Chapter 1: The Three Chief Forces of Western Civilization
The Three Chief Forces Of Western Civilization
Introductory
1. An enigma of life: the Universal and Abiding does not move the will; and what does move it is Individual and Evanescent.
Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,--all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,--does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.
2. Our personal experience as regards our own convictions.
Experience indeed and its resultant feeling are always, in the first instance, coloured and conditioned by every kind of individual many-sided circumstances of time and place, of race and age and sex, of education and temperament, of antecedent and environment. And it is this very particular combination, just this one, so conditioned and combined, coming upon me just at this moment and on this spot, just at this stage of my reach or growth, at this turning of my way, that carries with it this particular power to touch or startle, to stimulate or convince. It is just precisely through the but imperfectly analyzable, indeed but dimly perceived, individual connotation of general terms; it is by the fringe of feeling, woven out of the past doings and impressions, workings and circumstances, physical, mental, moral, of my race and family and of my own individual life; it is by the apparently slight, apparently far away, accompaniment of a perfectly individual music to the spoken or sung text of the common speech of man, that I am, it would seem, really moved and won.
And this fringe of feeling, this impression, is, strictly speaking, not merely untransferable, but also unrepeatable; it is unique even for the same mind: it never was before, it never will be again. Heraclitus, if we understand that old Physicist in our own modern, deeply subjective, largely sentimental way, would appear to be exactly right: you cannot twice step into the same stream, since never for two moments do the waters remain identical; you yourself cannot twice step the same man into the same river, for you have meanwhile changed as truly as itself has done, Πάντα ῥεῖ: all things and states, outward and inward, appear indeed in flux: only each moment seems to bring, to each individual, for that one moment, his power to move and to convince.
3. Our experience in our attempt to win others.
And if we transmit this emotion or conviction to another mind, or if we seem to be able to trace such transmission when it has been actually effected in ourselves or in others, we shall find that, in proportion as one mind feeds, not forces, another, the particular bond and organization of the mental and emotional picture which cost us so much, moved us so much, has, in each case, been snapped and broken up; the whole has been again resolved into its constituent elements, and only some of these elements have been taken up into the already existing organization of the other mind, or have joined together in that mind, to form there a combination which is really new. Even a simple scent or sound or sight comes charged to each of us with many but most differing connotations, arousing or modifying or supplanting old or new ideas and impressions in the most subtle, complex, and individual manner. Insist upon another mind taking over the whole of this impression, and you will have rightly and necessarily aroused an immediate or remote hostility or revolt against the whole of what you bring. Hence here too we are again perplexed by the initial enigma: the apparently insurmountable individuality of all that affects us, and the equally insurmountable non-affectingness of all that is clearly and certainly transmissible from any one man to another.
4. This mysterious law appears to obtain in precise proportion to the depth and importance of the truths and realities in view.
And if we seem boxed up thus, each one away from our fellow, in all our really moving and determining inclinations and impressions, judgments and affections, with regard to matters on which we feel we can afford to differ deeply and to be much alone; we appear to be more and not less so, in exact proportion as the importance of the subject-matter increases. In moral and spiritual, in religious and fundamental matters, we thirst more, not less, for identity of conviction and of feeling; and we are, or seem to be, more, not less, profoundly and hopelessly at variance with each other than anywhere else.
And more than this: the apparent reason of this isolation seems but to aggravate the case, because here more than anywhere else imagination, feeling, intuition seem indeed to play a predominant, determining part; and yet here more than anywhere else we feel such a predominance to be fraught with every kind of danger. Thus here especially we feel as incapable of suppressing, indeed of doing without these forces, as of frankly accepting, studying, and cultivating them. Now and then we take alarm and are in a panic at any indication that these springs and concomitants of life are at work within us; yet we persist in doing little or nothing to find sufficient and appropriate food and scope and exercise for the right development and hence the real purification of these elemental forces, forces which we can stunt but cannot kill. Nothing, we most rightly feel, can be in greater or more subtle and dangerous opposition to manly morality or enlightened religion than the seeking after or revelling in emotion; nothing, we most correctly surmise, can equal the power of strong feeling or heated imagination to give a hiding-place to superstition, sensuality, dreamy self-complacent indolence, arrogant revolt and fanaticism; nothing, even where such things seem innocent, appears less apt than do these fierce and fitful, these wayward and fleeting feelings, these sublimities and exquisitenesses, to help on that sober and stable, consistent and persistent, laborious upbuilding of moral and religious character, work, and evidence which alone are wanted more and more. Indeed, what would seem better calculated than such emotion to strain the nerves, to inflame the imagination, to blunt common-sense and that salt of the earth, the saving sense of the ridiculous, to deaden the springs of research and critical observation, to bring us, under the incalculably sapping influences of physical abnormalities, close up to where sanity shades off into madness, and ethical elevation breaks down into morbidness and depravity?
5. The experience of the human race: the two series of personalities, movements, races.
And the secular experience of the race would seem fully to bear out such suspicions. For have we not there a double series of personalities, events, and movements far too long and widespread not to be conclusive? On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,--as it were, hydra-like, to sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into mere drift and dreaming,--from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy places of human ignorance and passion. On the other hand, there are those that are formed and fashioned by clear, transparent thought; and these flourish in the cultivated, well-drained plains of human science and strict demonstration.
Among the first series, you have the Pantheistic schools and personalities of the decaying Roman Empire, Plotinus the Ecstatic, and Jamblichus, and such other dreamers, straining up into the blue; the somewhat similar, largely subterranean, Jewish and Christian sects and tendencies of the Middle Ages; the Anabaptist and other like groups, individualistic, fantastic, in considerable part anomistic and revolutionary, of the Reformation period; and such phenomena as the Eternal-Gospel troubles and the Quietistic controversy in the Roman Church. And above all, in the East, we have, from time immemorial, whole races, (in the midst of a world crying aloud for help and re-fashioning, but which is left to stagnate and decay,) still dreaming away their lives in Buddhistic abstraction and indifference.
