is a truth transcending all others in certainty." * Bv the testimony, the words and the works of other men we know tli it huiviar! knowledge is always in like manner the knowledge of the subject kii \iing and an object known. I may say that the entire experience of mankind is the continuous revelation of these realities in the human consciousness, and that all human experience is condi- tioned on their real existence. Man lives in their presence and in every act of intelligence sees their reality. If, therefore, the primordial postulate on which human knowledge rests is false, all human know- ledge vanishes away. Thus it appeai-s that the reality of knowledge is a primitive datum of consciousness underlying and conditioning all human experience and essential in all intelligence. But, it will be said, this is not a demonstration of the reality of knowledge. The assertion is true. Knowledge cannot originate in reasoning, for reasoning presupposes knowledge. If we must prove tvciything we cannot prove or know anything. For the same reason ♦ Psychology, Vol. i. p. 209. we cannot prove the reality of knowledge by reasoning. We can reason to what is unknown only from what is known. We cannot dive beneath all that is known and in the vacuum of total ignorance prove the reality of knowledge itself. We can reason only by the use of our own intellectual faculties. We cannot transcend these facul- ties to prove that they themselves are trustworthy. If one denies the reality of knowledge no proof can refute the denial. Every reason urged in proof of the reality of knowledge assumes that reality and derives all its force as an argument from the assumption. Every reason urged to prove that our intellectual faculties are trustworthy, can be a reason only because those faculties are trustworthy. It is therefore illegitimate and useless to attempt to prove the reality of knowledge or the trustworthiness of our intellectual powers. So far as this question is concerned, we do well to say with Goethe, " I have never thought about thinking." The speculation which entangles itself in this fruitless discussion merits the mockery of Mephistopheles m Faust : " I tell thee, a fellow who speculates is like a beast on a dry heath driven round and round by an evil spirit, while all about him lie the beautiful green meadows." * Nor does it discredit the reality of knowledge that its evidence is not a demonstration. It is more than a demonstration ; it is the very es- sence of knowledge itself; it is the primitive datum which underlie? every demonstration and makes it possible. Man lives in the light of the knowledge of himself and of the world, and all his experience is the continual illumination of these realities. Nor does it discredit the reality of knowledge that it is subjective, and that the mind itself contributes an element in the knowledge. If an intelligent being exists, he must be constituted with capacity of knowing ; and when he reflects on himself, he must find in himself that original capacity, and the act of knowing must be the warrant and evidence of the power of knowing. No outward influence on a stick or stone can make it know, because it is not constituted with a capacity of knowing. It can be no objection to the reality of know- ledge that knowledge is the act of a being constituted with the capacity of knowing and that it is by virtue of this constitution that the being knows. When the subjectivity of knowledge is urged agamst its reality, the absurd objection is flatly propounded that knowledge is impossible if there is an intelligent being who knows. The prmiordial postulate is not from the beginning formulated m * " Ich sag' es dir ; ein Kerl der speculirt, Ist wie ein Thier, auf diirrer Heide Von einem bosen Geist im Kreis gefiihrt, Und riugs umher liegt schone griine Weide." 14 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 15 ii the words, " knowledge is real," or " our intellectual faculties are trust- worthy." It exists, rather, in every act of knowledge, as the man's unenunciated consciousness of himself as knowing, of an object known, and of the knowledge. It is a waste of intellect to carry the question through metaphysical discussion. This postulate which underlies all human experience, conditions all human knowledge, and is the primi- tive datum of all consciousness, admits of no debate. Knowledge begins with knowing ; it reveals itself self-evident, as light reveals itself by shining. It originates as knowledge, the perpetual miracle of Minerva springing full-armed from the brain of Jupiter. 2. The reality of man's knowledge of the first principles which are regulative of all thought is a primitive datum of consciousness. Man finds himself unable to think in contradiction of them. They over- arch and encompass his thinking like a luminous firmament, which enlightens but cannot be transcended or escaped. It is the knowledge of these principles underlying and conditioning all thinking, which makes it possible from any process of thought to conclude by inference in knowledge. Thus in the experience of life all thinking is a con- tinuous revelation of these truths and of the reality of our knowledge of them. In a similar manner we come to the knowledge of truths which are obligatory on us as laws to the will. 3. I expect also to show, what I will merely indicate now, that the reality of our knowledge of God is a primitive datum of consciousness. Man being rational is so constituted that in the presence of God, and of his various manifestations of himself, he will know him ; and he will know that he knows God in the act of knowing him. In thinking of himself and the beings about him, he comes in view of the absolute being. In knowing the universal principles and laws of reason which are regulative of all human thinking and doing, he comes to the know- ledge of absolute Reason in which they are eternal in the fullness of wisdom and love. The development of man's consciousness of himself in his relation to the world, is the development of his consciousness of God. As in the experience of life, the unfolding consciousness of man is a continuous revealing to him of himself and of the outward objects of knowledge, so also it is a continuous revelation to him of God. The revelation is real to all; its right progress presupposes the normal development of man ; its completeness, rightness and harmony will be proportioned to the completeness, rightness and harmony of the de- velopment of the man. 4. The realities which I have considered are the elements of the three objects of all human thought and knowledge, the Ego or person, the World, and God. These are not mere ideas spun and woven from the processes of our own minds. They do not exist because we know them ; we know them because they exist. I exist ; therefore, being constituted capable of self-consciousness, I know myself in my own thinking and doing, and therein know personal being. The world exists ; therefore, being'constituted capable of perceivmg outward objects, I know them when they are in my presence. God exists ; therefore, being consti- tuted capable of knowing God, I know him in His various mani- festations. 5. It is sometimes claimed that real knowledge is that alone which is founded on experience. But the reality of knowledge, which is the condition of the possibility of experience, cannot be founded on ex- perience. We may truly say, however, that the entire development of consciousness in the experience of human life is the continuous revela- tion of the Ego, the World and God. Kant admits that in our moral convictions we have content in consciousness for the idea of God already known as a necessary idea of Reason. God also reveals him- self in the knowledge of universal principles and in all spiritual motives and emotions ; for these bring us face to fece with the absolute Reason in the fullness of its power, love and wisdom. In this sense we may say that we know the Ego, the world and God in experience. It is commonly said and widely accepted as unquestionable, that physical science, being founded on observation and induction, is certain knowledge; but that theological belief is only a faith which never becomes real knowledge. But physical science and religious know- ledge are, as knowledge, the same in kind, differing only in their objects. The observation and experience on which physical science rests are self-evident, unproved and unprovable knowledge. The prin- ciples on which all the inductions and deductions of physical science rest are self-evident, unproved and unprovable knowledge ; such are the principle that every beginning or change of existence has a cause, the principle of the uniformity of nature that the same complex of causes always produces the same effect, and the axioms of mathematics. And its verifications also are simply self-evident, unproved and unprovable knowledge by cumulative observation and experience, by persistence in which in the face of conscious fallibility and many mistakes, it attains what it rightly claims is real and indisputable knowledge. And this scientists call the scientific method; and because this knowledge has been attained in this method, they hold it for true in the face of unanswered objections and the utter inconceivableness of many of its conclusions; receiving it with all its inexplicable difficulties, as a learned professor of natural science has said, " without a wink." But the process of attaining theological knowledge is just the same. It rests on the trustworthiness of the self-evident and unproved primitive knowledge of observed facts and universal principles, just as physical 16 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. Bcience does. It rests on the experience and observation of mental and spiritual phenomena as indisputable as the phenomena of sense and essential and dominant factors in the whole history of man; phenomena which physical science confessedly fails to account for, and which it therefore most unscientifically ignores as beyond the pale of science. It also proceeds in its own sphere to verify its conclusions by cumulative observation and experience, and in the face of conscious fallibility and many mistakes attains to real knowledge. And it rightly holds it as real knowledge in the face of unanswered objections and unexplained mysteries. Thus physical science is founded in faith in the same sense in which theological knowledge is so founded; because its knowledge both of facts and of the universal principles underlying all its reasoning is self-evident, unproved and unprovable knowledge. And theological knowledge is founded in experience as really as physical science is. We properly accept this knowledge both of the natural and the spiritual as real knowledge because its reality as knowledge is a primi- tive datum of consciousness, even if we rest on that as an ultimate fact. But theism gives also rational ground for the reality of knowledge. For theism affirms that God is the Absolute Keason, and the universe is the expression of the truths, laws and ideals of Absolute Reason and the progressive realization of the ends which reason approves as worthy. The constitution of the universe therefore expresses these archetypal principles of Absolute Reason. Theism also teaches that man is in the image of God ; his reason, then, however limited, is the same in kind with the absolute Reason ; and Reason whether in God or man is everywhere and always the same. Thus theism gives rational ground of the reality of human knowledge. It gives rational ground for a man's knowing the reality of his knowledge when he translates the facts of the universe even to the remotest space and time into his own intellectual and scientific forms, factual and rational; when he assumes that the necessary principles of his reason are not merely subjective and regulative of his own thinking, but are princi- ples of reason everywhere and always the same, the laws of things ag well as thought, and thus finds them in the constitution of the uni- verse. It gives rational ground for the postulation of the correspon- dence of man's knowledge with the reality of nature, of the uniformity of nature which is the basis of scientific induction, of the identity of plan in it w^hich is the basis of classification, analogy and systemiza- tion, and of the objective universality of the primitive principles of reason which regulate all thought. It gives rational ground of the reality of scientific knowledge in declaring the common origin of the universe and all beings in it in the power of God, the eternal Reason, KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 17 energizing in its creation and expressing in its constitution and in the laws of its ongoing, the archetypal thought of his eternal love and wisdom. If it is necessary to the reality of human knowledge that all know- ledge be demonstrated, or that the mind knowing must have a power above itself to criticise its own highest powers and judge of their trust- worthiness, or that it must know reality out of all relation to its facul- ties and compare with it what it knows by its faculties, or that know- ledge must have no relation to a mind, then certainly knowledge is im- possible to man. But each of these demands involves absurdity and self-contradiction. We see then that man has knowledge. His knowledge begins in ex- perience as self-evident, primitive knowledge, it proceeds to the know- ledge of realities beyond experience by processes of thought under the regulation of self-evident and universal principles, and it issues in the knowledge of God and of the universe in the unity of a rational, scientific system through its relations to God. And, theism, when at- tained, throws its light back on human knowledge, and by disclosing God the absolute Reason, man in his image, and the universe as the expression of his thought, enables us to look beyond the fact that the reality of knowledge is an ultimate datum of consciousness and see the eternal ground of its being so. II. Agnosticism belies the constitution and consciousness of man, debars itself from the possibility of argument in its own support, and contradicts and nullifies itself. Because it denies knowledge on the ground that human intelligence is untrustworthy, it denies the possibility of knowledge and thus equally denies all knowledge. If man know^s anything whatever, he is proved capable of knowing, and agnosticism is totally false. I have already explained w^hy agnostic objections are entertained against theology more commonly than against knowledge in other spheres ; but logically and rationally, theology is no more invalidated by these ob- jections than astronomy or chemistry, or than a man's knowledge of the road home, or that he was once born, or that the beast he rides is a horse and not a sheep. As equally denying all knowledge, agnosticism is equally powerless against all. It contradicts the fiindamental and universal consciousness of man, which persists as the consciousness of knowing, and controls the entire action of mankind not excepting those who propound agnostic specula- tions. If one should carry out in action the doctrine of agnosticism, it would prove him insane. Agnosticism precludes the possibility of argument or evidence in its support. Argument and evidence presuppose knowledge. It is impos- 2 18 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. gible to appeal to knowledge in proof that knowledge is impossible, or to reason to prove that reason is irrational and untrustworthy The affirmation of agnosticism is self-contradictory ; it is the affirma- tion of knowledge and implies its reality. Agnosticism is a theory of knowledge. Hegel says : " No one is aware that anything is a limit or defect until at the same time he is above and beyond it." * An ox cannot know that it is ignorant of the multiplication table and incom- petent to learn it. If man were incompetent to know he would be equally unconscious of his deficiency. If I say that my beliefs are delusive and not knowledge, I assume that I know what true knowledge is, and by comparing my own beliefs with it I know that they are illusive. If I say that my intellectual faculties are untrust- worthy, I assume that I am conscious of a higher faculty by which I know the norm or standard of truth and judge my other faculties un- trustworthy. Hegel's maxim is applicable also to partial agnosticism. If I affirm that I have knowledge only of phenomena, not of the true reality which exists as a "thing in itself" out of all relation to my facul- ties, I assume a knowledge of the "thing in itself" and of phenomena as distinguished from it. When Mr. Tyndall says he has no faculty and no rudiment of a faculty by which he can know God, he already reveals the faculty of knowing him. If the existence of an object in- volves no contradiction and I can form a conception of it, then I am competent to know it if evidence of its existence comes within the range of my experience and my thought. When Hamilton and Mansel affirm that we have only a negative knowledge of the Absolute (which is no knowledge), and Spencer affirms that the Absolute exists but is the unknowable, they are already looking over the limits of the finite and know the Absolute as existent being. If they had no power to know the Absolute, they would be as unconscious of their ignorance as an ox is of its ignorance of geometry. Accordingly Hamilton teaches that we cannot know the Absolute, yet that by an entirely un- explained act of faith we believe in its existence and accept it as the supreme object of worship, love and obedience. When Mr. Spencer speaks of " the unknowable," he unwittingly reveals knowledge of it by describing it as "the Absolute," as "Cause, Power, or Force of which every phenomenon is a manifestation," as "some Power by which we are acted on," as "omnipresent" and " persistent." f So others, who deny that man can know God, refer to sin and suffering in the universe as incompatible with his existence and thus iissume know- ledge of God and of how he would have constituted and governed the universe, if he had existed. * Encyklopadie, Vol. I. p. 121. t First Principles; pp. 96, 98, 99. 258. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 19 The affirmation of agnosticism is also in itself an affirmation that man has knowledge; he knows that he cannot know anything. If agnosticism were proved true, at the same moment it would be proved false, for it would be proved that we know the truth of agnosticism. Augustine has exemplified this contradiction in a passage which almost dizzies the reader by its rapid turns. " I am most certain that / am and I know this and delight in it. In respect to these truths I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians who say: 'What if vou are deceived?' If I am deceived, / am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived ; and if I am deceived, by this token I am. And since / am, if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I amf for it is certain that / am, if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should he, even if I w^ere deceived, certainly I am not deceived in the knowledge that I am. Consequently neither am I deceived in knowing that / know. For as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know." * If the Agnostic says that he does not dogmatically deny the exis- tence or reality of everything or anything, but only affirms his igno- rance, he at least avows knowledge of his own ignorance and of himself as ignorant. Ignorance itself is knowledge of something by a person knowing, w4th the additional knowledge that the knowledge of that something is limited. If he says that he does not affirm even his own ignorance, but that his mind is in a state of continuous skepticism, doubting, questioning, in a continuous equipoise, neither believing nor disbelieving, still he affirms his knowledge of his own skepticism ; also, some knowledge is prerequisite to the possibility of skepticism, questioning or doubt. And such an equipoise is a state of unstable equilibrium, the existence of which in the conscious experience of man even on a single question is comparatively rare. We may safely say no man was ever perma- nently conscious of such an equipoise on all objects of thought. Agnosticism is therefore self-contradictory and self-annulling. It is not a legitimate topic for argument, and has no claim on the considera- tion of any rational being. It continues in debate only because skep- ticism thrusts it on us in its objections. Otherw^ise its discussion is no more pertinent as preliminary to theology than to astronomy. III. Any theory of knowledge, any system, or any proposition, w^hich involves agnosticism, is thereby proved false and has no claim to further consideration. There is little danger that agnosticism will find acceptance when distinctly avowed as such. It is not likely to infect men's minds except as it inoculates with its virus some theory ostensibly affirming *Civitas Dei, Book xi. 26. 20 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. the reality of knowledge, but essentially involving universal agnosti- cism and supported by objections which, if sustained, equally invalidate all knowledge. It is a sort of intellectual trichiniads which can be communicated to man only through the " stye of Epicurus " or some other. It must hide itself in some theory which in words affirms the reality of knowledge, in order to conceal the unreason which is its essence and to disguise the deadliness of the negation which it injects. But however disguised, every theory, system or proposition, which essentially involves agnosticism, is demonstrated to be false so soon as the agnosticism essentially involved in it is exposed. For example, while reality may exist unknowable by man in his present condition and development, we positively know that no reality can exist out of all relation to the human faculties in the sense that it is contradictory to the necessary and universal principles Avhich are regulative of all human thinking, nor in the sense that it is the only reality and that all which man knows is phenomenal and not real. For this involves agnosticism. Another example is found in the phenomenalism of this day. Pro£ Clifford says, " If we were to travel forward as we have travelled backward in time and consider things as falling together, we should come to a central all, in one piece, which would send out weaves of heat through a perfectly empty ether and gradually cool down. As this mass got cool it would be deprived of all life and motion. But this conclusion, like the one we discussed about the beginning of the world, is one which we have no right whatever to rest on. It depends on the same assumption, that the laws of geometry and mechanics are ex- actly and absolutely true and that they will continue exactly and absolutely true forever and ever. Such an assumption we have no right whatever to make."* But if the mathematics on w^hich astrono- mers rest their calculations is not the mathematics of the planets and the stars and if our geometry is not the geometry of all space, then our astronomy is good for nothing. By thus denying the universal truth of mathematical principles Prof Clifford destroys the foundation of physical science, and by discrediting the principles of reason, discredits all human knowledge. And thus phenomenalism is proved false, be- cause it necessarily terminates in agnosticism. I 6. Knowledge and Fallibility. One may be certain and yet afterwards find that he was mistaken ; he may be sure that he has true knowledge of reality and afterwards find that it was only an erroneous belief J. G. Fichte " developed, with most admirable rigor of demonstration, a scheme of idealism, the ♦ Lectures and Essays, Vol. i. p. 224. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 21 purest, simplest, and most consistent which the history of philosophy exhibits. And so confident was he in the necessity of his proof, that on one occasion he was provoked to imprecate eternal damnation on his head, if he should ever swerve from any, even the least of the doc- trines which he had so victoriously established. But even Fichte in the end confesses that natural belief is paramount to every logical proof, and that his own idealism he could not believe." * Hamilton was sure that Fichte had confessed himself mistaken ; but he himself may only have believed an error; since others, perhaps better ac- quainted with Fichte's writings, insist that his later works are the consistent development of his earlier. Similar experience is common to all men. Every person has often believed to be true what others with equal assurance have believed to be false ; has been certain that he had true knowledge of reality, and afterwards has found that it was only an erroneous belief It is objected that facts like these disprove the possibility of know- ledge ; that .w^hen one has found himself mistaken in his certainty, he can never be certain again. He will say, I have before assuredly believed that I had true knowledge of reality and have found myself mistaken. If I am equally certain now, how can I have confidence that I shall not again find myself mistaken ? Therefore, the objector argues, even if a belief is true, it can never be known to be true ; it cannot be discriminated from false belief But belief which cannot be known to be true is not knowledge ; it is uncertainty or doubt ; and the objector concludes that therefore knowledge is impossible. I. I reply that the objection, if valid, proves complete agnosticism. Therefore it is not entitled to the attention of rational beings and may be dismissed from further consideration. It is, however, a favorite objection of skeptics against philosophy and theology. Like all agnostic objections it is urged as having a special significance against these, though of equal force against all knowledge. IVIr. Lewes has written what he calls a History of Philos- ophy for the avowed purpose of proving from the mistakes, uncertain- ties and disagreements of philosophers that philosophy is impossible. The objection is specious and sometimes perplexes sincere inquirers. It is necessary, therefore, to delay a little in order to show that the co-existence of knowledge w ith conscious fallibility is entirely reason- able, and no necessary inconsistency exists betw^een them. II. The objection assumes as a fact what is contrary to the universal consciousness of man. It is not a fact that the consciousness of having been mistaken precludes certainty. The man is at least certain that he was mistaken. ♦ Hamilton in Reid's Works, p. 796. 22 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. It is according to common experience and observation that the mis- takes which men discover do not prevent certainty afterwards, even in respect to the subject about which they know they have been mistaken. But the objection rests on the assumption that certainty uuder this condition is impossible. The objection thus assumes as a fact what is contrarv to the universal consciousness of man. III. The ftict that man is constituted capable of knowing and at the same time finite is a rational ground for the persistence of knowledge after the discovery of mistakes and for the co-existence of knowledge with conscious fallibility. Man cannot cease to be conscious of knowing unless he divests himself of his own constitution ; yet being finite, his knowledge must always be limited and can be increased only by pro- gressive acquisition. In acquiring knowledge he is liable to mistake. As constituted rational he is capable of knowing ; as finite, he is liable to mistake. The objection implies that the reality of knowledge is proved by reasoning and may be disproved by argument ; but the knowledge that I know is inseparable from the rational constitution .of man ; it persists through all mistakes and dissolves them into knowledge, like a perennial spring whose living water flows through the snow which obstructs it and dissolves it into its own swelling volume. The objection, therefore, implies that finite or limited knowledge is impossible. It insists that an infallibility which precludes all mistakes is a necessary prerequisite, and the consciousness of it a necessary element of all knowledge. But such infallibility implies omniscience. The objection then is simply the absurdity that the knowledge of evervthing is a necessary prerequisite to the knowledge of anything, and that the consciousness of omniscience is an essential element of all knowledge. And for this nonsense we are asked to acknowledge that all human knowledge is unreal. The objection belongs to that type of thought which denies the reality of finite being and insists that the onlv realitv is in the Absolute Being. IV. In human intelligence there is a nucleus of knowledge sur- rounded by a zone of probability, opinion and doubt. In the nucleus of knowledge having the highest certitude there is no mistake ; mis- takes are in our reflective thinking on this knowledge, in our interpre- tation of it and inferences from it, from which comes the zone of prob- ability, opinion and doubt. When I am in pain I may mistake its cause, but I cannot mistake as to the fact of pain. I may mistake as to the shortest road home, but I cannot mistake, if I understand the terms, as to a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. I may know with indefectible certainty that darkness is not light, or that two and two make four, though aware that I hme sometimes mistaken th© KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 23 light of the rising moon for that of the rising sun, or have incor- rectly added a column of figures. The changes of belief alleged as proving knowledge unreal are often found on examination to be changes of opinion never held as certain. There has been a rapid succession of changes in the science of geology for many years; but the changes have been in theories devised to account for the facts rather than in belief of the facts themselves. Or, changes in scientific teachings are of conclusions from hasty or incomplete induction or deduction, or from insuflftcient observation, accepted provisionally as probable until further investigation gives certainty. These theories and conclusions are often put forth and received as science ; but intelligent persons hold them only as opinions or theories having as yet no claim to scientific certainty. There is nothing in a change of opinion or theory to throw doubt on the reality of knowledge, although such changes are often used as facts by which the objector would prove the instability and uncertainty of all human beliefs. In many other cases the change is of a belief which has never been scrutinized and formulated, and whose grounds and reasonableness the believer has never investigated. V. Through all mistakes and changes of opinion the great mass of knowledge persists. The changes of belief are steps in an enlargement and confirmation of knowledge, not in its subversion and destruction. The primitive knowledge, which gives the material for thought and the laws which regulate thinking, necessarily persists. Aside from the primitive knowledge, the greater part of acquired beliefs persist; as my beliefs that I was once born, that the Roman empire once exbted, that wheat is nutritious food, that a certain neighbor is not a drunkard. Many of these beliefs are continually receiving confirma- tion ft-om experience. The same is true of scientific beliefs. The recent discovery by astronomers that they were mistaken as to the exact distance of the Bun from the earth is not accompanied by any change in the great mass of astronomical knowledge. It is not true that man's beliefs are in continual transition and flux. The mass of them persist as know- ledge; the ocean remains though the waves are always rising and breaking and falling on its surface. Physical Science is advanced, with many a mistake, by the cumulative evidence of persistent obser- vation and experience, and inferences therefrom. The same is true of changes of spontaneous belief when scrutinized by reflective thought. A man grows up in the religious belief of his childhood, without inquiring as to its grounds. The first objection of skepticism disconcerts and distresses him ; and as new difficulties are 24 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. suggested, he is ready to think all his religious faith and hope must be abandoned. But as he proceeds to investigate, he may find, as multi- tudes have done, that the objections are not valid, that his belief rests on reasonable grounds. Thus his belief returns, sustained and con- firmed by reason, clearer, stronger and more reasonable for the doubts which it has looked in the face and found to be unreasonable. It has sent down its roots to the depth where is perpetual moisture, and its leaves no more wither and it does not cease from bearing fruit. In this sense it is true that the way to true belief is through honest doubt. If the objection were urged on an astronomer that the repeated and great changes in astronomical systems prove the untruthfulness of all astronomical science, he would reply that this objection was the denial alike of reason and of common sense. And rightly ; for in its greatest changes, like the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican sys- tems, astronomy has brought along with it into the new system a mul- titude of truths and facts already known in the old, and but for the knowledge of these it could not have advanced to the new system. It is simply an enlargement and growth of astronomical knowledge, not its extinction. The empirical scientist, if candid, will allow the same explanation of changes in philosophy and religious belief which he gives for those in empirical science. In urging this objection, the objector commonly includes agnosticism in philosophy and urges it as proving that philos- ophy is self-contradictory. But both empirical science and philosophy presuppose the reality of knowledge, and agnosticism is no more a part of the latter than of the former. This error in applying the objection being corrected, certainly the differences and changes of opinion and the controversies attending them in i)hilosophy are scarcely more numerous and frequent than in physical science. And as through all changes of physical science, so through all the changes of philosophy a mass of truth common to all philosophy is carried forward and becomes greater and clearer in the progress of philosophi- cal thought. Renan says, '' Who knows if the metaphysics and theol- ogy of the past will not be to those which the progress of speculation will one day reveal, what the Cosmos of Anaximenes is to the Cosmos of Laplace and Humboldt?"* And in philosophy as in physical science, the differences and the changes of belief have been steps in the enlargement and completion of philosophy, not in its subversion and destruction. The same is true of religious belief It has been well said, " Nothing has been so disputed about in the world as the Christian religion, un- less it be nature itself It is because, more than anything else, it haa * L'avenir Religieux des Societ^s Modernes, mbfinem. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 25 the simplicity and complexity of nature."* There is truth common to all religions. In the divisions of Christianity the beliefs held in common are usually more in number and more important than the beliefs which differ. Because religion is life, and the decay of re- ligious life is attended with decay of religious belief, the problem of the progress of religious knowledge is more complicated than the progress of science, and a sinking from a greater knowledge to a less and from belief of truth to belief of error is more likely ; yet even in religious knowledge the changes of belief have been predominantly incident to the enlargement of the knowledge. It is not the Christian who goes back to polytheism, nor the polytheist who goes back to fetichism, any more than the Copernican goes back to the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, or the chemist from belief in oxygen to belief in phlogiston. And as men have advanced from the lower types of religion to the higher, they have brought with them whatever of their religious beliefs remained true in the presence of their enlarged knowledge, and have sloughed off only those which had been exposed as errors.f Fetichism recognises the supernatural every where in nature. Poly- theism does not cease to recognise the supernatural in nature, but recognises it with more intelligence as divinities distinct from nature, energizing in its several realms and through its mightiest powers. When in the Roman Empire polytheism was carried to its extreme development, when an infant had one guardian divinity in its sleeping, another in its rising, another in its crying, and another in its walking, when in the growth of wheat, the germinating, the growth of the blade, the forming of the joints in the stalk, the setting of the grain had each its separate divinity, % this was the recognition of the divine presence, activity and care in all nature and in all human life. Monotheism perpetuated this truth and clarified and enlarged it in the knowledge of one personal God pervading the universe with wisdom and love, and ordering all its courses for the realization of the highest rational ends. The gods that had crowded the world vanished and the world was filled with the fullness of God. * E. D. Mead, " Carlyle," p. 27. fUnter der Ilulle aller Religionen liegt die Religion selbst.— /Sc/iiV/cr. JVaticanus the deity that opens the infant's mouth in crying; Levana lifts it; Cunina watches over the cradle ; Rumina brings out the milk ; Potina presides over its drinking ; Educa over the supplying of food. Seia cares for the grain when sown beneath the ground ; Segetia for the rising blade ; Proserpina for the germinating of the seed ; Nodutus presides over the forma- tion of the joints and knots; Volutina over the sheatlis infolding the stalk ; Patelana over the opening of the sheath ; Flora over the flowering : Lacturnus over the grain while in the milk; Matuta over the ripened grain; Tutilina over the harvesting: Runcina over the removal from the soil; Spiniensis over rooting out the thorns; Kubigo prote^'ts from mild^yf. —Augmtine Civitas Dei, Lib. iv. 8, 21. 26 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. During the first Christian centuries the Roman polytheists were outgrowing their ancient religion and were introducing from the East reliirions that niiirht better meet their wants. Before his conversion to Christianityj Constantine was a believer in one God, the Sun-God of the Persians.* When he saw the cross on the Sun, it signified to him that the Christian's God, who is a spirit, in righteousness and mercy redeeming the world from sin to Clirist-like love, is superior to the Sun-God whom he had worshiped, and must rightfully displace him. Whether the story is historically true or not, its significance and pertinence remain unchanged. Thus under all ignorance, doubt, probability, and all changes of belief is knowledge of reality, which from childhood to age in the individual and from century to century in mankind is becoming larger and clearer and is putting away erroi-s in its growth. And though other errors spring uj), they are incidental to investigation and to pro- gress in knowledge, not effective of its subversion and destruction. The legitimate influence of mistakes is not to annul our knowledge, but to lead us to greater carefulness and thoroughness of investigation. All this is only saying that man, though limited, is constituted intel- ligent and rational, that is, with the power of knowing; that he can enlarire his knowledge and clarifv it from errors by observation and reflection, and that the })ursuit of knowledge is a legitimate function of the human mind, and not, as Lessing has represented it, an ineffectual seeking prosecuted for the mere pleasure of the search, a fruitless hunt prosecuted for the mere excitement of the chase. \ 7. Criteria of Primitive Knowledge. The question now arises whether there are criteria by which we can discriminate among our beliefs those which are primitive and true knowledge of reality from those which are not. It has already been shown that we know that w^e know only in the act of knowing. Therefore the only possible criteriim must in some way be knowledge itself Four criteria, consistent with this restriction, may be named. I. The first criterion is of course the knowledge itself as it rises clear and convincing in its own self-evidence; it is the self-evidence of the knowledge. This is the true significance of the criterion of Descartes: "Having observed that there is nothing whatever in this, 'J ihinh iherefore I amj which assures me that I say the truth, save only that I see very clearlv that in order to think it is necessary to be, I concluded tliat I could take for a general rule that things which we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true things." f That is, knowledge is real *Uhlhorn, Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism. fOeuvres Vol. iii. p. 90, Prineipes de Philosophic. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 27 and true when it stands in the mind clear and distinct in its own self- evidence and asserts itself as knowledge. II. The second criterion is the impossibility of thinking the contrarj' to be true. This is merely the first criterion reversed. The positive knowledge is tested by an effort to reject it and believe the contrary. If it is found impossible, the reality of the knowledge is more clearly disclosed. It is analogous to testing the strength of material, first by a direct strain, then by a transverse. This test is commonly applied to the universal and self-evident prin- ciples which regulate all thought; for example, it is impossible to think of space as discontinuous, or to think of both of two contradic- tory propositions as simultaneously true. In these cases it is impossi- ble to think the contrary as true in any place or time or under any circumstances or conditions. The test is equally applicable to knowledge of a particular reality present to consciousness here and now; for example, my knowledge that I feel a pain. In such a case it is possible to think the reality to be unreal at another place and time or under other conditions ; but so long as it is present in consciousness I can no more think it to be absent, or unknown or unreal than I can think that a thing may be and not be at the same time. In the knowledge of a primitive and universal principle the impossibility to thought of its contradictory is universal. In the knowledge of a particular fact the impossibility to thought exists only in a particular place and time and under partic- ular conditions. Herbert Spencer states it thus: "In the one instance the antecedents of the conviction are present only on special occasions, while in the other they are present on all occasions. In either case, subject the mind to the required antecedents and no belief save the appropriate one is conceivable. But while in the first case only a single object serves for the antecedent, in the other any object, real or imagined, serves for antecedent." * The fact that this second criterion is the converse of the first is im- portant, especially in its application to the primitive beliefs of universal principles which are regulative of all thinking. It implies that these beliefs do not result from intellectual impotence, as Hamilton teaches in respect to the causal judgment, but from positive knowledge. The belief of the principle does not result from impotence to think the contrary, but the impossibility of thinking the contrary results from the self-evident and positive belief It is not a negation of knowledge arising from incapacity to think, but knowledge so positive that it carries in itself the consciousness that it is impossible to think the * The Universal Postulate ; Westminster Review, Oct. 1853. See also his Psy- ehology, §^ 426-437. 28 THE PHILOSOPHICAIi BASIS OP THEISM. contrary, it therefore gives no basis to the doctrine that God is unknowable, which is inferred from Hamilton^ theory of mental impotence. It must also be noticed that that which is impossible to thought or unthinkable nmst be distinguislied from the inconceivable, whether by the inconceivable is meant the unimaginable, or that which is not conceived in a logical concept or general notion. This distinction is imi)ortant because it is often urged by agnostics that because God is inconceivable he nuist be unknowable. If bv the inconceivable is meant the unimaginable, that which can- not be pictured in the imagination, we need not look far to discover that the thinkable and knowable is not restricted to the conceivable. A i)erson blind or deaf from birth knows that there are people who see and hear, that there are light and color and sound. But the blind man cannot picture light and shade and color to his imagination, nor the deaf man sound. Dr. IVIaudsley says of Kruse, who was completely deaf, that " musical tones seemed to his perception to have much ana- logy w ith colors. The sound of a trumpet was yellow to him ; that of a drum red; that of the organ green."* So it is possible to think of a being endowed with a sixth sense, altliough it is impossible to imagine what the revelations of the sense would be. I know there is a branch of Mathematics called Quaternions, but I cannot picture its methods to my imagination because I have not used them. The general notion horse is thinkable and knowable ; I can denote it by a symbol, spoken or written ; but it is not imaginable; if I try to picture it to the imagination I get only a particular horse, of a definite size, color and action. It is idle tlien to argue that whatevever is inconceivable in the sense of unimaginable is therefore impossible to thought and cannot be known as real. If bv inconceivable is meant that which cannot be formed with other individuals of the same kind into a general notion, it is also evident that what is possible to thought and knowledge is not re- stricted to the conceivable in this sense ; because the knowledge of the individual precedes the knowledge of the general notion ; the know- ledge of the general notion is conditioned on the knowledge of the individual. Therefore this second criterion must not be understood as affirming that a belief is true when its contrary is inconceivable, but only that it is true when the mind in its reflex action on its own knowledge, finds it impossible to think its contrary as real or true under the existing conditions; and, in the case of intuitions of primitive and universal principles, finds it impossible to think the contrary true under any * Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 45. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 29 conditions ; finds in fact that the assertion of the contrary would be nonsense, words used without meaning. Thus the common objection of agnostics that God is unknowable because in either or both of these senses he is inconceivable, is seen to be without force. III. The third criterion of knowledge is its persistence in face of all efforts of reflective thought to disprove it. By the persistence of belief in face of objection, ratiocination, and all reflective thought upon it, the mind ascertains that it is impossible to think the contrary and that the belief stands impregnable in its clearness and evidence as know- ledge. This persistence may appear in two ways. It may appear as persis- tence of intellectual assent notwithstanding all argument against it. It may also appear as persistence of spontaneous belief practically con- trolling action, even when, as the result of speculative thinking, it is conceded that the belief is untenable and its contrary is affirmed as true. Thus the idealist continues to be practically controlled by belief in the real existence of bodies, and the materialist by the belief that he is a free and responsible agent. In applying this principle we may refer to the persistence of know- ledge in our own individual experience, and also in the experience of mankind. We are not, indeed, to decide between the true and the false by the votes of a majority. But in investigating the experience of mankind we are not seeking to decide any question by votes, but simply to ascertain what are the persistent, essential and primitive elements of human intelligence. There is difficulty here in ascertain- ing the facts ; for the multitude of men have given us no information as to their conscious experience. But from observation, literature and history we have attained a large knowledge of the characteristics of humanity, and the researches of anthropologists are continually in- creasing it. From these sources it is possible to ascertain what senti- ments and beliefs are found persisting in all the experience of man. And if we find knowledge either of a particular reality or of a univer- sal principle which has been an element in all human experience, has consciously or unconsciously controlled all human thinking, and has persisted through all the changing conditions and progress of man, this persistence we accept as a mark of primitive, self-evident knowledge springing directly from the human constitution and revealing the ex- ternal environment common to all mankind. It may be objected that illusions of sense persist through all the ex^ perience of mankind; to the vision of man the firmament is ahvays an azure dome, the heavenly bodies move in it, parallel lines seem to converge; and it is objected that these persistent illusions make the criterion useless. I answer that all that persists in these so-called illu^ 30 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. sions is true and real. In vision, for example, the raan sees tha external objects precisely as the eye presents them. In the seeming convergence of parallel rails his eye reports truly the physical reality of the lessening of the angle of vision with increasing distance. His intel- lect interprets the sensation. If there is any error it is not in the sensation but in his interpretation of it. And this error does not per- sist. The belief that the heavenly bodies move around the earth or that the firmament is a solid dome, has not persisted. IV. The fourth criterion of primitive knowleclge is the consistency of itself and its necessary outcome with all knowledge. This criterion is of great practical importance in scientific and all other reflective thought. It has recently been said, " Internal consistency and harmony was the only test of truth known to antique thought ; and it supple- mented the appeal to actual authority characteristic of mediieval thought."