Among the second, the light, clear series, you have whole races, the luminous, plastic, immensely active Greek, the strong-willed, practical, organizing Roman, and the Anglo-Saxon determined “to stand no nonsense”; you have an Aristotle, sober, systematic; one side at least of the great Mediaeval Scholastic movement, culminating in St. Thomas, so orderly and transparent; above all, modern Physical Science, first subjecting all phenomena to rigorous quantitative and mathematical analysis and equation, and then reacting upon philosophy as well, and insisting, there and everywhere, upon clearness, direct comparableness, ready transferableness of ideas and their formulae, as the sole tests of truth. Descartes; Kepler, Galileo; Hobbes, Spinoza are, in increasing degrees, still perhaps the most perfect types of this clear and cool, this ultimately mathematical and Monistic tendency and position.
6. The dark, intuitive personalities and schools, apparently a mere stop-gap, transition, or reaction against the clear, discursive ones.
And further, the personalities and schools of the interiorly experimental, emotional kind seem to appear upon the scene but as stop-gaps or compensations for the other series, in periods of transition or reaction, of uncertainty or decay. So at the break-up of the Roman Empire (Neo-Platonism); so at the end of the Patristic period and just before the official acceptance of Scholasticism (St. Bernard); so during the foundering of the Mediaeval fabric of life and thought in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Pico, Paracelsus); so in the German Romanticism of sixty years ago, as a reaction against the survivals of the eighteenth-century Rationalism; so now again in our own day, more slightly, but not less really, in a revival of spiritual philosophy. It looks then as though the experimental-emotional strain could only thrive fitfully, on the momentary check or ruin of the clear and “scientific” school; as though it were a perhaps inevitable disease breaking in occasionally upon the normal health of the human mind. For the eventual result of the world’s whole movement surely seems to be the reclamation of ever-increasing stretches of knowledge and theory from the dominion of vague, irresponsible, untestable feeling, and their incorporation in the domain of that unbroken, universal determinism, of those clear and simple, readily analyzable, verifiable, communicable, and applicable laws which, more and more, are found to rule phenomena wheresoever we may look.
7. This seems especially to apply to the Intuitive-Emotional element of Religion.
And if the prima facie trend of centuries of thought and conflict appears to rule out of court even such a fringe of individual experience and emotion as ever accompanies and stimulates all religion: the verdict of history, indeed of any survey of contemporary life, if only this be sufficiently large, would seem fatal to any type of religion in which this individual experience and emotion would form religion’s core and centre, as in the case of the specifically experimental-emotional school generally, and of the Mystics in particular.
To take some such survey, let us look, to begin with, outside of where Catholic discipline and unity somewhat obscure, at first sight, even the legitimate and indeed the really existing diversities of school and tendency. In the Church’s organism each divergence has ever been more largely tempered and supplemented by the others; and since the Reformation, indeed in part even more recently, owing to an entirely intelligible and in part inevitable, reaction, even most legitimate and persistent divergencies, which flourished in rich and enriching variety throughout the Middle Ages, have largely ceased to appear in any obvious and distinct embodiments. Let us look then first to where such diversities grow unchecked, and indeed generally tend to excess and caricature. Let us take contemporary English Protestantism, and then Foreign Protestantism in the large lines of its history. In both cases the experimental-emotional strain and group will seem to compare unfavourably with its competitors.
For if we look about us in England, we seem to have little difficulty in classing the tendencies within the Established Church under the headings of High, Broad, and Low; indeed we can readily extend this treble classification to all the various schools and bodies of English Protestantism. We can easily conceive of the greater portion of English Nonconformity as but a prolongation and accentuation of the Evangelical school in the Established Church: the readiness and ease with which the former at certain moments unite and coalesce with the latter, show quite conclusively how close is the affinity between them. We almost as readily think of the Unitarian and Theistic bodies as prolongations and further sublimations of the Anglican Broad Church view, though here, no doubt, the degrees and kinds of difference are more numerous and important. And if it would be hard to find an extension, still more an accentuation, of the Anglican High Church party amongst the English Nonconformists, a strain largely identical with the sacerdotal current elsewhere has always existed in the Presbyterian churches. Nor must we forget the powerful and constant, both repellent and attractive, influence exercised by Rome upon even those outside of her obedience. To be quite philosophical, the survey ought to include all types of English Christianity; and, in that case, the High Church position would rank rather as a dilution, as a variety, incomplete and inconsistent though it be, of the type represented most strikingly and emphatically by Rome, than as a variant of the types having their centres at Wittenberg and Geneva.
And if we next turn to German Protestantism, especially to the simultaneous variations of its short-lived, fluid, formative period, we shall there too find this treble tendency. The Evangelical strain will be represented here by the numerous Illuminist and Anabaptist personalities, groups and movements to which Luther himself had given occasion, which but emphasized or caricatured his own earlier Mysticism; but which, when they threatened, by their revolutionary, communistic fanaticism and violence, completely to discredit and ruin his own movement, he suppressed with such ruthless and illogical severity. And the Broad Church strain will here be found emphasized and caricatured in Socinianism, and in such milder forms of Rationalism as prepared the way for it or followed in its wake. And finally, the High Church strain is not so hard to discover in much of the doctrine and in some of the forms and externals of Orthodox, official Lutheranism. Indeed in foreign Protestantism generally,--in Zwinglianism, in Calvinism, and in its other bodies and sects, we can trace various forms of, and degrees of approximation to, one or other of these three types, the Historical, the Experimental, the Rational.
Now looking at the scene of battle, for the moment quite generally, it would seem as though, of these three types and tendencies, the Emotional and Experimental had proved itself decidedly the weakest for good, the strongest for evil of the three, and this both in the past and in the present, both in England and abroad. We have here in England, in the past, the Puritan excesses in Ireland, Scotland, and England itself; and later on and down to the present, the largely dreary and unlovely, narrow and unjust monotony of Evangelicalism. We have there abroad, in the past, the Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist Saturnalia at Münster; and later on and down to the present, that Pietism which has so often barred the way to a just appreciation of Historical Christianity and to a candid acceptance of rational methods and results, and this without its being able to find any constructive or analytic working principle of its own. Both in England and in Germany, indeed throughout the cultivated West, only the Historical, Traditional school on the one hand, and the Rationalistic, Scientific school on the other hand, seem to count at all: it is they which alone seem to gain ground, or at least to hold it, at the Universities and amongst the thinking, ruling classes generally.
8. Yet this adverse judgment will appear largely misleading, if we study the matter more fully.
And yet this first aspect of things will, I think, turn out to be largely deceptive, to be but one side and one teaching of that noble inheritance, that great output of life and experience, past and present, which is ready to our hand for ever-renewed study and assimilation in human history and society, and which, taken as it really is,--as the indefinite prolongation of our own little individual direct experiences,--can alone help us to give to these latter experiences a full, life-regulating value. Let us take then the foregoing objections, and let us do so as but so many starting-points and openings into our great subject. This preliminary discussion will but prepare the ground and method for the following detailed study, and for the final positions of the whole book. Indeed even the book’s opening question can be answered only by the whole book and at our labour’s end.
I. The First Of The Three Forces: Hellenism, The Thirst For Richness And Harmony
We revert then to the apparent interior antinomy from which we started,--the particular concrete experience which alone moves us and helps to determine our will, but which, seemingly, is untransferable, indeed unrepeatable; and the general, abstract reasoning which is repeatable, indeed transferable, but which does not move us or help directly to determine the will. And we here begin by the study of the antinomy, as this has been explicated for us by Hellenism, the earliest and widest of the three main mental, indeed spiritual, forces that are operative within each of us Westerns, on and on.
1. The antinomy in the pre-Socratics.
Heraclitus appeared to us an impressive exponent of the former truth, of the apparent utter evanescence of these particular impressions and experiences, of the complete shiftingness of the very faculty within us and of the environment without us, by which and in which we apprehend them. An ever-changing self in the midst of an ever-changing world, basing its persuasiveness and persuadableness, indeed even its conscious identity with itself and its communion with others, upon the ever-changing resultants of all these changes: this would surely seem to be a house built not upon the sand but upon the quicksands.
Now we have to remember that Parmenides had, already in early Greek times, been equally emphatic, perhaps equally impressive, on the other side of this very question,--on the impossibility of Becoming, of Change; and on the certainty and knowableness of the utter Oneness and Permanence of all Being.[1] All that really is, he maintained, excludes all Becoming: the very notion of Being is incompatible with that of Becoming: the first is utterly without the second. All real Becoming would be equivalent to the real existence of Non-Being. Hence all Multiplicity and Becoming is necessarily but apparent, and masks an underlying absolute Unity and Permanence, which can be reached by the intellect alone. And this position of Parmenides was felt to be so strong, that all the subsequent Greek Physicists took their stand upon it: the four unchangeable elements of Empedocles, the Atoms of Leucippus and Democritus (atoms of eternally unchanging shape and size, and of one absolutely uniform and unchanging quality) are but modifications of the doctrine of Parmenides concerning the Oneness and Unchangeableness of Being.
But even Heraclitus himself is far removed from denying all Oneness, all Permanence. For, according to him, a permanent law of permutation runs through and expresses itself in the shiftingness of all things perceptible by sense; or rather one eternal physical substance, Fire, of ceaselessly active properties, is continually manifesting itself, in a regular succession of appearances, from fire to air, from air to water, from water to earth, and then backwards up again to fire.
And when once the Greeks begin to break away from all this Hylozoism,--these systems which uniformly, from Thales to Democritus, attempt to explain all things by some one living or moving Matter, without the intervention of Spirit or of Mind,--Spirit appears in Anaxagoras as the One, and as present, everywhere and in varying degrees, as the principle of the motion of that co-eternal matter which is here, on the contrary, conceived of as but apparently homogeneous anywhere, and as really composed of an indefinite number and combination of qualitatively differing constituents.
Thus in all its schools, even before Socrates and Plato, Greek philosophy clung to the One and the One’s reality, however differently it conceived the nature of this Unity, and however much it may have varied as to the nature and reality of the Many, or as to the relation and the bond subsisting between that Unity and this Multiplicity. Only at the end of this first period do the Sophists introduce, during a short time marked by all the symptoms of transition, uncertainty, and revolution, the doctrine, of the unknowableness, indeed of the unreality, of the One, and with it of the exclusive reality of mere Multiplicity, of evanescent Appearances.
2. In Socrates.
But Socrates opens out the second and greatest period of Greek philosophy, by reverting to, indeed by indefinitely deepening, the general conviction that Oneness underlies Multiplicity. And he does so through the virtual discovery of, and a ceaseless insistence upon, two great new subject-matters of philosophy: Dialects and Ethics. It is true that in both these respects the Sophists had prepared the ground: they had, before him and all around him, discussed everything from every then conceivable point of view; and they had, at the same time, helped to withdraw man’s attention from pure speculation about physical nature to practical occupation with himself. But the Sophistic Dialectic had ended in itself, in universal negation and scepticism; and the Sophistic Anthropology had, partly as cause, partly as effect of that scepticism, more and more completely narrowed and dragged down all human interest, capacity, and activity to a selfish, materialistic self-aggrandizement and a frank pleasure-seeking. Socrates indeed took over both these subjects; but he did so in a profoundly different spirit, and worked them into a thoroughly antagonistic view of knowledge and of life.