* This is an example of a common style of remark depreci- ating ancient and especially mediaeval thought. Such remarks grossly misrepresent the facts. And the depreciation of this criterion as of little value is contradicted by the continual use of it in modern thought. The verification on which science insists so strenuously as necessary to establish an hypothesis is nothing but ascertaining* the consistency of a conclusion of reflective thought with the results of observation. It is true, the mere self-consistency of a conception does not prove that it is a conception of reality. I may form a consistent theory of the government of fairies by Oberon and Titania. It is con- sistent with all known facts that beyond Neptune there may be a planet belonging to the solar system. These are only creations of imagination or conjectural possibilities, and do not present themselves in^ consciousness as knowledge. Mere consistency of thought cannot originate knowledge, but it may test it. Miin has varied powers or faculties, and knowledge obtained through one faculty or from one sphere of investigation must be consistent with knowledge obtained from every other. This consistency is a criterion of knowledge. AVhat I perceive by the eye I test by the hand. The correctness of an arith- metical division is tested by muIti])lication. If a necessary inference from a supposed principle is false, it compels us to doubt either the truth of the principle or the correctness of our reasoning from it. Speculative conclusions must be tested by observed focts. If an observed fact contradicts an accepted conclusion of science, the obser- vation must be repeated and corrected or the scientific conclusion must be modified. The whole process of verification is an ascertaining oi the consistency or inconsistency of the results attained by one intellec- tual jxjwer 01- process and from one sphere of inquiry with those at- ♦The Value of Life; A Keply to Mallock, p. 73. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 31 tained from others. And so far as from all we obtain successively the same results, our knowledge is tested and confirmed. Tlie same criterion may be applied in testing what is primitive knowled^>-e. If the intuitions of reason contradict each other they an proved false and at the same time reason itself is proved untrustworthy. If what seems to be primitive knowledge and its necessary outcome ia inconsistent with itself or with other knowledge it is not primitive knowledge. But the criterion is not merely negative. If primitive knowledge is found to be in harmony with experience, if the first principles which regulate thought do not lead us in our reasonings to error and contra- diction but to conclusions which all our powers in concurrence acknow- ledge as truth, if what we in our philosophy hold to be primitive knowledge conditioning experience, is in harmony with our actual experience, then we may properly say that it is continually verified by experience. It is consistent with itself and with all knowledge. It must be observed respecting the four criteria, that the mind does not consciously appeal to them in the primitive acts of knowing, but only in reflection on its own acts and in answ^er to the question whether knowledge is real. If then it is seen that the knowledge stands out clear and distinct in its own self-evidence, that it is impossible to think the contrary as real, that the belief persists in spontaneously regu- lating thought and action in the face of all speculative objections, and that it not only does not contradict any other knowledge, but is accordant with all our thinking and experience, it is accepted as real knowledge. If not, knowledge is impossible. 5 8. Knowing, Feeling and Willing. I. Knowing, feeling and willing are distinct but not separate. They are not separated in human experience. In every feeling there must be knowledge or belief Every act of will involves feeling which is its motive, and knowledge, which is the light in which the determina- tion is made and without which freedom of determination is impossible. And knowledge remains but nascent and cannot be apprehended in its complete significance until it reveals itself in feeling and discharges itself in voluntary action. The Speculative Reason cannot find the content and significance of its own necessary ideas nor solve its own necessary problems until it becomes the Practical Reason. Dean Swift compares the man of culture to the bee, which " visits all the flowers of the field and of the garden and by an universal search, much study and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax. . . . thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, 32 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BA&1& OF THEISM. sweetness and light."* Matthew Arnold has popularized Swift's con- ception of culture as comprising sweetness and light— the light of knowledge and the sweetness of right feeling, action and character. These are necessary elements of culture because knowing, feeling and willing are indissolubly united in man's personality ; they exist sijimlta- neously in the same mental state, and no one of them can in fact complete itself without the others. The light is for no purpose without the sweetness, and the sweetness runs to waste and disappears without the light. But while, in human experience, knowing, feeling and willmg are never separated, they are distinguished. They are not disparted organs or faculties; but ihey are different aspects of the same mental states, different poles of the same mental energy, different phases of the same indivisible personality. They are clearly presented in consciousness and recognised in thought as different. The difference of knowing, feeling and willing is apprehended by every mind and is at the basis of all reflection on the mental processes and powers. To deny it is to make all psychology impossible and all language respecting mental acts and processes unintelligible. II True philosophy must recognize both the inseparableness and the distinctness of the three. Any theory of knowledge which overlooks either the one or the other is false and necessarily prolific of errors. 1. At present perhaps the more common tendency is to overlook the close factual connection of the speculative inteUect with the practical side of human nature, to insist that true knowledge can be acquired only in the complete isolation of the intellectual process from all feel- ing, volition and choice, and so to exalt the speculative inteUect at the expense of the moral, the ^thetic, the religious and the practical in man. This tendency may explain some of the defects and errors of psychology, metaphysics and Christian theology; it is even more ob- trusive and more potent for evil in the materialistic speculations which swarm, like poisonous flies, around the head of "star-eyed science." ^ I will exemplify it in Christian theology. Some theologians have in- sisted that the Spirit of God can influence the human soul only by presenting truth to the intellect. An eminent divine preachmg m Boston many years ago declared: "K I could present truth to the mind as clearly as the Holy Spirit does, I could convert souls as easdy as He." This supposes man to be a creature of intellect alone, whose action is excited and directed invariably in a sort of mechanical way by processes of logic. But in a multitude of cases every man acts from feeling with scarcely the consciousness of belief or thought. If he meets a tiger in a jungle, his fear makes him run without a process • Battle of the Books; Swift's Works, Vol. i. pp. 203, 205. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 33 of reasoning. So preaching when addressed exclusively to the intellect is dry, while eloquence touches the whole man and in enlightening the intellect fires also the heart. And what is the power of music? Why does a cheerful face diffuse its sunshine, and gloomy looks spread like a chilling mist to aU? What is the power of a commanding presence, or of the self-possession and courage of a single person in a time of danger and general consternation? What did General Sheridan impart to his fleeing army in Virginia, when his mere coming into sight changed defeat into victory? The power of mere argument in deter- mining the opinions, conduct and character of individuals, the courses of history and the development of civilization has been greatly over- rated. The element of feeling commonly enters into the formation of opinions. Men adopt opinions, not because they have logically proved them, but because they suit their feelings, are in harmony with their characters and their views of human life and accordant with their chosen ends. Nor must opinion be erroneous because founded on the feelings. If the feelings on which it is founded are right, the opinion will be likely to be right. If a pure w oman passes on the sidewalk the entrance to a by-way to hell, whence come up the reek of the stews, the babble of drunkards, and the words of obscenity and profaneness, her pure feelings drive her away before she has time to think. A pure spirit in heaven may follow his feelings as safely as his judgment. There are as many erroneous opinions founded on false logic as on wrong feelings. Men do not commonly believe in God because they have proved his existence, but because their w^hole spiritual being cries out for him, is smothered without him, and refreshed, inspired and ennobled by his presence. The soul responds to the touch of the di- vine as the string of the viol to the touch of the musician. An atheist, who had been pressed with many an argument without conviction, was one day felling a tree. As the tree came crashing down, these words, from the memory of childhood, flashed on his mind: "As the tree fall- eth so it shall lie ; and as death leaves us so judgment must find us." It awakened his consciousness of responsibility and of sin; and he found no peace till he found it in faith in God. A most reasonable conversion, though unreasoning. For whatever may awaken the spir- itual in the constitution of man aw\^kens it to the consciousness of God. Hence the unexpected and seemingly inexplicable breaking down of religious unbelief in the great crises of life. When the shadow of death is glooming on the soul and the body is sinking to its last sleep, the spirit awakens and finds itself, as it always must when it awakens, face to face with God. The intellect, therefore, is not the only inlet by which the truth can enter and influence a man. His soul is like a great cathedral admit- 3 34 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. ting light through many windows, each stained its own color and hav- ing its own pictures ; yet not falsifying the light, but showing in the varying colors its real elements and its diversified richness and beauty. Therefore the only true philosophy is that which germinates from the entire constitution of man and grows with the normal growth of his entire life. This is the only philosophy which can safely be the guide of life. A French writer has said regretfully, " There is in each of us a poet that died young." It is the characteristic of genius that this inborn poet lives the whole life long with all the dewy freshness of youth. It is the characteristic of Christianity that passing through the intellect it quickens and keeps fresh all the purest and most beautiful sentiments of humanity, all that is noblest and most divine in the spi. ritual life, so that always in the freshness of spiritual youth, " as little children" we enter iuto the kingdom of God. 2. Errors also arise from identifying knowing, feeling and willing, or obscuring the difference between them. These errors do not arise so much from definite denials of the difference, as from admissions or at- tempted explanations or lines of thought and argument which imply that there is no difference. Such, for example, is the assertion that choice is a judgment of the intellect; and such is the use of the popular saying, that feeling is a kind of knowing, as if it w^ere a philosophical definition. In respect to errors of this class two points must be noticed. The first point is that in cases of which we say the feeling is the knowing, there is a belief or knowledge present with the feeling. If fear moves a man to run away from a tiger, the fear involves a belief or know- ledge that the tiger is a dangerous beast. If a pure w^oman is driven by her feelings away from impurity, she knows what impurity is and knows that she has come near it. And the knowledge in these cases is just as different from the feeling as if it were separated from it by some hours. In all these cases the knowledge, in the order of dependence and thought, is presupposed in the feeling. How can one fear if he has no knowledge of danger? It is only in iur^tinct that the feeling and action i)reeede the knowledge. And evolutionists suppose that in in- stinct the knowledge originally preceded the feeling and action, but by heredity through many generations the knowledge or belief has become merged and lost in the feeling. The other point to be noticed is that feeling and willing cannot in themselves be ultimate criteria of knowledge. If one person lives for sensual gratification and another for the service of God and man in obedience to the law of love, their respective feelings will lead them to difierent lines of conduct, to different views of life and to diflferent opinions. Feeling may guide to right action, and opinions founded on KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 35 feeling and character may be right. But this can be so only when the feelings and the character are right. Any testing of opinions by their conformity with our own feelings and character necessarily presupposes knowledge of what feeling is right and what is wrong. And, further, the very act of testing an opinion in this way is an act of thought, and not a feeling; the comparing of character and feelings and judging which is right is an intellectual act; and the standard of judgment between right and wrong is the truth and law of reason, and is not in the feelings. III. Feeling and w^illing may be used, with the qualifications just mentioned, in testing the reality of knowledge in general, and in veri- fying particular beliefs. 1. Our feelings, choices and volitions, the whole practical side of our constitution protest against agnosticism as really and effectively as do our reason and our knowdedge. Mr. Spencer's doctrine that the abso- lute being, the ultimate ground and deepest reality of the universe, is unknowable, is contradictory to reason and knowledge. If the true and ultimate reality is unknowable all reality is unknowable ; what w^e take for reality is merely phenomenon, and what we take for know- ledge is merely illusion. Mr. S2)encer himself contradicts his OAvn agnosticism by declaring his knowdedge of the unknow able ; for he declares that the Unknowable ground and reality of phenomena is absolute being, exists, is power, is everywhere present, and is mani- fested in all the ongoing of the universe. To the agnostic, belief in the existence of an unknowable absolute as the ultimate ground and reality is self-contradictory; even a genius like Herbert Spencer cannot enunciate the doctrine without contradicting himself And if the Ab- solute Reality is unknowable all reality is unknowable and knowledge is impossible. This agnosticism is equally contradictory to the rational constitution of man on its practical side. To say that the ultimate reality of things is unknowable, and yet to insist that it ought to be the object of rever- ence and even of religious homage and that we ought willingly to order our actions in cooperation with the manifestation of the unknowable as it reveals itself in the evolution of the universe, is certainly absurd. We are told that religion is legitimate in the sphere of feeling and that imagination may picture the unknowable, in w hatever form it wiU, as an object of worship. But can a sane man revere and love and serve what is unknown and unknowable? Especially can he w^orship what he knows is a fiction of his ow^n imagination and revere it as the Absolute Being? So also Hamilton and Mansel declare that the Absolute is unknowable, that what is knowledge and truth and right and love to us may not be knowledge, truth, right and love to God; and yet thai 36 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. we ought to love, adore and serve him. The doctrine contradicts both the pure or speculative Reason and the practical. It is alike absurd ' and immoral. If that, which is most real in the universe and is the ground of all that is, may be unreason and not reason, may be the con- trary of all which we know as true, right, perfect and good, may be the antagonist of all which human reason approves as the objects of our highest aspirations, our best affections dnd our noblest endeavors, then our whole moral and practical nature not less than our rational is an abortion and a lie. Man has no scope for his aspirations, affections and powers. " Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" becomes the only true account of human existence. No philosophy or science which involves this can ever gain wide or permanent control of the mind of man. 2. The practical side of our being also implies objective reality. Fear, joy, pity, anger imply an object of fear, joy, pity and anger. If these feelings are purely subjective the feelings themselves cannot exist. In an important sense we perceive objective reality through all the feelings as really as through sensation. Our feelings are a sort of reaction on the outward object. A philosophy which denies that the feelings imply objective reality, would deny that our. feelings have any relevancy to the world in which we live and thus would annihilate all motives. Such a philosophy cannot be believed. It is equally true that choice and volition imply objective reality. All enterprise and energy assume the reality of the Universe as the sphere of action, and of the objects sought by enterprise and energy. The man striving with all his might to remove an obstacle, to over- come an enemy, to gain house and land cannot doubt the reality of the objects. A philosophy which denies the objective reality of things is as fatal to all energy as it is to all knowledge. Man cannot believe it. Man is a part of the universe. It acts on him and he reacts on it, not in his intellect alone, but also in his feelings and his will. And this reaction, whether in knowledge, feeling, choice or exertion, is always attesting the reality of its object. 3. And since we are so constituted that we judge some feelings, aims and actions to be worthy and noble and others unworthy and ignoble, a true philosophy must teach that the universe gives scope to our in- tensest action for the realization of our highest aspirations and our noblest ends. A philosophy which denies this is Pessimism ; it denies that life is worth living ; it declares that the universe gives no scope for feeling, or action or achievement of any worth. The Reason, the Feelings, the Will revolt from it. The truth of opinions is tested by their bearing on action and character, their teachings as to what are the highest ends of human life, and their power to quicken and guide to the realization of those ends. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 37 And the practical side of humanity also attests the reality of man's spiritual being and of the objects of his highest aspirations and en- deavor. For men live but a little time. If the universe is to give realization to their highest hopes, satisfaction to what is best in their affections, scope for their noblest endeavors, their lives must be more than " little breezes " which "dusk and shiver Through the wave that runs forever ; " they must be immortal. And this practical attestation of the reality of the spiritual is precisely the same in kind with the practical attestation of the physical, which in fact compels the belief in its objective reality. Man perceives the reality both of the spiritual and the physical through his feelings, choices, volitions and exertions as really as he perceives outward reality through the senses. There is a true and profound phi- losophy in one of the " preliminary principles " of the Presbyterian " Form of Government ; " " Truth is in order to goodness ; and the great touchstone of truth is its tendency to promote holiness, according to our Saviour's rule, 'by their fruits shall ye know them.' There is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty. "* Some scientists teach that, as the mevitable result of evolu- tion, the whole universe will come to a stop and all life and motion forever cease. Our whole being revolts against, resents and resists the conclusion. In accordance with the foregoing principles the impossi- bility of this belief and the revolt and resentment of the heart against it are founded in a true philosophy. It is safe to predict that any theory which necessarily involves this conclusion will never gain cur- rency among men. In like manner, when we are told that the universe gives no scope for the realization of our spiritual aspirations and that the objects of them have no reality, that our endeavors to attain the noblest ends of our being must be abortive, and that the progress of science is destined to chill and still all such aspirations and endeavors forever, our whole being revolts against, resents and resists the conclu- sion. And this revolt and resistance also are justified by true philo- sophy ; and we may safely predict that a theory involving such a conclusion will never control the action and history of mankind. 4. The greater part of human actions are acts of faith. In every en- terprize a man risks something of the present to win something in the future. He does it in faith that events will be according to his calcu- lations. If he succeeds he knows that his calculations were according to the realities of the universe ; that is, according to truth ; for truth is reality intellectually apprehended. If he fails, he knows that he was * Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. p. 344. 38 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. in error. In either case by his voluntary action he acquires knowledge of reality. And in this way a great part of human knowledge is acquired. But a man may aim at unworthy ends. The universe makes both good and evil possible to him. If now he can ascertain any principles determininix what are the highest possibilities of his being, those princi- ples must be true ; because those highest possibilities are what the uni- verse itself makes possible to him in his reaction on it. Man is so constituted that principles of action present themselves in his consciousness as regulative of his thinking, and feeling and will- ino-. He distini^uishes the reasonable from the absurd, the true from the false, the right from the wrong, the perfect from the imperfect, the worthy from the unworthy. In the true, the right, the perfect and the wortiiy he recognizes the highest possibility and supreme good of his being. In reference to these there are problems which thrust themselves for solution on every generation, questions which every age must answer. Are the highest possibilities and noblest ends of human life attained by acting in supreme selfishness or in universal love? by lives of self-indul- gence and ease and being ministered unto or by lives of energy and service? by Uves conformed to the negations of materialism or to the large and positive principles, promises and hopes of Christianity? These are letritimate criteria of knowledge. The materialist appeals to these and similar criteria as constantly and as earnestly as the theist. By these criteria the experience of the race is establishing the supremacy of the law of love and the reality of man's spiritual interests and rela- tions. Christianity has already advanced far in proving itself true by its effects. When in the lapse of time its principles are all realized and its promises fulfilled in the civilization of mankind, the demonstration will be complete. IV. The errors and superficiality of skeptical and materialistic scien- tists rest largely on their disregarding the real relations of knowing, feeling and willing and attempting to construct a science of the uni- verse as if it were an object of thought alone. 1. It is this which leads them to reject, in theory, all argument from final causes. I say in theory ; because in fact they habitually use it in their scientific investigations. i\Ian's knowledge in all departments is closely connected with the satisfaction of his feelings and the accomplishment of his purposes. He accepts the statements of fiict and metliod accordance with which enables him to accomplish his designs. He accepts as true the princi- ples which enable him to realize what both the reason and experience of man pronounce right, and perfect and of true worth. The practical Reason is as real a factor in his knowledge as the Speculative. The KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 39 recognition of final causes is in the essence of his knowledge, as really as the recognition of eflacient causes. Nor does the knowledge of the efficient, preclude the reality of the final cause. Some unmusical per- son once described the playing of a great violinist as scraping catgut with horse-hair. It is a correct description. But it would be foolish to insist that this physical force and its instruments are all that science can recognize in the performance, and that it knows nothing of it as the intentional production of enchanting music. As Bulwer says: " Science is not a club- room ; it is an ocean ; it is as open to the cock- boat as to the frigate. One man carries across it a freightage of ingots and another may fish there for herrings. Who can exhaust the sea? Why say to the intellect, 'The deeps of philosophy are pre-occupied?'" 2. The principles which have been presented expose the error that the scientific spirit is the pure love of the truth, defecated from all admixture of feeling, preference or choice. Of the love of the truth in this sense Mr. Lecky says that it " is perhaps the highest attribute of humanity;" that they who possess it "will invariably come to value such a disposition more than any particular doctrines to which it may lead them; they will deny the necessity of correct opinions;" that is, love of the truth will entirely cease, being displaced by love for a cer- tain disposition or feeling ; love of the truth will be displaced by love for the love of the truth. Mr. Lecky goes so far as to insist that chil- dren ought not to be religiously trained lest it should prejudice them. This would equally imply that the child ought not to be trained to virtue, since this training also implies doctrine. The necessary infer- ence would be that a child must not be taught to love God and his neighbor lest he should be biased and prejudiced. Professor Huxley characterizes a religious belief founded on the spiritual aspirations and needs of the soul as immoral. Prof. Clifibrd, in his essay on the " Eth- ics of belief," says that to believe even the truth without scientific investigation and evidence is morally wrong and incurs guilt; and that if a busy man has not time to investigate he must not believe. But a large part of human actions are ventures on beliefs which have not scientific evidence, in the sense in which Prof Clifford uses the phrase, and which nevertheless are beliefs so decisive that men venture on them property, reputation and even life. Would the professor call all these acts sin and say that the actors mcur guilt; that is, that they de- serve punishment? In this conception of the love of the truth the mistake of our modern illuminati is that they conceive of man as divided against himself; they isolate the intellect from all the other constituents of humanity. They do not jom with crass practical materialism in saying that man liveth by bread alone. Their maxim is, rather, that man liveth by intellect ^Q THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. alone. The feelings and the will, all that belongs to moral character and practical activity and interests are conceived as in antagonism to the right action of the intellect ; and this antagonism is conceived a^ man's'' normal state. Hence the only security for the intellect in its search after and knowledge of the truth is its complete isolation and protection from its natural enemies, the feelings and the will, the moral character and the interest in the practical activities of life. In order to the successful use of the intellect our modern illuminism requires the student to unman himself; to divest himself of all feeling and char- acter, of all choice or preference, even of the preference for right rather than wrong, or for enjoyment rather than misery, of all, in fact, which moves him to action and makes him capable of achievement, which makes him of any use or his life of any worth to himself or others. Plainly this can only lead to agnosticism and not to the know- ledge of the truth ; for it assumes that falsity is organized into the very constitution of man. , The real condition of discovering the truth is just the contrary. It is not the isolation of the intellect from the feelings, choices and volitions, but it is the harmony of intellect, feeling and will in the complete de- velopment of the man in the unity of his being to the realization of the rational and normal standards of truth and right, of perfection and worth. Right feeling and character must be in harmony with the knowledge of the truth and helpful to its attainment. It is not feeling, choice, purpose, determination which bias men against the knowledge of the truth ; it is only wrong feeling, choice, purpose and determina- tion. . In the verv definition of the love of the truth, as conceived by our illuminati, are obvious inconsistencies. They push the analysis of men- tal processes so far that they seem to regard them not only as separate faculties or organs, but as separate entities in conflict with each other. In insisting that the love of the truth must be defecated from feeling, choice and purpose, they contemplate truth as an entity existing isolated from all relation to human interests. But this is to say that the uni- verse itself has no relation to human interests; for truth is the reality of the universe intellectually apprehended. As such it has powerful and constant influence on human interests. The very conception of seeking truth isolated from human interests is itself falsehood. The supposed isolated truth, if discovered, would not be the truth, would not be the reality of the universe apprehended in the mind ; it would be unreality and falsehood. At best it could be only a partial and one- sided apprehension of reality. The definition involves another incon- sistency. The love of the truth itself involves feeling ; seeking to know truth under its influence, is seeking under the influence of a feeling. It KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 41 may mislead to disregard moral duty and culture and all the truth in^ volved therein ; which would be as real a bias misleading away from truth, as the moral feelings themselves can be. This conception of the love of the truth reveals its insufficiency and erroneousness also in its practical development. There is a common impression that men devoted to study are weak in practical affairs. So far as this is the necessary result of confinement to a particular line of work it is no disparagement to the scholar ; as it is no disparagement to a lawyer that he does not understand medicine. But if study is prosecuted with only a speculative interest there is a weakness of the man and not merely a necessary professional limitation ; for his de- velopment is abnormal, his culture sickly, and his knowledge awry. One result is that his interest is concentrated on the inquiry, not on the truth ; he studies for the enjoyment of his own intellectual acti- vity. This is the purport of Lessing's famous saying : " If God held in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the single always urgent impulse to search after truth with the condition that I be always and forever in error, and should say to me. Choose, I should humbly turn to his left hand and say. Father, give me this ; the pure truth is for thee alone."* This saying has been repeated by many in different forms as expressing the true scholarly spirit ; and Hamilton approves it as expressing the true end and value of philosophical investiga- tion. But it certainly does not express the love of truth. On the contrary it declares that love of truth is entirely displaced by the en- joyment of intellectual activity. And what a picture is this of the life of a student— a life of amusement only. For what is the difference be- tween spending life in hunting the truth or in hunting foxes, if the truth is no more valued than the fox, and in each case the sole end is the en- joyment of the exercise? Hence comes dilettanteism, a mere amusing one's self with literature, art or science in entire indifference to truth and to its applications to the regulation of life. Hence hypercriti- cism and fastidiousness, a languid and luxurious disposition to get the most enjoyment possible out of life, and yet a fastidiousness which can find nothing to enjoy. Hence the tendency, which appeared in the decline of the Roman empire, to long and arid controversies on barren questions. Epictetus ridicules a question much discussed in his day. It was this : " If a man says of himself, ' I lie,' does he lie, or does he tell the truth ? If he lies he tells the truth ; but if he tells the truth he lies." Chrysippus wrote a treatise on this question, entitled the '• Pseudomenos " in six books, said to have been famous in its day. f Another tendency is to Skepticism as the ultimate issue of all intel- * Werke : Vol. x. pp. 49, 50. Ed. Berlin, 1839. Eine Duplik. f Epictetus; Discourses, B. ii. chap. 17. 42 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. KNOWLEDGE AND AGNOSTICISM. 43 lectual endeavor ; a perpetual inquiring, " ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." The whole signiticance of life comes to be expressed in an interrogation point. Sterling and Jamea Blanco White were examples; seeking a faith and never finding it; passing from one faith to another in perpetual unrest, like a man lost in a Dismal Swamp, leaping from one quaking turf to another till he sinks in the suflbcating quagmire — a life of intense activity but of no achievement — the whole energy spent in seeking a place to stand. Another result is indifference to truth both in itself and in its bearing on human welfare. Underlying this false conception of the love of the truth is the assumption that truth cannot be known ; that all opiniong must be held as doubtful ; that the scientific spirit requires that we must be indifferent to what we hold as truth and always ready to receive its contrary. This precludes the conception of any principle believed, to which the'will consents in allegiance, by which the man regulates his life, and for which he would willingly die. Paul must meet the Athe- nians on Mars' Hill as ready to believe in Jupiter as in Christ. One writer has taught that the existence of a revelation from God of princi- ples true for all time would be incompatible with human progress. Another has expressed doubts whether ever a martyr for truth acted wisely. All such representations imply that truth cannot be known ; that the deepest principles on which human knowledge depends may in the future be found false; that everything is uncertain. Thus this theory of the love of the truth is in its essence agnosticism. While this theory reveals its insufficiency and erroneousness in its practical development, it is disproved also by the fact that all great epochs of human progress have been characterized and carried forward by the presentation of truth in its practical bearing on life, and with glowing feeling and steadftist purpose on the part of those who have been agents in the progress. Their love to tlie truth has not been defecated from all feeling nor sublimated into indifference. They have loved the truth in the sense that with all the powers of their being they lived for it and if necessary were ready to die for it. Freedom of inquiry is a condition of progress ; but it is only a condition, never the power by which the progress is effected, ^^oble characters are formed and great deeds done, not by inquiring after truth, but by believing it and acting on it. The great change wrought by Lord Bacon in physical science itself was not effected by his teaching men to reason by induction. Men have always reasoned by induction as well as by deduction. But Lord Bacon wTOught the great reformation in science by calling men oflF from merely speculative inquiries, such as occupied the mediieval schol- astics, to investigations bearing directly on the welfare of man. m 3. A right moral character and a devout and reverential spirit, instead of being hindrances to the investigation of truth, are essential to the condition of mind most favorable to such investigation. They are component elements of a true scientific spirit. This is so because they are essential to the wholeness and harmony of man's development. These are helpful in the study of physical science. They are indispen- sable in the investigation of moral and religious truth. The greater the purity, delicacy and earnestness of the moral and religious life, the greater the fitness to appreciate moral and religious truth. A cleanly person is a better judge of what cleanliness is than a savage in the filth of his wigwam or an old monk who has always religiously abstained from washing. A pure woman is a better judge of moral purity than a rotten debauchee. A mean man is a poor judge of what is honorable and a swindler of what is honest. It is the same in religion. Paul and John are better judges of religious truth and its evidence than Simon Magus or Pontius Pilate. This is the philosophy of the New Testament : " The pure in heart see God ; " " Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Pride, selfishness, sensu- ality, the heart of sin blind the mind to religious truth. To such a man religious truth is foolishness, and the whole Christian life unintel- ligible. ^But as Schelling truly says: "To remain unintelligible to such an one is glory and honor before God and man. Barbarus huic ego sim nee tali intelligar ulli."* 4. The doctrine which I have been presenting is accordant with the familiar fact that knowledge and culture are advanced indirectly by the growth and development of the man, quite as much as by direct study, argument and examination of evidence. Obscurities which by dint of thought we once could not make clear, difficulties and objections which we could not argue down, we find, in later years, to be obscurities, diffi- culties and objections no longer. It has come to pass as the result of growth. If all knowledge must come by direct intellectual effort, isolated from feeling and willing, this result would be impossible. But because knowing, feeling and willing are inseparable in the unity of the person, the growth and development of the person insure an advance in knowledge and intellectual insight. ♦ Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre; Sammtliche Werke, I. 433. CHAPTER III. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. i 9. Classification. The powers of the mind are commonly considered in three general classes : — Intelledy the mind considered as intelligent or capable of know- ing ; Semibillty or Feeling, the mind considered as susceptible of motives and emotions ; Will, the mind considered as self-determining. The acts and processes of knowing may be considered in three classes: — Intuition, Representation, and Refiedioti or Thought. All knowledge arises in Intuition, or in Representation, or in a process of Thought. I. I speak of powers or faculties merely as a matter of convenience, to denote the mind itself considered as capable of various acts or states. This is well put by Lotze, who says, in substance, that for the whole of every circle of similar phenomena we ascribe to the soul a peculiar faculty or capacity to act in a way which proves it competent to the ac- tion in each circle of phenomena. As many as are the distinct groups of acts which come under our observation, so many distinct faculties fur the soul must we assume — but not a distinct number of qualities laid out adjacent to one another and imprinted on its nature, but so in affinity with each other that they all concur, as distinct expressions of one and the same being, in the wholeness of its rational development.* II. The mind is active in knowing, not passive. The object known does not imprint itself on the mind in a state of passivity as tracks are imprinted in mud. Knowledge is an action of the mind. All know- ledge consists in knowing. III. In all knowledge the element of intelligence is contributed by the mind itself In perception there must be the object perceived, the subject perceiving, and the perception. The perception is the act of the mind ; it is its primitive intelligence ; it is the intellectual equiva- lent of the object known in the act of perceiving. Every inference is an act of the intellect; and the intellect can draw an inference only because, bv virtue of the constituent elements of its own rationalitv, it 44 * Mikrokosmus ; vol. i. pp. 183, 184; Book II. chap. 2. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 45 knows principles regulative of all thought, which make an inference from reasoning possible. Knowledge without any element of mtelli- gence contributed by the mind itself, is inconceivable and unthinkable ; the words are without meaning. It is objected that because in all knowledge the element of intelli- gence is contributed by the mind itself, therefore all knowledge is sub- jective and unreal and our intellectual faculties untrustworthy. This objection is mere nonsense. It is the objection that knowledge is im- possible because there is a mind that knows ; or that knowledge is im- possible because it is knowledge. In other words it demands that the definition of knowledge must include the denial of all the conditions which make knowledge possible. IV. Knowledge cannot be distinguished from knowledge as different in kind, but onfy as differing in the conditions under which it arises and in the character of its objects. A geometrical demonstration is a process of thought; but the process consists merely in bringing the different elements of the figure successively into juxtaposition before the mind, so that it sees the relations between them. When thus brought before the mind, the knowledge of the relations springs up clear'' in its own self-evidence. The process is a passing successively from knowledge to knowledge. Reasoning could never establish its conclusion, were it not for this always inexplicable act of knowing, in which, at each successive step, the mind knows the relations of things brought together before it. I lO. Intuition or Primitive Knowledge. I. Intuition or primitive knowledge is knowledge which is imme- diate and self-evident. It is immediate in the sense that it is not attained through the medium either of a representation, or of any process of thought. It is face-to-face knowledge. It is self-evident; it needs no proof; it cannot be proved, because nothing can be adduced in proof more evident than the intuition itself. II. Intuition is distinguished as presentative or perceptive, and rational. 1. Presentative or perceptive intuition is immediate and self-evident knowledge of some particular reality in some particular mode of ex- istence present to the consciousness. This includes sense-perception and self-consciousness. Sense-percep- tion is intuitive knowledge of external objects through the senses ; it is man's intuitive knowledge of his environment. It has been objected that sense-perception is not immediate know- ledo-e, because it is through the senses. It may be replied that the 46 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 47 J I objection is equally valid against all intuition, since all mental opera- tions involve the action of the brain and nerve. It may be replied, further, that while these physical changes are important facts of physio- logy and must be taken into account in any complete investigation of mental phenomena, yet man has no consciousness of them whatever, they do not explain the facts of consciousness nor make a bridge for thought from the motions of matter to conscious knowledge, feeling and determination. On the other hand, these states of consciousness are real and well-known facts, distinct from the physiological processes. They are themselves the mental phenomena which we are seeking to understand. They are distinctively psychological facts and must be defined and discriminated as such. Sense-perception is immediate knowledge, in the sense that it does not arise through the medium of any other psychological act or process ; it is not attained through the medium of representation or of a process of thought. Self-consciousness is the intuitive knowledge which the mind has of itself in its own operations. Sense-perception and self-consciousness are sometimes designated as external and internal perception. 2. Rational intuition is the immediate and self-evident knowledge of a universal truth or principle. It is not asserted that the truth or principle is universally believed, but that it is universally true ; not that all men believe it everywhere and always, l)ut that it is true everywhere and always. And as such it asserts itself in the consciousness ; it must be so, and under no circum- stances or conditions can it be thought contrarywise. 3. Intuition is the original primitive knowledge, which gives the ob- jects about which we think and the principles which regulate all think- ing. Presentative intuition gives the particular realities about which we think. They may be called objects, or material or data of thought. Rational intuition gives the principles which regulate all thinking and which make reasoning and inference possible. It also gives, in the knowledge of universal truths, material or data for thought transcend- ing the particular realities given in presentative intuition and so opens to our knowledge the supersensible, the personal and the divine. 4. The name intuition has often been restricted to rational intuition. It is more properly applied both to this and to the presentative intui- tion. Both are alike primitive, immediate and self-evident knowledge, and therefore ought to be designated by the same name. The designa- tion of all primitive knowledge as intuition is also accordant with the etymology of the word and with the usage of philosophical writei-s of the highest authority. When thus designated the name expresses the common quality of all primitive knowledge and emphasizes the truth that all objections against rational intuition on the ground that it is immediate and self-evident, unproved and unprovable knowledge, are equally valid against sense-perception and self-consciousness. III. The mind, considered as capable of rational intuition, I shall call the Reason. Reason as thus used must be distinguished from reasoning, which is a process of reflective thought. So Plotinus speaka of "the transition from reason to reasoning."* ^ 11. Knowledge by Representation. Knowledge by representation is knowledge of a reality formerly pre- Bented in intuition and now re-presented in a mental image or concept. The mental image or concept is called a re-presentation. When these mental images are not recognized as re-presentations of realities previously presented, they are known merely as mental images, and are the objects or material for the creations of imagination. The recognition of a mental image or concept as a re-presentation of a reality previously known, is memory. Memory is the power of repre- senting the past and of knowing it again through the re-presenta- tion. Memory is self-evident knowledge. It stands independent of reason- ing in its own self-evidence. In this respect it agrees with presentative intuition. It differs from it in that the knowledge is not immediate, but through a representation. It presupposes a reality formerly known in- tuitively, and now known again through a re-presentation. The reality of knowledge through memory is essential to the reality of all knowledge which rests on a process of thought or involves any lapse of time. Without it observation and experiment can ascertain no facts, reasoning can reach no conclusion, experience can accumulate no knowledge ; for the knowledge of this moment would vanish irrecover- ably in the next. The attempts to vindicate the trustworthiness of memory otherwise than as giving self-evident knowledge are futile. Mr. Huxley holds that certainty is limited to the present consciousness. Yet he says that "the general trustworthiness of memory" and "the general constancy of the order of nature" "are of the highest practical value, inasmuch as the conclusions logically drawn from them are always verified by expe- rience." t He argues that the present act of memory may be trusted, because in past experience a multitude of remembrances have been found to be correct. But he can have no knowledge of any past re- membrance and its verification except the knowledge given by memory * mrdl^amc arrd vov hg Xoyiofidv; quoted by John Smith, Select Discourses ; Cam- bridge, 1673, p. 94. t Lay Sermons, p. 359. 