Socrates begins, like the Sophists, with the Multiplicity of impression and opinion, which we find occasioned by one and the same question or fact; and like them he refuses to take the Physicists’ short cut of immediate and direct occupation with things and substances, say the elements. Slowly and laboriously he works his way, by the help of Dialectics, (for these have now become a means and not an end,) around and through and into the various apprehensions, and, at last, out of and beyond them, to a satisfactory concept of each thing. And the very means taken to arrive at this concept, and the very test which is applied to the concept, when finally arrived at, for gauging the degree of its finality, both these things help to deepen profoundly the sense of a certain Multiplicity in all Oneness and of a certain Oneness in all Multiplicity. For the means he takes are a careful and (as far as may be) exhaustive and impartial discussion and analysis of all the competing and conflicting notions and connotations occasioned by each matter in dispute; and the test he applies to the final concept, in view of gauging the degree of its finality, is how far this concept reconciles and resolves within its higher unity all such various and contrary aspects suggested by the thing, as have stood the brunt of the previous discussion and have thereby proved themselves true and objective.
Socrates again, like the Sophists, turns his attention away from Physics to Ethics; he drops speculation about external nature, and busies himself with the interior life and development of man. But the world in which Socrates’ method necessarily conceives and places man, and the work and standard which he finds already latent in each man, for that man to do and to endorse in himself and in the world, are both entirely different from those of the Sophists, and occasion a still further, indeed the greatest of all possible deepenings of the apprehension of Oneness and of Multiplicity.
For the world of Socrates is a world in which Reality and Truth reign and are attainable by man; never does he even ask whether truth is or can be reached by us, but only what it is and where it lies and how it can be attained. And since Socrates instinctively shares the profoundly Greek conviction that Reality and Truth are necessarily not only one but unchanging, he assumes throughout that, since Truth and Reality do exist, Oneness and unchanging Being must exist also. And thus the Oneness of Reality and the Multiplicity of Appearance are re-established by him in Greek philosophy. And their apprehension is indefinitely deepened and extended, since, whatever is being knowable, and knowable only through Dialectics, and Dialectics having left us with concepts each in a sense a one and a many, Life itself, Reality and all Nature must, somehow and to some extent, be also a one and a many. And man according to Socrates is required, already as a simple consequence of such convictions, to discover and acknowledge and organize the One and the Many in his own interior life and faculties. For if his senses tell him of the Many, and his reason alone tells him of the One, and the Many are but appearances and the One alone is fully real,--then it will be in and through his reason that he is and will be truly man.
Thus immediately within himself does man have a continuous, uniquely vivid experience of the One and the Many, and of the necessity, difficulty, and fruitfulness of their proper organization; and from hence he will reflect them back upon the outer world, adding thus indefinitely, by means of Ethics, to the delicacy and depth of his apprehension of such Oneness and Multiplicity as, by means of Dialectics, he has already found there. But further, he now thus becomes conscious, for the first time at all adequately, of the difference between his own body and his own mind. And here he has no more a Oneness and a Multiplicity, he is directly conscious of a Oneness in Multiplicity, of a ruling and organizing power of the mind in and over the body; and the One here is unseen and spiritual, and the Many is here found to be an organism of forces and of functions designed, with profound wisdom, to correspond with and to subserve the soul. And this Microcosm is readily taken as a key and an analogy wherewith to group and explain the appearances of the world without. Much appears in that outer world as unreduced to system; but then similarly within us much is still in a state of chaos, of revolt. In that world no one ruler can be directly perceived; but then similarly within us, the one ruling mind is perceptible only in its effects. And this inner organization, ever required more than realized, is not a matter of abstract speculation, of subtle induction, adjournable at will; it is a clamorous consciousness, it is a fact that continually requires acts to back it or to break it. Strengthen it, and you have interior expansion and life; weaken it, and you bring on shrinkage and death. For the passions are there, active even if we refuse to be active, active against us and above us, if not under us and for us; and their submission to the reason, to effort, cannot fail, once our attention is fully turned that way, more than anything else to keep alive and to deepen our sense of the organization of all that lives, of the presence of the One and the Many, of the One in the Many, in all that truly lives at all.
3. In Plato.
Now this dialectical method and this ethical subject-matter get applied, investigated, and developed, with ever-increasing complexity and interaction, by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the three spiritual generations of this, the greatest period of Greek Philosophy. And the more penetrating the method becomes, and the more deeply it probes the subject-matter, the more intense and extensive is found to be this Unity in Multiplicity both within man and without him.
In the teaching of Socrates both the method and the apprehension of Unity and Multiplicity are as yet, so to speak, in bud. Dialectics are here still chiefly a Method, and hardly as yet a Metaphysic as well. The soul here is as yet but simply one, and virtue is also simply one, and simply and directly identical with knowledge, and hence directly teachable: the very possibility that the will may not or indeed cannot follow, necessarily, automatically, the clear perception of what is really good for it, is one quite foreign to the mind of Socrates, indeed to all Greek thinkers up to the very end of the classical philosophy.
In Plato the methods and the results are both, as it were, in flower. Dialectics have here become both a systematic method, and a metaphysical system: not only are Ideas true, and the only means for reaching truth, but they alone are true, they alone fully are, and exist as separate self-subsisting realities. And as in the world within, Goodness is, in this profoundly ethical system, seen and willed and striven for as supreme, so also in the world without, is the Idea of Goodness considered as existing supreme from all eternity, and as somehow the Cause of all that truly is.