48 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. itself. He cannot know in a single instance during his process of veri- fication what he is verifying nor on what premises his logical conclusion rests, except as he remembers. How can an intelligent man gravely propound such a begging of the question as argument, and claim that he is scientific ? The trustworthiness of memory cannot be established by experience, since it is itself a condition of the possibility of experi- ence. James Mill explains our belief of memory as the result of the associ- ation of ideas. But this is an impossible explanation. A visit to a house in which I once dwelt may be the occasion of mental images of various scenes arising in my mind ; but it does not in the least account for my knowledge that these are representations of scenes in my past life. Or when he says that the ideas of piist experience are irresistibly associated with the idea of myself experiencing them, and this irresisti- bleness constitutes belief, in this statement itself he assumes a know- ledge of past experience and of myself experiencing it as already exist- ing and as the basis of the entire effect attributed to the association of ideas. Physiology explains memory by " the organic registration of the results of impressions on our nervous centres." Whatever is present in consciousness is attended by action and waste of nerve, and leaves behind in the nerve itself a trace, which Dr. Maudsley compares to a scar, or a pit left by small-pox. * This implies that every object seen during a lifetime leaves a trace like a scar on the retina of the eye, that these innumerable scars imprinted on this exceedingly small surface and new ones momentarily added, are distinct and without confiision, and that each one remains identified with the object which originally caused it and ready at every moment to represent it in consciousness without commingling it witli any other. This explana- tion is simply inconceivable, and itself needs explaining as much as the fact which it professes to explain. And the difficulty is multiplied by the five senses, by all the nerves of feeling and motion, and by the several parts of the brain if the theory is established that each of them has its special function. At the most, physiology can only describe the physical conditions of intellectual action. It cannot find thought and knowledge in the structure or functions of the nerves, nor explain them by molecular motion, or by the traces of its action which it leaves. ^ 12. Knowledge through Reflection or Thought. I. Reflection or thought is the reflex action of the intellect attending to the reality known in presentative intuition, and apprehending, dif- ferentiating and integrating it under the regulation of the principles •Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, pp. 182, 183. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 49 known in rational intuition, and concluding in a judgment. Discrimi- niiting or distinguishing may be used as synonymous with diflerentia- ting, and comprehending or unifying as synonymous with integrating. 1. It is a prerequisite to thought that both the reality about which we think and the principles which regulate our thinking be already given in intuition. 2. The objects of thought as presented in intuition are indeterminate. They lie before the mind in their reality, differences and relations. But they lie before the mind as indeterminate or nebulous matter, present to the consciousness but undefined. Neither consciousness nor reason gives any ground for the theory of Reid, Kant and others that we first perceive the minima visibilia, and then proceed to unite them in thought, the mind passing from one to another so rapidly that the transition is not remembered ; or that the object perceived is, as Kant calls it, " a synthesis of intuitions," or as J. S. Mill calls it, " a group of sensations." Every intuitive percep- tion, according to Kant, being contained absolutely in one moment,* can be only a perception of an indivisible unit of extension and an indivisible unit of time. But we have no knowledge of an indivisible unit of extension or of time. We know the ego as the indivisible unit in the sphere of personality. AVe have an hypothesis of the existence of atoms as the ultimate indivisible units of matter; but these atoms are not the units of perception. This theory of successive perceptions of minima has no warrant. On the contrary the material for thought is presented by intuition in an undiscriminated whole. It is sometimes called the nebulous matter of intuition. The primitive knowledge is often associated with the feelings ; the feelings themselves carry know- ledge undiscriminated and unformulated in them. In the intuition all the elements of the reality are presented to the consciousness in solu- tion ; it is only at the touch of reflective thought that the solution crys- tallizes and all its parts stand out distinctly and in order. In the nebulous, unelaborated matter of intuition the mind by reflection notes the particular realities, their differences and relations, and thus attains clear, definite and complete cognition, which can be declared in a judg- ment or proposition. 3. Reflection or thought consists of Apprehension, Differentiation and Integration, f The reflex act of thought is primarily attention, alike in apprehend- ing, discriminating and comprehending. The mind turns back or re- flects on the reality presented in intuition, and notes what it is. Real- * Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Book II. Chap. II. Sect III. 2. t " Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis." J. G. Fichte. 50 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 51 ity consists of beings, their differences, and the relations by which they are in unity. The mind as it reflects on this reality notes the beings which are presented in it, traces out their differences, and notes their unity in various relations. These are the three acts of thought, appre- hension, differentiation and integration or comprehension. The unit of thought is a particular being, simple or complex. The first act of thought is the apprehension of a particular being in the qualities, acts and modes of existence in which it is presented to us in intuition. For according to a necessary law of thought we do not apprehend (jualities and acts as appearances merely, but we apprehend the being that appears and acts in them. Hence apprehension is sometimes called identification, be- cause it is the identifying of the qualities and acts with the being that appears and acts in them. I cannot apprehend color, form, solidity, motion or thought except as I know some being existing (ex-sisto) or standing out to view in the color, form, solidity, motion or thought. Conversely, I cannot apprehend being except as existing in some qual- ity, action or mode. Apprehension, therefore, is the reflex act of the mind attending to some particular portion of the reality given in intuition, noting what it is, and thus making it an object or unit of thought. Thus one walking in the evening has the starry sky before his eyes, spread out as an un- discriminated expanse. Presently he fixes hb attention on Sirius, notes its size, brightness and bluish tint, and thus apprehends it. In a busy city he hears a confused mingling of sounds, discriminating none ; pres- ently he attends to a particular sound and apprehends it as a charcoal- vender's cry. Or he feels at once the chair on which he sits, the table on which he leans, the pen which he holds in his hand, without noticing any. Presently he attends to one of these things, notes something about it which interests him for the moment and so apprehends it. He attends (at-tendo), stretches his mind, as it were, about the object and grasps it as an object of thought. His apprehension may go no further than to note its figure in space, or it may extend to a more careful and com- plete observation of its qualities ; but in either case he apprehends or grasps it in his mind. The first act of thought, then, is attending to some portion of reality presented in intuition and apprehending or grasping what it is which the intuition presents to the mind. Language recognizes this distinction between the mere presentation of a reality in sense-perception or self-consciousness, and the intelligent apprehension of it by the mind ; as in the significance of look as dis- tinguished from see; listen as distinguished from hear; touch, handle as distinguished from feel; and in the French language the same distinc- tion is extended to the other senses; flairer and sentir ; savourer and gmder. Apprehension by taste is exemplified in a taster of teas. He 'A tastes the infusion in one of a row of cups, attends to it and appre- hends what the flavor is. He then distinguishes or differentiates it from teas of different flavors already known to him ; he then integrates or comprehends it in a unity or class of teas of the same flavor and pronounces it Souchong of the second quality. A delicate eater attends to or apprehends the flavor of every morsel and thus gets pleasure, while another, intent on other objects, eats without noticing the flavor of his food. Differentiation or discrimination is the reflex act in which the mind turning its attention on the reality given in intuition, notes the peculi- arities of an object already apprehended and thus distinguishes it from other objects. Integration or comprehension is the reflex act in which the mind, afler having apprehended two or more objects and distinguished them from one another, continues to fix its attention on them, and takes cogni- zance of them in their real relations and thus integrates or comprehends them in a unity. A relation is any real connection between two or more objects by attending to which the mind comprehends them in a unity of thought. Havmg differentiated them, by perception of this relation it brings them back (re-lation) into unity of thought. The relation is not created by the mind as a mere subjective thought, but it is objectively real and perceived as such. Thus we discover relations of distance and position in space, of antecedence, sequence and simultaneousness in time, of degree and equality in quantity, of resemblance in quality, of causal efficiency, of knowledge connecting a subject knowing and an object known, and many others. The process of thought may be compared to the resolving of a nebula with a telescope. In the faintly luminous mist as it appears to the naked eye, the astronomer finds the stars, distinguishes them from one another, comprehends them in the unity of a cluster, and is able to comprehend them in the profbunder unity of their astronomical rela- tions. So in the nebulous matter of intuition, thought apprehends the particular realities, distinguishes them from one another, and then comprehends them intelligently in the unity of their real relations. The process of thought may be compared to the development of life in the incubation of an egg ; the homogeneous yolk is diversified into lines and parts distinguished from each other, and these parts are then integrated in the living organism of the chick. Ulrici makes all thought to consist of differentiation.* Hamilton makes it all to consist of comparison. But it is evident that before two objects can be compared or comprehended in a unity, they must have * System der Logik, S. 66 and ante. 52 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. been known as distinct; and before they can be difierentiated, each must have been apprehended as an object of thought. II. All luuiuui thought consists of apprehension, differentiation and comprehension or integration. By these i)rocesses men think on all subjects. If thought is the observation of a sensible object, it begins with apprehending what it is. I once heard Prof Agassiz say that when he found an insect of a spe- cies new to him, he was accustomed to spend some hours in close in- spection of it, and thus he got it so completely in his mind that he never failed afterwards to recognize it. This was his apprehemion of it. He could then distinguish it from all other species by the properties peculiar to it, and could by resemblance assign it to its proper genus and species. The same are the processes in the farthest range and most complicated action of thought. In all thinking the mind follows this beaten track. In the most complicated processes of thought the mind can do no more than to apprehend, discriminate, and compre- hend. It has but three questions to ask : What is it? What is it not? How is it related to other things in the unity of a harmonious whole? Thus the ancient Greek philosophy classified the objects of human inquiry : to oV, t6 irepov, to iv — being, its difference, its unity. When two or more objects have been apprehended and discrimi- nated, the mind proceeds to cognize them in a larger unity or whole and in real relations not discovered at the first glance. This whole becomes a new unit of thought to be differentiated and integrated again. And this process the mind continues till it comprehends all material things in the unity of a Cosmos, and it and all spiritual reality in the unity of a rational system under the government of God. All error in thinking must be in one or the other of these three pro- cesses ; and thought should be carefully guarded in each. Error arises when the thinker does not clearly, correctly and adequately apprehend the object under consideration ; or when he confounds it with that which diffei-s ; or when he integrates the discriminated realities in false and unreal relations, or in a partial and one-sided unity excluding realities and relations essential to the comprehensiveness and completeness of the thought. III. Thought does not present to the mind the beings which are its objects, nor their differences and relations ; it merely apprehends some reality which intuition presents, and under the regulation of the laws of thought traces out the differences actually existing between the apprehended objects and discovers the real relations by which they exist in unity. Thence it may proceed, beyond what is presented in intuition, to infer, according to the principles of reason, the existence of reality not actually observed and to determine its dilierences and rela- THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 53 tions. This process we call reasoning; but it is only apprehending, differentiating and integrating under the regulative principles known by rational intuition. The necessity of thought has been illustrated by comparing the un- discriminated content of intuition to light falling on the eye without shade or color, which would make sight as useless as it would be in total darkness ; or by the supposition that every object was of the same ghade of blue, which would destroy all knowledge of color. * But these analogies are misleading ; for they seem to imply that thought creates the qualities, differences and relations of reality; whereas it only takes cognizance of them. If in the reality presented in intui- tion, there were no qualities, peculiarities and relations identifying and distinguishing the reality, thought would be forever unable to appre- hend, distinguish and comprehend it. IV. Thought, as thus far considered, has for its object beings, their diflerences and relations, and those complex unities and larger systems of beings which thought discovers. These may be either present in intuition or remembered. For we have seen that every process of knowledge which has duration involves memory. There are also certain subsidiary objects of thought, necessary to the best prosecution of our thinking about these realities, yet deriving all their significance from the fact that they stand for them. One class of these subsidiary objects of thought is the mind's own representations, not with memory of the objects represented, but present in consciousness simply as representations. These the mind apprehends, differentiates and integrates, forming ideal creations. We can also attend to a being as it appears in a single property or act and distinguish it from or compare it with the being appearing in another property or act. This process is called abstraction. By ab- stracting single properties and acts and making them objects of atten- tion, we are able to apprehend, differentiate and integrate them. It must be noticed however that the object of thought here is still a being, though attended to as appearing in a single property or act. We also form logical concepts or geneial notions. The necessity for these is in the limitation of the human mind. If it were necessary in thinking to know every object in all its peculiarities as an individual, and to designate it by a particular name, the multiplicity of objects would overwhelm the mind and confound alike the power of expressing thought and the power of thinking. The mind, therefore, resorts to the expedient of grouping together in a concept oi general notion indi- viduals which have certain common qualities, disregarding qualities in * Ulrici System der liOgik, S. 65. Hobbes says, " Sentire sempei idem et non sentire, ad idem recidunt." "To perceive always the same is all one with no< perceiving anythmg." Physica, iv. 25 ; opera, I. 321, Molesworth Ed. 54 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. which the individuals differ and designating the concept by a symbol oral or written. We as it were bind these individuals in bundles, labeling each bundle ; then we can handle them and pass them from hand to hand. Man's power of using general notions and of designa- ting them by language whereby he is able to lift himself above the multiplicity of objects which confuses him, master it with knowledge, and communicate, perpetuate and accumulate his knowledge, demon- strates his pre-eminent greatness. Yet in another view the necessity of resorting to this expedient reveals his limitations. God alone knows all objects severally in their individuality and "calleth them all by name. >> § 13. Thought Distinguished by its Objects. Thought may be distinguished by its objects into three kinds : Ab- stract or Formal; Concrete or Realistic; and Creative. In each case thought consists of apprehension, differentiation and integration ; the distinction is only in the object on which the thought is employed. I. Formal or abstract thought has for its object a logical concept or general notion designated by a general name, and consists principally in the analysis and distribution of the content of the general notion by means of the syllogism. II. Thought is concrete or realistic when its object is a particular reality presented in consciousness or remembered. In concrete thought general notions and words are used, but the object to which the thought is directed is a concrete reality presented at the time or remembered. For example, w^hen a chemist is investigating the properties of oxygen, he has some particular portion of oxygen before him and the judgment in which he affirms the result of his observation and experiment affirms gome particular action of that particular portion of oxygen. When a botanist examines a plant or a zoologist an animal, his thought is upon the particular specimen before him. After examining many specimens and finding the same property common to them all, he is able by induction to predicate that property of all individuals of the kind. But in every case the object of his investigation is not a general notion designated by a word, but is the concrete reality itself. Some of the processes of concrete thought are Observation and p]xperi- ment, Classification, Co-ordination in invarial>le sequences or laws of na- ture, Colligation of facts, Induction, Deduction, Verification, Interpre- tation and Vindication of facts to the Reason and Systemization. De- duction, as it appears in concrete thought, consists of inferring effects from a known cause, particulars from a known universal principle or law and mathematical trutlis from the forms of space and number. III. Thought is called Creative when its object is a mental represen tation. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 55 Creative thought is the reflex action of the mind on its own represen- tations, apprehending them, distinguishing them from each other and comprehending them in a complex whole. The primitive process is the same as in formal and realistic thought ; but as the objects of thought are the mind's own representations, the results can be only mental re- presentations ; just as in formal thinking, since the objects of thought are notions and words, the result of the thinking can be only notions and words. The power of creative thought is the Imagination. 1. In its lower forms creative thought is fantastic; that is, it is not regulated by rational truths and laws. In this lower action it may be called fancy or phantasy rather than imagination. A centaur, or a tree with leaves of silver, blossoms of precious stones and fruit of gold are fantastic creations. The creations of fancy are sometimes pleasing. I recall, as an example, a pretty French picture of autumn, in which cherubs are putting out the flowers with extinguishers. Another ex- ample is Riickert's " Der Hhmnel ein Brief J' in which he compares the sky to a letter of which the sun is the seal ; when night takes off the seal, we read in a thousand starry lettei-s that God is love. 2. In its higher form, the imagination creates ideals accordant with rational truth and law, in which it embodies its highest conceptions of the perfect. The creations of imagination differ from fantastic combi- nations in that they express the deepest truth and reality ; they differ from imitation in that they begin with ideals and proceed to express them outwardly, while imitation begins with the outward object and tries empirically to copy it. Imagination seizes its object by the heart and works from within outwards. 3. While the imagination cannot of itself carry knowledge beyond its own representations it takes the lead in every sphere of intellectual activity. Imagination creates the ideals which the artist expresses on the can- vas and in the marble, in words and music, in buildings and parks. It creates the ideals of mechanical inventions. When Hargreaves upset his wife's spinning-wheel, he saw in the revolving vertical spindle the ideal of the spinning-jenny. Watt saw the steam-engine in the uplifting of the lid of a tea-kettle. Galileo saw the principle of the pendulum in a swinging chandelier. It takes the lead in scientific discovery. When it flashed on I^e^vton, as by an inspiration, that the law^ according to which apples fall from a tree is the law of the solar system, he created in his thought a solar system regulated by that law. Kepler created in thought the orbit of Mars ; in fact tried nineteen hypotheses before he hit the geometrical fig- ure in which all the known facts as to the positions of the planet could be colligated. Harvey, seeing the valves in the veins, saw the circulation of the blood, creating in imagination the circulatory system of the body. 66 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 57 The creative faculty is equally essential in criticism. The critic must penetrate through the work of art to the ideal which it expresses. He stands before the finished work, as an explorer and discoverer stands before the complicated realities of nature. He must create in his own imagination the ideal of the work and the plan of the artist in expressing it, and thus find its intended unity and significance before he can criticize its execution. It takes a genius to understand a genius. It takes a Goethe to reveal a Shakespeare, an Addison to reveal a Milton. The creative power is equally essential in teaching and in all com- munication of thought. The ideal, the whole created in imagination according to its real principles, must be presented and grasped before the learner can analyze it into its elements or construct its scattered elements into the real whole. Even in practical affairs the imagination is equally pre-eminent whether in a statesman constructing the plan of a wise administration of government, or in a general planning a campaign, or in a merchant or manuflicturer planning his business. In every sphere of human thought it is the leading power of the intellect, the queen of all the faculties of intelligence. In its higher inventions and discoveries it is "the vision and faculty divine" of genius. Where a common mind sees a kettle lid lifted, a spinning- wheel thrown over, a chandelier swinging, a genius sees the application of a power which changes the history of the world. Where a common mind sees only a mass of intricate and confused facts, the genius sees the principle and law by which they are constructed into the unity of a system. The facts lie heaped in tables of figures and collections of books. It is only to the Orphic music of a master-thought that they move and arrange themselves in the harmony and beauty of a scientific system. This is the effect of the imagination, the creative power of the mind: "Which in truth Is but another name for absolute power. And clearest insight, amplitud<' of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood." IV. Scientific investigation is principally by concrete thought, though necessarily supplemented by the abstract and the creative. The imagination creates hypotheses and suggests lines of investigation ; but it cannot of itself go beyond its own representations. Formal or abstract thought is indispensable because we must use words and gen- eral notions ; but it is inadequate. 1. Formal or abstract thought is inadequate on account of the thinker's tendency to stop in the general notions and words. As its I 4 ■J objects are notions designated by words, the thought itself oflen fails to go beyond them. But scientific thinking must needs penetrate within the general notions and names to the realities signified. Boole says : " By some it is maintained that words represent the conceptions of the mind alone ; by others that they represent things In the processes of reasoning signs stand in the place and fulfil the office of the conceptions and operations of the mind ; but as those conceptions and operations represent things and the connections and relations of things, so signs represent things with their connections and relations ; and lastly, as signs stand in the place of conceptions and operations of the mind, they are subject to the laws of those conceptions and operations. " ^ But though the word is the sign of the concept yet it is only a sign or symbol of it ; and though the concept is a concept of things yet it can be designated only by a symbol and can be imaged as reality only in some one of the particular things included in it. Hence the danger that the thought stop in the words, and the necessity to complete intel- ligence that the thought pass through the words to the things. " Battles are bloody " : the mind assents without emotion. The sight of a battle, a visit to a battle-field directly after the fight, a narrative of the experience of a single wounded soldier, fills up the words with a terrific meaning. " London is in England " : but it takes the experi- ence of a lifetime in that city to learn what it is in England which is denoted by the word London. Through thus stopping in the words and not going through the words to the things comes so oflen the unreality of knowledge gained out of a book through words. Thought about things is necessary to give freshness and significance to thought about words and concepts. As Carlyle says, to think it is to thing it. Ludwig Noire says : " The only correct method of investigation is to verify things by things " ; and he exemplifies the difficulty of reaching reality through words by relating that a number of eminent philolo- gists had a feast prepared according to some ancient Greek recipes, with the result that it thoroughly disordered the stomachs of all who partook of it and caused the death of one of them. An extreme ex- ample of sticking in the letter he gives in the story that when the Florentines began eagerly to look through Galileo's telescope, the priests rebuked them from the Scriptures with the words, " Viri Galilaei, quid statis spectantes in coelum " ? And he quotes a warning against this danger of empty thinking from Thomas Aquinas : " Names do not follow the mode of being which is in things, but the mode of being which is according to our cognition." f Spinoza gives a similar cau« * Boole's Laws of Thousrht, p. 26. t Ludwig Noire; Die Welt als Entvrickelung des Geistes, §§ 10, 11, 12, 13. 58 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PEOCESSES OF KNOWING. 59 tion : " Whence it is easy to see how carefully we should avoid, in the investigation of things, the confounding of the entities of reality with the entities of thought. It is one thing to inquire into the nature of things, another to inquire into the modes in which they are perceived by us. If these two are confounded we shall neither be able to under- stand the modes of our receiving nor the nature of the things itself."* Examples of confounding psychological processes with logical, and of substituting logical concepts and forms for reality are frequent in the writings of Hamilton, Kant, and notwithstanding the warning just quoted, of Spinoza himself; and the exposure of this confusion is often a sufficient exposure and refutation of their fallacies. The pantheism of Kant's successors in Germany was little else than a resolving of the world-process into a process of logic. Beings, their qualities, differ- ences and relations are not known from the logical concepts of thought ; the logical concepts are formed from the knowledge of beings. 2. Formal or abstract thought, being limited to the analysis and distribution of concepts already formed and named, is insufficient for the synthetic processes by which we enlarge our knowledge of reality, and for the synthetic or ampliative judgments which enunciate the new knowledge acquired by our investigations. It is incompetent also for the scientific analysis of real things, to which the most intractable compounds reveal the secret of their elements. Modern science, em- pirical, philosophical and theological, has not been built up by the analysis of concepts and words. 3. Accordingly the three primary axioms of formal logic, the princi- ples of identity, of non-contradiction and excluded middle, are not a sufficient basis for the logic of realistic thought engaged in the investi- gation of reality and the discovery and systemization of facts. These axioms of pure or formal thought are founded on the categories of unity, plurality and totality, which pertain to number without neces- sarily including any content of reality. But the principles of real thinking must carry reality through the whole process. Reality in its individualify, diversity^ complexity, is much more than the mere forms of unity, plurality, totality. In realistic thinking, the judgment of identity expressed in the formula, A is A, is not the identical proposition, " Whatever is, U^ which some logicians f have propounded as the first principle of all thinking. Rather it is the judgment that the A of thought is the intellectual equivalent of the A of reality ; and this reality is not a general notion expressed by a name, but a concrete reality apprehended in the concrete qualities and activities which mani- * Cogitata Metaphysica ; Appendix Renati Descartes Prin('i))iorum Philosophiae. Pars prima, Cap. i. ^ 9. Bridges' Ed. Vol. i. p. 102. t Prof. Jevons, Principles of Science, p. 5. See Ueberweg Logik, ^ 77. ^m m fest what it is. It is the judgment which declares the result of simple apprehension ; that is, it declares in respect to any portion of pre- sented reality which has become the object of attention, what the reality is which the intuition has brought before the mind. The realistic judgment of difference, A is not B, must not be con- founded with the judgment of non-contradiction, A is not not-A. Two contradictories cannot co-exist ; one excludes the other ; but two objects that differ are both known to exist and to exist as difierent ; the other is as real as the one. The judgment of excluded middle, " everything is either A or it is not-A," in which formal thought is completed, recognizes the sum total of thought merely as a total of number. But a complex whole of reality is much more than a total of arithmetic, because the parts are individual realities differing from each other, and the relations which unite them are real and diverse. Of this no notice is taken in the formal thought which forms its totals by counting and rests on the maxim that the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts. This is a maxim of arithmetic which deals only with number, but not of science which deals with concrete realities. A family, a nation, a steam-engine is more and other than the sum of all its parts. The substitution of the empty forms of number, unity , plurality and totality for reality, with its individualities, differences and relations, and the errors consequent, are conspicuous in the writings of Hamilton ; in consequence of which his " absolute " fluctuates between an arithmetical total, and a logical concept comprising all things and distinguished from nothing ; his grand law of thought includes all that is conceivable in thought between two extremes contradictory of each other, and yet both necessarily believed ; and his only resource to save reason from being entirely discredited by its own antinomies, is to recognize its impotence ; so that the necessary beliefs of reason are resolved into the mind's conscious- ness of its own self-contradiction and incompetence. Instead, therefore, of the law of excluded middle, which recognizes the universe merely as a numerical total composed of A and not-A, we have, in concrete thinking, the judgment, A is related to B, C, D, &c., in the unity of a complete whole. Or, all things exist in relation to each other in the unity of a complex whole or system. 4. To supplement the inadequacy of the formal logic Leibnitz sug- gested the additional principle of the Sufficient Reason ; of which he says : " This principle is that of the need of a sufficient reason why a thing exists, why an event happens, and why a truth is held." * This principle may be accepted ; not merely in the sense that thought must * Fifth Letter to Samuel Clarke, § 125; also Theod. I. ^44. 60 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 61 account for every beginning or change by finding its cause, but in the broader meaning that thought must account for and explain all reality by its accordance with the truths, laws and ends of reason in the unity of a rational system. It is impossible for a rational being to rest in any thought as completed until this accord with reason is discovered. Prof Bowen proposes to reduce all these principles to two: "All thought must be consistent with itself; " " All thought must be conse- quent ; that is it should never affirm or deny a union of two concepts without any ground for such affirmation or denial."* But this still keejjs us within the limits of formal or abstract thought. The fact that thought is consistent with and consequent on itself does not prove it to be knowledge of reality. 5. The principles, which underlie realistic or concrete thought, and are the basis of a logical science of its laws, seem to be these : (a) Thought must be consistent with reality as given in intuition. (b) Thought must be consistent with itself This is the positive form of the law of non-contradiction. While consistency of thought with itself does not prove it true, its inconsistency with itself or its self- coutradictoriness proves it false. (c) Thought must be consistent with the regulative principles of reason. To these may be added three others, which may be called laws of things as w^ell as laws of thought. (d) Knowledge is correlative to reality. This, as has been shown, is of the essence of knowledge. Thought then must not only be consistent with intuition, carefully including all and excluding nothing which intuition gives, it must carry with it also the certainty that intuition rightly connoted is knowledge of reality. (e) What is contradictory in thought is impossible in reality; or, stated positively, all particular realities are consistent with one another in reciprocal relations in the unity of a complex whole. Contradiction is no more possible in objective reality than in subjective thought. Co-existing realities are always compatible. (f) "WTiat is contradictory to the necessary truths of reason is impos- sible in reality. The absurd cannot be real. Or, stated positively, all particular realities must be accounted for and explained to the reason as existing in a rational system consistent with the truths, laws, ideals and ends of reason. 6. These principles are at the basis of all scientific investigation. Science assumes them at the start. It starts with the assumption that things are concatenated, that there is unity in all diversity, and that * Ix)gic, pp. 48, 53. every object in the universe exists in scientific or rational relations, whether it can or cannot be scientifically known by us. When a new animal, plant or mineral is discovered it is taken for granted that it can be scientifically classified ; when a new fact is observed it is taken for granted that it can be co-ordinated under natural law. All science starts with the assumption that the universe is a rational system and that every reality in it must be in relation to other reality in that system ; and, if accessible to our knowledge, may be found in its place in a system of scientific thought. 7. That advancement in science is made chiefly by the processes of concrete thought is true of philosophical and theological science, not less really than of empirical. Philosophy and theology are not the knowledge of propositions, notions and words, but of beings, their qual- ities, powers, conditions and relations ; they are the knowledge of these in their accordance with the truths, laws, ideals and ends of reason, and in the unity of a rational system expressing the archetypal thoughts of the absolute and supreme reason. The object of religious faith is not doctrine, but the living God. ^ 14. Induction and the Newtonian Method. A special consideration of induction is necessary not only on account of its intrinsic importance, but also because the students of the phy- sical sciences are designating them as distinctively Inductive Sciences, thus appropriating the word and insinuating that induction is used in no other sphere of thought ; it is necessary, also, because the word in- duction is now used ambiguously and confusedly to denote two distinct methods of reasoning. These two methods I shall consider in succes- sion. The first I shall call Simple Induction ; or, because Lord Bacon used the word induction to denote it, Baconian Induction ; or, because until recently the word induction has commonly been used to denote this method, Induction, without any qualifying^ word. The second I shall call the Newtonian Method, because it was used by Sir Isaac Newton ; or, the hypothetical method, because it begins with an hypo- thesis. I. Simple induction is the inference that because all observed agents of a particular kind under certain conditions manifest a particular pro- perty or produce a particular effect, therefore all agents of the same kind, not hitherto observed, will, under the same conditions, everywhere and always produce the same effect. 1. By induction we extend our knowledge from that which has been observed to that which has not been observed. What is observed is a uniform or unvaried sequence ; that is, every agent of a particular kind, under particular conditions, so far as 6J THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS ^ND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 63 observed, has always produced the same effect. The inference by induction extends our knowledge beyond observation to all agents of that kind under the same conditions wherever or whenever they thus exist. All observed specimens of oxygen combine with iron in certain definite proportions. By induction we infer that all oxygen in existence combines with iron according to the same proportions. A sequence ob- served in comparatively few specimens of oxygen and iron, is known by induction to extend to all the oxygen and all the iron in the uni- verse. A sequence observed in comparatively few instances is known by induction to be a uniform sequence or law in all instances of the same kind. Some logicians define " perfect induction " as the knowledge of a uniform sequence obtained by observing every existing individual of a kind ; for example, our knowledge that all the planets of the solar system revolve around the sun. But this is not induction, it is mere observation. Induction always carries our knowledge from what has been observed to what has not been observed. 2. The principle on which induction rests is this : The same complex of causes must always and everywhere j)rodiice the same effect By a complex of causes I mean the various causes and conditions which concur in producing an effect. These causes and conditions combined 1 call a " complex of causes." This accords with the maxim of logic, " Causoe partiales in tofo concursii stant pro unoJ^ My statement of the principle, therefore, is scientifically exact; and it is necessarily and universally true. Rev. Dr. Wm. Thompson has stated the principle: " Under the same circumstances and with the same substance the same effects always result from the same causes." All that he specifies, how^- ever, is properly included in the " complex of causes." This is a primitive principle regulative of all thought and known by rational intuition. It cannot be known by experience. It transcends experience. It is impossible for man to examine every portion of oxygen in tlie universe to learn by observation whether it supports combustion. No human experience can have observed every instance of bodies gravitating towards each other. No observation can bring within the knowledge of human experience to-day what will not happen till to-morrow. ^ Nor can this principle be itself established by induction. Dr. Wm. Thompson and J. S. Mill, though differing widely in their statements of the principle, both affirm that the principle itself is the result of in- duction. * But that the principle on which all induction rests should itself be the product of induction is as impossible as that a ♦Thompson, Outline of Laws of Thought, p. 307; Mill's Logic, B. iii. chap. 3, ^ 1. 4 1 •i (;hild should be its own father. Much confusion and errof of thought have been occasioned by indefinite or incorrect statements of the prin- ciple on which induction rests. Perhaps the loosest statement is that used by Reid and Stewart : " Our intuitive conviction that the future must resemble the past." This is inadequate, because induction carries us beyond experience, not only into the future, but also into the past and into remote space ; also because it does not define in what respect the future must resemble the past. Thus loosely stated it is not true. It is not true of civilization in every age and country, that the civiliza- tion of every future age will resemble it. It is not true that the sun will rise every twenty-four hours forever ; nor that it has so risen in all the past. It is commonly said that the principle of induction is, that nature is uniform in its operations. This also is inadequate, because it does not define with scientific exactness what the uniformity of nature is. In fact some scientists have of late endeavored to escape being held to any exactness in stating it. Prof W. G. Clifford speaks of two kinds of uniformity, exact uniformity and reasonable uniformity, of which he says even the first is not entirely exact.* Prof Jevons also rests induction on a loose statement of the uniformity of nature. " The results of imperfect induction," (induction in which observation has not extended to every individual of the kind) " however well authenti- cated and verified, are never more than probable. We never can be sure that the future will he as the present. ... It is the fundar mental postulate of all inference concerning the future that there shall be no arbitrary change in the subject of inference ; of the probability or improbability of such a change I conceive our faculties can give no estimate. . . . Inductive inference might attain to certainty, if our knowledge of the agents existing through the universe were complete, and if w^e were at the same time certain that the power which created the universe would allow it to proceed without arbitrary change." f The principle of the uniformity of nature, exactly and correctly enunciated, is simply the principle on which induction rests, as I have already stated it. The uniformity of natiu-e consists in the uniform or invariable sequence of the same effect, whenever and wherever the same complex of causes acts. A law of nature is simply the enuncia- tion of this invariable sequence in respect to any particular complex of causes and its effects. Nature is uniform in the sense that its laws remain unchanged whatever be the changes in the actual succession of phenomena. 3. We can now distinguish induction from erroneous conceptions of it and its functions. * Lectures and Essays, Vol. i. p. 141. t Principles of Science, 3d Ed. pp. 149, 151. 239. 64 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. it' Induction does not guarantee the correctness of our observation either as to what is the complex of causes which produces an effect, or as to its factual continuance unchanged. Certificates of the effi- cacy of a nostrum in curing a fever are not a basis for induction, because there is no certainty that the medicine was essential in the complex of causes leading to the convalescence, and also because what is called fever in one case may have arisen from a physical derange- ment entirely different from that which caused what is called fever in another. The principle of induction is not '^post hoc, ergo propter hoc.'' It presupposes an exact scientific determination of what the complex of causes is and of the uniform sequences in the cases ob- served. Induction does not guarantee the continued action of any observed complex of causes. Another cause may arrest its energy, or disjoin its elements. Nor can induction inform us, in that case, whether or not the complex cause will ever reappear. Anthracite coal may be burned and the heat resulting be used to drive machinery. But the suj)ply may some time be exhausted ; then that particular complex cause will no more act. Lime and water combine and generate heat ; but the water of the moon, if it ever existed there, has disa[)peared, and it i? now impossible to slake lime in that satellite. Even a sequence knowu to have been invarial)le during the whole history of human experience may hereafter be interrupted. Causes already known may be in ac- tion which, if continued, must bring it to an end. " We are now told, in accordance with the views of Thompson and Mayer, that the earth is already oxidated or burnt through its crust lialf-way to the core; that it is grown so cool in the course of ages that it could not now melt a layer of ice ten feet thick in a hundred years ; and that the lunar tides which act as brakes on the rotary motion imparted by its primordial heat must in time cause it to spin more slowly and feebly, imtil at length it shall flutter on its axis as a dead world like the moon, ever turning the same pallid face to the sun." * The sun will then cease to rise and set as it has done through all human his- tory. So long as no cause is known to exist which may disintegrate any particular complex of causes or arrest its energy, we believe that it will continue to exist. But even then we cannot predict its continuance with certainty ; for some hitherto hidden potency may be discovered which will arrest its action. Scientific hypothesis has made us familiar with sethers which transcend sense ; and already the conclusion of the authors of the "Unseen Universe" is seen to be possible; "that the THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 65 available energy of the visible universe will ultimately be appropriated by the invisible, and we may now perhaps imagine, at least as a possi- bility, that the separate existence of the visible univei-se will share the game fate, so that we shall have no huge useless inert mass existing in after ages to remind the passer by of a form of energy and a species of matter that is long since out of date and functionally effete. Why should not the universe bury its dead out of its sight ? " * 4. But all this brings no discredit on induction ; because induction makes no claim to prove the continuity of the existence or action of any particular complex cause, and also because the law of nature re- mains unchanged, even after any particular agent to which it applies has ceased to act or to exist. The laws of nature are the same in the moon as on the earth, although water and living beings do not there exist. Whatever doubt may arise from suspicion of inaccuracy of observation or of the agency of unknown causes, the conclusions of true induction are of unerring certainty and universal application. The same complex cause, whenever and wherever it acts, must pro- duce the same effect ; and thus amid all the diversity of events nature in all its action is uniform and orderly under law. 5. The true principle of induction and of the uniformity of nature gives no support to the assertion that an event contrary to the previous universal experience of man is incredible and cannot be believed on any evidence. This assertion could have gained credence only when founded on some indefinite and incorrect statement of the principle, like that of Keid, that the future must resemble the past ; it has no support from the principle of induction rightly understood. When potassium was discovered, the fact that it ignited in water was contrary to the univer- sal experience of man that water extinguishes fire. Traveling on land forty miles in an hour, communicating by telegraph across the ocean, hearing words spoken across a large city were events contrary to univer- sal experience until the respective inventions of the steam locomotive, the electric telegraph, and the telephone. So far from conflicting with the uniformity of nature, the occurrence of unprecedented events is incidental to its progressive ongoing. The first plant, the first animal, the first man was each a new thing under the sun. Hume urged the objection that a miracle is incredible because it is contrary to universal experience. The objection is without force against the true principle of induction and the true conception of the uniform- ity of nature. XL When effects are observed while the cause and law are unknown, * Prof. Shields, Final Philosophy, p. 444. •The Unseen Universe, pp. 118, lid. G6 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 67 y science discovers the unknown cause and law by the method of hypo- thesis, deduction and verification; sometimes called the Newtonian method, because used by Newton in discovering that the law of gravi- tation extends to the whole solar system. He began with the hypothe- sis that gravitation, already known in the fall of bodies to the earth, extended also to the moon ; he then deduced what must be the positions of the moon if the hypothesis were true ; he then verified it by compar- ino- the results of his deduction with the actual positions of the moon given in astronomical tables. The verification foiled at first on account of errors in the tables, but was successfiil when the tables had been cor- rected by more accurate obser\^ation. 1. The Newtonian or hypothetical method differs from simple induc- tion in its data, its method and its result. Its data are observed efiects, whose cause and the law of its uniform action are to be discovered. The method consists of three reflective processes, hypothesis, deduction and verification. The result, if the hypothesis is verified, is the discov- ery of the hitherto unknown cause and its uniform action, that is, the cause and the law of its action. 2. The hypothetical method may be exemplified from the uses of it familiar in common life. It is the method of nomads and savages in their sagacious tracing of a trail ; one of the many stories of this is the following. A camel driver looking for a lost camel asked an Arab whom he met if he had seen it. The Arab asked, "was it lame in its right fore leg, blind in its left eye, with a front tooth missing, and loaded with honey?" The camel driver said, "so you have seen it ; and where is it?" The Arab protested he had not seen it, when the driver charged him with stealing it, and was proceeding to take him before an ofiicer of justice. But the Arab explained that he knew it was lame, because the imprint of one foot was uniformly slighter ; he inferred its blindness from its cropping the herbage on but one side of the way ; he knew that the animal had lost a front tooth because at every bite a por- tion of the herbage remained uncropped ; and the gathering flies where the honey had dripped made known the nature of the load. This reasoning of the Arab is precisely in the hypothetical method. He observes the marks along the way and attempts to ascertain their cause ; he makes the hypothesis that the cause was a camel described as above; he makes a deduction what sort of marks such a camel would make in passing, although from his familiarity with camels this part of the process would be so rapid he would hardly notice it ; then he veri- fies his hypothesis by accurately observing the facts, and finds that they are precisely those which a camel with these characteristics would make. JuBt so an investigator observes the complicated processes and effects t ., of nature, makes an hypothesis what the cause is and how it acts, de- duces from this what the effect of a cause so acting must be, and then verifies the hypothesis by ascertaining whether the effects actually ob- served are those deduced. The same method is used in discovering an anagram ; as if one were required to find an anagram of Terrible Poser and discovers it to be Sir Robert Peel. It is noticeable that the one who is quick in discovering an anao-ram, is the one who sees it in the given letters ; that is, he creates an hypothesis. On verifying the hypothesis he may find that it lacks a letter, or has one too many, and tries again. But the one who takes each letter in succession as the initial and tries to find all the possible combinations, proceeds slowly and, oftener than not, fails. The same method is used in deciphering an inscription in an unknoAvn character. The study of natural science is a deciphering of the book of nature. 3. The hypothesis is a creation of the imagination, and, in great dis- coveries and inventions, it is this creation which reveals the " vision and faculty divine of genius." If the marks of the camel had been confus- edly intermingled with those of other animals along the same path, the Arab's problem would have been more difficult. But in nature the effects of many undetermined causes are thus intermingled. The ob- server must create in imagination a definite system in which a part of these heterogeneous facts shall be conceived as effects of a determinate complex of causes acting in accordance with a determinate law. 4. In creating a correct hypothesis the student is aided by knowledge already attained ; as the Arab's knowledge of the camel's foot gave him a clew to the true hypothesis ; as the trilingual inscription on the Rosetta stone gave to Champollion the clew for interpreting other hieroglyphics. It is only they who have been close observers of nature who are likely to make hypotheses worthy of examination. And they are aided to do it not merely by their knowledge, but by their trained habits of obser- vation. They are aided also by analogy. Things which resemble each other in some particulai-s are conjectured to be alike in others. Thus Newton conjectured that the diamond would be found to be a combusti- ble from its resemblance to known combustibles in its high power of re- fracting light. And Franklin conjectured, from the resemblance of thunder and lightning to the phenomena of the discharge of a Leyden jar, that they were efiects of the same cause. Hence scientific discovery and mechanical invention are not due mere- ly to " the vision and faculty divine of genius," but also to painstaking observation, intellectual discipline and large acquisitions of knowledge. Says Tyndall : " It is by a kind of inspiration that we rise from the wise and sedulous contemplation of nature to the principles on which the 68 THE PHILOSOPHICAL B.^IS OF THEISM. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 69 facts depend. The mind is, as it were, a photographic plate, which i« gradually cleansed by the effort to tliink rightly, and which when cleansed,' and not before, receives impressions from the light of truth. This passage from facts to principles is called induction, which in its highest form is inspiration ; but to make it sure the inward light must be shown to be in accord with the outward fact. To prove or disprove the induction we must resort to deduction and experiment."* 5. For the verification of an hypothesis there are two requisites. Af ter deducing from the hypothesis all the results implied in its truth, all the facts must be found by observation to correspond. Also, there must be no other hypothesis with the deduced results of which the facts equal- ly correspond. There were formerly two hypotheses as to electricity, Franklin's and Dufay's. Neither of them sufficiently accounted for tlie facts ; both are displaced by the present hypothesis. There were two hypotheses of combustion, that of phlogiston and that of oxygen. Af- ter long and sharp controversy among scientists, the latter has displaced the former. When an hypothesis is verified in both of the ways indi- cated it is considered to be scientifically established. Verification is sometimes possible in a tliird way, by bringing the hitherto unknown agent under actual observation. So the existence of a planet beyond Uranus was inferred by the hypothetical method and the planet was afterwards discovered. In most cases the object sought cannot be brought under direct observation by any means which man can command. Nor is this necessary to the scientific verification and establishment of the hypothesis. The law that gravitation acts with a force directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance is suggested by mathematical principles and verified by the accordance with it of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and is thus scientifi- cally established bevond all doubt. But it is forever impossible by any weighing or mechanical testing of forces to establish it by direct obser- vation. It is equally impossible to establish the law of the conservation and correlation of force by direct observation of the molecular action into which the motion of masses is transformed, or of the transformations of molecular action, as from electricity into heat. In like manner the hypothesis of the a;ther can never be verified by direct observation of the sether. There is no ground for the assertion that inference by the method of hypothesis is not established until the agent and sequence sought are brought under direct observation ; and the demand for verifi- cation in this third way is no more imperative in philosophy and theo- logy than in empirical science. And yet it is continually being de- manded as essential in the former by those who in physical science freely ♦ Fragments of Science, p. 60. accept hypotheses as established which do not admit of verification in this third way. The value of the method is in carrying our knowledge beyond the range of observation. 6. The hypotlietical method rests on the intuitive principle that every effect must have a cause adequate to produce it. 7.' The hypothetical method is of fundamental importance in all scientific investigation. It has been used in scientific discovery in all ages; and with success corresponding not merely to the genius of the discoverer, but to the degree and exactness of knowledge and the habits of accurate observation guiding him in creating his hypothesis. Thus Archimedes hypothetically referred the conditions of equilibrium on the lever to the conception of pressure, while Aristotle could see in them only the strange results of the properties of the circle ; Pascal adopted correctly the hypothesis of the w^eight of the air which his predecessors had referred to nature's horror of a vacuum ; Vitellio and Roger Bacon referred the magnifying power of a convex lens to the refraction of the rays towards the perpendicular, while others con- ceived it to result from the matter of the lens irrespective of its form. In view of such fiicts Whewell says : " Facts cannot be observed as facts except in virtue of the conceptions which the observer himself unconsciously supplies ; and they are not facts of observation for any purpose of discovery, except these familiar and unconscious acts of thought be themselves of a just and precise kind. But supposing the facts to be adequately observed, they can never be combined into any new truth, except by means of some new conceptions, clear and appro- priate."* To the same purport are the words of Comte: "No real observation of any kind of phenomena is possible, except in so far as it is first directed and finally interpreted by some theory Scientifically speaking all isolated empirical observation is idle and even radically uncertain; science can use only those observations which are connected at least hypothetically with some law Facts which must form the basis of a positive theory could not be collected to any purpose without some preliminary theory which should guide the collection. Our understanding cannot act without some doctrine, false or true, vague or precise, which may concentrate and stinmlate its efforts and afibrd ground enough for speculative con- tinuity to sustain our mental action." f 8. The Newtonian method is now commonly called induction. The simple induction recognized by Bacon is the only induction which, as peculiar and distinct from all other processes of reasoning or of •Philosophy of Inductive Sciences, Vol. ii. pp. 189, 206. t Cours de Philosophic Positive, Tom. iv. pp. 418, 665, 667. tineau's Translation, pp. 475 and 525. Logons 48, 51, Mar* 70^ THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OP THEISM. thought, is entitled to the name. It is this which until recently ha« been called induction. The application of this name to the Newtonian method increases the confusion of thought which has existed on the subject, and mis- leads by pushing the real induction into the background and giving its name to a complex process each of whose three subordinate processes is already known by its appropriate name, hypothesis, deduction, verifica- tion. The first is a creative act of imagination, the second is deduction and cannot at the same time be induction, and the third is observation und a comparison of what we observe with what we have deduced. Prof. Jevons regarding this process as induction, is driven to the con- clusion, " If I have taken a correct view of logical method, there is really no such thing as a distmct process of induction." '^'^ The reaction against the Baconian induction in recent scientific thought is worthy of attention. It is remarkable that it is against the induction of Lord Bacon, so long glorified as the epoch-making thought which rescued the human mind from the hypotheses and deductions of scholasticism and metaphysics, and turned it in the direction of dis- covery and of useful knowledge. It is remarkable that the reaction is to the methods of hypothesis and deduction, once so much under opprobrium as the methods of metaphysics that the appellation " induc- tive," with the Baconian meaning, was given to the physical sciences as marking their distinctive preeminence. Newton himself, with sin- gular unconsciousness, felt obliged to utter the disclaimer, '' hypotheses non jingo;'' and later discoverers by the hypothetical method liave apologized for its use. Since the physical sciences have claimed and do claim preeminent and even exclusive certainty and value as being founded on observation, it is remarkable that this reaction is awav from tills recognition of the preeminence of observation and to a de- preciation of it as " idle and even radically uncertain," and of no scientific " use," except as " directed and interpreted by some theory." And it is remarkable that after all this reactionary change, scientists insist on applying the old name induction to the method of liypothesis, deduction and verification, as if fearing that the physical sciences would lose prestige if they were known to be preeminently sciences of hypothesis, deduction and verification called by their proper names. " Wide is the range of words this way and that."t 9. Neither induction nor the hypothetical method is peculiar to in- vestigations in physical science. Each is a method spontaneously used by the human mind in investigations in sciences of every kind and in •Prioc. of Science, p. 579. f 'ETTfwv 6e TTolvQ vofMuq E)Sa ml ivda. Iliad xx. 249. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 71 the common afiairs of life. Lord Bacon did not invent nor discover the method of induction. It had always been in use. He guarded the minds of men against false reasoning, turned them to the study of per- sons and things rather than of notitms and words, and to the study of reality in its bearings on the conduct of life and the welfare of man. Newton did not discover nor first use the hypothetical method. Des- cartes distinctly recognizes it in his " Dissertatio de Methodo ; " and it was used in discoveries both by Lord Bacon's predecessors and suc- cessors. Lange, after noticing these facts, makes the extraordinary mistake of saying that " Newton reverted to Bacon." ^ The truth is that, independently of all logical theories, this method and the simple induction of Lord Bacon are the methods spontaneously used by the human mind in investigating facts, whether in science or in the prac- tical afiairs of life. 10. Correct hypotheses and the discoveries involved in them have oflen been suggested by genius, long before the hypotheses have been verified and the discoveries made. Very striking is Lord Bacon's anti- cipation of the modern discovery that heat is motion. In explaining his su'T-crestion of this fact, he says emphaticallv ; " it must not be thought that heat generates motion or motion heat (though in some respects this be true) but that the very essence of heat, or the suhf^fantlal self (quid ■ipsum:) of heat is motion and nothing else." f Descartes anticipated the vortex rings of Sir Wm. Thompson.^ Aristotle anticipated Columbus. He says that the earth must be spherical, and proves it from the ten- dency of things in all places downwards and from the spherical form of the earth shown in eclipses of the moon ; and he argues that it is com- paratively small, because in traveling north or south the position of the stars changes, and stars are seen in Greece or Cyprus, which are not seen in countries further north ; and then says ; " Wherefore we may judge that those persons Avho connect the region in the neighborhood of the pillars of Hercules with that towards India and who assert that in this way the sea is one, do not iissert things very improbable." § Anticipa- tions of scientific discovery sometimes come from speculative philosophy. Schelling suggested the identity of the forces of magnetism, electricity, and chemical affinity ; || Kant in his Naturgeschichte des Himmels anti- cipated the nebular theory of Laplace. Sometimes these anticipations * Geschicbte des Materialismus, i. 239, 240. t Novum Organum, B. II. 20, Basil Montagu's Edition. X Wurtz, Atomic Theory ; Cleminshaw's Trans, p. 329. I Aristotle de Coelo, Lib. 14, Ed. Casaub. p. 290, 291, quoted Whewell Hist, of Inductive Sciences, Vol. I. p. 133. il Whe^ell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, B. V. Chap. II. 12. 72 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. are made by poetical genius. IMilton anticipated the extension of the law of attraction to the solar system : " What if the sun Be centre to the world ; aoii other stars, By his attractive virtue and their own Incited, dance about him various rounds." ? 15. Relation of Reflective Thought to Intuition. I. Reflection or thought gives no elemental object of knowledge. Tht objects about which we can think are all fii-st given in intuition. 1. This maxim is true only when intuition is understood to include sense-perception, self-consciousness and rational intuition. The maxim that all the elemental objects of thought are given in the primitive knowledge is not disputed in any school. The difierence is as to the range of the primitive knowledge. If it is limited to sensible objects then thought can concern itself with these alone. If man also has intui- tive knowledge of himself in his various mental acts and states, then these are legitimate objects of thought. If he has also intuitive know- ledge of principles of reason asserting themselves in his consciousness and regulating all his thinking, tlien he must take cognizance of reason, and its fundamental realities, truth, law, perfection, worth, the absolute, as "for us"* positively known as the fundamental reality, the supreme and transcendent truth ; and must connote all particular realities in their relations to these universal and all-regulative norms. Pertinent here and profoundly significant is the seemingly playful definition which Socrates gives of thought. It is "the conversation which the soul holds with itself The soul when thinking appears to me to be just talking ; asking questions of itself and answering them." f To the empiricist thought is inspecting, weighing and measuring that which seems external to us. But in truth it is only under the regulation of the principles and laws of reason that thought can conclude in knowledge or comprehend the outward in science. Thought is " the large discourse of reason," and is fruitful only because " mind is the measure of all things." It is fruitless surveving which takes no note of the relation of the surface to the chain by which it is measured. 2. The maxim is true only of the primitive or elemental realities. These realities can be defined or described only by referring to the per- son's own intuitive knowledge of them ; as the odor of a rose or the * " I am far from implyiner that a supra-sensible does not exist. I only affirm that it does not exist /or iuTithesis of faith and reason. This can be done only by showing that faith in God is itself the act of reason in the highest manifestation of its rational power. And it may also be shown that human reason nmst have the knowledge of reason absolute and su- pitiiie in order to maintain its own rational power to know. As man knows himself rational, so he knows himself religious. As he knows himself in contact with the external world through sense, so li. 1 HOWS himself in contact with God through his spiritual constitu- tion. In the normal unfolding of his own constitution he finds himself ill LiiL ])resence of absolute being. In the normal unfolding of his consciousness of himself he finds in himself the consciousness of God. The primitive knowledge of the Absolute is a part of his primitive knowledge through intuition. All primitive knowledge Ls more or less mixed with feeling ; there is.primitive knowledge in all feeling. But this is not peculiar to religious knowledge ; it is equally true of all knowledge. The denial of a special faith-faculty as the organ of religious belief, and the identification of religious belief with primitive knowledge does not deny the dependence of our knowledge of God on the awakening of the spiritual life by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, or by any influences which quicken and illuminate the human mind ; nor does it deny the knowledge of God in experience whereby we acquaint our- selves with him and are at peace. However this knowledge is origi- nated it must follow the law of all knowing ; it must begin as primitive, implicit, unelaborated knowledge, merged in the religious experience and not at first clearly apprehended in consciousness, nor discrimi- nated, defined and integrated in a system. The defenders of Christian theism, who admit that theism rests on a faith which is not knowledge, are misled by a false theory of knowledge and surrender the very citadel of their defences. The late Professor T. H. Green, of Oxford, truly said : " Under difterent relations and in different modes of itself, reason is the source alike of faith and knowledge." ..." Christianity is cheaply honored when it is made exceptional ; God is nut wisely trusted when declared unintelligible. ' Such honor rooted in dishonor stands ; Such faith unfaithful makes us falsely true.* God is forever reason; and his communication, his revelation is of Reason." The empirical knowledge of nature rests on faith in the game sense in which theism rests on faith. 3. The word faith \\i\s, been used with various meanings ; and this is a reason why, so far as possible, we should avoid using it as a synonym for intuition or primitive knowledge. It is used to denote trust which is the condition of justification ; also to denote belief of testimony on the authority of the witness ; also belief on the authority of the Church or of divine revelation. The maxim " crede ut intelligas " has as many different meanings, each of special application, and each irrelevant to the general question which we are considering as to what precedes reflective knowledge in general or reflective religious knowledge in particular. Hence has arisen great confusion in the discussion of the subject. Thus Hamilton confuses himself After naming many philo- sophers, ancient and modern, who have used the words belief or faith to denote " The original warrants of cognition," that is, the principles of rational intuition, he adds the following : " St. Augustine accurately says, ' We know what rests on reason ; we believe what rests on author- ity.' But reason itself must rest at last on authority ; for the .original data of reason do not rest on reason, but are necessarily accepted by reason on the authority of what is beyond itself . . . Thus we must go THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. philosophicaUy admit that belief is the primary condition of reason, and not reason the ultimate ground of belief. We are compelled U) currc 11 der the proud ' i/tie%e at aredas' of Abelard, to content our- selves with the humble ' Crede ut intelliga^ ' of Anselm."* The quota- tion is entirely irrelevant, for Augustine is speaking of the authority o! liie Church. The same is true of Aiiselm and Abelard. The doc- liiiic cuii) aipeared that the church had authority to declare the mind of the Spirit uu i the meaning of the word of God. Tiie" crede ui wieUigas'' then meant. Believe implicitly what the church teaches uiiit, ut I , rs.iKil investigation and conviction of its truth. The intelli- gence «.t ,. tlnli^v iliou^rht following the belief was merely a reverent astciiainin ' M u tuii il. • Imrch meant. Abelard asserted the right to irivc-ti it. liM n iiih .1 Lht doctrine of the church before believing it. it IS ruri 1^ w> n ,Lc Liie special pleading by which llaiuilton endeavors toa{)pl> ilii-iitterly irrelevant definition to " the original warrants of cognition." -t. i j At the Reformation the Bible as the word of God, accredited and illuminated by the testimony of the Spirit, was recognized, instead of the church, as the authoritative rule of faith and practice. But the testimony of the Spirit gradually receded in the Protestant theological thinking until the letter of the scripture, supposed accordmg to an arid theory of verbal inspiration to be itself the testimony of the Spirit, was recognized as the authoritative rule of faith and practice, and thus became the formal principle of Protestantism. Belief in this was demanded as pre-requisite to intelligent investigation of Christian truth, T f • It is evident that these special applications and peculiar meaningB of the maxim are entirely irrelevant to questions concernmg the rela- tion of reflective knowledge to primitive, the true conception and proper designation of primitive knowledge, and the reality of religious knowledge and its legitimate place in the circle of human intelligence. 4. Knowledge through the belief of testimony is reflective know- ledge because it is attained by the interpretation of symbols. It can never be intuitive or primitive knowledge. It may be said, however, that man is constituted susceptible of receiving knowledge by testi- monv A man cannot be defined from his individual personality alone. He is a member of a race which is constantly in contact with him and acting on him at many points ; and he is constituted suscep- tible of receiving these influences. Only as this fact, complemental to his personalitv, is recognized can man be understood. His suscepti- bility of receiving knowledge through testimony is one of these points Df contact with the race. The child believes everything. We do not » Eeid's Works : Hamilton's Ed. Note A, page 7G0. THE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF KNOWING. 81 learn to believe but to disbelieve. The consciousness of the race always in contact with the individual seems to infuse itself into his indi- vidual consciousness and enlarge it to a world-wide knowledge. In this way the knowledge of past generations is communicated to the living and knowledge is continually enlarged. Principles and laws and science get incorporated mtu customs, institutions and civilizations and are thus perpetuated Were it not for this power of participating iu the consciousness of the race, men would remain through all time at the lowest grade of savagery ; or rather man could not have con- tinued to exist on the earth. Testimony, in its broadest sense as denoting all communication of knowledge from man to man, is an important medium through which knowledge already elaborated by others is communicated to us and received in its elaborated form. V. Reflection and experience become a sort of spontaneous knowledge in common sense. The Philosophy of Reid is called the philosophy of common sense. The phrase here means the semm communis of man- kind, and refers to the principles believed or at least acted on by all mankind. Thus used " common sense" is essentially the same with in- tuition. There is also a popular and homely use of the word in which it has a different meaning. This Locke speaks of as " large roundabout common sense." This is continually appealed to as a source of know- ledge, especially in the practical direction of conduct. It is a know- ledge' by which a man judges what action is wise, while unable to tell why he believes it to be so. I suppose it to be the result of the experi- ence and reflection of life, which has inwoven itself into the texture of knowledge and acts with the quickness and insight of an intuition and with the unconsciousness of an instinct. Customary action tends to be- come automatic. What was learned with painstaking, as speaking a language, tends to become spontaneous. What was once the slow result of thought, may come, by long experience and hereditary transmission, to act with unerring unconsciousness as an instinct. So common sense may be the past experience half sunk already into an mstinct and spon- taneously indicating what it has always found to be wise. It is not an intuition, since it is always possible even at the moment to think that the contrary may be true. It is not unerring. But the continual ap- peal to it is not unphilosophical ; and it should be noted as a source of knowledge, which can only remotely be resolved into intuition, memory and thought. I 16. Relation of Reflective Thought to the Universal Reason. The processes of reflective thought essentially imply that the universe is grounded in and is the manifestation of Reason. They thus rest on the assumption that a personal God exists. g2 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. I. This assumption is the ultimate ground of the possibility of know- ledc^e by inference. If the mathematics by which astronomers make their calculations are not the mathematics of all space and time, all our astronomy is worthless. If the law of causation, and the principle of the uniformity of nature that the same complex of causes always pro- duces the same effect, are not true of the whole universe, all our science is invalidated. If the law of love is not the law of all rational beings all ethical knowledge is annihilated. That the principles of reason are evervwhere aii i 1 1^^ :t} ^^ Liie same is the basis of the possibihty of rational knowledge, i > ui i 1 1 is is only saying that Keason supreme and universal, everv'.vliere an I al ^ ays one and the same, is energizing in the universe ail i !> till ultimate ground of its existence, constitution and develop- iiM lit. Ana this Energizing Reason is God. Science assumes that the iiuix , rse is a system vr cosmos concatenated and ordered under princi- I 1 > an 1 lax.< evervwhorp and always the same, and that by these it can deterinin wliat th- -iii iug of the universe is in its farthest extent in space an i what ii Im- ^ < ti nud will be in the remotest past and future. This is po-il.i nn'v hocause these truths and hiws are eternal in the vnv al.^ null i;cu:.uii wiiu expresses them by his energizing in the con- stiiuti 'II arnl rvolution of the universe. And the theist adds that the evoluti.ii niili,- universe is the firover progressive expression uiui real- ization, not nnlv i'i'iniili- ani !au^. imt also of rational ideals an r1 ends; ideals ani ( mis -i wisdom and low, whiah are eternal and archetypal in til'- An^'jiiLlt' iiL'U.-oa, (un\. Likr this was the positi* ai oi Descartes. He recognizes, at the basis f)f all ril* < tivr intrlli-oTipo. primitive beliefs on which the force of all pi-,,,t. ar:H.na,^ an.i uuhnut uiu-'n man is condernnr-d to irromorliable diHiht; hr sees that these fun.iauM nial principles thus nece.->anly be- litvid miL.t liave their reality in God, and that if God does not exist, ,.ur reason has no 'juanuitv: asi-1 ii. proclaims God, a.- ilie first and the must I'triainof all truiu.^. IdiU:, ihe existence of God, the absolute licasMii, is ilu' idtimatf -naind ofth'-' possibil it v of scientific knowledge. This n.-rs mi tlir truth that ili- uidverse i- ultimately grounded in RetLSdii, iliat it is consiitutcd and ;roes on in accu'daui-r with rational truths and laws, and for tliu nalization of rational ideals and ends. It implies also that we have knuwlt-dge of rea^^un and .-t" its truths, laws, ideals and ends; that tlie primitive intuitions of human reason are true ; that the necessary and univt r>al principh.s eonstitiu-nt of human ration- alitv are enn>tituent |irin('i{)K>s ol' rationality which is universal and supremo. WitliMul thi> nritlur indurt ii^n n-.r the Newtonian method can conclude in n-al kno\s ledge. "Tin.- melude> tic' a.^-^umplion with- • iheless there is in the human constitution a persistent impulse to seek to know the realities within us and without, to account for them by findino- their causes, to interpret and vindicate them to the reason by finding their accord with rational principles, laws and ends, and thus to bring them into the unity of a rational system. I 17. Probability. In completing our survey of the acts and processes of knowing, we find that reasoning is not always demonstrative; that after man's utmost investigations in the legitimate use of his intellectual powers a lai ge part of his conclusions fall short of certainty. ^Vliat must be done with the mass of probability ? I. In cases of evidence insufficient to give certainty it is natural and leertainty of our knowledge of the objects of sense. They affirm the knowledge of bodies composed of infrangible atoms, and of force with its conservation, correlation and transformations. It is unnecessary, also, because Hume demonstrated that every theory of phenomenalism or subjective idealism involves the denial of all knowledge. It is idle to reopen a question then decisively settled, or to plunge again into the discussion of insoluble puzzles which were then remanded to the sphere of that transcendent skepticism which de- nies all knowledge because a man cannot take himself up in his own hands and examine himself, as he would an insect under a microscope. So Mr. Mulford puts it : " Man by the senses has a direct perception of the physical w^orld and it is a waste of thought to carry the subject through metaphysical speculation. But this does not demonstrate the certainty of the physical world to one who denies it There is no demonstration of the being of the physical world." * Our know- ledge (;i it 16 not by reasoning or any reflective thought, but is by intuition. So Lord Bacon affirms that sense gives us knowledge of " natural matters," " unless a man please to go mad."t Sense-perception, however, does not decide between speculative theo- ri' .- nf r}je constitution of matter. These are irrelevant to the question. T^' ^iuiLtci euusists of Boscovich's points of force, or of Dr. Hickock's pt iif'il^ f)f force in equilibrium, if it is a form of will-force, or a maniles- 8 a * Republic of God, p. 96. Note. t Distributio operis, prefixed to Novum Or^num. PRESENTATIVE OR PERCEPTIVE INTUITION. 89 tation of thought, all its properties and powers and its objective reality remain unchanged. It must be added that in sense-perception there is always a rational in- tuition, implicit or explicit in the consciousness. In sensation I become aware of the action within my consciousness of a power not my own. At the same time I know in the light of reason that this power not my own must be exerted by some other being ; for it is a rational intuition that every change must have a cause. Man cannot divest himself of his reason in any act. Natural Realists recognize an implicit judgment in every perception ; it is sometimes called a psychological, as distinguished from a logical judgment. What is really present is the implicit, rational intuition that the power exerted is the power of some being. In per- ception, so far as the intellectual act is the knowledge of a particular power present and acting here and now, we call it presentative or per- ceptive intuition ; so far as it is the knowledge of a universal principle of reason applicable in the particular case, it is rational intuition. But the fact that a rational intuition is present in perception does not invalidate the know ledge. Rational intuition gives knowledge as really as perceptive. And the mind is not divided ; the act is one act in which the mind, constituted both perceptive and rational, knows by in- tuition at once perceptive and rational. So far from invalidating the knowledij-e, the union of the two is essential to it. Rational intuition without the perceptive intuition of an object is empty of content ; per- ceptive intuition, without rational intuition of the form in which reason sees it, is unintelligent and falls short of knowledge.* As to the general objection that knowledge must be wholly subjective and therefore not real know^ledge, because a factor is contributed by the intellect, it is sufficient to reply as follows. If external reality and a man to know it exist, the knowledge is impossible except as the man and the reality about him act and react on each other. In human knowledge the outward reality acts on man through the senses and man reacts in sense-perception. In voluntary exertion the man acts on the outward reality and it reacts on him. In both ways he knows its ex- istence. The objection implies that it is essential to the knowledge of outward reality that no such action and reaction take place. It implies that the mind must have know^ledge of an object without coming into any relation or connection with it, without acting or reacting on it. It requires that there must be knowledge Avithout know^ing. It is also objected that because knowledge is an intellectual act it can have no resemblance to the outward object, and that therefore w^e ca» have no knowledge of the outward object, but only of subjective im* * " Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer ; Anschauungen ohne Begriflfe sind blind." Rant. 90 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. pressions. This objection implies that knowledge in order to be real must be like the outward object ; that in perceiving a tree there must be some image, imprint or effigy of the tree in the mind. This notion may have arisen from the analogy of outward objects impressing the sensorium, and especially of light entering the eye. But an image, or imprint, or effigy of a tree cannot enter the mind any more than the tree itself can. Nor can knowledge, which is an intellectual act, be an image or imprint of a tree. The objection is just as valid against tlie knowledge of impressions and phenomena as against the knowledge of tlu' tree ttself. When an object is present to the senses it awakens sen- saiiuii ill a SMI) N"^ holly mysterious to us; the mind reacts on the object 5^ ^.^^^^.ptive'and rational intuition and knows it. The object per- ceived does not imprmt an image; it occasions an action of intellect knowing the object. Tli i^Tception has no resemblance to the object, but is its intellectual equivalent; is the conscious reacting of the mind on liie object and knowing it. The sensation itself is the response m the feelings to the presence of the object. All objections of this kmd rest on tin a^h-nrditv that knowledge of outward objects is possible only \ni cease to be knowledge and become identical with insensate bodies; that knowledge is possible only if divested of that which is its essence a^ knowledge; that knowledge is impossible if there is a mind that kli'=W8. As to the mystery how material things can be apprehended by the mind in an iiuellectual equivalent, we may say at least that the Uni- verse is itself the expression of thought and therefore can be translated back into tliought. In the Absolute Reason the archetypal forms of all that ;~ in the uiiis ei.^e are eternal. In the finite Reason there must be, if n .t ti. aiclu'typal forms of thmgs, at least the cai-a iiv of construct- ing tlu i!inll.LitutiM! of the universe, eternal in the absolute Reason. In the finite Rea>..n th. re must be at least the capacity of kn^uin- these con. stitiinw i.rnirlnlc^ nnrl laws, as occasion for their apim-aib.n arises in exp( ra II. . in the cunnnuai action and reaction of the finite Reason and the universe. The universe in its deepest significance nral ronlitv i9 the ,x|,r. ^^ioii nf th- jii !i. tvpal thoughts of the Absolute Reason. In the uinu- rra^-!! ih-rr imiM, ' Uv at least the power to iran^lan' it back into th.Mhou-ht uhi.-k iicxpresses, to grasp its reality ana .i-niiicance in inirllrfiual cMiiivaient^ in which and in which alone iib true reality ami <;i. ni- 11 ' :nre known. That which is in it- nri-in and essence the ex- pression of thoutrht can be apprehend. <1 "n iliought. We may reason- al.lv .oppose thai if the universe w. r- not originally the expression of PRESENTATIVE OR PERCEPTIVE INTUITION. 91 thought, science and all other apprehension of it in thought would be impossible. The universe and the things in it would have no intellectual equivalents. §19. VViiat is Known through Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the knowledge which the mind has of itself in its own operations. I. The object known, the subject knowing and the knowledge are known simultaneously in one and the same act. In every act of knowing the knowledge of self as knowing is an essential element. This accords with the first law of thought, that knowledge implies a subject know- ing, an object known and the knowledge. In thought the knowledge of the object is distinguishable from my knowledge of myself as know- ing; but they are inseparable in fact. I perceive a stone. If my knowledge of myself perceiving is annulled the entire perception is annulled. But my knowledge of myself is not given in a separate act. All Imowledge is a knowledge of two realities, the object known and the subject knowing, in one indivisible intellectual act. The knowledge of the object may be called direct intelligence, the knowledge of the subject, inverse. The mind is like the sun, which in revealing external objects necessarily reveals itself. Sense-perception and self-consciousness are simultaneous in one act. It is like the hand which can grasp objects only as it retains its vital connection with the organism ; like the electro-magnetic circuit, one force acting at two opposite poles ; or like tlie interaction between the nervous centers and the outward object by the afferent and efferent nerves. The same two in one is noticeable when the object of thought is itself mental. When a mental state is continuous, as a sorrow, a pre- ference or purpose, a belief or a doubt, the mind can observe it while present, as it would observe a zoological specimen continuously present before the senses ; the mind can also attend to its representations of former mental states. In these cases also the knowledge is direct of the object and inverse of the subject ; and the latter is essential to the knowledge as really as in sense-perception. This knowledge which we have of ourselves in every act of knowing is sometimes called implicit or virtual consciousness. It is the intuitive unreflective consciousness in which the mind knows all the elemental material of thought respecting itself in its own operations. It is the mind's primitive knowledge of itself not yet apprehended, discrimi- nated and integrated m thought. It is present in all feeling and all voluntary action as well as in all knowing and thinking. The direct intelligence or knowledge of the object is expressed in the 92 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. formula, " This is." The inverse intelligence or knowledge of the subject is expressed in the formula, " I know that this is." The former is the affirmation when the mind, intent on the object known, gives no attention to itself as knowing, as one breathes the air without noticing it The latter is the affirmation when the mind takes notice of its own knowledge and affirms it. It affirms both the subject knowing and the knowledge ; both, " It is I who know," and " I know that 1 know." II. By seli-consciousness we have knowledge of our own mental actions and states. We thus know what thought and knowledge, doubt, probability and certainty are ; what argument, inference, gen- eralization and other intellectual processes are ; what joy and sorrow, hope and fear, desire uiul aversion, volition and choice are. Comte objects that psychological knowledge founded on conscious- ness is impossible ; because the mind in perception or thought is occu- pied with the object and cannot at the same time attend to its own action ; and consequently the mental operations can be examined only as represented in memory. He says : " Nothing can be more absurd than the supposition of a man seeing himself think." Similar views are avowed by De ^lorgan, Dr. Maudsley and F. A. Lange.* Lange says : " We have already seen that Materialism is prepared, in a way forbidden to all other systems, to bring order and unity into the sensible world and is justified in treating man and all his affiiirs as a special case of the universal law of nature. But between man as object of empirical investigation and man as the subject having immediate knowledge of himself, an eternal gulf remains fixed. Hence the ex- periment forever returns whether the view of the universe derived from self-consciousness will not be more satisfactory ; and so strong is the common attraction of man to this side that this experiment is a hundred times regarded as successful, though all preceding experiments of the kind are known to have failed. It will be one of the most essential steps in the progress of pliilosophy when this experiment is finally abandoned. But it never will be unless this impulse to find the unity of thin^ is satisfied in some other way." He proceeds to say that a unity of the life and of the spirit may be created for the uni- verse by poetry and imagination, though it must be excluded from the sphere of knowledge. Few now affirm, as explicitly as Comte, the impossibility of psycho- logical knowledge derived from self-consciousna^s. But it underliee the prevalent tendency to exclude from science all knowledge not derived ♦Comte Positive Philosophy. Martineau's Translation, p. 383. De Morgan, Formal Logic, chap. ii. pp. 26-28. Dr. Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology of Mind, chap. i. p. 9, etc. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Vol. i. pp. 68, 69. PRESENTATIVE OR PERCEPTIVE INTUITION. 93 from the senses and is implied in the familiar sneers at psychology de- rived from consciousness, as only a sham, worthless for science. I ap- preciate the importance to psychology of knowing the physical and or- ganic conditions of mental action and the value of the results of physio- logical research. But the facts which psychology seeks to know are precisely the facts known in consciousness and in no other way, which cannot be identified with the molecular motions of brain and nerve, and which from their very nature must forever elude the investigations of physiology. In the words of J. S. Mill in reference to this objection in his criticism of Comte, "There is little need for the elaborate refutation of a fallacy respecting which the wonder is that it should impose on any one." And the wonder remains and grows, that it is still assumed in all the thinking of the day which denies the reality of any knowledge except what is derived from the senses. For it is evident that we do have knowledge of our own thoughts, feelings and volitions; that we do dis- tinguish and describe generalization, deduction, induction and other in- tellectual processes ; and that all physical science recognizes itself as amenable to laws of thought accordance with which is essential to cor- rect results. It is evident also that all this knowledge of mental pro- cesses can not have been attained by attending to the representations of them in memory; for nothing can be remembered which has not been previously known. It may be noticed also that, if the fact that self- consciousness involves memory invalidates it as knowledge, then all sci- ence is invalidated ; for in every experiment, observation and course of reasoning the conclusion involves the memory of the beginning and of all the steps in the process. Also, it is true that the mind can know and attend to more than one object at a time. Besides all these errors and inconsistencies involved in Comte's objec- tion, the knowledge which it recognizes as real is both inconceivable an<^ unthinkable. It requires me to believe that I have knowledge of a sen sible object through perception without having any knowledge that 1 know it, without having any knowledge of my perception or of myself as perceiving. Such knowledge is as unthinkable as a circular square ; and the affirmation that it exists is mere nonsense. Misapplied analogies have helped to give currency to this fallacy. It is said, " The eye cannot see itself" De Morgan compares self-con- sciousness to the inspection of a watch as it runs, by a man who cannot take it to pieces and is entirely ignorant of machinery ; and adds : " I would not dissuade a student from metaphysical inquiry; on the con- trary I would rather promote the desire of entering on such subjects; but I would warn him, when he tries to look down his own throat with a candle in his. hand, to take care that he does not set his own head on 94 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. fire."* But the facts that an eye cannot see itself and that a man can- not look down his own throat, do not disprove a man's consciousness of his own thoughts, feelings and purposes. Nor is there any analogy be- tween a man's looking at the movement of a machine external to him- self, and his knowledge of his own thoughts, feelings and purposes. ITT ?>y consciousness the mind has knowledge of itsell* in its own operations. L It is an error held by many, that in consciousness man knows only mental operations but not himself in those operations. The mind, it is sail i^ cuiiscious of certain impressions or actions from which it infers its v\\n ( xistence. But this is impossible because it ascribes to thought tin nail . ii'lent power of knowing by inference an elemental reality ditUivnt in i.iii 1 iVom every reality given in infuitiou. Or, it is said, that till- i.iii'i i> r .!iscious of cert:iiii impressions and by a reflective process Liiiii'iur- tlnse consciousnesses into a uuity which is the self. But this i.-^ iinposc^ibic hrcmsethe idea of an iiuii\ i.-ible one is originated ill the ku-.wlr.l'i.- r,f >(ll'; all. I if not thu^ -iven in consciousness cuuld nevt-r he known l»v iiittiviic- ; aiul Incause tlie unity attained would be oiilv a unity of impression.- ■ / who fh()ik. Even 5ke})tics who deny the existence ofas])irit or mind admit that this is the testimony of consciousness. Ludwig Noire, for example, remarks that thou-h a man i«: one of the most complicated of beings, he always thinks of Inm.-rlt' a- an iiitlividual and through all lile iden- tical. The same 1- thf decision of reason. Thought without a thinker is as impossible U) reiu-uii, a- laoLiim without a body which moves and a force whi<'h mnvos it. Who is the / i\vm is conscious of my liiuught hut not of iiiv- It* ihe thinker'/^ Aud what does consciousness of my th.-ii-hi !:i*aii but consciousness of myself as iliinkinj"' The knowledge of self is imnii lit but essential in all knowledge. Knowledge without a niina kuovsiu- is unLhinkuble; and all words used to designate it are ^v r K \ iilh .ut meaning, nugatory symbols to express what consciousness lb ver gives, what mind cannot think, and what reason knows to be im- possible. 2. Aiiother error is that we have a greater certainty of our mental ♦ Formal Logic, p. 27. PRESENTATIVE OR PERCEPTIVE INTUITION. 