It is true that Plato nowhere succeeds in finding in his system a fitting place for a Personal God: for, among other reasons, the Platonic Ideas are all, from the lowest to the highest, but Hypostasized Concepts of Kinds, and are hence, quite consistently, considered to be perfect and supreme, in precise proportion as they are general. The highest Idea will thus of necessity be the most general, the most devoid of all determination, and hence the least personal of them all.
It is true also that in his Metaphysics generally he insists so much upon the complete severance and self-sufficingness of the Ideas as over against Appearances, that he prepares his own inevitable failure again to bridge over the gulf that he himself has thus dug too deep and broad. Especially is his half-suggestion misleading, that the transition to Phenomenal Multiplicity is but a further extension of the Multiplicity already observable in the world of Ideas. For these two Multiplicities are evidently entirely different in kind. Each Idea is conceived as necessarily eternal, unchanging, complete and perfect in its own way; whereas each appearance is conceived as necessarily temporal, changing, incomplete, and imperfect even in its own way.
It is true again, that, in Psychology, Plato breaks up the Soul into the three parts of the Reason, the Irascible Passions, and the Concupiscible Passions, and that he discriminates between them even as to their place of residence in the body. And correspondingly he distinguishes, in Ethics, the four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and Justice: he distributes the first three virtues among the three parts of the soul, allotting ever one of these virtues specially to one part; and makes Justice to be the general virtue that sees to each part carrying out its own special work and virtue, and respecting the work of the other two. And thus we seem to get away from the Oneness of the soul and the Oneness of virtue, as already taught by Socrates.
It is finally true that not only does Matter remain unexplained and treated as though in itself a mere nothing; but that it is considered, nevertheless, as somehow strong enough to hinder and hamper the Idea which really constitutes that Matter’s sole reality. Hence also springs Plato’s saddening aloofness from and contempt for all trades and handicrafts, for all the homely tastes, joys, and sorrows at all peculiar to the toiling majority. And herein he but considerably deepens and systematizes one of the weakest and most ruinous traditions of his class, age, and people, and falls far short of Socrates, with his deep childlike love of homely wisdom and of technical skill and productiveness. Indeed Matter is considered to be the one occasion of all sin, just as ignorance is considered to be the one true cause of sin. For although Plato throughout holds and proclaims free-will, in the definite sense of freedom of choice; and although he, in some passages, declares the ignorance which (according to him) is the necessary condition of a wrong choice, to be itself voluntary and culpable and to spring from an avoidable attachment to the world of sense: yet he clings, nevertheless, to the Socratic position that all ignorance and immorality are involuntary, that no man does or can act against what he sees to be for his own good.
All this would of itself suffice to show how and why the Platonic system has, as such, long ceased to live or to be capable of resuscitation. And yet even some of the apparent weaknesses just referred to are nearly or even entirely strong points in his scheme. So with his treble division of the Soul, if we but soften the distinction of actual parts into a difference of function or of object. For, already in Plato’s own judgment, these parts admit of and require a regular hierarchy of subordination: the Irascible part is the natural ally, if properly tamed and broken in by the Reason, of this Reason against the Concupiscible part: it is the winged steed amongst the two horses of the chariot of the soul, and the charioteer, the Reason, has to see to it that this his winged steed flies not recklessly, but lends all its strength to keep its heavy, wingless, downwards-tending yoke-fellow from plunging them all into the deep and dark. Hence all this really makes for a true, because rich and laborious, Unity in Multiplicity. The same applies to the scheme of the four Cardinal Virtues; for here also there is a balancing and interaction of forces and of duties, which together are well fitted to deepen and fruitfully to unify the soul.
But above all, there are four main conceptions which, with varying degrees and kinds of clearness, consistency, and proof, run throughout the Dialogues, and which not all the ever-increasing perception of the complexity of their implications, nor all the never-ending costingness of their reproduction, have long kept mankind from accepting and working into their own inner life and into their outlook and labour upon the world without.
There is, first, the sense of the Universal nature of philosophy. Philosophy is here not a science alongside of other sciences, nor a sect existing with a view to the advantage of its members, nor a substitute for religion or science, art or action; but it stands for the totality of all mental activity, the nearest approach to an adequate realization of the reasonable nature of man. Hence philosophy has constant relations with all departments of human thought and action; or rather they all, with their several methods and ideals, come to enrich and stimulate philosophy, whilst philosophy, in return, reacts upon them all, by clarifying and harmonizing them each with itself and each with all the others.
There is, next, the constant conviction of the reality of moral accountableness on the one hand, and of the strength of the passions and of the allurements of sense on the other, of the costing ethical character of the search for light and truth, of the ceaseless necessity of a turning of the whole man, of conversion. “As the bodily eye cannot turn from darkness to light without the turning of the whole body, so too when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul must be turned from the world of generation unto that of Being, and become able to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and best part of Being, that is to say of the Good.”[2] Hence Philosophy is a Redemption, a Liberation, a Separation of the soul from the body, a Dying and seeking after death, a constant Purification and Recollection of the soul; and the four Cardinal Virtues are so many purifications;[3] and men who have once come to lay the blame of their own confusion and perplexity upon themselves, will hate themselves and escape from themselves into Philosophy, in order to become different and get rid of their former selves.[4]
There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other--moving out of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior work; and moving back into itself, into the world of Unity, of spirit and interior rest. Hence there is and ought to be a double movement of the soul. And this double action does not continue on the same plane, but the moving, oscillating soul is, according to the faithful thoroughness or cowardly slackness of these its movements, ever either mounting higher in truth and spirit, or falling lower away into the sensual and untruthful. For these its ascensions are “effortful,” painful, gradual; they are never fully finished here below, and they nowhere attain to that absolute knowledge which is possessed by God alone.[5] “We ought,” he tells us, “to strive and fly as swiftly as possible from hence thither. And to fly thither is to become like God”; but he adds, “as far as this is possible.”[6]
And there is, lastly, an unfailing faith in an unexhausted, inexhaustible, transcendent world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, which gives of itself, but never gives itself wholly, to that phenomenal world which exists only by participation in it; and in a Supreme Goodness, felt and half conceived to be personal and self-communicative, as the cause of all that is anywhere beautiful and one and good.
These four characteristics of Universality, Conversion, Unification, Transcendence, we find them together in Greek philosophy once, and once only, namely in Plato. Twice again we have indeed a world-embracing, world-moving scheme placed before us, and in each case two of these four characteristics reappear in a deepened and developed form. For Aristotle works out, more fully and satisfactorily than Plato, the characters of Universality and of Unification; especially does the latter find a great improvement. And Plotinus insists, even more constantly and movingly than Plato, upon Conversion as a necessary means, and upon Transcendence as a necessary characteristic of all true philosophy. But Aristotle has lost the Conversion from out of his scheme, and also the Transcendence conceived as at the same time immanent in the world; and Plotinus has lost the Universality, and the Unification conceived as a Unity in Multiplicity.
4. In Aristotle.
As to Aristotle, the improvements upon Plato are marked and many. There is the doctrine of the non-existence of the General apart from the Particular; the doctrine of Matter as not simple Non-Being, but as Not-yet-Being, the Possible, the Not-yet-Actual, which is waiting the presence of the Form to give it the Actuality for which it is destined, since Matter requires Form, and Form requires Matter; and the doctrine, here first fully developed, of Motion, the Moved and the Moving.
Since all Motion, Change, Natural Life spring from Form (and a particular Form), working in and with Matter (a particular and appropriate Matter), the ultimate First Moving Cause must Itself be all-moving and all-unmoved, that is, it must be Pure Form. We thus get the first at all adequate philosophical presentation of Theism: for this Pure Form is then shown to be eternal, unchanging, all thought, self-thinking, and absolutely distinct from the world which it moves. In all other real Beings the Form has, in various degrees, to contend with the manifold impediments of Matter; and in proportion to the Form’s success, does the resultant Being stand high in the scale of Creation. The plant, with its vegetative and plastic soul, stands lowest in the scale of organic life; next comes the animal, with its sensitive and motive soul; and highest stands man, with his rational and volitional soul. And each higher Being takes over, as the lower part of his own nature, the functions and powers of the lower Being; and hence, since all Beings constitute so many several parts of the world’s systematic whole, they are all deserving of the closest study. And Man, destined to be the highest constituent of this whole, can become so only by moving as much as may be out of his entanglement in the lower, the passive functions of his soul, and identifying himself with his true self, with that active power, that pure reason which, itself pure Form, finds its proper objects in the Forms of all things that are.
Thus we get a system of a certain grand consistency and an impressively constant re-application of certain fundamental ideas to every kind of subject-matter. But the Platonic Dualism, though everywhere vigorously attacked, is yet nowhere fully overcome.
For in Metaphysics, Plato’s “One alongside of the Many” becomes with Aristotle the “One throughout the Many”: to the mind of the latter, the Separate General, Pure Form as existing without Matter, is a mere abstraction; Matter without Form is a simple potentiality; Matter and Form together, and they only, constitute the Particular, and (in and by it) all actual and full Reality. And only Reality, in the highest and primary sense, can, according to him, form the highest and primary object of Knowledge. Yet knowledge never refers to the Particular, but always to the General; and, in the Particular, only to the General manifested in it. And this is the case, not because, though the Particular is the fuller Reality, we can more easily reach the General within it; but, on the contrary, because, though we can more easily reach the Particular, the General alone is abiding and fully true and really knowable.
Again, for Aristotle the Particular, which alone really exists, is constituted a particular and really existent Being, in virtue of its participation in Matter; but it is constituted as abiding, true, and knowable, in virtue of its Form. The cause of its Reality is thus different from that of its Truth; the addition of the simple Potentiality of Matter has alone given Reality to the pure Actuality of Form.
Finally, for Aristotle all Movement, as comprehensive of every kind of change, being defined as the transition from Potentiality to Reality, as the determination of Matter by Form, can be called forth, in the last resort, only by a pure Form which, though the cause of all Motion, is itself unmoved, is pure Thought and Speculation, a thinking of thinking,--God eternally thinking God and Himself alone. Yet this God is, if thus safely distinguished from the world, yet hardly more Personal than Spirit was in Anaxagoras, or the Idea of Good was in Plato. For not only does Aristotle refuse Him a body and all psychic life, but with them he eliminates all Doing and all Producing, all Emotion and all Willing, indeed all Thinking except that of His own lonely Self-Contemplation. And yet the activity of the will is as essential to Personality as that of thinking; and thinking again we can conceive as personal only if conditioned by a diversity of objects and a variety of mental states. And this God’s relations with the world are strangely few and still curiously materialistic. For He but sets the world in motion, and has no special care for it or detailed rule over it; and since, of the three or four kinds of motion, spacial motion is declared to be the primary one, and its most perfect form to be the circular, and since a circle moves quickest at its circumference, He is conceived as imparting to the world a spacial and a circular movement, and this, apparently, from a point in space, since He does so from outside. His transcendence is, so far, but a spacial one.