95 operations than of the existence of self. Mr. Huxley says : " Is our knowledge of anything we know or feel more or less than a knowledge of states of consciousness? And our whole life is made up of such states. Some of these states we refer to a cause we call self; others to a cause or causes which may be comprehended under the title noUself. But neither of the existence of self nor of that of the not-self have we nor can we by any possibility have any such unquestioned and imme- diate certainty as we have of the states of consciousness which we con- sider to be their effects." They are " hypothetical assumptions which cannot be proved or known with the highest degree of certainty which is given by immediate consciousness." * But this also is contrary to the clearest testimony of consciousness ; I cannot be more certain of my thought than I am that it is I who think. It is also contrary to reason ; for, since thought is impossible without a thinker, I cannot be more certain of the former than of the latter. 3. There is a third error which belongs to the skepticism of Hume. He conceives of man as simply recipient of impressions. These impres- sions have no objective reality, i'or tliey are simply received in sense, while no object is perceived. He argues that we cannot infer their ob- jectivity from memory by the identity of the representation with a pre- sented object; for in memory we have merely impressions similar to certain previous impressions ; my rememlirance of a tree seen yesterday is merely an impression similar to an impression received yesterday. AVe cannot infer an objective reality by the principle of causation ; we cannot infer that the shocks which we feel are caused by the outward objects striking us; for all that we know of cause and effect is antece- dence and sequence in time. We are thus shut up in our own sid)jec- tivity, and the content of the subjectivity is merely impressions of sense, and {)hantoms of those impressions surviving in memory, and cohesion of those impressions which has arisen from their repeated association. Thought is merely transformed and cohering sensations. Knowledge cannot break throuL^h the condutinated encasement of subjective im- pressions to any objective reality. On this theory it is impossible to have knowledge not only of other persons, but also of outward objects and even of ourselves. Hume says : " When I enter intimately into what I call myself. T always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a sensation and never can ob- serve anything but the sensation." Another "may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued which he calls himself, though I am sure there is no such principle in me. But setting aside some meta- * Lay Sermons : Descartes, p. 359. 96 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. PRESENTATIVE OR PERCEPTIVE INTUITION. 97 physicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind li.ai they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions wiiK it succeed each other."* This position of Hume has found distm- tnsi>!i a iiciiiid.ji- at liie present day. J. S. Mill says: "Mind is noth- iii- hut a series of our sensations (to which must now be added our in- ternal fl . liiiL,^), a> tlv V actually occur, with the addition of infinite possiltiHti''- "f frrliiig re(}n*riMg for their actual r*'a!i/ation conditions ^,s\llvli uuiy (*r inav n-t iak. place, but which as possibilities are always in oxistoTict , an-i many of them {)resent."t Pn-f. Cliliurd says in plaiiar lauguagu: • Tiic ptTCLiving self is reduced to the whole aggre- gate nt' itrliiiL^? linkrd together and snccoeding one another in a certain manner." "The miial is to be regarded jus a stream of feelings wliich runs parallel to ami ^iiniillaih'ously wiili a (vrlaiii part of the action of the body— -tliat is to say, thtit particular part of the action of the brain in whieii the cerebrum and the sensory tract are excited." ;): So Her- bert Spencer f^peaks of the minfl as "being composed of feelings, and the relations between feelings, and the aptitudes of feelings for entering into relati(»us varying with their kinds." § This error also, like the two preceding, is contrary both to c(mscious- ness and to reason. No man is conscious of himself as a series of sensa- tions. Anl' iny-rlt' alway- a.s one and the same. No one pretends that man in .-til cnii.-.riousness knows intuitively the answers to metaphysical < questions by which men try to explain this fact; as, wliethcr tlie soul is '* a simple substance," or "a persistent force," or " a monad," or " the ordered unity of many elements." It is enough that 1 know myself as an indiviihial being persisting in iden- titv, the subject of \ariuus t|uaiities and powers and of many successive acts and conditions. V. In self-consciousness man knows himself as a rational free-agent, susceptible of rational motives and emotions, and tlitis knows himself as a person. The distinctive (qualities of a i)ersonal being are reason, susce])ti- bility to rational motives and emotions, and free-will. In the exercise of rational intuition man is conscious of himself as lieason. In his interest in truth, in right, in virtue, in beauty, in worthy ends of action and in God, he is conscious of himself as the subject of rational motives and emotions. And in every free choice and volition he is c..n>cious of himself as free-will; he knows his freedom of will in kuiiwing himself Dr. Mansel says truly : - The freedom of the will is so far Irom l)eing, as it is generally con>idered, a controvertible (jues- tion in philosophv, that h is the fundamental postulate without which all action and all i})eculation, philosophy in all its l)ranches and human consciousness itself would be impossible." t Thus man knows himself as the subject of all the distinctive attributes of a person, and therel)y distintruishes himself from irrational and impersonal beings. Thus in self-ccmsciousness originates the idea of personal being as distinguished from the impersonal We cannot have any idea of a personal being except as we find the personal in our consciousness of ourselves as rational and free beings. The elements of personality, without our consciousness of them in ourselves, wouhl be a.s inconceivable as colors to a man born blind, or sounds to a man born deaf Our knowledge of personality is ])ositive not negative. I do not know it merely as distinguished from the noL-me ; I know it positively *QuotfMl Mansel Prolonromena Logica, p. 122. tMikroko^imis. P.. ii. k;ii». 1. ; Metapliysic. : Eucyclupedia Brit. 8th Ed. Vol. xiv. p. 618. ' t4 $\-i 1 M as realized in myself It is the impersonal which I define by the ex- clusion of the personal, the not-me by the exclusion of the me. When I have found personality in myself I can recognize it in another. When I know myself as I, I can know another person as Thou; and I know him as Tfwii, and not merely as not-me. When man knows personality in himself then and only then is he capable of knowing it in God. For without the knowledge of person- alitv in himself, the question w^hether a personal God exists would be meaniuLrless ; it not only could not be answ^ered, it could not even be asked ; man luus no knowledge of personality except as he fii'st has known it in himself I have said that I have positive knowledge of personality ; I know it not merelv as distinguished from the not-me, but as realized in myself Therefore I cannot c(mcur with Lotze when he says: "Com- plete personality is to be f )und only in God ; while in all finite spirits there exists only a weak imitation of personality."* Man's knowledge of his own personality arises antecedent to his knowledge of person- ality in God ; and he knows it in himself as a real personality. In the " / am " of self-consciousness he declares his clear and certain know- ledge of himself as a person conscious of reason, of susceptibility to rational motives and emotions, and of free self-determination. Amid the changes and evanescence of natural things he knows himself persisting the same in the strength of his personality, " One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 'i 20. Kant's Distinction of the Ego and Cosmos as Piieno- menon from thie Noumenon or tiling in itself. Kant teaches that the real Ego is not the Ego known in self- consciousness, but is the Ego existing as a Thing in itself , out of all relation to our facidties and known onlv as a Noumenon or necessary idea of Reason. He affirms that the Reason demands the existence of the Ego as necessary to knowledge ; but he argues that because we are conscious of ourselves only in our mental operations, all that we really attain is a synthesis of those operations, which, by a paralogism or necessary illusion of the Reason, we mistake for the Ego. The real Ego must lie beneath all our mental operations and out of all relation to our faculties as a thing in itself. This noumenal Ego I will call the transcendental Ego. Kant's doctrine is the same respecting the Cosmos. He says : " All our intuition is only the presentation ( Vors- tfUnng) of phenomena ; and the things wdiich we intuit are not in themselves as our presentation of them ; " " The Ego is but the * Mikrokosmus : Vol. iii. p. 576. 100 TTTF Pi!ll.nhy in the last forty rears; Contemporary Review, January, 1880. t Christliche Glaubeuslelire, jf 7 : 2. t De Subtilitate, Ex. CCCVII. § 21; THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. [^ jj ignorance ou the subject. Yet the same savage will not attempt to in- close a piece of ground for a hut with two straight poles, and if shot w^ith an arrow will know that some one shot it. lu this respect rational intuition is analogous to presentative intuition. Children and savages Bmell, taste, hear, see and feel and are practically guided by their per- ceptions before they attain in reflection the abstract idea of sensation or attempt to define and formulate it. They know their own existence before they attain the idea of the Ego. And always primitive unelab- orated knowledge precedes knowledge elaborated in thought. Lotze illustrates the rational intuition latent in the constitution by comparing it to the spark in the flint. " As little as the spark shines as a spark in the flint before the steel strikes it, so little are the first principles of reason in the consciousness before all impressions in experience which are the occasion of their arising Thev are born in us in no other sense than that in the original constitution of the spirit is a trait Tvhich obliges it, under the excitement of experience, to build up these ways of knowing." ^ So Lichtenberg says : " The peasant employs all the principles of abstract philosophy, only enveloped, latent ; the philosopher exhibits the pure principle." f D' Alembert expresses the opinion that metaphysics cannot teach anything that is new, but can only bring into clearer consciousness and present in the order of a system what every body knew before. Canon Kingsley says that what is needed to confound people's skepticism in philosophy and theology is " only to bring them to look their own reason in the face, and to tell them boldly, you know these things at heart already, if you will only look at what you know and clear from your own spirits the mists which your mere brain has wrapped around them." J Even before they are recognized and formulated they "Are yet the fountain light of all our day. Are yet a master light of all our seeing." Once recognized they are " truths that wake To perish never." IV. The argument against "innate ideas" as presented by Locke has no relevancy to the real doctrine of rational intuitions. Descartes explains that the ideas are natural in the sense that they do not origi- nate from without but in the faculty of intelligence itself; and they are naturally in the intellect, not in act but only potentially; as we say that generosity is natural to some families, and certain diseases to * Mikrokosmus : B. ii. chap. 4, Vol. i., p. 247, 248. t Hinterlassene Schriften, Vol. ii., p. 67. X Biography, p. 190. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 117 others ; not that the children suffer from the hereditary disease at or even before birth, " but only that they are born with the faculty or predisposition to contract it." * Leibnitz in his " Critique " of Locke explains that the mind is full of characters which the sense reveals but does not imprint, and compares it to a sculptor finding in a block of marble which he is chiseling veins tracing a Hercules. Prof Sedge- wick illustrates it by comparing the mind to a paper written with invisible ink : " As for knowledge his soul is one unvaried blank ; yet this blank has already been touched by a celestial hand, and when plunged in the colors that surround it, takes not its tinge from accident but design and comes forth colored with a glorious pattern." f Ra- tional intuitions are innate only in the sense that they are constituent elements of reason ; that, as man becomes conscious of himself in experience, he finds himself a rational being endowed with norms and in possession of principles of reason regulating all his thinking, and constituting him able to discriminate between the true and the fiilse, and to infer the unknown from the known. And this, rationalistic philosophers since Descartes, with more or less clearness, have appre- hended and explained. Locke's argument against innate ideas was, even in his day, a striking example of ignoratio elenchi, or philosophical kicking at nothing ; yet it has held and still holds its place with skeptics, as if the doctrine which it controverts were really believed by somebody and its refutation would prove that there is no God. A remarkable example is the chapter on "Innate Ideas" in Dr. Biichner's "Kraft und Stoff:" Among the inane objections which Descartes ridicules X is this, that infants cannot have knowledge and ideas in the foetal condition before birth. Yet Dr. Buchner gravely urges this very objection, as if this trumpery were believed. The principles and doc- trines which Dr. Buchner controverts in this chapter are not to be found in modern philosophy or theology. ? 24. Significance as Regulative Principles. I. Kational Intuitions are void of significance except as applied to beings and their attributes, conditions and relations known in percep- tive intuition. From mere a priori principles nothing can be deduced. The principle that every beginning or change has a cause, is void of content until I perceive some being in the exercise of power. ^ Then this principle extends the causal power back to the eternal. Principles known in rational intuition may be compared to the sides, and realities known in perceptive intuition to the rounds of a ladder. The sides ♦Oeuvres de Descartes : Consin's Ed., Vol. x., pp. 94, 98, 99. fOn the Studies of the University, p. 54. iVol. X., p. 107. 118 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. lying by themselves are useless for the purposes of a ladder, and so aro the rounds. But when the rounds are inserted in the sides we have a ladder by which we can scale the heavens. If the reason is winged with intuitions, empirical reality is the atmosphere without which it cannot soar. Schopenhauer says, " In proportion as any cognitioa is necessary, in proportion as it brings with it what we must think and cannot think otherwise, it has less reality ; and in proportion as it in- cludes empirical accidental varieties, it has more reality — more of what stands on its own basis and cannot be deduced from another."* This is no invalidation of rational intuition ; for it is an obscure recognition and an inadequate and misleading enunciation of the connection of rational intuition with empirical reality which I am affirming. The representation of rational intuition in Browning's Paracelsun is a caricature of the doctrine, though some Mystics have held something like it : *' There is an inmost center in us all Where truth abides in fulness : and to know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, Than in eflfecting entrance for a light Supposed to be without." We have seen, on the contrary, that the rational intuitions exist primarily, not as formulated truths, but as constitutional norms, that they appear in consciousness only on occasion in experience and have content and significance only as applied to empirically known reality. While the impact of the outward is necessary to unlock " the im- prisoned splendor," it is equally necessary thai the unlocked splendor go out upon the outward or be reflected on us from It, if it is to enlighten us with knowledge. And as the splendor unlocked from its prison in a lump of coal had its origin in the sun, human reason can become luminous with intelligence only because it is itself the creature and likeness of the reason supreme and absolute in God. II. Rational intuition does not guarantee the correctness and com- pleteness of our observation of facts and our reflective judgments respecting them. Rational intuition gives the knowledge that two par- allel straight lines can never meet ; but it gives no information on the question whether two given lines are parallel and straight. Perhaps the most common and effective objection against the validity of rational intuitions is the fact that the Ancients regarded the existence of anti- podes as absurd. But the anci^mts in this case applied the principle oi causation correctly to what they, in their ignorance of gravitation and the sphericity of the earth, supposed to be the facts. According to ♦ Die Welt nk WUU md Vorsteilung, i., 145. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 119 their 'iew of the facts the existence of people at the antipodes would be impossible, because it would be an efiect without a cause. The principle remains true and the conclusion necessary from it is correct. The mis^ take is as to the facts. The objection derives all its force from the misrepresentation that rational intuition gives a knowledge of the facts, which no intelligent person afiirms. Such a rational intuition would approximate closely to omniscience. Prof Helmholz attempts to invalidate rational intuition by suppos- ing intelligent beings living on a solid sphere, but capable of perceiving only what is on its surface. They would know space only in two dimensions. To them a line curving with the earth's surface would be a straight line. Therefore the axioms that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that between two points only one straight line can be drawn, would no longer be true. This sounds ex- ceedingly learned and profound ; but it is merely the childish objection that if some persons should mistake a curved line for a straight one, the axioms of geometry would no longer be true. If we are to reason from fancies like this it is as easy to prove one thing as another, and com- plete agnosticism is the necessary result. It is idle to inquire how things would appear to beings that would know themselves and all bodies merely as mathematical surfaces, having length and breadth without thickness. III. These principles are regulative, that is they determine the pos- sible and the impossible. I do not mean what is possible or impossible to a particular finite being; for that would be determined by the degree at which its power is limited. I mean what is possible or impos- sible to any and all power. 1. These principles are regulative of intellectual power ; they deter- mine what is possible and what impossible to thought. All thinking is regulated by them ; for it is impossible to think the contrary of them to be true ; all reasoning depends on them, and without them cannot conclude in an inference. Attempting to pass beyond them the intel- lect drops helpless in vacuity and fatuity. They are the primitive prin- ciples and constituent elements of rationality itself; to reject them is to strip rationality from the reason and to extinguish reason in unreason. 2. These principles determine what is possible to will-power. They are laws of things as well as of thought. The absurd cannot be real. It is impossible to think that two contradictories coexist in the same place and time. It is equally impossible for them to coexist. No will- power can cause them to coexist. If we suppose will-power annulling the law of causation and producing a change that is uncaused, the thought nullifies itself in the attempt to think it ; for it is an attempt to think of an efiect which is not an efiect. It is equally true of all 120 THE PHILOSOPHICAL B.iSIS OF THEISM. other first principles of reason. No poirer of will can create, annul or change a single principle of reason or give reality to what contradicts it. Will cannot alter the sphere of reason. Power, even though almighty, is powerless upon truth. Will, even though almighty, cannot eliminate the 3Iust be and the Ought to be from the universe. 3. These principles determine what is possible in nature. Physical science is the discovery in nature of the principles and laws of Reason pervading and regulating nature. If these principles had been in the reason of man, but not in nature, man could never have put them into nature, nor have caused nature to be regulated by them. If they had been in nature and not in the reason of man, man never could have discovered them nor formed any conception of them. And this is only recognizing from a new point of view the synthesis of phenomenon and noumenon, which, in contrast to Kant's antithesis of them, I have already shown to be essential to all rational intelligence. An intelligible object is impossible without an intelligent subject. The noumena or necessary principles and ideas of Reason are the unchanging forms in which reality is known by rational intelligence. If all that is known by man is phenomenal and not the real being, because known in rela- tion to his mind, and the noumenon or real being is out of this relation and unknowable l)y man, then all that is known by any mind is phe- nomenal and unreal because known in relation to that mind. Thus we have the monstrous absurdity that noumena exist as pure objects out of all relation to all and every intelligent mind, that is, pure objects unintelligible to any mind and contrary to any and every principle of reason. The existence of such an object is impossible. And this im- possibility is affirmed in the proposition that the principles of reason are laws of things as well as of thought ; that through the reason the phenomenon is in synthesis with the noumenon. The absurd cannot be real. A reality contradictory to reason would be equally contrary to itself Man's knowledge is limited. Realities may exist beyond the range of human observation and transcending human reason. But in the farthest range of possibility beyond the limits of human knowledge, nothing can exist which contradicts human reason, and is thus in its nature unintelligible and out of relation to any and all rational intelli- gence. " Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit." * AVhen we say that the objects of sense-perception and self-conscious- ness are known in the forms of the principles of Reason, in other words, when we say that these principles are regulative of things as well as of thought, we simply sffirni that these realities are known as existing in a system of things accordant with the universal truths of Reason. It ia * Juvenal, Sat. 14, 321. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 121 often objected that we have no real knowledge of the objects of presen- tative intuition because we know them only in relation to one another. But they are known thus, because they exist thus. We find them in a rational system because they exist in a rational system. The denial that rational princi[)les are regulative of these realities is the denial that the realities exist in a rational system ; and this of course is the denial of the possibility of natural science, for natural science is the knowledge of nature as a system accordant with reason. Then it would follow that the universe is not grounded in reason and its constitution and on- going are not accordant with rational truths and laws. Then there would be no difference between the reasonable and the absurd ; two and two might make five ; two straight lines might inclose a space ; contra- dictions might be necessary and universal truths; the supreme law might be, " Thou shalt love thyself with all thy heart, and thyself only shalt thou serve ; " and all these absurdities might be real to-day and their contraries real to-morrow, and the past might become future, and virtue be sold at a dollar a pound. And this is only saying that all basis of intelligence would disappear, the description of the universe would be nonsense and not science, and unreason would be supreme. The human mind must peremptorily reject such nonsense or sink into idiocy. It necessarily rejects it only because the rational intuitions are the constituent elements of reason, and regulate all thought. And it is only because the constitution of the universe is accordant with these principles and its ongoing regulated by them, that the universe is a Cosmos and not a chaos. They are the "flammaiitia moenia vmndi,'' * the flaming bulwarks of the universe, which no power not even though almighty can break through or destroy, and within which the cosmos lies in the light of rational truth, and moves in the harmony and order of rational law to the realization of rational ideals and ends. Thus the principles of reason, together with the truths inferred from them, and the ideals and ends determined by them, are the archetypes of nature. ^ 25. Validity of Rational Intuition. The possibility of philosophy and theology rests on the validity of rational intuition as a source of knowledge. Its vindication is, there- fore, of prime importance. I do not propose to prove these principles, each of which stands by itself, if it stands at all, in its own self-evidence ; but only to vindicate their validity against objections. I. Rational intuition is immediate self-evident knowledge, known as such in the act of knowing ; as such it sustains all the criteria of primi- tive knowledge. It is no objection against the principles thus known ♦ Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I. 73. 122 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. 1 that they rest only on self-evidence and cannot be proved ; for all knowledge must originate in like manner as self-evident knowledge. They, who reject them because they cannot prove them, remind us of Martin Luther's words : " When at a window I have gazed on the stars and the whole beauty of the vault of heaven, I have seen no pillars on which the builder had set the vault ; yet the heavens fell not, and the vault still stands firm. Now^ there are simple folk who look about for such pillars and would fain feel and grasp them. But since they cannot, they quake and tremble as if the heavens would certainly fall, and for no other reason than because they cannot see and grasp the pil- lars. If they could but grasp them, then, they think, the heavens w^ould stand firm enough." Truth rests on other than material supports which the senses can grasp, yet firm as the intangible forces holding fast the earth and the stars, which God hangeth on nothing. We may well agree with Aristotle that they w^ho forsake the nature of things or self-evident principles will not find any surer basis on which to build. Even those who deny their validity are compelled to rest their thinking on them. Locke, in the very chapter in which he is arguing against innate ideas, admits the validity of rational intuitions by saying : " He would be thought void of common sense, who, asked on the one side or the other side, went to give a reason why it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be. It carries its own light and evidence with it and needs no other proof; he that understands the terms assents to it for its own sake, or else nothing will ever be able to prevail on him to do it."* The same may be said of all the first principles known in rational intuition. They severally sustain all the tests or criteria of primitive knowledge. They are self-evident. It is impossible to think the contrary as true. They persist in the practical control of thought and action in the face of all speculative objections and denials. They are consistent with each other and with all knowledge. They are there- fore knowledge. And because primitive or intuitive knowledge exists independent of reflective thought, it cannot be uprooted by it. " What has never been reasoned up can never be reasoned down," II. These principles are indispensable in all reasoning. Without them reasoning could never conclude in an inference. This has already been shown. If man is capable of an inference from premises he must have rational norms for his decision ; if he is capable of bringing any investigation to a conclusion in knowledge, he must know universal principles according to which the connection and unity of particular realities known in presentative intuition can be determined. If he is capable of exploring the Cosmos and bringing it within his science he ♦Essay, B. I. chap. iii. ? 4. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 123 MUst have a final standard of all truth. And this is as true of induc- tive reasoning, on which the physical sciences claim specially to rest, as it is of any other. And scientists acknowledge this practically and implicitly, if not theoretically. Some writers whose theory of know- ledcre leans to complete positivism use these principles while re- cognizing no philosophical basis for them. Prof Bain says of the principle of the uniformity of nature which is at the basis of all induc- tion, " Our only error is in proposing to give any reason or justification of the postulate or to treat it as otherwise than begged at the very outset " And Prof Helmholz says of it: " In this case but one course is available; Trust it and use it."* Says Royer Collard: " Did not reasoning rest on principles anterior to reasoning, analysis would be without end and synthesis without beginning." Says H. Spencer, criti- cising *' pure empiricism or experimentalism " : " Throughout its argu- ment there runs the tacit assumption that there may be a philosophy in which nothing is asserted but what is proved. ... The conse- quence of this refusal to recognize some fundamental unproved truth is that its fabric of conclusions is left without a base. . . . Philo- sophy, if it does not avowedly stand on some datum underlying reason" (i. e. reasoning) " must acknowledge that it has nothing on which to stand." t Elsewhere Mr. Spencer criticises "the metaphysicians" for giving more weight to reasoning than to the simple deliverances of con- sciousness ; and contrasts them in this respect both with the " mass of men" and " men of science." He censures them for "a tacit assump- tion that the mode of intellectual action distinguished as reasoning ia more trustworthy than any other mode of intellectual action." J III The rational intuitions are verified in experience. It is impossible, of course, fully to verify them in this way because experience is limited and cannot be co-ordinate with the universal. But so far as human experience extends it verifies the prii>.ciples of rational intuition. They are inherent in the common sense which regulates the action of common life ; and our every-day thinking and action verify them. They are continually verified in physical science. The principles which regulate our thinking are found to be regulative of the constitu- tion and course of nature. Natural science is the knowkxige of systemized nature. The fact-system in nature is found to be the thought-system of reason. The discovery of this system in nature and its enunciation constitute physical science. In registering the sy*^ -u ♦" Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraue und handle." t Principles of Psychology, Vol. II. pp. 391, 392. X Psychology, Part VII. chaps, ii.-iv.. Vol. II. pp. 312, 317, 336. 124 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM I ■If of nature in science the mind registers in science its own trustworthi- ness and verifies the principles and laws of its own rationality. This is exemplified in mathematics, which is wholly a creation of the mind. In geometry we deal only with imaginary lines and figures ; in algebra we do not limit ourselves even by numbers, but use symbols equally significant of all numbers. By complicated and intricate processes we reach as the result empty forms of thought expressed in mathematical signs. Yet we find that these are the forms iu which the universe is constituted and the formulas which express the laws of its action. The law of gravitation could never have been discovered by observation ; it is derived from an a priori mathematical principle. Yet it is found to be the law which matter to the remotest star obeys. So in induction, by the help of an intuitive and universal principle we pass from the known to the unknown, from the particular to the general, immeasurably beyond the range of observation and experi- ment. And in hypotheses we create imaginary systems and then by observation find that the same systems have been created in the actual universe. Often, as I have elsewhere said, these anticipations of dis- covery have been made by students of philosophy not engaged in the scientific observation of nature, and not till years and perhaps genera- tions afterwards has some observer, guided by the hypothesis, found it real in nature. To evade the force of this reasoning we have been told of late that the law of gravitation is not exactly correct, though sufficiently so for our purposes, and " that we have no reason for believing that the known laws of geometry and mechanics are exactly and absolutely true at present, or that they have been approximately true for any period of time further than we have direct evidence of" * But since the law of gravitation enables astronomers to predict many phenomena of the solar system to a second and since the perturbations are in other cases BO complicated as to present a mathematical problem which no human mind is competent to solve, it is more probable that the calculator has left out some element of the problem than that the law of gravitation is not correct. This verification of rational intuition by facts is continually going on in the life of the individual and in the processes of human thought and the progress of science. It is a never ending verification of the trust- worthiness of human reason and the validity of its regulative principles. Through the whole history of human thought man is always finding the universal manifested in the particular, the necessary in the contingent, the unchanging m the transitory, the rational in the natural. So the • Prof. Clifford's Essays, i. 221, 222, 224. WHAT IS KNOWN THPwOUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 125 ocean swells up and manifests itself in the unending succession of its waves. IV. Rational intuition is necessary to interpret sense-perception. Sensation reports correctly the peculiar impression of outward agents on each sense. But it is only by judgment in accordance with the prin- ciples of reason that we apprehend the reality signified by the impres- sion on the sensorium. The senses show us the sky as a blue dome, the sun, moon and stars as moving in it, parallel rails converging as they recede ; and always we resort to reason to interpret these preseutationa of sense and ascertain what the reality is which they bring before us. The ear gives us sound, the eye light and shade, the general sensorium heat ; but it is thought, regulated by the principles of reason, which dis- closes the undulations which impinge on the ear and cause sound, and the molecular vibrations which cause light and heat. And it is thought, guided by the principles of reason, which carries knowledge to distances of space and time entirely beyond the observation of sense, and discovers that the facts known by sense are in the unity of a rational system. Those who doubt the validity of rational intuition are wont to point in contrast with great satisfaction to the clearness and certainty of knowledge by sense-perception. But it is evident that without the aid of the rational intuition sense-perception could gain but a small part of our knowledge of the physical universe. Hume has demonstrated that subjective Idealism, founded on the be- lief that in sense-perception we have knowledge only of impressions on the sensorium, involves universal skepticism. On the other hand Kant has demonstrated that Sense alone, without rational principles given by the mind, is equally incompetent to give real knowledge. Together they have demonstrated that both presentative intuition and rational are essential to knowledge. The mind is not passively recipient of im- pressions but active in knowing. The mind knows. And the postu- lates or principles of rational intuition belong to the very nature of knowledge. Liard, as reported by Janet, says, " As yet the Positive school has not answered the learned demonstration of Kant on the neces- sity of a priori principles, or rather has ignored it. It has made no ad- dition to the old empiricism which the school of Leibnitz and Kant refuted." Any system of Positivism like that of Comte, propounded as a theory of knowledge without noticing the principles established by Hume and Kant, is not entitled to the attention of scholars. Accord- ingly Lange says, " The very attempt to construct a philosophical theory of things exclusively on the physical sciences must in these days be de- scribed as a philosophical one-sidedness of the worst kind." * ♦ Geschichte des Materialismus ; B. II. Sect. II. Chap. I. 126 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. I conclude, therefore, that the power of rational intuition is essential in the idea of Reason, as extension is in the idea of body. The know- ledge of first principles of reason is essential to all knowledge which rises above mere impressions or phenomena, and is inherent in the na- ture of rational intelligence. The denial of them involves complete agnosticism. This result Fitz-James Stephen exemplifies when he says, ** It is surely obvious that all physical science is only a probability, and, what is more, one which we have no means w^hatever of measur- ing. . . . The present is a mere film melting into the past." * We accept, therefore, as the most fundamental postulate, the principle that the self-evident and necessary intuitions of the mind are true. Of this postulate H. Spencer says, " Not even a reason for doubting its validity can be given without tacitly asserting its validity." f V. It is objected that these principles are not universally believed. It is said, If they are constitutional and self-evident, every one must be- lieve them ; and this, it is said, is not the fact. 1. In sustaining this position it is usually urged that infants and savages have no knowledge of them. As thus urged the objection is founded on misapprehension of the doctrine. It is pertinent only against innate ideas, the existence of which no one aflirms, not against rational intuitions existing as constitutional norms and elements of rationality, and rising in consciousness as regulative of thought only on occasion in experience. The customary attempt to discredit the principles and laws of thought because infants and savages are not conscious of them is unscientific. It rests on the false assumption that nothing is constitutional in man except what infants and savages are conscious of; human powers are to be ascertained not by observing what they are in mature men but only what they are in their nascent state in infancy and savagery. It is an appeal from facts to fancies, from what we know to what we do not know. This kind of reasoning would prove that it is not natural to man to have a beard, or teeth, or parental affection ; or that it is not natural to an apple to bear blossoms and apples because they are not observed in the seed. AVe do not study the acorn to find out what the oak is, but the oak to find out what the acorn is. The objection rests on the further mistake, in respect to savages, that a principle does not regulate thought and action until it is consciously formulated. The doctrine is that men think and act under the regula- tion of these principles even when they have never consciously formu- lated them. The objection, therefore, is founded on a misapprehension of the doctrine. The validity of rational intuition, in ite true meaning ♦ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, pp. 346, 347. t Psychology, Vol. II. p. 491. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 127 is sustained by the common consciousness of mankind ; and in vindi- cating it we avail ourselves of this ancient argument, which Hesiod states at the end of his "Fbr^ and Days:" "The word proclaimed by the concordant voice of mankind fails not; for it is a sort of di- vinity." * 2. But we are told that these beliefs are not necessary even to culti- vated persons. J. S. Mill says: "Any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis, who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose, will, when his imagination has once learned to entertain the notion, find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe, events may succeed one another at random without any fixed law; nor can anything in our experience or in our mental nature constitute a suflicient, or indeed any reason for believing that this is nowhere the case."t Mr. Mill held that all necessary beliefs arise from association of ideas in the life-time of an individual. He could consistently suppose that under new condi- tions new associations could be formed. But here he supposes new con- ditions which break up the old associations without forming new ones. His supposition, therefore, is directly in contradiction to his own theory. Mr. Mill does not say that he can conceive of such a world of unreason, but only that he thinks one might learn to conceive of it. It is very common for skeptics who hold that our knowledge is unreal because knoAvn through our own reason, to tell us of a world possibly known to other minds in which right is wrong, and the angles of a triangle may be equal to six right angles, or a hollow sphere with continuous surface may be turned inside out without rupture. But when we attend to it we see that it is a mere Sheinhamphorash or abracadabra, words to conjure with, which overawe the unthinking but are seen by all thoughtful persons to be sounds without meaning. Accordingly Comte and others who exclude the very ideas of cause, force, and being from scientific thought and limit it to phenomena, yet continually think and write under the regulation of the principles which they reject. The existence of the real is unavoidably asserted in every attempt to prove that knowledge is only relative; the ex- istence of both subject and object is asserted in every proof that we know no objective reality ; the knowledge what a true cause is as distinguished from an invariable antecedent is asserted in every denial of the possibility of having knowledge of a true cause ; the validity of rational intuitions is appealed to in assertmg that they cannot be valid ; * ^/mj S'hvTTOTE irafiKav aTrdlT^vrai. i)v riva iraXKoX Aaoi III 111 that man's reason acts in the light of truths which eternally enlighten the Keason that is absolute and supreme. AVe say, therefore, with F. H. Jacobi : " In creating man God theo- morphized ; therefore necessarily man anthropomorphizes. What makes man to be man, that is, the image of God, is Reason. This begins with the 'lam: Where this word resounds within, expressing the inmost being, there is Reason, there is Personality, there is Freedom. Accordingly we confess to the conviction that man bears in him the image of God— inevitable anthropomorphism— and we affirm that with- out this anthropomorphism, hitherto called Theism, there is only either atheism or fetichism." * It would be a fatally misleading anthropomorphism to ascribe to God the limitations of man, his bodily form and constitution, or the qualities of his natural life. But it is sophistry to argue from this that personality in its essence is not the same in man and in God ; and the latter error is as deadly as the former. 7. To the doctrine that the principles which regulate man's thinking originate in the intuition of reason and are valid for all thinking beings, Lange objects : This " view, which is peculiar to the true origmal He- gelianism, leads necessarily to Pantheism ; for it already presupposes as an axiom the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the uni- verse and with all spirits." f This has been a common error of German metaphysics. But Theism corrects it. The unity of spirits is not the pantheistic identity of substance, but the unity of persons under the universal truths and laws of one rational and moral system. The universal refison is not submerged unconscious in nature, but energizes in the personal God, and expresses its truths, laws and ideals in the constitution of the universe. Man is constituted rational. As in contact with external nature his reason is developed, he finds in him- self the principles of universal reason ; he recognizes them as laws of thought and action, constructs ideals in accordance with them, and by them discriminates between good as worthy and evil as worthless. He finds them also regulating nature. He recognizes the universe as con- tinuously expressing the archetypal thoughts of the supreme reason. Thus only can he comprehend the cosmos in the unity of a system and describe it in science. Without the theistic recognition of the su- premacy of reason all science disappears, either disintegrated into individual impressions void of real knowledge, or attenuated into an abstract and unreal universal ; " Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before, Sinks to her second cause and is no more." ♦ Gottlichen Dingen ; Werke, Vol. iii. pp. 418, 422, 428. t Geschichte des Materialismus, B. ii., Sect. i. chap. ii. t WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 149 Thus knowing God, man by faith and love comes into a moral unity with Him and with all rational beings. XI. The discussion proves that the intuitions of reason are real knowledge and that the only reasonable explanation of them is that they are constituent elements of Reason and reveal Reason eternal, absolute and supreme, and that Reason, everywhere and always, in God and man, is essentially the same. In the acknowledged failure of Comte's Positivism and of Mill's theory of association, and in the evident inadequacy of the explana- tion of the evolutionist, the resources of empiricism are exhausted and we fall back on the Reason as the only and complete explanation. The rational intuitions exist as norms in the rational constitution of man ; as his constitution is developed, they reveal themselves in con- sciousness on occasion in experience, as universal regulative principles ; and in their revelation of man to himself as personal Reason, they re- veal to him the supreme and absolute Reason as the personal God, conditioning his own perscmal existence, and without whom his own rational intelligence w^ould be impossible. The discussion proves that all who would not deny the reality of all knowledge must recognize the rational intuitions as real knowledge, whatever theory of their origin may be adopted. They are regulative not only of all thinking but also in the constitution of nature. By them we are able to appre- hend the Cosmos as a realm of ideas and laws, and to construct science which is its intellectual equivalent. Says Prof. John Fiske : " So long as individual experience is studied without reference to ancestral expe- rience, the follower of Kant can always hold his ground against Locke in ethics as well as in psychology." * This admits the reality of the principles independent of the theory by which they are accounted for, and the sufficiency of the rationalistic explanations aside from the theory of ancestral experience. The objective validity of something in the constitution of the human mind corresponding to rational intuition Hume himself seems to admit : "As nature has taught us the use of our limbs without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves by which they are actuated, so she has implanted in us an instinct which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects, though we are ignorant of those powers and forces on which this regular course and succession depends." f We must ask, Who is the Nature that teaches us? And have we not here an uncon- scious acknowledgment of the supremacy and ubiquity of Reason, which our rational intuitions reveal ? ♦Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. ii. p. 326. t Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, sect. II., sub finem. 150 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. WHAT IS KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION. 151 I Mr. Frederick Harrison says man is "the being which is the real discoverer and author of law. . . . Laws of nature are not so much the expression of absolute realities in the nature of things (of this we know nothing absolutely), but they are those relations which the human intellect has perceived in co-ordinate phenomena of all kinds. . . . The whole sphere of law is nothing but the outcome of the human intelli- gence applied to the world of phenomena." * But " the great Human Being," in whose " Human Providence " Mr. Harrison finds " both law and author and minister of law," certainly did not of its o^\ti mind and wdll arrange nature according to these laws ; on the contrary, it finds the world arranged according to them. This, positivists like Mr. Harrison would be obliired to admit. Then, we necessarilv ask, how came the world to be arranged according to these laws, and how came the Human Being to know them? The Positivist arbitrarily rules this question out as illegitimate. Yet it is a question which man has always asked ; and the recognition of a cause beyond man is as necessary in "the great Human Being," and has been historically as constant and univei*sal, as the laws which ^I Harrison so freely recognizes. If the laws which man finds in the world have no objective reality, then it must be equally true that the world has no objective reality. Then human knowledge ceases, and "the great iiuinan Being," forever cheating itself with illusions, is not the Being on whom man can rest in peace as the supreme object of trust and worship. And again we see that if man has any real know- ledge, the principles and laws which are regulative alike of nature and of his own thought, must be principles and laws in an absolute Reason, the ultimate ground alike of nature with its laws and of man with his rational intelligence, and that Reason everywhere and always, in God and man, is the same. XII 1 he possibility of science, and indeed of any knowledge, more than the sense of isolated impressions on a sensorium, rests on the fol- lowing realities : — Through rational intuition man has real knowledge of universal, regulative principles, and in knowing them has knowledge of himself as Reason. Supreme in the Universe is Reason essentially like our own, and, however transcending, never contradicting the Reason of man ; and Reason is everywhere and always the same. The principles of Reason are universally regulative of thought and eflScient power, in the sense that the absurd can never be made real. These realities are the conditions of the possibility of science. Be- cause man is Reason, and because the universe is accordant with * The Creeds Old and New, Nineteenth Century, November, 1880. rational principles and laws and progressively realizes rational ideals and good, and because it thus expresses the archetypal thoughts of the supreme Reason, it can be apprehended and systemized in science by the rational intelligence of man. XIII. Atheism must rest on some theory which logically involves the impossibility of knowledge. This is a necessary inference from the positions already established. It is also verified by the history of all atheism which attempts to vindicate itself to rational intelligence. If it is impossible to know God, it is impossible to know anything scienti- fically in the unity of a rational system. THE ULTIMATE REALITIES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. 