In Physics, Aristotle still constantly describes Nature as an harmonious, reasonable Being, an all-effecting force. There is here a mythical strain at work, and yet nowhere is a subject clearly defined to which these various qualities could be attributed.
In Anthropology again, the active soul, the rational and free-willing, the immortal principle, is that which specially distinguishes and constitutes Humanity, and which indeed is the Form of the lower soul-powers and of the body as well. Yet it is these lower soul-powers, it is the passive, the vegetative and sensitive, the mortal soul-powers which, in and with the body, constitute this particular man, and only particular men are really existent. Where and how then is this living man’s Personality, his indelible consciousness of the unity of his nature, to arise and to be found in all this medley?
And finally, in Ethics, Aristotle maintains and develops, it is true, the great Socratic tradition of conceiving all virtue as active, and demands with Plato that the whole man should, as much as may be, put himself into all his moral acts. Indeed Aristotle makes here the great advance of definitely denying the Socratic doctrine that virtue consists in knowledge, and of abolishing the Platonic distinction between ordinary and philosophic virtue. All moral qualities are, according to him, matters of the will; and arise, in the first instance, not through instruction, but through exercise and education. But in place of Plato’s grandly organic, though still too abstract scheme of the Cardinal Virtues, each of the three partial ones pressing upwards and requiring and completing the others, and all three bound together by the general fourth, we get a more detailed and experimental, but only loosely co-ordinated enumeration and description of the virtuous habits, all of them so many means between two vicious extremes. The purificatory, recollective, self-fleeing, grandly organic, deeply religious tone and drift of Plato’s philosophy, that priceless conviction that we must give all if we would gain all, has disappeared.
Everywhere then we get in Aristotle that noble Greek insistence, upon Action and Energy, upon Reason and Clearness, upon the General and Unification. But at all the chief turning-points we get a conflict between the General, which is alone supposed to be fully true, and the Particular, which is alone supposed to be fully real. And hence we are left with an insufficient apprehension of the inexhaustibleness of all Reality, of its indefinite apprehensibleness but ever inadequate apprehendedness. And above all, as both cause and effect of all this, we find here only a slight and intermittent hold upon the great fact and force of Personality in both God and man. In a word, if in Plato the abstracting process went in general still further than in Aristotle: in Aristotle the supply of experimental material of a spiritual kind which in Plato was ever enriching, supplementing and correcting the abstract reasoning and its results in matters of spirituality, is almost entirely in abeyance.
5. In Plotinus and Proclus.
In the third and last period of Greek Philosophy, we can pass by the Stoic and Epicurean, and also the Sceptical schools. For, great as was their practical importance and influence, these schools never aimed at embracing the totality of life; no one of them ever, as a matter of fact, cultivated more than one side of a purely individual self-education and peace-seeking. They reproduced and continued, on a larger scale, those interesting three minor Socratic schools which themselves had, even during the full times and universal systems of Plato and Aristotle, constituted as it were the backwaters away from the main stream of Greek speculation. The Stoic system carries on the Cynic school; the Epicurean, the Cyrenaic; and the Sceptical, the Megaric. Unity and Rest is monopolized by the Stoic, and Multiplicity and Movement by the Epicurean; whilst the Sceptic attempts to stand apart from and above both. What Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, living in still many-sided and public-spirited times, had, in their lives and teaching, seen and practised together; now, in a period of spiritual poverty and self-seeking, is seen and practised by separate schools separately, each in external conflict with the other.
Only the system of that great mystical soul, Plotinus, has, for our present purposes, a claim on our close attention. Indeed this, the last great attempt at synthesis of the ancient Greek mind, will have to occupy us in such detail throughout a great part of this book, that here we can but briefly indicate its chief characteristics as regards the One and the Many.
It is then clear that Plotinus is an even more intensely and exclusively religious spirit than is Plato himself. Some of his descriptions of the soul’s flight from the world of sense and of the soul’s substantial touch of God in ecstasy, and again his penetrating apprehension of the timeless and spaceless characteristics of Spirit, have never ceased, at least indirectly, to leaven, and to lend much of their form to, the deepest recollective aspirations of religious souls in Europe and Western Asia, for some fourteen centuries at least.
Yet this religious sense is here so exclusive, and it thirsts so vehemently for perfect unity and for an infinite Superiority and utter Self-sufficingness of God, that it readily allies itself with, and reinforces by a massive enthusiasm and asceticism, the abstractive trend which, so strong at all times in Greek philosophy, was at this period already, for other reasons, growing more intensely abstractive than ever. Under this double influence Plotinus reduces the two great, deliberate, alternating movements of the soul,--its Outgoing to the Particular and Contingent, and its Incoming to the General and Infinite, as they are taught by Plato,--to one only, that of Recollection and Abstraction, a movement ever up and away, from all Multiplicity, to the One alone. And he denies to this One all Multiplicity whatsoever,--hence all such conscious, volitional action upon the world as is involved in Plato’s magnificent, though never worked out, intuition that it is love, (some energizing analogous to our thinking, loving and willing the existence, the self-realization and the happiness of other self-conscious beings,) which moves the Good, as it were, to go out from Itself, and to communicate Itself to others. Here, in Plotinus’s scheme, Man begins indeed with sense-impressions and imaginative picturings, with discursive reasoning and intuitive reason, with feelings, volitions, and energizings of every kind. But the more he moves up, the more of all this he leaves utterly behind; till, in ecstasy, all will, love, thought, consciousness, cease altogether. For man has thus been getting nearer and nearer, and more and more like, the One; and this One is just nothing besides sheer, pure Oneness,--it is neither Will, nor Love, nor Thought, nor Self-consciousness, in any degree or sense of these words.