153 'I I CHAPTER VI. THE ULTIMATE REALITIES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGR §26. Definition. By ultimate realities I mean the ultimate kinds or genera of reality which are known in intuition and designated by a common name, and are the objects of human thought. It is conceivable that all the ele- mental realities known in intuition may be ascertained and named. If this should be done we should have before us and know by name all the ultimate genera or kinds of reality of which it is possible to have knowledge. We may call them for short the ultimate or fundamental realities, and our ideas of them the ultimate or fundamental ideas of knowledge. Aristotle attempted a classification of the ultimate genera of reality, and called them Categories. Kant, however, has used this word to denote the Root-notions {Staimnbegnffe) of the understanding, the pure forms of thought given by the mind itself Since his day the word has retained the meaning in which Kant used it. Some other word, there- fore, must be used to denote the ultimate genera of reality. §27. Matter and Form. Kant calls the particular reality known in perceptive intuition the "matter" of thought or knowledge; the rational truths and laws which declare its relation to the universal, and which are known in rational intuition, he called the "forms" of knowledge or thought. It has been objected that the latter, as " forms of thought," can have no objective reality ; and it has come to pass that any use of the terms matter and forms of thought at once awakens the suspicion that the writer using them denies the reality of knowledge. But in their true significance they carry in them no suggestion of the unreality of knowledge. Tlie ** matter " of knowledge is the particular realities known in presentative intuition ; its " form " is the truth and laws which express their relation to the universal. Sense-perception and self-consciousness know a par- ticular being in its particular modes of existence. Reason knows the same in its relations to the universal. The " matter " of my knowledge of power is power :^^ T know it in some particular exertion of it ; ita 152 4 \ 4 " form " is the rational principle that every beginning or change of ex- istence must have a cause. The "matter" of my knowledge of space is extension in its three dimensions ; its " form," in which Reason knows it, is the metaphysical principle that space is continuous, immovable within itself and unlimited, and the mathematical principles of geometry. When this true conception has been attained, the controversy about the "matter" and "form" of knowledge passes away, and with it the doubt which it has thrown on the reality of knowledge. The necessary forms of thought are also the forms of things. They are forms of things because originally and eternally they are archetypal in the su])reme Reason. Plato's " ideas " were at once conceptions of the mind and forms or archetypes of things. When we grasp the fact that in intuition we have positive knowledge of self and external being and of universal principles of reason, we necessarily come to the Platonic position that the necessary forms of thought are the forms of things ; we grasp in its true significance the principle which has given to Platonism its peren- nial life, that the truths of reason are at once the laws of thought and the archetypal norms of all existence. It is the error of Kant that space and time, which he calls forms of sense, and reality, substance, cause, existence and other categories of the understanding, are pure subjective forms of thought, which the mind must necessarily put under phenomena in apprehending them. But we now see that the necessary forms of thought are simply the universal norms or principles of reason ; and that these must be the norms or principles regulative not of thought only, but of all existence ; because, if not so, reason is false in its constituent elements ; what we have taken for reason, the organ of truth, is found to be unreason and an organ of falsehood ; and rationality and knowledge are no more. We return now to the true position. Perceptive intuition is the knowledge of some particular being in some particular mode of exist- ence. Rational intuition is the knowledge of the rational norms of all existence. By reason we know the particular reality as related to truth that is universal, necessary and unchanging, and through this to Reason unconditioned and supreme. § 28. Classification. The Ultimate Realities are of two classes, distinguished by their origin ; each of these classes must be subdivided into two : — Class I. Ultimate Realities primarily known in Presentative Intuition : 1. Being. 2. Modes of the Existence of Being. ff t M 154 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. Class II. Ultimate Realities primarily known in Rational Intuition : 1. Norms or Standards of Reason: — The True, The Right, The Perfect and The Good ; or Truth, Law, Perfection and Good. 2. The Absolute. I mean by " the good " that which Reason estimates by its standards of Truth, Right and Perfection, as having w^orth, or as worthy of the pursuit, possession and enjoyment of a rational being. The Absolute is the unconditioned and all-conditioning Being, on which finite beings in all the modes of their existence depend, and in which the norms or standards of Reason are eternal. The intuition of Reason that Absolute being must exist, is a truth. As such it belon^rg with the True, and is, like every other necessary truth, a law of thought and a norm or standard of judgment But this intuition opens to us the knowledge of the Absolute or Unconditioned. This properly stands by itself in the classification as the last of all the ultimate realities. Aristotle classifies the genera of reality in ten categories ; Bein^^ Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, Possession,' Action,' Passion.* This is evidently incomplete ; and the same may be said of all attempts to complete it. But it was begun on the right principle. His categories are not logical predicates of general notions, but realities of concrete being. The ultimate realities are not found by the methods of abstract thought and formal logic, but by those of concrete or real- istic thought attending to concrete beings. Kant, on the contrary, develops his categories from the twelve logical functions of possible judgments, and proceeds throughout to logical products rather than to concrete realities. The result is a grand system of what thought must be, empty of all content of known being. I do not claim that the classification which I present is complete and open to no objection. I present it only as a classification which I have found helpful to use in attempting to set forth the reality, extent and limitations of human knowledge. It will be noticed that, according to this classification, knowledge begins as knowledge of particular beings in their several modes of existence, proceeds to the knowledge of them in their relations to the universal principles of reason, and issues in the knowledge of absolute being; this is the order of knowing and thinking. On the other hand, in the order of dependence, the Absolute Being is first, as the ultimate ground of the existence of all particular beings and of the possibility of their unity as a universe. In the Absolute Being all truth, law, perfection and worth are archetypal and eternal, and of these the uni- verse of finite things is the ever progressive expression and realization. ♦ 'Owm, noaov, ttoi6v, npog u, ttov, rroH, Keladai^ Ix^iv, noiiiv, naaxttv. Topica I. 9. Organon I. KaTT/yopiac. CHAPTER VII. ULTIMATE REALITIES PRIMARILY KNOWN IN PERCEPTPV^E OR PRESENTATIVE INTUITION: BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. i §29. Being. I. Being is known immediately in presentative intuition and can be defined or described only by referring every man to his own conscious- ness of it. A man knows being in his consciousness of himself as existing. The whole idea of being is given in that consciousness. To say I think, is the same as to say, It is I who think. I think, I axi, I feel, every aflarma* tion which a man can make of himself carries in it the aflBrmation, / am; and, without the I am, it is void of all significance and reality It is here that he has the knowledge of being. We also have knowledge of being in sense-perception. In one and the same act I know the outw^ard object and myself And of each I have positive knowledge. I know myself not as a mere negation of the outward object but as positively known being; in this positive knowledge I affirm, I am. I know my own being in all its fullness of life, intelligence and power. I know the outward object, not merely negatively as not-me, but positively ; my own body posited in and occu- pying space, and other bodies impinging on my organism or resisting my energy. Because being is known intuitively it cannot be defined, but can be known only in one's own consciousness of it. We know" that a thought, an action, a feeling, a motion is not a being. It is impossible to think these as beings. We refer the thought to^ a thinker, the action to an agent, the feeling and the motion to a being that feels and moves. But we cannot define what a being is ; we know what it is in the con- sciousness of self and the perception of bodies. Having attained in perceptive intuition the idea of being, we group together all realities known as beings, whether persons or things, in onp class and call them beings. And this is the first of the ultimate reaH^ ties known in perceptive intuition. 155 156 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 157 r I II. Being, as known in perceptive intuition, is a particu' r or deter- minate being existing in particular properties or attributes. Being ex-ists (ex-sisto) ; it stands out in view. It exists or stands out to our knowledge in various qualities or powers ; also as one or many ; as occupying space or persisting in time ; as under limitation ; and as in relation. These may be called attributes of being as known in per- ceptive intuition ; and, since in these the being ex-ists, they may be called modes of existence. III. Being, known by perceptive intuition as existing in various modes, is known by the Reason in rational intuition in the "forms" of its universal principles and laws and in accordance with its unchanging standards or norms. We know by rational intuition that every quality, attribute or phe- nomenon is a quality, attribute or phenomenon of a being. There can be no thought without a thinker, no action without an agent, no motion without something that moves, no beginning or change without a cause, no phenomenon without a being that appears in it as well as a being to whom it appears, no truth without a mind to know it. Conversely, we know by rational intuition that every being exists in some attributes or properties. And this is only saying that every being ex-ists. There can be no being without attributes ; there can be no being without power of some kind ; and this is only saying there cannot be a being that does not exist. If we attempt to think of Being without attributes, a substance stripped of all properties, we have nothing left. Not only is nothing left, but our thought issues in the contradiction that Being is the same with Nothing. And this is the " Thing in itself" out of all relation to our faculties. It is not an unknowable which we may some time come to know ; it is not Nothing, as the mere denial of being ; it is the symbol of a hopeless contradiction at the root of all know^Iedo^e. Thus we know being in its deepest reality and significance. While perceptive intuition gives us particular beings existing in particular modes, rational intuition shows us that this being is real being as Reason knows it in its relations to the universal. Thought cannot pass behind this to think of anything more real. Beyond being, as preventative and rational intuition know it, is nullity, into which thought cannot enter nor intuition glance. IV. Being, in its whole reality as substance and quality, agent and action, is presented in presentative intuition. The reality presented in intuition we apprehend in thought as substance and quality, agent and action ; but the reality thus apprehended is given in the intuition. It is so apprehended in thought because it is so in reality. Rational intui- tion adds that being, thus known, is real being, as reason in the light of I i its universal principles knows it must be. Substance and quality, therefore, is not, as Kant regards it, a form of pure thought wholly subjective to the thinker, but it is objectively real in the being as known in presentative intuition, and is so apprehended in thought both because it is so in the particular being known, and because Reason sees that it must be so in all beings. This is accordant with the earlier Greek philosophy, wbich did not use bnoxiiiievirj (substance), but Soffia, to denote Being ; as if we had the abstract word Beingness. The same usage we find centuries later in Augustine : " It is called Essence, as derived from Esse, and denoting that which is ; and it is also called substance, as derived from siibsisto, with the same meaning." * Essence is the Latin etymologically corre- sponding with the Greek Surria, and might legitimately be used with the same meaning, were it not appropriated in logic to a difierent use and with a difi*erent meaning. The ancient Greeks debated whether everything is in constant flux and transition, or whether under all changes something stands. In self-consciousness I know myself as the subject of many qualities and many successive acts, yet myself under all the changes persisting the same. The same is known in every being ; under diverse qualities and successive acts the being stands the same. To denote the being thus standing the same under many qualities and successive changes, we call it mbstance ; that which subsists or stands the same under all diverse qualities and changes. It might with equal propriety have been called persistence, as that which stands unchanged through all changes suc- cessive in time. But as it stands out knowable in its attributes we speak of its existe^ice. Here we have the synthesis of phenomenon and being. It is the synthesis of subsistence or substance and ex-istence. The Being in one aspect subsists, in another it exists. The phenomenon is simply the existence of that which subsists and persists, revealing it to our know- ledge. As revealed or appearing we call it phenomenon. But it is the phenomenon or appearing of the being. The phenomenon is filled with the being : it is the being ex-isting so as to be knowable ; and thus it is the true and real manifestation of the being. V. Being is the fundamental reality ; all other ultimate realities are determinate of being and have no significance otherwise. Being is presupposed in all the other ultimate realities. The other realities primarily known in presentative intuition are modes of the existence of being. The ultimate realities of Rational Intuition are realities only as they pertain to Being ; they are the Truth, the Law, the Perfection, * De Trinitate, Lib. VII., c. 4. 158 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. the Good of being ; and the Absolute is an empty idea except as it is known as Absokite being. Being is a datum prerequisite in all gen- eralizations and in all thought. Accordingly Aristotle called the categories genera of being or of beings, yhti xm ovroq or tmv ovrmv. He explicitly recognizes concrete, individual, determinate being (rods rt) as the unit of knowledge, and primary being (Trpwrr) dotria) as present in all reality, known in all knowledge, and supposed in all the categories.* Reality is a broader term than being. While the qualities of a being cannot be thought of as existing separate from the being, we may direct attention to a particular quality and thus abstract it in thought. Such an abstract idea is a reality, but we cannot call it a being. Reality includes being and all its modes of existence and the forms in which reason knows it. A thought or feeling or action is a reality, but Ls not a being. Modes of existence, however, have no reality, except as modes of the existence of being. However abstract a general notion may be it is real only as it is a subjective notion of the thinker, or is the notion of modes of existence in some being. A centaur is real as the fancy of a mind. Solidity is real not only as the thought of a mind but also as a property of a body. There is no reality apart from being. I 30. Modes of Existence. I. Power. This is the first mode of existence. In knowing action, man knows power to act. He knows his own power in his own action and the power of outward objects in their action on his organism. In action being ex-ists or comes out to view as having power to act. Power is the primary mode of existence ; it is characteristic of all beings and is their primary manifestation, whereby they are knowable. Power to act is known immediately in self-con- sciousness and sense-perception ; it cannot be defined ; but is known only in the presentative intuition of it. Power may be distinguished as of various kinds by the actions in which it reveals itself, as power of knowing, thinking, determining, power of communicating and arresting motion. When a being is observed to exist in the continuous and unchanging manifestation in itself of any power, we call the being a substance and the power a quality. When the being is observed to manifest power in any beginning or change of existence in itself or another we call the being a cause, the power an energy and the beginning or change of existence an effect. Substance and cause are different names of beino: according as its powers are observed in continuous and unchanging * To 6i Ti TUyu KaO* tKdarijv Kari/yopiav. Met. p. 1032a, 13-16. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 159 I I manifestation of itself, or in a beginning or change of existence in itself or another. The present tendency of scientific thought is to the conception of na- ture as dynamic. Matter is no longer inert, but energetic ; all masses are in motion ; the molecules are in motion among themselves ; an atom itself is, as some suppose, a whirling vortex of matter. Rest is relative only. Accordingly the so-called qualities of beings are called powers. Hence it is not uncommon to designate a being as a power, although this language is to be accepted only as a metonymy. Prof Bowne says, " Substance is individualized force or power."* But this is inadequate ; for both power and individuality are modes of existence, and have no significance, except as the power and individuality of a being. If being is nothing without power, power is nothing without being. Nor does any one in this way escape the recognition of being. Every attempt to identify being with power must issue in hypostasizing the power ; then we have the power hypostasized and the power appearing in quali- ties and acts, and find ourselves again confronted with the old two in one, substance and quality, agent and action, being and existence. No thinker can throw his thought below being; nor can complete his thought above it and without it. Cause is not merely a form of pure thought without content ; its con- tent is being exerting power in effecting a beginning or change of exist- ence. Cause and effect are not mere antecedent and consequent ; the change called the effect is effected by power in the cause. And what power is, is known in experience by presentative intuition. James Mill says that the idea of power in causation is " an item altogether imaginary."! But, if so, whence came the idea of power, which all men have ? Mr. Mill's assertion implies that imagination has the trans- cendent power of creating the image of an elemental reality never given in intuition. And it contradicts the universal consciousness. Every man distmguishes a cause as exerting power from a mere antecedent ; and all language indicates the distinction. The fall of the mercury in a barometer is the antecedent of a storm, but not its cause ; the opening of the floodgates is an antecedent of the flow of water and the turning of the water-wheel, but not their cause. W. R. Grove says truly that to cease to use the words cause and force with this meaning would render the language unintelligible. J A cause may be agent, or transitive, or reactive. An Agent cause merely acts or exerts power without effect beyond the act itself; as, I thmk, I choose, I determine. There is also no causative act interme* * Studies in Theism, p. 234. t Analysis of the Human Mind, Vol. II., p. 256. X Correlation of Physical Forces. Youman's Ed., pp. 18, 21, 160 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. diate between the agent and the action ; the being manifests itself in the immediate forth-putting of power. The aot must be referred to the agent as its cause, and that which is caused is merely the act itself A cause is trarmtive when the power passes beyond the immediate action and effects an additional change ; as when by volition I raise my hand, and move the air in contact with it. In this case the cause produces the effect by an act of power intermediate between the cause and the effect. Physical science recognizes an actual transmission of energy. A reactive cause produces an effect by power reacting against a power acting on it ; as arresting motion. A personal being is a free cause. He not only does his own actions, but in the exercise of his energy he is autonomic, self-directive and self-exertive. All finite beings are acted on by powers exerted on them by some cause ; the being so acted on is object or recipient. This corresponds to the Aristotelian category of passion. The effect of the action is a new action in the recipient ; as the stroke of the bat communicates molar motion to the ball or the blow of a hammer communicates molecular motion to the anvil. Locke properly called this receptivity passive powcF. TT. One and Many. The second mode of existence. 1 . Lidimdualiiy and Identity. In knowing himself as the subject of diverse qualities and of successive acts man knows himself as an indi- vidual, as one and the same being in all the diversity of action which he knows in immediate consciousness or in memory. It is not by reflective thought that he combines these diversities into a unity ; but in every act he is conscious of himself as one and the same self. He cannot be said even to remember himself, since the knowledge of himself as persisting the same, is presupposed in the knowledge of succession and in the memory of past acts. Thus the knowledge of individuality and identity originates in self-consciousness, as already explained. Individuality, however, does not imply simplicity. It is always a unity of the diverse ; the human mind cannot think of an individual that is perfectly simple. The unity of an individual is not of several beings in one, but of several powers in one and the same being. A man is many-sided ; but always knows himself as one and the same. The individual is not indivisible in the sense that his various modes of being cannot be distinguished in thought, but in the sense that the unity of those modes is not a unity of thought merely, but a unity as the modes of existence of one and the same being. The individual is not indivisible in the sense that it is independent and indestructible ; but in the sense that the being remains one and the same in all modes of existence however diverse, and in aU relations BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 161 to other beings however complicated. A person can never be blended into another being or lost in any combination of beings. It is always one and the same person. Nor can the person be divided into two persons, for the division would be the extinction of the person. So necessary and universal is this knowledge of self as an individual bein^, that it has been the common and spontaneous belief of man- kind ; and the belief has been so inwrought into their constitution that they have believed that through even the change which takes place at death the man persists, as he has persisted through all the changes of life, and survives in another mode of existence, the same individual being. The explanation of this world-wide belief as if it originated in man's sight of his own shadow or his remembrance of his dreams is a conjecture not verified by observed facts and as an hypothesis is entirely inadequate. The only philosophical explanation is found in the fact that man knows himself as persisting one and the same through all changes, and that this knowledge of himself is presupposed in the unity and continuity of all knowledge. This knowledge is included, at least as virtual or implicit consciousness, in all knowledge whatever. 2. IiidividuaUty and otherness or alterity. We have been considering difference of qualities or powers in the same being. There is also the distinction of being from other beings, not merely by qualities or powers, but also by being itself. As the knowledge of individuality and identity originates in the knowledge of self, the idea of otherness originates in our knowledge of beings not ourselves. In perceiving an outward object I know it as a being acting on me or on which I react. The perceptive intuition pre- sents the " matter" or object of the knowledge, and the reason sees it in its rational " form," as the power of a being that is not me ; it is another being. When a man knows himself as J he may know another person as Thou. In logic an individual is a completely determinate being. It may belong to a class, but it has peculiarities by which it is distinguished from all other individuals of its own or any other class. In logic two beings completely determinate and just alike would coincide and become one ; because logic, in forming its general notions, recognizes nothing but the attributes and attains nothing but an idea or notion. Hence Leibnitz insisted that no two things can be exactly alike ;* confounding the logical notion with the being, and imagining that the beings would coincide and become one as the logical notions do. It is one of innu- merable instances of philosophers running into profoimd errors by con- founding logical abstractions with concrete beings. But, as we have 11 Nouveaux Essais, Avant-Propos. 162 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 163 seen, the objects of concrete thought are beings in their modes of exist- ence. An iudividual is not only completely determinate, but is also a completely determinate being. And if the attributes of two beings were precisely alike, they would still be separate as two distinct beings — separate by the whole breadth of being. The ultimate units of all thought are of three classes: — Finite per- sons ; Material beings, whatever the ultimate units of matter may be ; God the absolute and unconditioned One. 3. Number. The idea of number originates from the knowledge of beings as individuals. They are thus known as one and another. Not attending to their peculiar attributes, but simply to the individuals, we know thepi as distinct beings, one and another and another. Man then learns to distinguish one from two, two from three, as groups of different numbers come before him ; and to these groups he gives names, one, two, three and so on. When familiar with the names, he comes to abstract the beings, and the empty forms of number remain ; which he designates by symbols. He then invents some method of notation by the multiples of some unit-number, by which he is able to designate large numbers and to calculate arithmetically. Tlie knowledge of number is given in the virtual or implicit con- sciousness so soon as a man knows himself as an individual and distin- guishes himself from another. But the mind attains to the explicit apprehension of the empty forms of number and learns to name them only by a slow and difficult process. Children must have visible objects to count for a long time before they can reckon by the abstract forms and names. The capacity for arithmetic is comparatively late in its development. And anthropologists tell us of savages who have attained the idea of a divinity before they could count beyond the number of their fingers. Some philosophers have proposed the theory that the idea of number originates from the idea of succession in time. This theory is not satis- factory as an explanation of the idea, and is not supported by any known facts. III. Extension in Space. The third mode of existence. In perceptive intuition we have knowledge of bodies extended in space. We know our own bodies posited in space and moving in it. Also by handling bodies I know them as extended. Also by moving my body from place to place or extending my hand from one body to another I have knowledge of distance and direction. Thus in perceptive intuition I have immediate knowledge of extension in three dimensions, of distance and of direction. If now in thought I abstract the body from its place, void place is left ; I cannot think it away. It is empty room for a body. In passing from place to place, I find extension, as room for body, continuous, and since all place that I observe is continuous I may infer by the Baconian induction that room for bodies extends continuous in the three dimen- sions to the farthest stars. So far our knowledge by perceptive intuition and our reflection on it extends. Now by rational intuition we know that room for bodies is continuous, immovable and illimitable. It is impossible to think it absent any- where ; it is impossible to think that it moves on itself or is in any way chann-ed ; and it is impossible to think it limited, because it cannot be bounded except by further room. We have also all the rational intui- tions which are the basis of geometry. Thus we have the knowledge of space as reason knows it in its "forms" of universal and necessary truth. Space as thus known is not a pure subjective form of thought, but is a form of things. The particular reality which gives it content is the extension of bodies in three dimensions, their distance and direction as intuitively perceived and all that we learn of the same in thought. By rational intuition this reality is known in its universal significance as continuous, immovable, unchangeable and illimitable room for being. Yet, as known in rational intuition, space has no significance except in relation to bodies and cannot even be thought except as room for them. The knowledge of body is first ; the knowledge of space is derived from it. This is the clear idea of space as it lies unvexed by metaphysics in the mind. And the result of metaphysical thought must still be that space is continuous, unlimited room for bodies, and thus has reality only as related to bodies or at least to the possibility of their existence. The doctrine that space is merely a subjective form of sense is con- trary to all consciousness. Our consciousness that our bodies exist in space, not space in us, is as decisive as consciousness can be. The denial of it is, as Spencer says, " as repugnant to common sense as any propo- sition that can be framed."* The denial is not demanded by Keason to meet any necessity of thought. On the contrary, the denial of the external reality of space and the affirmation that it is a form of sense within us involve complete egoistic idealism, according to which the world and all in it are merely somebody's subjective impressions and every man has a universe of his own in his own mind ; and to every man every other man with his peculiar universe is but a subjective idea. This theory of the subjectivity of space is a part of Kant's phe- nomenalism ; if true, it necessitates phenomenalism and issues in com- plete dogmatic agnosticism. If space and time have no objective reality, all that we suppose to exist in space and time, whether subject * The Last Postulate, Westminster Rev., October, 1853. 1G4 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. ■ or object, is also unreal. But space is a form of things ; as such, while objectively real to us, it is a form of thought archetypal in the Absolute Reason ; and equally are things themselves, with all their principles and laws, archetypal in the Eternal Reason. It has been supposed that the belief that space has but three dimen- sions is an ultimate datura of consciousness. But among the strange novelties of our day is a school of mathematicians, of whom the late Prof Clifford was one, who claim to have discovered a fourth dimension of space. It is evident, however, that in thinking and writing of space with four dimensions or with manifold dimensions, these mathematicians are governed, like the rest of us, by the inevitable ideas and axioms of space with three dimensions. They speak of radii of circles and other straight lines, as if straight lines in the sense in which we use the ex- pression, were known to exist in this inconceivable kind of space. They use the principles true only of space with three dimensions in proving that it has four or more. They speak of curved, spherical, non-homal- oidal space as distinguished from space with three dimensions, which they designate as homaloidal or fiat ; as if space were itself a body con- tained in space ; as if in fact space with four dimensions were a sphere or curved body of some sort contained in space with three dimensions; for it is only in the latter that we have any knowledge of a curve or sphere. Figure, position, distance, direction, so far as the words have any meaning to us, are conditioned on space with three dimensions and are contained in it. They have no meaning when predicated of space itself Space has no figure, position, distance or direction. In solving geometrical problems by algebraic methods we sometimes reach an unthinkable and impossible result, as the square root of minus a; but solving the problem by the geometrical method, the significance of the result is made plain, as that the line is produced in the oppo- site direction. The hypothesis of a fourth dimension of space is pro- posed to explain certain unthinkable and impossible conclusions of mathematical demonstrations. The mathematical reasoning issuing in the conclusion may be correct and the conclusion necessary from the definitions assumed. If in the progress of knowledge we become able to look at the problem from a new point of view or to solve it by a new process, the conclusion may become intelligible and the contradic- tion disappear. But the hypothesis of a fourth dimension of space to explain it is not scientific ; it is the farthest possible from a vera eausaj such as is admissible in a scientific hypothesis ; and it explains nothing ; for a fourth dimension of space is itself unthinkable, and the affirma- tion that it exists is simply nonsense, words without meaning, like the old scholastic question, " An chimaera bombitans in vacuo possit come- dere secundas intentiones?" BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 165 IV. Duration in Time. The fourth mode of existence. In perceptive intuition we know ourselves as persisting in successive acts ; thus we know the duration of existence and the succession of events. If we think away the being that is persistent, there remains the time in which he was existing. That cannot be thought away. Having thus the idea of time, in rational intuition we know that it must be continuous, immovable and illimitable. There must always be time for beings to act. The development of this idea is entirely ana- loo-ous to the development of the idea of space and needs not be further considered. It may be added, however, that the distinction is not properly between time and eternity, but between time measured by successive events of existence and time not thus measured. It is not time that flows through successive events, but successive events which flow in time. " Sur les mondes detruits dort le Temps immobile." Time is commonly identified with life or history measured by events, and thus conceived as distinct from eternity. There is an eternity past and an eternity to come, and time, in which we live and act, is conceived as lying between them like a strait between two oceans. But the time of our lives might be better illustrated as a current in the ocean, which flows in its own particular course, while the ocean re- mains the same ; and the current as it flows swells with the ceaseless tides and heaves with the ceaseless billows of the unchanging ocean in which it always is. V. Limitation and Quantity. The fifth mode of existence. Quantity is predicable, not directly of beings, but of their duration, extension and power. The idea arises in the perception of the limita- tion of duration, extension or power, and of the different degrees of limitation, as more or less. In lifting weights I find my power limited, and limited in different degrees. In moving my hand along lines or surfaces I find them limited and in diflerent degrees. If I hold a weight in each hand I perceive that they are equal or unequal. K I see two straight rods side by side I perceive that they are equal or unequal in length. Thus arises the idea of quantity and of equality or inequality. We are then able to adopt some determinate quantity as a unit for measuring other quantities. VI. Difference and Relation. The sixth Mode of Existence. The foregoing are modes of the existence of beings in their individu- ality. But beings do not exist isolated ; they are in unity with other beings in a system. The peculiarity by which they are distinguished we call difference, and the reality by which they are in unity we call 166 THE PHILOSOPHIC.iL BASIS OF THEISM. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 167 relation. Difference and relation are observed modes of the existence of beings. We know beings as distinct and different, and yet a^ in relation, because they exist distinct and different, and yet in relation. It is because beings exist thus that all thought must consist of appre- hension, differentiation and integration. Difference and relation are really two modes of existence ; but they are so constantly associated in thought that it is convenient to consider them together. Beings are distinguished and related in each of the modes of exist- ence already noticed. In power uniformly manifested as quality, we have likeness and unlikeness. In the power of knowing and thinkin«>- we have the relation of subject and object. In the energy of transitive cause, we have the relation of interaction ; in space, relations of distance and direction ; in time, relations of contemporaneousness, and of before and after ; in quantity and number, relations of equality, of more or less, of ratio and proportion. There are also distinctions and relations in those forms of power manifested in organic life, as of parent and offspring, and particularly in sensitivity. In personality we find dis- tinctions and relations transcending all that have been mentioned, and characterizing the rational and moral system, in which the interaction is by moral influence and under moral law. The full significance of these is dependent on the rational intuitions and the ultimate realities known through them. These differences and relations are primarily presented in intuition. Thought does not originate them; it simply traces them out in the unelaborated nebulous matter of intuition. I see at a glance the dif- ference between white and black ; if not, no thinking could ever have revealed it to me. In like manner I perceive resemblance. If two silver dimes lie before me, they are both present to my vision and I perceive their likeness. The resemblance is a reality presented in the intuition, of which otherwise we could have no knowledge or conception. It is objected that this process implies memory, comparison and judg- ment. The objection has force against Reid s theory that we perceive the minima vmbilia in succession, but is fiitile against the psychological fact, now generally admitted, that we both perceive and attend to several objects at once. In like manner I perceive intuitively the marbles in my hand as many and as all ; or the uuequal height of a man and boy who stand side by side. Nor can we discriminate by any kind of differ- ence, or comprehend in any kind of relation whicli has not first been known in intuition. In thought we trace out the differences and rela- tions given in intuition and so discriminate the beings in their differences and comprehend them in their relations. The qualities and powers of a being are not properly said to be themselves in relation to the being ; because they are of the peculiar essence of the being as a completely determinate individual. In thou"-ht we can abstract quality from substance ; and so, accordantly with formal logic, it is common to speak of the relation of substance and quality. But in concrete or realistic thought substance and quality are inseparable. Substance is nothing without quality, and quality is nothing without substance. Hence the qualities and powers of a being are no^ really in relation to the being. In speaking of the differences and relations of beings we assume the distinctness of beings as indi- viduals and speak of their differences from and relations to one another. Difference and relation have no reality except as the differ- ence and relation of being. A numerical total must be distinguished from a complex whole of interacting beings, as a steam-engine, a solar system, a family, a nation. These are unities by the relation of interacting powers ; not mere nu- merical totals in which the units have no content and in the totality simply count so many. Of a numerical total the maxim is always true that the w hole is equal to the sum of all the parts ; but this is not true of complex wholes which consist of beings related in unity by interaction of power. A steam-engine, a watch, a family, is far other than the numerical sum of all the parts. AVe see here the fallacy of those philosophers who accept the maxim as declaring the funda- mental constitution of the universe and think they prove the Absolute Being unknowable because they cannot construct it under this maxim ; or who propound the numerical triad, unity, plurality, totality, as the basis of all the laws and the limitation of all the matter of thought : or who deny the knowledge of the Absolute because it cannot be found by counting or by the arithmetical rule of addition. These are ex- amples of the evils brought on philosophy and theology by substituting empty abstractions for beings as the objects thought. By tracing out the differences and relations presented in intuition and inferring others not perceived the mind distinguishes beings as personal and impersonal and comprehends them all in these two classes. It knows all impersonal beings in the unity of a Cosmos or system of Nature, all personal beings in the unity of a Moral System and all finite beings in the unity of a universe in its relation to God. I 31. Inferences. I. Knowledge, at its beginning in perceptive intuition, is ontological ; that is, it is knowledge of being. Ontological knowledge arises at the beginning of knowledge, in per- ceptive intuition, not in its advanced stages in the knowledge of Absolute Being. This is the critical point in defending the leality of knowledge againsi: agnosticism. It is sometimes thought that the ontological ques- i6S THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 169 tion meets us only in the question whether the knowledge of absolute being is possible. It is really the question whether the knowledge of any being is possible. And this resolves itself into the question whether knowledge begins as the knowledge of being. If it does not begin thus, then the knowledge of being cannot come in afterwards. We have already (k'lnonstrated that if knowledge begins as the knowledge only of sensations and impressions it can never issue in the knowledge of being. But it has been shown that knowledge is ontological at its beginning ; then it goes on continually as the knowledge of being and must issue in the knowledge that Absolute Being exists ; it continues to be the know- ledge of being in its regress through conditions and causes up to God. Comte in his Positive Philosophy affirms that, if it is once admitted that we have knowledge of cause or force as distinct from the i)henomcna of motion, we must eventually admit that there is a God. II. In man's perceptive intuition of himself and his environment his knowledge begins as knowledge of personal and impersonal beings. The two classes of persons and things are discriminated and comprehended in thought. But the beings distinguished and their distinctive attri- butes are perceived in the very beginning of knowledge, and equally in all subsequent perceptions. They are presented, as has been shown, in one and the same intuition. Mr. Mansel objects that consciousness is an attribute of the Ego, and in the consciousness of self the knowledge of being arises ; therefore a body cannot be known as a being because, in denying that it is con- scious, " I deny tlie only form in which unity and substance ar3 known to me."* The objection would be valid if my knowledge that the out- ward object is a being w'ere an inference from my knowledge of myself; but it is the immediate perception of power acting on me, and the rational intuition that all power is exerted by a being. The objection would be valid if the outward object were only known negatively as a not-me, as J. G. Fichte teaches ; but it is known positively in my know^- ledge of my own body and the powder impinging on it. Moreover, if every peculiarity of myself is an essential attribute of being, then necessarily I am the only being in the universe. We may know beings in different modes of existence or endowed with different attributes, just as we know dogs of different characteristics. Phenomenalism has been excluded by the fact that knowledge Ls ontological in its beginning in perceptive intuition. Now Materialism is excluded by the fact that know^ledge in its beginning in perceptive intuition is the knowledge of self, endowed w^itli the attributes of a per- ♦ Frulegomena Logica, p. 125. gonal being ; and Idealism is excluded by the fact that in the same act of perceptive intuition man knows outw ard bodies occupying space and moving in it, and endowed with the attributes of impersonal being. And the knowledge of each is positive knowledge in one and the same mental act, so that if the knowledge of either is unreal the knowledge of the other is unreal also. Kant recognizes the " I think," the synthetic unity of all conscious- ness, as going along with all knowledge, but only as a phenomenal unity of apperceptions separated by an impassable gulf from the real being. Therefore his Ego, Cosmos and God remain mere ideas, necessary indeed, but void of content. To escape from this phenomenalism, J. G. Fichte starts with the knowledge of self as real being. He teaches that things are really and in themselves what they are necessarily thought to be by rational beings, and that therefore, to every rational Ego of w hich a finite mind can conceive, that is the truth of reality which is neces- sarily true to thought. But he teaches that the matter of knowledge is itself given by the same synthetic activity of the intellect which, according to Kant, gives the forms of sense and the categories of the understanding; that the outward object is known only as a negation or not-me, not as a power positively acting on the sensorium and revealing a being that causes it. Thus, as Kant himself suggested, Fichte's attempt to attain a knowledge of the world from self-consciousness without empirically given matter, gave only a shadowy and ghostly impression instead of real being. And in all his later modifications of his philosophy he cannot transcend nor escape from his primitive ideal- ism. His God is the moral order of the universe, his universal or absolute Ego relapses into an idea coming to consciousness of itself in individual form in man. Hegel seems often close to the most fundamental comprehension of the true reality. For instance, with him the antithesis betw^een phenome- non and essence, betw^een what appears and what is, is only an anti- thesis of two human modes of conception which are afterwards identifie-v^ in a synthesis. This synthesis is the reality ; the phenomenon is pervaded with the essence and is thus its entire and adequate manifestation. Again, according to Hegel, there is one spiritual being to whom man is related, not merely as a part of the world, but as participating some- how in the self-consciousness of that being— a mode of presentation which involves Pantheism, though suggestive of the truth that man is so constituted and so related to God that the normal development of his o^vn consciousness insures his consciousness of the presence of God. Again he presents the great truth that the Absolute Eeason reveals or expresses itself in the natural worlds and in the rational and moral systems of finite persons. But here again his method of presentation 170 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THPHSM. is pantheistic. The Ahsohite underlies the finite universe of matter and mind, not dynamically and rationally, but as their Substance, itself coming to consciousness in man. It exerts, or thrusts itself forth ad extra in nature ; it " externalizes " itself, " becomes other than itself." By means of a progressive development of nature from the lowest to the highest stages the Absolute Reason returns from this " otherness " or '* i .^,nn. hominei."* Of this type was the pan- theistic philosophy of Germany, which developed the errors, but not the truths, of Kant's system. Accordingly we find L H. Fichte elaborately proving the reality of finite things, though, like Lazarus, with the gravoclothes of the pantheistic philosophy still entangling his steps, f ^ii . Mulford, on the contrary, follows in the wake of the German Fan- theism : " Being is of itself, in finite conditions, a vacant phase of thought." " The empty notion of being as derived from finite exist- ences."! But if the knowledge of being is not given in intuition it is impossible fur thought to create it. If we do not know real being either in ourselves or the objects about us, we can never know^ the being of God. A world of " vacant phases of thought," the thinker himself being one of them, can never carry the thought to the being of God. The word being has been often used in philosophy to denote any object of thought of which it can be affirmed that it is. Being then w^ould denote tliought, feeling, motion, distance, relations, conditions as * Quoted, Mansel, Limits of Religious Tliought, 289. t Theistische Weltansicht, ?? 30, 31, pp. 108-114. X Republic of God, pp. 2 and 34. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 175 well as persons and things. Thus including all persons and things, all qualities, acts, conditions and relations, it has no distinctive and essen- tial content by which it can be distinguished from anything else ; it is completely indeterminate. It is in fact, as Hobbes called it, an hypos- tasizing of the copula is, which denotes the connection of any predicate with any subject. Logically the inference follows that being, since it is entirely indeterminate, is the same as nothing. Many using the word in this latitude, still attach to it, wittingly or unwittingly, its legitimate and distinctive meaning, and conclude that being in every sense is a non-entity. Mr. Mulford seems to have followed this track to his He- gelian conclusion : " In the process of logic through finite conditions, the notion of being is an empty phase of tliought, and is resolved through a logical necessity into mere nothingness ; but the notion of being derived from finite conditions is not to be applied to the being of God." * Like Hegel himself, he here identifies the world-process with a subjective process of logic, and the world of mind and matter itself and all which it contains with a subjective logical notion. And throughout, Mr. Mulford identifies the necessary passing in human thought from the finite to the infinite, with the objective dependence of God's being on the finite and its subsequence to it. Those who deny that finite persons and things are beings, argue from the fiict that they are derived and dependent. This assumes that eter- nity and self-existence are essential to being. This is not true. So long as I exist I know^ myself as being, whether my existence began lately and will soon end or I exist forever. We must have the idea of being before we can consider its origin and dependence, its finiteness or its infinitude, its conditionateness or its unconditionateness. IV. Being is not an attribute but the subject of attributes. It is subject and attribute in synthesis; or since the being appears in its attributes, we say that being is the real and the phenomenal in syn- thesis. This is in contradiction of Kant's antithesis of the real and phenomenal. Much of the confusion in discussing being arises from regarding it as an attribute. But I do not predicate being of myself as an at- tribute ; the being is myself, the subject of all my attributes. When I say, John is a being, I do not predicate being of him as an attribute, but simply aflfirm that he is one of the class of beings ; just as when I say John is a man, I do not affirm that man is an attribute of John. Being is not a name of the sum total of all attributes. For if 60 it is entirely indeterminate and equivalent to nonentity. Hegel in the beginning of the logic says we cannot think less * Page 212. 176 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. about any tiling than when we predicate of it being; that is, when we say it is. Being he regards here as the noun corresponding to the copula is, and denoting all possible predicates. Hence it is entirely indeterminate. But being is not an attribute but the subject of at- tributes. The affirmation respecting any object that it is being is not a weak affirmation ; it affirms that it is the subject of attributes. In this affirmation I also predicate of the object of thought, those attributes which are common to all beings, whether pei-sons or things, whether finite beings or the Absolute being. These I suppose to be power, unity and identity. When I say of any thing that it is a being, I affirm that it is a subject of attributes, among which must always be power, unity and identity ; it is endowed with power and persists as one and the same being. This does not prechide attributes peculiar to itself, any more than the fact that a horse is an animal, precludes qualities peculiar to the horse. Descartes held that there is nothing common to matter and mind; that communication between them is possible only by the incessant interaction of God. But if the im- pa. determinatio negatio €5«," is commonly attributed to Spi- noza. I have not, however, noticed it formally stated in his writings. In letter 40 (to an unknown correspondent) he says : " If the nature of that being is determined and conceived as determined, that nature is conceived as not existing beyond those bounds (terrainos) ; which is contrary to its definition " as infinite. Evidently he de- ludes himself here with the conception of a body bounded in space, which necessarily excludes all bodies beyond its bounds. In letter 41 he says that determination denotes nothing positive but only the privation of existence, and therefore whatever exists cannot be determinate ; which would imply that it cannot exist in any definite mode. Elsewhere also his reasoning rests on the assumption that the maxim is true. But he seems to be inconsistent with it when he ascribes attributes and modes oi existence to the one and only substance and so identifies it with the universe; and when he determines it by his definition, " Xatura naturans et natura naturata in identitate est Dens." And Proposition IX. of the Ethics, already cited, seems to enunciate a principle contradictory of the maxim. BEING AND ITS MODES OF EXISTENCE. 179 speculative ingenuity in every age. For it not only addresses itself to the desire of knowledge which the greatest masters of ancient thought believed to be innate in our species, but it adds to the ordinary strength of this motive the inducement of a human and personal in- terest. A genuine devotion to truth is, indeed, seldom partial in its aims, but while it prompts to expatiate over the fair fields of outward observation, forbids to neglect the study of our own faculties. Even in ages the most devoted to material interests, some portion of the current of thought has been reflected inwards, and the desire to comprehend that by which all else is comprehended, has only been baffled in order to be renewed. It is probable that this pertinacity of effort would not have been maintained among sincere inquirei-s after truth, had the con- viction been general that such inquiries are hopelessly barren." * ♦Laws of Thought, p. 400. lU \ht CHAPTER VIII. THE TEUE- THE FIRST ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION: NORM OR STANDARD OF THINKING AND KNOWING. ? 32. The five ultimate realities known through rational Intuition. In rational intuition the mind comes in sight of reality of which neither reflective thought nor presentative intuition can of themselves give any knowledge. The ultimate genera of the realities thus given I call the Ultimate Realities known through Rational Intuition, and our ideas of them I call Ultimate Ideas of Reason. They are the Noumena in the true sense of the word. This word has, however, been so ap- propriated by false philosophy, that it is difficult to divest it of the erroneous meaning thus attached to it and I do not attempt to re- claim it. The Ultimate Realities known in rational intuition, which I shall consider, are five : — The True, the contrary of which is the Absurd ; The Right, the contrary of which is the Wrong ; The Perfect, the contrary of which is the Imperfect ; The Good determined by the standard of Reason as having true worth or as worthy of the pursuit and enjoyment of a rational being, the contrary of which is the Unworthy, the Worthless, or the Evil. The Absolute or Unconditioned, the contrary of which is the Finite or Conditioned. The four first are the Norms or Standards of Reason and are classed together. They are the basis of Mathematics, of Logic, and of Specula- tive, Ethical, ^Esthetic and Teleological Philosophy. The fifth as the Unconditioned and All-conditioning One stands by itself and is the basis of Theology. The four first are norms or standards by which Reason estimates and judges beings in all their modes and actions. The True is the rational norm or standard of thinking and knowing ; the Right is the norm of efficient action, personal or impei-sonal ; the Perfect, of the creations uf thought and their realization by action , the Good, of all 180 FIRST ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE TRUE. 181 that is acquired, possessed and enjoyed. The third of Kant's three questions, "What can I know? "What shall I do? "What may I hope?" must be divided into two: "What may I become?" "What may I acquire and enjoy?" The four norms correspond to these four questions ; the True is the rational norm or standard of what a man may know, the Right, of what he may do, the Perfect, of what he may become, and the Good, of what he may acquire and enjoy. We also apply these standards to nature. In so doing we assume that nature itself is the expression of Reason and therefore can be judged by the standards of Reason:— the True, the Right, the Perfect, and the Good. If Nature is not the expression of rational thought there is no propriety nor significance in judging it by the standards of rational thought. When we judge of nature by these norms or standards of Reason the questions are :— Does it express or reveal truth ? Is it ordered under law ? Does it realize or tend to realize ideals of perfection? Is it productive of good? The ancient classification, the True, the Beautiful and the Good, is inadequate. I have substituted the Perfect instead of the Beautiful as a more correct designation of that idea and comprehending all that belongs under it, of which visible beauty is but a part. I have added The Right. Plato, to whom this classification of the True, the Beau- tiful and the Good is commonly ascribed, attempted to develop the idea of right from the good, and sometimes seems to resolve virtue into ex- pedielicy. The idea of the right, however, appears sometimes instead of the true. Pythagoras is said to have discoursed of the just, (dixdtojv) the beautiful and the good ; and in Plato's Parmenides, Socrates and Parmenides converse of the just or right, (dtxato,) the beautiful and the good. The idea of the right cannot be developed from the idea of the good and is certainly entitled, if any thing is, to a place among the fundamental realities known in rational intuition. I call attention again to the fact that rational intuition does not give the knowledge of being, but only of the unchanging forms in which, because the universe is grounded in Reason, all beings exist, and m which therefore Reason, when they are brought under its knowledge, must know them as existing. When any object, thought as a bemg existing thus or thus, is brought to the notice of Reason, Reason must estimate it according to its unchanging rational forms, as true or absurd, as right or wrong, as perfect or imperfect, as good or evil, and as finite or absolute. The intuition that Absolute Being must exist presupposes the kno^dedge of beings. Beings are already known to exist ; tnen Reason sees that a Being that is absolute and unconditioned must exist. And again I call attention to the error of abstract and scho- lastic thought, that because our knowledge of finite beings precedes 182 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. lit HI If t our knowledge of the Absolute Being, therefore finite beings must exist before the Absolute Being exists, that the Absolute Being is dependent on the finite, and man has created God. This error is possible only when the methods of concrete and scientific thinking are abandoned, and the notions and processeses of formal logic are mistaken for the beings and actions of the real world- ^33. The first Norm or Standard of reason: the true: The Norm or Standard of thinking and knowing. I. The True is the name of the ultimate genus which includes all the universal truths or primitive principles known in rational intuition, the contraries of which are absurd ; they are norms or standards regidative of all thinking and knowing. These truths must be distinguished from factSy which are enunciations of the knowledge of particular realities (facta). It must be remembered, however, that this (lit?tinction is not carefully made in the common use of language, scientific or popular. The enunciation of a thought which is the intellectual equivalent of reality, particular or universal, is a truth. We therefore have frequent occasion to distinguish them by a qualifying word or phrase, as univer- sal truth or truth of reason as distinguished from a factual or empirical truth. The word truth is also used to denote both the subjective knowledge and the objective reality of which the knowledge is the intellectual equivalent. The truths of reason are not merely subjective beliefs, but are objectively real in the sense that they regulate all thought and energy. The principle of causation is not merely a belief of my mind, it is a law of the universe. The correlation of truth and reality appears in the interchange of the words, true and real, as true gold, true piety, the true Gou, The English word truth (troio, troivth), gives prominence to the sub- jective belief The Greek dXijiUia, the unconcealed, gives prominence to the objective reality. TT The truths of Reason have to us objective reality as principles and laws of things, because they are, as already set forth, constituent elements of rationality eternal in the absolute and supreme Reason. This accords with the Platonic philosophy, modified as it necessarily must be by Christian Theism. The ideas exist eternal and archety|)al in God the supreme reason. The rational ideas of the True, the Right, the Perfect and the Good, and all forms and ideals compatible with them are eternal in the mind of God as an ideal universe before it exists as the universe which we perceive. By his power acting under the guidance of wisdom and love he gives expression to his archetypal FIRST ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE TRUE. 183 thoughts in space and time, and under the other limitations of finite Things. He also gives existence to finite beings constituted rational like himself who, as in their normal development they come to know them- selves, know the rational image of God. Here arises a moral system, in which God makes still higher and grander expression of his archetypal thoughts. . . Plato sometimes attains this conception. He recognizes the prmci- ples of reason as the remembrance of what the soul saw in some former state of existence when in company with God, truths in which God is and in the knowledge of which he is God.* The soul knows God in these truths as the eye by a ray of light knows the Sun. Nor, argues Plato, would this be possible if the eye were not the one of the senses most like the sun.f This often quoted observation, that the eye's power of seeing depends on its likeness to the sun, is not understood in its full significance unless we remember that the ancients supposed that the eye when turned towards the sun was, as it were, kindled by it and emitted from itself the rays by which we see. So the rational spirit, because it is itself reason, sees the light of reason in God. Cicero also says that reason in man is " participata similitudo Rationis a3tern?e" and " vincu- lum Dei et hominis." Augustine teaches the same. "Being thus admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my guide ; and I was able to do so because Thou wast my helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, (such as it was,) even above my soul, above my mind, the Light unchangeable. . ... He who knows the truth, knows what that Light is."t Says Thom^ Aquinas : " When we say that we see all things in God and accordino- to him judge of all things, we mean that we know and judge all thin-s bv participation in his light. For the natural light of reason is itse/a certain participation of the divine light."§ The doctrme that we see all things in God, whatever mistiness and error accompany it as taucht by ^Nlalebranche and other writers, has at least the significance given to it bv Thomas ; that man's reason sees the light of the universal reason ; that\vhat is the True, the Right, the Perfect, the Good which has true worth, to the reason of man, is the True, the Right, the Perfect the Good which has true worth, to the universal reason of God ; that we know truly even particular objects only as existing m a rational system, and we know them in a system as we know them ordered m unity in accordance with rational truths, laws, ideals and ends. This doctrine that man knows universal principles of reason which * Phcedrus, 249. t Republic, B. VI. 508. X Confessions, B. VII. Chap. X. 16. I Summa Theologise, Part I. Qusest. XII. Art. XL I 184 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. are eternal in God the Supreme Reason is not a flight of swarming enthusiasm, but is accordant with common sense, is the conclusion of the most profound thinkers in all ages, is the necessary inference from the most sober investigation of the rise and processes of knowledge and the laws of thought, and is itself the basis, whether recognized or not, of the possibility of science. They are the flighty and heedless thinkers who deny this. So in speaking of Anaxagoras, Aristotle said that, " the men who first announced that Reason (voo<;) was the cause of the world and of all orderly arrangement in nature no less than in living bodies, appeared like a man in his sober senses in comparison with those who before had been speaking at random and in the dark." * * Quoted by Prof. Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History in France ;\ii i iiermany, p. 90. CHAPTER IX. THE RIGHT OR LAW: THE SECOND ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION : THE NORM OR STANDARD OF EFFICIENT ACTION. §34. General Significance. The principles of reason and all necessary inferences from them when known as regulative of power are called laws. They are laws to power of every kind, intellectual, physical and voluntary. I. They are laws to intellectual and physical power. 1. To intellectual and physical power they are laws in the sense that they determine what it is possible or impossible for power to effect. In these cases the relation of the truth to the power as its law is expressed by the verbs, must, can, cannot, and by the nouns, necessity, possibility, impossibility. In this sense these truths are laws of thought. The conclusion of a demonstration in geometry is, " It must be so " : it is impossible with the demonstration in mind to think the contrary to be true. In the same sense they are laws to physical power. When we see a stone moving we know that it 7nust have had a cause, it is impossible it should move without a cause. A builder cannot make a structure stable, if it is not constructed according to the principles of geometry and mechanics ; it must fall. A projectile of a certain weight propelled by a certain force at a certain angle of elevation and meeting a certain resistance from the air mmt de- scribe a certain curve in its flight. All instances are summed up in the maxim, " The absurd cannot be real." No power can give reality to that which contradicts reason. Whatever is real is capable of reason- able explanation. 2. Conformity of the action of intellectual or physical power to the truths of reason as law, is called right, non-conformity is called ivrong. A bo/s solution of an algebraic problem is right; a steam-engine works right, that is, its action is what it must be if in all its parts it is constructed according to the principles of mechanics. 3. The phrase '" law of nature " is commonly used to denote an observed uniform sequence of antecedent and consequent. This, how- ever, IS not a regulative principle of reason, but merely a generalized 185 i » 186 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. fact. We do not say, " It must be so," but only that, so far as observed, it uniformly is so. The word hw is here used in a secondary sense ; it does not denote a true law of reason, and we are not concerned with it in the present discussion. It is important, however, to note the dis- tinction ; because observed uniform sequence is not only dignified with the name of law, but also deified as the cause which sufficiently accounts for the existence and order of the universe. 4. Some laws of nature, which are usually regarded as merely uniform sequences, do in reality rest on rational principles from which they derive all their significance as laws. The law^ of gravitation is com- monly spoken of as expressing merely an observed uniform sequence, but in truth this law is not known by experience but is deduced from an a priori mathematical principle. The same is true of the law of the dispersion of light. Also, when science carries an observed sequence beyond the observed fiicts, the induction rests entirely on self-evident intuition of reason. Also, the laws of mechanics rest partly on the law of causation and partly on mathematical principles both of which are first principles of reason. II. The [)rinciples of reason and all necessary inferences from them are also law^s to the will. 1. To the will they are laws, in the sense that they declare what the will in its free action ought to do, what is its duty or obligation. To the will the law does not determine what it is possible or impossible for it to effect, nor declare necessity or what the will must do. Every man is conscious that in the exercise of free will he can disobey law and can exert all his energies to accomplish ends contrary to reason ; yet every man is still conscious that the truth of reason is a law which he ought to obey. 2. Conformity of the action of the will with law is right, its non- conformity is wrong. 3. Truth known as law^ to a free will is moral law, and conformity of a will to law is right in the distinctively moral or ethical meaning of the word. ill. The law to intellectual power, the law to physical power, and the law to free will have the common characteristic of law in that each is a truth of reason known as a law to the action of power. They are the three classes of rational laws or laws of reason. The third differs from the first and second in that it is addressed to rational beings having free w^ill, it commands action and requires obedience, it imposes obliga- tion or duty, and it may be obeyed or disobeyed ; but it brings with it no necessity of action. It is moral law. On the contrary the first and second are not laws to free will ; they utter no command, they impose no obligation or duty, they can neither be obeyed nor disubeyed, they SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 187 carry with them simply necessity. They are not moral law. The word ricrht 'IS applied in each case has the common meaning of the conformity of action to law ; but right in its ethical sense denotes distinctively the conformity of the action of a rational being with law by his own free choice of ends and determination of actions. Law and Ri^dit have moral or ethical significance only as applied to rational beings'determining by free will their own ends and actions. Reason knows itself as regulative of all power. In respect to rational free-agents reason knows itself as having authority to give law, to com- mand obedience, to impose obligation. §35. The Ethical Significance of Right and Law. I The ethical idea of right and law arises in the rational intuition that I ought to act reasonably, that is, in accordance with the truths of reason ; or, more generally formulated, "A rational being ought to obey reason," or, " what is true to the reason is a law to the will. In this intuition the person comes to the knowledge of a new reality which is expressed in the word ought and to which the nouns corresponding are obligation, duty, law. This new reality is that he exists under law that the universal principles and the necessary inferences from them, which he knows as truths, are laws which he is under obliga- tion to obey. Like other intuitions, this one is practically operative on his action before he formulates it in reflective thought or even recognizes it as a judgment. But as he reflects he finds that what he knows as true to his reason he knows to be a law to action; he finds himself saying I ought, and learns the sigmficancc of obliga- tion and duty; he finds himself approx^ng some actions because con- formed to principles which he knows as true ; and this common quality of these acts he calls right, and the contrary quality he calls wrong. Thus the ideas of right and wrong rise directly from rational intuition. Without rational intuition man could never have known the difference of right and wrong or had any idea of law, duty and obligation. II. Significance of ethical terms. 1. Ought, obligation, daty. Like all words designating knowled^ cfinq) would determine it. On either side of this mean, in excess or defect, lies vice," (B. II. chap. vi. 15, 16.) In defining what the chief good is, he says, it cannot be happiness merely, because men derive happiness from different and incompatible sources. He defines the chief good as determined by the standard of reason ; " An active condition of the soul guided by or not without reason " ; or more fully ; " An active condition of the soul in accordance with its best and most perfect virtue (dperrjv) in a complete (or perfect) life (h ^iu) r£>icitJ).f " Therefore, though Aristotle teaches that virtue consists in attaining the highest good, yet his ethics is a system of intuitive morals having little in com- mon with utilitarianism, because he determines what the highest good is by the standard of reason and declares the dependence of ethical distinctions on that standard. In the Euthyphro Socrates says that a quality or act " is loved by the gods because it is holy ; it is not holy * Nicomachean Ethics, Book II. chap. ii. 2. t B. I. chap. vii. 14, 16. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. I97 because it is loved by the gods." (10.) And yet, though these philoso- phers deny that the will even of the gods can originate moral dis- tinctions, Mr. Spencer classes them with Hobbes as teaching that moral distinctions are created by the enactment of the State. * This is the more surprising because Aristotle explicitly distinguishes in political ethics between that which is just by nature and therefore has every- where the same force, and that which is enjoined by enactment ; and notes with disapproval the opinion of some that the latter is the only just and unjust.f And Plato repeatedly argues against this error as held by Protagoras and others whom he mentions in different dia- logues.J Christianity, in its historical revelation of atonement for sin through the humiliation and suffering of Christ, brings to the front the fact that law is neither created, annulled or changed by will, not even by the fiat of God's will ; but that God's action in the forgiveness of sin must declare the immutability of law as really as in the punishment of trans- gressors. The only philosophy consistent alike with reason, with theism and with Christianity is that of Augustine, following Plato, which recognizes truth and law as eternal in God, the supreme and absolute reason. No fiat of God's will, no exertion of almighty power can make love to God and man to be wrong, or selfishness and malignity right. And this is no limitation of God ; for it simply declares that God is perfect and absolute Reason, that his will is eternally in harmony with Reason, and his action eternally in wisdom and love. For will-power to change the moral law would be to subvert Reason and to annihilate God. God is Reason, not active and powerless, but energizing freely. God is will, not capricious, energizing in unreason, but a rational and reasonable will. Some theologians, however, have missed the true philosophy and have taught that moral distinctions rest ultimately on the will of God. Conspicuous representatives of this error are Duns Scotus and Ockham in the Middle Ages, and Descartes in modern times. § The error seems to have arisen in part from failing to distinguish between God's law, which in its principles is eternal in the reason, and God's government, which, in declaring and enforcing the law, is the action of wdl. It seems to have arisen in part from jealousy of infringement of God's * Data of Ethics, p. 51. t Nicomachean Ethics, B. V. chap. x. and B. I. chap. i. iThaetetus 172, 177: Laws, B. x. 889, 890: Gorgias: Minos. Even the Antocrat in the Politicus, and in Laws, B. iv. 710, rules because he is the wisest and best of the people and in accordance with a science of government which regulates his entire administration. ^ Duns, Lib. I., Sentent. dist. 44; Ockham, Sentent. Lib. II., qu. 19; Descartes, Responsio ad sextas objectiones, 6; Works, Cousin's ed., Vol. IL, pp. 348-355. 198 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. prerogative. It was argued that the dependence of moral distinction* on the will of God is essential to the freedom of the divine will ; an argument wliich confounds freedom with arbitrariness and supposes a character unchanging in a right choice to be incompatible with free- dom. It wiis argued by Descartes, " to him who considers the immen- sity of God it is evident that there can be nothing at all which doth not depend on him, not only nothing subsisting, but also no order, no law, no re^on of truth and goodness." But he does not consider that truth and law, being eternal in God's reason, are as really dependent on God as what is created by his will. Leibnitz even suggests that in advoca- ting this error Descartes was not in earnest. Theologians who held this error certainly did not intend to deny the universality, immutability and supreme authority of Gods law; for the fiat of God's will which made it law they recognized as eternal and unchangeable. Thus An- selm said that the dictum that a thing is right because God wills it, is not to be understood as if in the case of God's willing anything wrong, as a lie, it would be right. * Duns Scotus, who accepted the logical consequence of the principle and taught that the just would be unjust if God willed it, yet admitted an unconditional necessity for the law of love as well as for everything which logically follows from the same. (Lib. III.) And Descartes held the inseparable identity of the will and the thought of God. It seems therefore to have been not a denial of the universality and immutability of the moral law in its practical bearing, but rather an hypothesis deemed necessary in certain venture- some speculations respecting the metaphysics of God's constitution, and involving an unwarranted abstraction of the divine will from the divine reason. Accordingly we find it used in later times as a philosophical basis for the supralapsarian doctrine of predestination. It is greatly to be lamented that this error has ever found foothold in Christian theology, with which it is essentially in conflict. It cannot be held, even as a speculative theory, without distorting and vitiating both the theology and the practical teaching of Christianity. It has led to bald and hard j)resentations of theolog}% incompatible with the essential truth and spirit of Christianity and with the best thought and the best piety of the ages ; and by the misrepresentations which it has engendered it is a hindrance to the reception of Christ and his gospel. VI. True Ethics is distinguished from the theory that the principles of truth are eternal and universally regulative, but are external to and independent of Ciod. Some theists have been led into this error to avert the imputation of the skeptic that according to theism the principles of truth and right * Cur Deus Homo, I. 12. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 199 are created by a fiat of God's will. They concede to the skeptic that there is no other way in which these principles can be dependent on God ; they fail to see that they are eternal in the absolute reason, and thus are dependent on God, although independent of his will, and law to it in all its action ; and so they plunge into the abysmal error that truth and right have no dependence on God, but are independent and eternal in the constitution of things. It is philosophically impossible that this theory should be true. The universe consists of concrete reality, not of abstractions ; it is a uni- verse of beings in theu' various modes of existence. All knowledge is the knowledg*e of being. The existence of truth, right, law, perfection, beauty or worth independent of any mind, is without meaning and im- possible to thought. It is as meaningless and impossible as the exist- ence of motion without a body moving and without force moving it. The rational cannot exist without a Reason or Mind, any more than the corporeal can exist without a body. This theory nullifies the evidence of the existence of God. From our knowledge of reason in ourselves and in the scientific constitution of the material universe we infer that the universe is grounded in the personal God in whom as the Absolute Reason all truth and law, all ideals of perfection, and all norms or standards of good are eternal This theory nullifies this evidence by declaring that aU rational princi- ples and laws, all rational norms of perfection and good are indepen- dent of any Reason or mind and are eternal in the constitution of things. Not only does the theory nullify the evidence of the existence of God but it is itself the direct contradiction of theism ; for it affirms that the universe is ultimately grounded in the impersonal, not in the personal. It thus concedes all that is essential in the theory of " crea- tion by law " ; for what is first and fundamental in the universe is law but not God. It coincides with monistic theories, materialistic or pantheistic, which explain the universe as the sum total of matter and its forces actmg eternally according to unconscious law. It coincides with Spinozism which recognizes thought as one original attribute of substance, but it is unconscious thought. It coincides with Hartmann's *' Philosophy of the Unconscious," which recognizes the revelation of rational intelligence everywhere in the universe, but it is in unconscious intelligence. It agrees with Hegel who puts thought before matter, but it is unconscious thought. Hegel however is more philosophical than this theory, for he starts with pure Being, while this theory starts with that meaningless abstraction, the constitution of the universe. As a theistic theory it is unphilosophical and inconsistent with itself ^ If we try to think of truth or law independent of mind in the constitution 200 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. of things, the essence of truth and law escapes and nothing remains but facts instead of truths and factual sequences instead of laws. It might still be possible to speak of what appeai-s to be, but no longer possible to speak of what must and what ought to be ; for all princii)le3 and 111 ws of reason have subsided into j)henomena; there is no standard of distinction between the true and the absurd, the right and the wrong, the perfect and the imperfect, the worthy and the unworthy. Thus the theory slumps into monism, materialistic or pantheistic, which knows no supreme being except the universe itself In reply the theist, who has fallen into this error, claims that the evidence of God's existence still remains, since there must be a being who has caused the universe to exist, and that he must be wise and good because he has caused it to exist in accordance with these princi- ples and laws. Here, however, is evidence only of a power by which the universe exists and acts ; and this power, for aught that api)ears, may be in the universe itself There is no evidence of wisdom and goodness ; for according to the theory, these princij)les and laws are eternal in the constitution of things, and if the universe exists at all it must necessarily exist according to its own eternal constitution, which is entirely independent of God. Besides, the being who is thus supposed to bring tlie universe into existence is himself conditioned, and cannot be God, the absolute and unconditioned being. Rev. Dr. Fairchild says, "The principles of morality rest on the same foundation with those of mathematics and all necessary truths The moral law .... exists in the nature of things .... Of the modification of this doctrine, that obligation has its origin in the reason of God, it is only necessary to remark that reason does not originate principles or truths, it only per- ceives them already existing."* I may remark in passing that this author entirely misapprehends the doctrine which he so summarily sets aside. It is not the doctrine that principles or truths are originated by the divine Keason, but that they are in it eternal and without be- ginning. God knows them in himself as eternally " constituent elements of reason." This misapprehension exemplifies what I said, that theists are led into the error which I am controverting, by the impression that if truth and law are dependent on God they must have been originated or created by some definite divine act But I return to the quotation. The surprising doctrine here asserted is that the nature or constitu- tion of things, that is, of the universe, exists eternal with no dependence on God ; and that truth and law are eternal in it and independent of God. God, therefore, is aiways conditioned by this eternal and inde- Moral Philosophy, pp. 116-120, 143. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF KEASON: THE RIGHT. 201 pwident constitution of the universe and by all the truths and laws that are eternal in it. If he creates or efiects anything, he acts under necessity and can effect only that universe, the constitution of which already exists independent of him. He is thus conditioned under necessity in the exercise of his power. He is also conditioned and limited in his knowledge. " Keason only perceives" the constitution of things and the principles and laws eternal in it " already existing." God acquires knowledge of the constitution of things and the principles inherent therein by perception and ob- servation of what is external to and independent of himself God then is conditioned and dependent both as to his power and his knowledge. He is merely a Demiurge who studies the constitution of the universe and its principles and laws and necessarily shapes the worlds in ac- cordance therewith ; because the eternal constitution of things makes it impossible to shape them otherwise. Here. also is abstraction carried to the utmost. I have criticised Spencer because, like a raediajval schoolman, he hypostasizes abstractions of human thought and feeling and deals with them as distinct entities. Here in like manner the nature or constitution of the universe is abstracted from the universe and conceived as eternal ; the truth and laws dominant in the universe are abstracted both from it and from the supreme reason, which is God ; and these abstractions are hyposta- sized as eternal, self-existent, independent entities, and presented as alone the unconditioned and all-conditioning ground of all that is. It is impossible to carry the hypostasizing of abstractions farther ; and so long as theologians teach such theories of the universe we need not wonder that skeptics stigmatize theology as a tissue of abstractions. On the contrary true theology, from beginning to end, deals always with concrete beings. The ultimate ground of the universe is the living personal God, eternal, self-existent, unconditioned and all-conditioning. In him as perfect reason all truth, all law, all ideals of perfection, all rational norms determining the ends worthy of rational beings are eternal. These are themselves " the nature of things " or the constitu- tion of the universe, because they are the archetypes which, in his wisdom and love, God is progressively expressing in finite things ;^ and therefore the universe in all its physical and all its rational systems is the continuous revelation of God. Whereas, according to the theory which I am criticising if carried out to its necessary logical inference, the uni- verse is not a revelation of God, but only of its own constitution, m jvhich all truths and laws are included, existing eternal and entirely independent of God ; and the necessary inference is either Atheism or Pantheism. In support of the theory that truth exists in the nature of thmgs 202 THE PHILOSOFlilCAL BASIS OF THEISM. independent of God it is urged that if God and all being were non- existent, space and time must nevertheless remain, and geometry and arithmetic would still be true. This is put forward in the quotation which I have been criticising and is the great argument in defence of the theory. If in the non-existence of being space and time should remain, that does not prove that moral law is eternal independently of God. But men deceive themselves by these violent suppositions of the non- existence of being. We are rational beings and all our thinking is under the rational laws of thought. By no intellectual somersets can we leap out of ourselves and our own rationality. Therefore, if we suppose ourselves to think away all being, we ourselves remain \n tho void and think there according to the necessary principles of reason. Then we infer that if no being existed, everything must be as we in the exercise of our reason must think it ; and so space and time, geometry and arithmetic would survive. Whereas, if there were no being, there would be no reason, no difference between the true and the absurd, or the right and the wrong; and the mathematically impossible and 'all that reason sees to be absurd, would be just as possible as its con- trary ; for nothing w^ould be, and nothing w^ould be possible. Hence in the non-existence of being space would be emptiness, a mere negation or non-entity ; just as darkness is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat. Knowledge and thought are impossi- ble except as being is the object of the knowledge and the thought. Nothing is real except being, its modes of existence, and the rational truths, laws, ideals and ends which are regulative of it. It is impossible to. have a thought which transcends all being, or which is not, directly or indirectly, a thought of being. In supposing that we know anything as to what would remain if all being were non-existent, we deceive our- selves. The very question is absurd, for it is the question, if there were no being, what would he? The only answer to this question is thu entire cessation of intelligence. Space has no reality except as room for being. Room for being has no reality except as the possibility of being. The possibility of being is in God only. Space and time are forms in which finite beings exist. They are not, as Kant teaches, subjective forms of sense in finite mmds. To finite minds they are objectively real. But they are forms of finite reality which are archetypal and eternal in the absolute and divine reason. According to the constitution of the universe eternal in the divine rea- son, finite beings cannot exist except in time, or in both space and time. Subjective and objective are one in God in the sense that what is objective to us is fii-st subjective in the archetypal thought of God. Schleiermacher says, " God's eternity is the absolutely timeless causality SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 203 of God, conditioning, with all that is temporal, time itself." " God's inimens'ity is the absolutely spaceless causality of God conditioning, with all that occupies space {iillem raumlichen), space itself" There is, then, a real significance in Dr. Clarke's a priori argument for the existence of God from time and space, but in a way different from that in which he presented it. Space and time have no reabty except as forms or constituent elements eternal and archetypal m the absolute Reason, and thus are forms of the existence of finite We* conclude that this theory of truth and law eternal in a constitu- tion of things independent of God, is fatal to theism. All personal beings are autonomic. As man finds the law in himself m his own reason and conscience, so all truth and law are eternal m God, the absolute reason. No man can throw his thought behind God. God is the resting-place of the intellect not less than of the heart. All hues of thought converge towards God; all meet and stop in him; all spring again from him, made certain as real knowledge and efiective as life-giving wisdom. When a thinker, audacious to soar beyond the limits of thought to its ultimate ground, imagines that he is soarmg beyond God, suddenly, like Satan flying in chaos, he meets " A vast vacuity ; all unaware'?, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops Ten thousand fathoms deep.'' § 38, The Formal Principle of the Law and the Real Principle. L The formal Principle of the Law declares the idea and significance of law. It is the rational intuition in which the idea of law arises, namely, A rational being ought to obey reason; or, ivhat is truth to Rea- son is law to wiU. This is the statement of the principle in philosophy, where it appears in its most abstract form. In theology it would be, Every rational being ought to obey God; or. The truth eternal in God, the supreme reason, is law to the action of all rational beings. ^ The principle is formal in the active sense Jormative or comtitutive. When truth is known as related to the action of will, we know intui- tively that we ought to obey reason. In this intuition reason sees the truth in the form of law, as imposing on the will obligation to act in conformity with the truth. This intuition of reason is the formal prm- ciple of the law, the principle which gives the distinctive idea and sig- iiifipfiTice oi law II. The real principle of the law declares what the law commands: Thou shatt love the Lord God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor 204 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. m thyself. All which the law commands is comprehended in this principle. The formal principle declares the obligation to obey the law but not what the law requires. It tells us that every one ought to obey reason, or to obey God, but does not tell what reason or God requires. If by this principle we attempt to include all the virtues in a unity or to designate tlie one essential quality in all virtuous acts whereby they are all virtuous, we get only this, that they are all acts of obedience to law ; in answer to the question, What does the law command ? we have only the empty assertion. The law requires obedience to itself. The real principle of the law answers this question ; it declares that the law requii-es love to God and our neiglibor. This is the essential quality of all virtues whereby they are virtuous ; it includes in one principle all that the law requires. Si>ecific duties are required by the law. But the specific commandments need not be considered here ; for the law of love is the real principle which includes them all. This distinction of the formal and the real principles of the law forces itself on the notice in every thorough discussion of ethics, and ethical writers have attempted to indicate it in various ways. President Hopkins, for example, gives us '' The Law of Love and Love as a Law." The terms which I have appropriated to express it, seem to me better fitted for the purpose than any otliers. We may use the words to discriminate actions. An action may be fonnally right but really wrong ; as Paul's, action in opposing Christianity was formally right because he acted with the recognition of the law and believed liimself to be obeying it ; it was really wrong because it was contrary to the real requirement of the law. III. As declaring the reality and significance of law, the formal principle is indispensable to the law and to its practical efiiciency. 1. It opens to us the range of thought peculiar to law, difierent from the agreeable, the profitable and the prudential, and difierent from the truth. ^ It is like the opening of a new sense. It reveals a new world of reality. Without it we should have no knowledge of duty, or virtue, or authority or law. These words would be meiiningless. It seems at first an empty principle ; but it lies at the basis of all moral distinc- tions. Max Miiller says : " There is no religion which does not say, ' Do good, avoid evil' There is none which does not contain what Eabbi Hillel called the quintessence of all religions, *Be good, my boy.'"* You laugh and say it means nothing. But it has a mo- mentous meaning. It calls the boy away from passion and caprice to reason as his guide ; it refers him to a law wMch declares an unchange- ♦ Science of Religion : Lecture IV. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 205 able distmction between good and evil and sets him to studying what that law requires ; beneath that command to be a good boy and giving it significance, is the law of God. Note the immense difierence be- tween an education which says " Be a good boy," and that which should say, " Be rich, my boy " ; or, " Seek your own pleasure, my boy " ; or " Never mind whether you are good or bad, my boy." The dawning of the knowledge of duty in a child's mind is Hke the dawn- mg of the day. 2 The formal principle declares the real prmciple to be law. it is not mere advice to love God and your neighbor; it is not merely the didactic information that love is beautiful, agreeable or profitable. It is law, Thou shall; it is law, declared by the authority of God and en- forced by penalty for disobedience. Without this strength and au- thority of law, righteousness is displaced by the desire to please, virtue liquefies into a gush of feeling, and love is dissolved into mere amiable- ness and sentimentality. ^ 3 It recognizes the important aspect of virtue as domg duty, as obedience to law, as subjection to rightful authority, as loyalty to government; and, on the part of the administrators of government, the enactment, maintenance and enforcement of just laws. Loyalty etymologically means fidelity to law. Loyalty to a person is a secondary meaning of the word, and is inferior in dignity to loyalty to principle and law. If the American people are loyal to the constitu- tion and laws rather than to persons, it is because they have attained a higher grade of civilization and political culture. If, however, m losing loyalty to persons they have lost also loyalty to law and government, reverence for rightful authority and the very consciousness of subjec- tion to it, they have sunk rather than risen in the scale of civilization. It is this sense of duty, this loyalty to law and authority which is as- serted and emphasized in the formal principle of the law. 4 It also gives the important aspect of virtue as the harmony of the will with the reason, and the consequent harmony of the man with himself. , , ^ 5. It gives also the important aspect of virtue as the harmony of man with God, and so with the constitution of the universe. IV. As declaring the requirement of the law, the Real Prmciple is indispensable to the law and to its practical efficiency. Without it the formal principle gives no information as t» what the '"^ WithouTit duty, if it could be known, would be done without love. Virtue would be mere obedience t» a categorical imperative. But love is the fulfilling of the law. I obey God because I love him I serve my nei<^hbor because I love him. Christ recognizes love as the essence 206 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM, of virtue. The sense of duty alone cannot rise to the sweetness, beautv freedom and dignity of right character. Sir Thomas Browne presents a wholly inadequate concei)tion of Christian duty when he says : " I give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the will of God ; I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that enjoined it ; I relieve no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating dispo- sition ; for this is still but moral charity and an art that oweth more to passion than to reason."* At this point, also, Kant's Ethics is defec- tive, grand as it is in its presentation of duty. He attempts to construct ethics from the formal principle of the law alone. The only motive which he acknowledges as purely moral, is the sense of duty desiccated from all feeling. From the same error has arisen the belief that the greater the struggle in doing right, the greater the virtue ; the more spontaneous, easy and joyous the right action is, the less its virtue. Whereas, the contrary is true ; the greater the love, the greater the spontaneity and joy of the service, and the greater the virtue. Love in its perfection outstrips the sense of obligation and anticipates the categoric imperative of conscience. And, in the issue, duty done merely in obedience to authority be- comes debasing. Conformity merely to the formal principle of the law would be a submission to law in ignorance of what the law requires. It would be a blind submission to another's will, not an intelligent sub- mission to Reason. It would be the obedience of a Turkish Janissary, as ready to do wrong as right, if so commanded. In the moral education of a child it is necessary from its very help- lessness that it be first taught submission to authority. Thus it learns that it does not live for itself alone ; thus it is trained to the conscious- ness of duty, to obedience to authority, to the knowledge of the neces- sity of rendering service to others, and through this to the spirit of self- sacrificing love. It has been suggested by some profound thinkers that God proceeds in the same manner in training the human race in its infancy and childhood. Man is found first under a patriarchal govern- ment, in which the ruler is obeyed as the father of the clan or tribe. And thus, as the fii*st step in moral development, man is taught the ideas of authority, law and obedience. And this accords with the pro- verbial maxim expressing the common sense of mankind, that no one is fit to command till he has first learned to obey. But history as decisively proves that a training merely to unques- tioning submission to authority is debasing and crushing, rather than Beligio Medici, Part IL, ii, pp. 116, 117. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 207 ennobling and developing. Anthropologists tell of the slave kissing the hand that strangles him ; of the savage, accused of a crime which he did not commit, not attempting to save his life by denying it ; the con- Bciousncss of personality and personal rights had been entirely crushed out of them. And the child trained merely to unquestioning and un- intelligent obedience is likely, at the first opportunity, to break away from all authority alike of man and of God. It must be added that the will cannot consent to the formal principle of law otherwise than in the act of love to God and man which the real principle of the law requires. Moral education must train first to the con- sciousness of duty and obligation, and to obedience to law. But it must also give the knowledge that the obedience is not rendered to superior power, but to rightful authority ; not to the caprice of arbitrary will, but to' the behests of perfect reason ; that the law obeyed is the truth of reason and the requirement of perfect wisdom and love ; that the commandment is addressed to rational intelligence and the service required is a reasonable service, the service of universal love. Hence it is only in the act of love that the will consents to the formal principle of the law. And this is the teaching of Christian ethics. God, the Absolute Reason, sets forth the truths of Reason as the law to Will ; in Christ he comes at once as lawgiver and redeemer, setting forth under human conditions his own obedience to the law in self-sacrificing love to bring sinners back to obedience ; and in Christ he calls men to the duty and the exalted privilege of loving all men as God in Christ has loved them, and serving them as God in Christ, taking the form of a servant, has served them. The conception of virtue as the harmony of the will with Reason and with God is, as we have seen, important. But the will can come into harmony with Reason and with God only as we actually love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. §39. Evidence that the Law of Love is the real Principle of the Law. The question next to be considered is, how do we know that the law of love is the real principle of the moral law? How do we know that the law requires universal love ? What love is will be fully explained in a subsequent chapter. It is ne- cessary, however, briefly to define it here, in order to give an intelligent answer to the question before us. The command of the moral law is addressed to man as rational free-will. The love which it requires is not natural affection ; it is not emotion, or desire, or passion ; it is the free choice of the supreme object of service. The law forbids a man to employ his energies supremely in serving himself; it requires him to 208 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. choose God as the supreme object of service and his fellow-man to be served as having rights equally with himself under the universal gov- ernment of God. I. As Christians we find this requirement of universal love in the laws of Closes, sanctioned as the all-comprehensive principle of the law by Jesus Christ. (Deut. vi. 5, Lev. xix. 18, Matt. xxii. 37-39). At present, however, I confine the inquiry to evidence aside from reve^ lation. II. The rational ground of the belief that the law requires love is the fact that every man is related to other rational beings in a moral system. Man finds himself intimately related to other persons in society ; his own welfare and his sphere of achievement depend on their action, and theirs on his. That man exists, not isolated but in a system, seems to be involved in the very act of knowing. Knowledge is the relation between a subject knowing and an object knowTi. In the act of knowing I know myself not only as distinct from other beings, but also in relation to them ; I look out on the outward world and know myself as a center of relations radiating in every direction and connecting me with other individuals. And further, in the knowledge of myself as a person, I know myself related to other persons in a rational system. And this is inherent in the very possibility of knowledge. Thus in the very act of knowing I know myself related to others in a rational system ; and this relationship is the intellectual basis of the law of love. Still further, in knowing the truths of reason as law to will, man knows himself in a moral system. He has intuitive knowledge of the formal principle of the law that a rational being ought to obey reason. In knowing himself rational man knows himself under the law of reason. He knows this law as universal, unchangeable, imperative, and of supreme authority, as the law of Reason supreme, absolute and eternal. He recognizes himself and all men on the same level as subjects of this common law, owing reciprocal duties to each other. Thus he finds himself in a moral system, owing duties and service to others under the law of reason equally binding on them all. He knows that in all his action bearing on another rational being he ought to consult the rights and interests of the other as really as his own. Therefore we are not in a moral system because we are required to love one another; we are required to lovo one another because we are in a moral system. Love is required by the constitutive law of the 6}^stem. We have seen that moral law is distinctively law to free-agents in the SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 209 exercise of free-will. Now we find another quality distinctive of moral law ; it is law to a free-agent in his action towards other free-agents. Law is properly called moral only so far as it declares the duty of a rational free-agent to a rational free-agent in a moral system. It is evident that in such a system " no man liveth for himself;" a selfish life has no legitimate place. For the selfish life translated into thought would aflarm the absurdity that the system and all the beings in it exist only to serve this selfish man. The maxim on which he selfishly acts, if made a universal law, would bring every man into deadly conflict with every other ; human life would become impossible, and the social system would be destroyed. III. The knowledge of existence in a moral system being presup- posed, the knowledge of the real principle of the law is immediate and self-evident in rational intuition. 1. This intuition, that the law requires love to God and our neighbor, arises, like all others, on some particular occasion in experience and is practically operative before it is recognized and formulated in thought. When a man finds his own action aftecting the interests of another per- son, and recognizes the fact that he and the other exist together in a rational system, he knows intuitively that he ought to respect the rights of the other equally with his own. The formal principle of the law, so soon as we recognize other rational beings with us in a rational system, carries us on to the knowledge of a reciprocity of duties and rights which involves obligation to reciprocity of love and service. This intuition is germinal in the virtual consciousness before it is recognized and formulated in thought. The law of love is not known in intuition completely formulated as Christ proclaimed it. Rational intuitions act in the concrete before they attract attention to themselves, and it is only by reflection on particular cases in which they have thus acted that we get the principle and the idea and formulate them in words. So it is with the law of love. It is known in intuition primarily m particular cases when, in acting with reference to another, the obliga^ tion is felt to regard his rights and interests equally with our own. From this equalifij the word equity is derived. 2. The application which any person makes of the law will vary with his own conception of the moral system to which he belongs. When man knew himself only as a member of a clan, he was aware of obligations only to his clan. Having scarcely knowledge of the existence of men beyond a few neighboring clans, whom he knew only by their maraudings, it is not wonderful that he felt no obligations to regard their rights and interests. Hence arose the ancient sentiment which regarded a stranger as an enemy and treated him like a wolf. Says Cicero : '' One whom we now caU a foreigner (peregrmum) was 14 210 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. called by our ancestors an enemy (hostis)/** And Plautus says: "A stranger is to a man, not a man, but a wolf."t Similar sentiments were long dominant in ancient civilization. The Phenicians and the Greeks conceived of the state a^ a city ruling the surrounding territorv. The same was the Roman conception. Even in the times of the empire citizenship was theoretically citizenship of Rome. So long as man thus conceived of himself as identified with a small community, he recog- nized his obligations to that community and its members ; others he regarded ns natural enemies and conceived it right to conquer and enslave them. J In like manner, so long as a man identified himself with a caste or order, he recognized his obligations to those of his own rank, but absolved himself from obligations to others. The solidarity and fraternity of mankind, the obligation of every person to serve man- kind, found slight recognition and never became a power in ancient civilization. Yet as the smaller communities were merged in laro-er states and men came more and more to know the countries and inhabit- ants of the earth, these great ideas make their appearance and the obli- gation of man to man as such is recognized. Max Miiller says the word "mankind" never |iassed the lips of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. § Yet at a later period the Stoics had the idea of a city of the world, a commonwealth transcending all particular states. Cicero said : " For a man to detract anything from another and to increase his own advan- tage by the damage of another, is more against nature than death, poverty, grief, than anything which can happen to a man in body or estate. Nature prescribes that a man consult the interest of a man, whoever he may be, /or the reason that he is a man." || Seneca says: " We are members of a vast body. Nature made us kin when she pro- duced us from the same things and to the same ends." " The world is my country and the gods its rulers." ^ M. Aurelius Antoninus says : " My nature is rational and social ; my city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man it is the world. The things which are useful to these are alone useful to me." ** 3. The Law requiring love to God as supreme and to our neighbor as ourselves cannot be understood in all the significance of Christian Theism without considerable advance both in intellectual and moral culture. Its full significance presupposes the idea of the universe both * De Officiis, B. I., c. 12. t " Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quum qualis sit non novit : " Aainaria, Act 3, scene 4, line 8S. t Plato, Laws, B. I., 625, 626. I Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. IL, p. 5. !| De Officiis. Lib. III., cap. V., 21, and cap. VI., 27. 1 De Benedciis. ** Thoughts, VI., 44. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 211 as a Cosmos or unity and order of all material worlds, and as a moral system in which all rational beings exist. And, again, this presupposes an idea which the human mind was slow to attain, the idea of a uni- vei-sal relio-ion, of one God, in their common relation to whom men of all nations and ages are brought into unity m a moral system. But even this idea of one universal system has its germ in the rational intuition that absolute being must exist ; and in the intuitive know- ledge of obligation, and therein of a law transcending myself and coming down from an authority above me, which is universal, unchang- ino-, imperative and supreme. In whatever form man, in different stages of development, pictures to himself this authority, it is always the supreme. 4. We see that sin, which is the essential evil, consists in self-isola- tion. Buddhism regards the existence of finite beings as essential evil, because they are individuated, and in their individuality distinct from the infinite one ; from this evil the only redemption is reabsorp- tion into the infinite. Christianity, on the contrary, emphasizes the individuality, responsibility and dignity of personal beings, and sets forth their unity in a moral system under the law of love. Sin and evil arise when a person, by his own free choice, isolates himself from the system by choosing himself as his supreme object of service, and so puts himself into antagonism to both God and man and does what he can to mar the order and beauty of the system and to resist and annul its supreme law. We see, therefore, that the law of love is essential in the rational constitution of the universe. God is love. We see also that man's knowledge of the law of love is rooted in his constitution as a rational being and asserts itself in its germinal and rudimentary form as an intuition of reason. Man is so constituted that, as his reason normally unfolds, he knows himself under law and knows that the law requires universal love. IV. That man is constituted for subjection to the law of love is indi- cated in his emotional nature. He is constituted susceptible of both egoistic and altruistic motives and emotions. In babyhood the child yields almost exclusively to impulses tending immediately to its own sustenance and comfort. This is natural because in its helplessness it is dependent on others. But as it becomes capable of acting, the altruistic feelings appear. Affinity for others, the desire for their society, sympathy with their joys and sorrows, compassion for their distresses and the disposition to help them in their needs are spontaneous impulses of the human heart. Both are essential to the well-being of the individual and of society. 212 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. Egoism alone disintegrates society and reacts iu isolation and desola- tion on the egoistic individual. Altruism alone by leading the indi- vidual to neglect himself and his own business in order to help others, deprives him of the means of helping others and of the knowledge and power to help wisely and efficiently ; and thus is fatal to both 2>arties. Egoism and altruisui are not contrary but complemcntal ; each is essen- tial to complete love to God and man. Christianity recognizes both. It has been censured as requiring an exclusive altruism. The censure discloses a surprising ignorance. In the command, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," Christianity recognizes the love of self as the measure of love to the nei not an objection to it, but rather a confirmation of its truth. Chri. hometan poets of Persia ; " The verse of Saadi who represents a return of good for good a^ a slight reciprocity, but says to the virtuous man, ' Confer benefits on him who lias injured tliee;'" also the fanciful com- parisons in the verses of Hafiz, the poet of Shiraz : "Learn from yon orient shell to love thy foe, And store with pearls the hand that brini?s thee woe. Free like yon rock from base vindictive pride, Emblaze with gems the wrist that rends thy side; Mark where yon tree rewards the stony shower With fruit nectareous or the balmy tiower: All nature cries aloud : shall man do less Than heal the smitten and the railer bless ? " In closing his remarks on this subject he says, " My principal motive was to give you a spcimen of the ancient oriental morality which is comprised in an infinite number *f Persian, Arabic and Sanscrit com- positions."* The principle of the Golden Rule is expressed in various forms by Herodotus, Thales, Pittacus, Lysias, Isocrates, Diogenes Laertius, (who cites it as an expression of Aristotle), Seneca, Ovid, Terence, Epictetus and ^larcus Aurelius Antoninus. It has commonly been said that Confucius gave it only in the negative form. But Prof Ezra Abbot has shown that he has given it both in the negative and the positive forms.f It is to be noted that, while ancient writers set forth the Golden Rule, they do not commonly set it forth as the action or expression of the heart's love to man, nor recognize its essential connection with love to God. This is not surprisinii:, how^ever, since it is only when man comes to know the one only God, and thus attains the conception of a universal religion, that he comes to know the solidarity of the human race in one moral system, and thus is able to appreciate the deeper grounds of his interest in man in their common relation to God as their father. Herein we see the great superiority of the ethics of Jesus Christ, who teaches that man's duty to man is inseparable from his duty to God, and can neither be understood in its true significance nor prac- tised in its true spirit apart from his duty to Him. Plato, however, recognizes this relation and teaches that our duty is determined by our membership in the moral system under the govern- ment of God. " The ruler of the universe has ordered all things with * Discourse XI. before the Asiatic Society. The Philosophy of the ancient East; Works, Vol. III. pp. 243, 245. London, 1807. t Journal of the Am. Oriental Soc. Vol. IX, SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 223 a view to the preservation and perfection of the whole, of which each Dart has its fitting action and passion, and every minutest action and nassion of each part to the last fraction has its appointed supervision. Of these parts one is thine, stubborn youth, which, however little, always influences the whole. You forget that this, and everything that comes into being, exists for the whole, that the whole may be blessed. You exist for the whole, not the whole for you."* To the same purport is the discourse of Epictetus. " If what philoso- phers say of the kinship between God and men be true, what has any one to do but, like Socrates, when he is asked what countryman he is, never to say that he is a citizen of Athens or of Corinth, but of the universe. For why, if you limit yourself to Athens, do you not farther Hmit yourself to that mere corner of Athens where your body was born ? .... He who understands the administration of the universe and has learned that the principal and greatest and most comprehensive of all things is this vast system extending from men to God ; and that from him the seeds of being are descended, not only to one's father or grandfather, but to all things that are produced and born on earth, and especially to rational natures, as they alone are qualified to partake of a communication with the Deity, being connected with him by reason ; why may not such a one call himself a citizen of the universe ? why not a son of God?" t So also Plutarch : "It is not so much noble to confer benefits on those who love us as ignoble to refrain from doing so ; but to pass over an occasion of revenge, to show meekness or forbearance to an enemy, to pity him in distress, to bring help to him in need, to assist his sons and family if they desire it, any one who will not love this man for his compassion and commend him for his charity, must have a black heart made of adamant or iron, as Pindar says." X Cicero also recognizes the basis of law in reason and its origin in God : " Right reason is the true law, congruent with nature, universally difflised, unchanging, everlasting ; which imperatively commands to duty and forbids fraud ; which, nevertheless, while it requires rectitude, leaves me free to obey or to disobey. No authority exists to repeal this law, or to detract anything from it, or to enact any law contrary to it. Neither by the Senate nor the People can we be absolved from our obligation to obey it. Nor is there any authoritative expounder of the law other than itself Nor will there be one law in Rome, another in Athens, one law now, another hereafter ; but one everlasting and ♦ Laws, Book X., 903. t Discourses, Book I., chap. 9, Higginson and Carter's Translation. t On Receiving Profit from Enemies, 9. I 'til 224 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. 11' W*' undying law will hold together all nations in all time, and will be the one common master, as it were, and commander of all. It is God who is the author, the judge and the enactor of this law. He who will not obey it must Hee from himself and spurn the nature of man; and herein he will suHer the severest punishments, even if he escape other intlictions commonly regarded as penalties." * Of the divine origin of law the Chorus in Sophocles' (Edipus Tyran- nus says (864-873) : " Oh that the Fate may favor me in reverent purity of word and deed, commanded by laws fixed on high, the off- spring of the heavenly Aether, of which Olympus alone is the father, which are not the offspring of the mortal nature of man, nor does for- getfuhiess ever put them to sleep. The great God is in them and never grows old. Lawless and violent caprice begets the tyrant." Of the ancient Egyptian ethics M. Chabas says: "None of the Christian vir- tues is forgotten in it ; piety, charity, gentleness, self-command in word and action, the protection of the weak, benevolence towards the huml)le, deference to superiors, respect for property, .... all is expressed there." t VII. It remains to consider some objections. 1. It is objected that there is no agreement in the moral sentiments of mankind. Practices which are regarded as praiseworthy in some ages or countries, are condemned iis crimes in others. The answer is that there is an agreement in the principle by which these conflicting acts are justified. They who justify slave-holding argue that it is best for the slave and best for freemen ; that it is essential in the best con- stitution of society. Their arguments are appeals to the law of love, just as really as are the arguments of those who condemn it. Hindoo women cast their children into the Ganges. They justify it by saying that we ought to give our most precious things to God, and that the sacrifice insures the eternal felicity of the child and of the mother ; thus they appeal to the law that we should love God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourselves. The rumseller justifies his business by rea- soning that he must provide for his own family ; that alcoholic drink is beneficial ; that its licensed sale causes less drunkenness than its pro- hibition ; he appeals to the law of love. In these and all similar cases the difference is not as to the supremacy and obligation of the law of love, but as to questions of fact. It must be further considered that the same outward act which m some cases truly expresses regard for the rights and welfare of others, may in other cases violate their rights and hinder their welfare. Pa- ♦ Fragmenta: De Republica, Lib. III.; Opera: Boston, 1817, Vol. XVIL, rP* 185, 186. t Quoted Renoiif 's Religion of Egypt, p. 74; see 74-80. SECOND ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE RIGHT. 225 rental love sends the child when healthy to school, but when sickly keeps it at home. Our Saviour teaches that in a rude state of society a custom may be left unopposed, because society must make further moral progress before it can understand the evil and develop a wise and effective opposition. * 2. It is also objected that savage races have been found entirely des- titute of moral ideas and of knowledge of moral distinctions. If so, they are but children of a larger growth. The objector over- looks the facts that principles are constitutional norms, not inborn idetis ; that they presuppose a certain development of the being and some occasion in experience before they influence action : and that the}' practically influence action before they are recognized or formulated in reflective thought. The fact that a child or a savage denies all know- ledge of the difference between right and wrong is entirely compatible with the influence of moral motives and action under their influence, which would reveal the moral nature to any intelligent observer. No evidence sufficient to establish the fact alleged by the objector has ever been adduced. Travelers are commonly untrained to scientific observation and ignorant of the savages' language ; they found their conclusions on a brief and superficial acquaintance. Their testimony also is merely negative, to what they have not observed, not to any facts positively incompatible with the existence of moral motives and emotions. Even missionaries who have dwelt among savages may deceive themselves by demanding a kind of evidence not necessary to prove the fact and, in the circumstances, not to be expected. Thus Mr. Mofllit denied that the inferior tribes of South Africa had any moral sentiments. Yet in the same volume he relates that one of these natives came to him in great indignation because one of his tribe had stolen his cattle, and dwelt on the aggravation of the ofiTence by the fact that the thief was one whom he had recently helped and befriended in a time of distress. All this is palpable evidence of moral feeling, though Mr. Moffat was not intelligent enough to perceive it.f We have also the testimony of specialists of high authority in anthroi)ology. Quatre- fages says : " Confining ourselves rigorously to the region of facts and carefully avoiding the territory of philosophy and theology, we may state without hesitation that there is no human society or even associa- tion in which the idea of good and evil is not represented by certain acts regarded by the members of that society or association as morally good or morally bad." | Tylor, the author of " Primitive Culture," ♦ Matt. xix. 7, 8. t Moffat's Missionary Labors and Scenes in South Africa, X Human Species, p. 459, Appleton's Ed., B. X., chap. 34. 15 226 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. says : " Glancing down the moral scale among mankind at large, we find no tribe standing at or near zero. The asserted existence of sav- ages so low as to have no moral standard is too groundless to be dis- cussed. Every human tribe has its general views as to what conduct is right and what wrong, and each generation hands the standard onwards to the next. Even in the details of those moral standards, wide as their differences are, there is a yet wider agreement throughout the human race."* * Contemporary Review, April, 1873. See the same conclusion in Tylor's Primitive Culture, Vol. I., pp. 219, 386 ; Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities, p. 17 ; Ee- iiouf 's Religion of Ancient Egypt, pp. 130, 131. CHAPTER X. THE PERFECT: THE THIRD ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION : THE NORM OR STANDARD OF THE CREATIONS OF THOUGHT AND THEIR REAL- IZATION BY ACTION. ? 40. Origin and Significance of the Idea. The idea of the Perfect arises when we think of an object as consti- tuted in accordance with the truths and laws of reason, and as thus being in its constitution an expression of these truths and laws. I have the idea of a circle as a portion of space inclosed by a line, all the points of which are equally distant from a point within called the cen- ter. If I think of a line actually drawn in exact accordance with this idea, I think the figure thus described must be a perfect circle. If I think of a steam-engine constructed in exact accordance with every law regulative of such a structure, I must think of it as a perfect steam- engme The idea of the perfect implies a rational standard within the mind, accordance with which is perfection. Without such standard the idea of perfect and imperfect could not arise ; the mind would have no idea for the words to express. Objects might be compared as large or small, agreeable or disagreeable, useful or noxious, but not as perfect or imperfect. This rational standard is possible only because we have knowledge through rational intuition of the truths and laws of reason. The Per- fect, tlierefore, denotes a new reality, our knowledge of which depends on rational intuitions. This is the norm or standard of the creations of thought and their realization by action, in nature and in art, in growth and in construc- tion, in character and institutions. By it we judge as perfect or imper- fect a rose and a watch, a solar system and a steam-engine, the character of an individual and the institutions of society. §41. Ideals. I. When the mind imagines a perfect object, that creation of the imagination is called an ideal. 227 228 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. r If 1 ll I have distinguished imaginatian and fancy. Wlien the mind in its creation proceeds in harmony with rational truth and law and thii.s expresses the deepest reality and true perfection of the object, the creative power is called the imagination and its product is an ideal. AVhen the mind creates capriciously, without regard to truth, law and reality, the creative power is called the fancy and its product is a conceit or fancy. II. In creating its ideals the imagination uses only the material given in perceptive intuition, but combines it in accordance with the principles and laws of reason. Cicero says Zeuxis had five of the most beautiful women of Crotona as models from which to make up his ideal of perfect beauty.* Ideals are not obtained by copying observed objects. The qualities of observed objects are used as material ; the ideal is attained, not bv imitation but by creation. The ideal thus created may be itself imperfect, that is, not the true ideal. The error, however, as in ethical mistakes, is not in the princi- ples but in the judgment that applies them. Taste is improved by culture, as are the delicacy and correctness of moral judgments. The liability to mistake is greater than in morals, because in aesthetics we are one remove further from the principles which we apply. III. The ideal is usually nearer to perfection than the object of it observed in experience or expressed by art. A great artist is above nature and comes down upon it from his ideals. An imitator is be- neath nature and tries in vain to lift himself up to it. Says Cicero: "We can conceive of statues more perfect than those of Phidias. Nor did the artist when he made the statue of Jupiter or Minerva con- template any one individual from whom to take a likeness; but thnv was in his mind a form of beauty gazing on which he guided his luuul and skill in imitation of it."t Goethe says, "The Greek artists in representing animals have not only equaled, but even far surpassed nature. . . . They turned to nature with their own greatness. . . . Our artists .... proceed to the imitation of nature with their own personal weakness and artistic incapacity, and fancy they are doing something. They stand below nature. But whoever will produce any- thing great nmst so improve his culture that, like the Greeks, he will be able to elevate the mere trivial actualities of nature to the level of his own mind, and really carry out that which in natural pheno- mena .... remains mere intention." J But must not an artist be true to nature? Yes; and he is the *De Inventione, II. 1. I CoDversations with Eckermann, pp. 341, 342. t Orator, c. 2 and 3. THIRD ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE PERFECT. 229 more true to nature for approaching it from his ideal. A photograph is an exact copy of the man ; but it is a copy of him when he is brouo-ht to a full stop, when his attitude and face are least expressive, and all his lineaments stiffen and shut him in, as an oyster shuts itself in its shell. A portrait is idealized ; and for that very reason it is more true to nature; for it presents the man in his best ex- pression, which best reveals all that is worth knowing in him as a man. So nature is the expression of ideals in the mmd of God. In getting the ideal we get the real significance and deepest truth of nature. IV. Ideals are possible only by virtue of the reason. Ideals are not found by observation but are creations of imagination according to the standard of reason. It is because man is rational that he is im- pelled to seek and enabled to find a perfection which exists neither in himself nor in the objects about him, but which is the standard by which he judges both himself and outward things. And it is because nature itself expresses the thoughts of the reason which is supreme in the universe, that man finds suggestions of his own ideab in nature and discovers all things arranged in a Cosmos progres- sively revealing the Ideal which is perfect and eternal in the mind of God. V. The practical importance of ideals is the same with the practical importance of the imagination. Invention alike in the fine arts and the industrial, is primarily the creation of an ideal. An attempt to realize anything in invention without an ideal must fail. The attempt would be like that of a child to arrange blocks while as yet it has not attained the ideal of a house or of any geometrical figure ; it becomes a mere hap-hazard juxtapo- sition. Ideals are important in discovery. The hypothesis, which is the first step in the Newtonian method, is simply the creation of an ideal. Without ideals criticism is impossible ; criticism is always the com- parison of the actual with the ideal. One cannot say. It is a beautiful morning, or. It is a shocking bad hat, or. It is a love of a bonnet, with- out an ideal with which the object criticised is compared. Without ideals we should have no knowledge of progress ; for without them there would be no standard by which to determine whether any movement is progressive or retrogressive. The expectation of the pro- gress of man, which is so powerful in modern Christian civilization, would have no significance if man could not in the light of reason pro- ject his vision to an ideal to be realized in the future beyond all that man has ever been or has ever attained in the past. What science tells us of higher and lower orders of plants and animals is meaningless, I 230 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. f I re i f except as man is able to form ideals with which to measure them as lower and higher. The theory of evolution involves in its very essence the doctrine of progress in the past and the expectation of progress in the future. But the theory itself is meaningless, unless man is endowed with reason that rises above all the trailing sequences of nature and furnishes a standard by which evolutionary progress from lower to higher becomes intelligible ; and its realization through the ages past is incredible and impossible, if from the beginning no reason has had in itself the ideal toward the realization of which it has advanced and guided the progress. Ideals are essential in the practical life of every day. The foresight necessary to success in business involves an ideal construction of the course of events affecting the business and the action demanded in rela- tion to them. Teaching and receiving instruction involves the constant exercise of imagination in grasping what is taught in its true unity and significance. Controversy goes on endlessly because each disputant fiiils to picture to himself the attitude of the other. Even in morals ideals play an essential part. " Put yourself in his place ; " " Do as you would be done by;" these maxims require the exercise of imagination to pic- ture to yourself the rights and interests of another. Kant's maxim, " So act that you would be willing the principle of your action should be a universal law," requires, whenever it is applied, an imaginary con- struction of a moral system on the principle of that action and its com- parison with the true ideal of a moral system accordant with reason. I 42. Beauty as known by the Reason ; or Principles of yCsthetics. It is only from the idea of perfection that the principles of a true sesthetical philosophy can be unfolded. Some of these principles I will set forth. I. Beauty is ideal perfection revealed to the reason in some partic- ular concrete object or combination of objects. 1. Beauty is perfection revealed, perfection lustrous and outshining. I do not mean that the beauty exists only when observed. The llower that blushes unseen loses none of its charms in its loneliness. But I mean that the word beauty, as used, not only denotes the perfection of the object, but also suggests that the perfection, if observed, would charm the observ^er. It indicates the connection between the perfection of the object and the admiring appreciation of the mind to whom the perfection is revealed. 2. The perfection must also be revealed in some concrete object. The ideal must appear in the actual. The law of gravitation mathematically THIRD ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE PERFECT. 231 gtated awakens no aesthetic emotion. But the conception in the con- crete, of all bodies on the earth and of the solar and all stellar systems moving harmoniously in conformity with this law and constituting the cosmos, awakens aesthetic emotion. There may be beauty in a master-stroke of military genius ; but it is not in the abstract thought but in the concrete combination of move- ments by which the commander transforms peril into victory. Beauty can be predicated of perfection only as perfection is revealed or sug- gested in persons or things ; in action, or in some natural or artificial product of action. 3. The perfection revealed in a beautiful object of nature or art is that of a finite object which within its own limits and in the peculiarity of its own being reveals a rational ideal of the perfect. It does not reveal perfection of all kinds, but perfection in a particular object. It may be a beautiful hand without symmetry of the entire body ; or a symmetrical form without intellectual expression ; some feature or line- ament, some partial gleam of perfection. Hence the beautiful object must be of a kind capable of expressing a rational ideal of perfection and must reveal or suggest the perfection of its kind. A cottage may be beautiful as a cottage, though it would be ridiculous as a cathedral. Indeed the addition to anything of qualities belonging to things of another kind would make it imperfect. A dog may be beautiful as a dog ; if wings or fins were added it would cease to be beautiful and become a monster. A picture of the human form with wings may be called an angel, but is a monster. 4. Objects are beautiful in different degrees. The ideals themselves are of higher or lower grades according as they express more or less of the affluence of the reason and the spirit. The ideal beauty of a rational being is of a higher order than that of a brute or inanimate being. And there are different orders of beauty in rational beings. In a European gallery a Madonna by Raphael and a Madonna by Mu- rillo hang side by side. The ideal of the former was evidently that of the happy mother. The ideal of the latter was that of the conscious mother of the Christ, pondering in her heart the woe, the mystery and the promise of the Messianic life. Each ideal is expressed with the power of genius. The latter reveals greater riches of spiritual truth and moves the soul to proportionally greater depths. Also beautiful objects of the same kind approximate in different degrees to their ideals, and so may be said to have different degrees of beauty. II. Beauty is the outshining of truth. Beauty is the revelation of an ideal. An ideal is an imaginative conception of an object as perfect. Perfection is predicated of an object when it is in entire accordance with the law of reason. Law is the truth of reason considered as a law THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. to action. Beauty is therefore the revelation in an object of the truth of reason. " Beauty is the splendor of truth." This maxim is commonly at- tributed to Plato. I have never found it expressed in just these words in Plato's writings, but it is a legitimate inference from his phi- losophy. This Veron denies. He says, "We might with some difficulty establish a connection between such a phrase and the doe- trine of Aristotle, which made imitation the aim and principle of art : but not with that of Plato." * He has made the surprising mistake of supposing the maxim to mean that beauty in art consists in the exact imitation of objects of nature. In its true meaning it is emi- nently Platonic and expresses the deepest reality of the beautiful. Nature is the expression of the archetypal thoughts or truths of tlie absolute Reason. An object is beautiful when it reveals the ideally perfect, and thus expresses the truth or thought of reiison. Symmetry is founded on mathematical ratios and proportions. The beauty of the Greek architecture dei)ends on mathematical ratios, as of the diameter of a column to its height. A Frenchman, after measuring a column with its various parts, calculated by these ratios the dimensions of the Parthenon and of all its parts; then he measured the building and found nowhere a variation of more than a fraction of an inch. A gothic rose-window may be resolved into a skeleton of mathematical lines. The relative positions of leaves on the branches in different kinds of trees is expressed in a series of fractions va- rying according to an exact law. The musical scale is mathematical. The sweetness or harshness of the tone, its quality as inspiriting and joyous, or sorrowful, as tender or defiant, and its harmony are de- scribed in science mathematically by the length and rapidity and relation of vibrations. The beauty is the outshining of exact mathe- matical truth. These are examples of what is true of all beauty. When we penetrate to its deepest significance, we find that beauty is the splendor of truth. This accords with the fact that ideals are not formed from beneath bv copying what is observed in experience, but created from above by the reason combining the material given in experience according to rational truth and law ; thus they are standards by which the combinations of nature and those of art are judged as perfect or imperfect, beautiful or ugly. By these standards we thus judge the physical universe itself as a whole, and call it a Cosmos a^ ordered under law and progressively realizing a rational ideal. III. Beauty, while the same in essence, is distinguishable by the * ^Esthetics ; by Eugene V^ron, Armstroag's Translation, pp. 96, 97, 392. THIRD ULTIMATE IDEA OF REASON: THE PERFECT. 233 attributes or modes of existence in which it is manifested. Symmetry is beauty of form ; the rational ideal of perfection of form. Graceful- ness is beauty manifested in motion. Motion on mathematical lines jtraight or curved, describing geometrical figures and rhythmic in time, or of uniform or uniformly accelerated or decreasing velocity, is more pleasing than motion irregular in space and time. Military marching and evolutions, and dancing are both regulated by music and awaken (esthetic admiration. It may be presumed that all graceful motions, if measured, could be described with mathematical exactness. Beautiful motions are regulated motions, they conform to an ideal and reveal mind; unregulated motions are ugly. The attempt to regulate his movements by one not familiar with the law and not trained to control his muscles in accordance with it, is ugly. Hence the ease and grace of a well-bred person contrasted w^ith the awkwardness of a boor in society. A firm signature like that of John Hancock to the Declara- tion of Independence as a regulated movement is pleasing ; w^hile the tremulous signature of Stephen Hopkins is displeasing. A curve may be pre-eminently the line of beauty because, deviating at every point of the motion from a straight line according to a law, it discloses at every point the presence and control of a mind realizing an ideal. Simple colors probably are merely agreeable to the eye. But in the combination of colors the imagination can create ideals and the com- bination may have beauty in the true sense. In this case the harmony which appears in the ideal creation rests on the scientific fact of complemental colors. Some writers, Lord Kames for example, limit beauty to visible objects. But we speak of beautiful music as pro- perly as of beautiful forms. Simple tones and the quality of a sound may be merely agreeable or harsh to the ear ; but the combination or harmony of sounds in music is beautiful. Titian's combinations of color and Beethoven's symphonies are true creations of genius. Odors and tastes and simple feeling like that of the smoothness of velvet, give no opportunity for ideal combinations ; they are merely agreeable or disagreeable sensations. But these, and simple color, in combination with other elements of reality, may enhance the beauty of flowers, fruit or other objects of sense-perception. Powder is also an element of beauty. The strength of a gnarled oak is an element of the ideal of it. But it must be force that is regulated. One never ceases to admire the moving piston-rod of a steam-engine, so regular, so calm, and yet so mighty. Unregulated power causes no lesthetic emotion, but only fear or consternation. Even mass, though having no beauty in itself, may, in combination with other elements, contribute to aesthetic emotion. Also, in any mechanical product, the adjustment and exact movement of its parts revealing intellectual skill, constitute an element in the 234 THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. beauty. In a perfect steam-engine or watcli, the beauty is not merely the symmetry of form, the gracefulness and strength of the movement the harmony of color, but it is much more the accurate adjustment of the parts, all acting according to law in subordination to the design of the whole mechanism. The same is true of the action of man on men. We rightly admire a^ beautiful a campaign manifesting the brilliant combinations of military genius, or a stroke of political genius in the effective combinations of a great statesman. So also we admire the beauty of literary productions ; not merely the rhythm and euphony of the language, nor the scenes which by the word-pictures are brought before our minds, but also the literary structure of the work as realizin^r an ideal. For the same reason we properly speak of a beautiful argu- ment. Some writers limit the beautiful to objects perceivable by the senses. But these limitations have no philosophical basis. According to the only rational and philosophical criterion, every object is beautiful which is the concrete expression of an ideal of perfection. This bein