Plotinus’s scheme is thus indeed prompted by some of the deepest Mystical aspirations. But whilst in its one deliberate movement--that of man up to God--it starts from convictions and requirements that are deeply ethical, libertarian, spiritual, theistic: it will be shown, in its conception of the nature of the One and of this One’s relations down into the world, to be curiously naturalistic and determinist, and subtly materialistic. Thus does Greek Philosophy end in an impressively all-devouring Abstraction, in an intense Realism destructive, step by step, of precisely all that concrete, individual, personal Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of all the spiritual, hence organic, interior, self-conscious reality, which had given occasion to this system. We have now but so many hypostatized abstractions, each more pale and empty than the other, each ever more simply a mere category of the human mind, indeed, but a category appropriate to Things and to Mathematico-Physical Laws, not to Spirit and to Ethico-Personal Organisms. The system, in its ultimate upshot and trend, is thus profoundly anti-Immanental, anti-Incarnational: a succession of increasingly exalted and increasingly empty Transcendences, each of which is, as it were, open upwards but closed downwards, takes the place of all deliberate operations and self-expressions of the Higher in and through the Lower, hence of all preveniences and condescensions of God.
And in Proclus, practically the last non-Christian Greek Philosopher, all these intensely abstractive, naturalistic features get finally and fully systematized, whilst but intermittent traces remain of Plato’s richly manifold, organized activities and his at times strikingly incarnational conceptions; and only skeleton-schemes persist of those rapt recollective experiences of Plotinus which, derived in his case from direct experience, constitute him, among all Philosophers, as Dr. Edward Caird most aptly calls him, the “Mystic par excellence.”
Ii. The Second Of The Three Forces: Christianity, The Revelation Of Personality And Depth
Now the whole of this clear, conceptual, abstractive Greek method, in as far as it identified abstractions with realities, and names with things, and reasoning with doing, suffering, and experience; and sought for Unity outside of Multiplicity, for Rest outside of Energizing, for the Highest outside of Personality and Character as these are developed and manifested in the permeation and elevation of the lower; has in so far been succeeded and superseded by two other great world-moving experiences of the human race, experiences apparently even more antagonistic to each other than either appears to be to the Greek view: Christianity and Scientific Method.
1. The unique fulness and closeness of unity in multiplicity of our Lord’s life.
As to Christianity, it is really impossible to compare it directly with Hellenism, without at once under-stating its originality. For its originality consists not so much in its single doctrines, or even in its teaching as a whole, and in the particular place each doctrine occupies in this teaching, as in its revelation, through the person and example of its Founder, of the altogether unsuspected depth and inexhaustibleness of human Personality, and of this Personality’s source and analogue in God, of the simplicity and yet difficulty and never-endingness of the access of man to God, and of the ever-preceding condescension of God to man. Hence if Christianity is thus throughout the Revelation of Personality; and if Personality is ever a One in Many, (and more deeply One and more richly Many, in proportion to the greatness of that spiritual reality): then we need not wonder at the difficulty we find in pointing out any one particular doctrine as constitutive of the unique originality of Christianity.
For a Person came, and lived and loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His Power and His Spirit for ever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near,--that His character and teaching require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences of the human race to the end of time. If there is nothing shifting or fitful or simply changing about Him, there is everywhere energy and expansion, thought and emotion, effort and experience, joy and sorrow, loneliness and conflict, interior trial and triumph, exterior defeat and supplantation: particular affections, particular humiliations, homely labour, a homely heroism, greatness throughout in littleness. And in Him, for the first and last time, we find an insight so unique, a Personality so strong and supreme, as to teach us, once for all, the true attitude towards suffering.
Not one of the philosophers or systems before Him had effectually escaped falling either into Pessimism, seeing the end of life as trouble and weariness, and seeking to escape from it into some aloofness or some Nirvana; or into Optimism, ignoring or explaining away that suffering and trial which, as our first experience and as our last, surround us on every side. But with Him, and alone with Him and those who still learn and live from and by Him, there is the union of the clearest, keenest sense of all the mysterious depth and breadth and length and height of human sadness, suffering, and sin, and, in spite of this and through this and at the end of this, a note of conquest and of triumphant joy.
And here, as elsewhere in Christianity, this is achieved not by some artificial, facile juxtaposition: but the soul is allowed to sob itself out; and all this its pain gets fully faced and willed, gets taken up into the conscious life. Suffering thus becomes the highest form of action, a divinely potent means of satisfaction, recovery, and enlargement for the soul,--the soul with its mysteriously great consciousness of pettiness and sin, and its immense capacity for joy in self-donation.
And again, His moral and spiritual idealism, whilst indefinitely higher than that of any of the philosophers or prophets before Him, has nothing strained or restless, nothing rootless or quietistic, nothing querulous or disdainful, or of caste or sect about it: the humblest manual labour, the simplest of the human relations, the universal elemental faculties of man as man, are all entered into and developed, are all hallowed in smallest detail, and step by step.
And finally His teaching, His life, are all positive, all constructive, and come into conflict only with worldly indifference and bad faith. No teacher before Him or since, but requires, if we would not be led astray by him, that we should make some allowances, in his character and doctrine, for certain inevitable reactions, and consequent narrownesses and contrarinesses. Especially is this true of religious teachers and reformers, and generally in exact proportion to the intensity of their fervour. But in Him there is no reaction, no negation, no fierceness, of a kind to deflect His teaching from its immanent, self-consistent trend. His very Apostles can ask Him to call down fire from heaven upon the unbelieving Samaritans; they can use the sword against one of those come out to apprehend Him; and they can attempt to keep the little ones from Him. But He rebukes them; He orders Peter to put back the sword in its scabbard; and He bids the little ones to come unto Him, since of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed St. Mark’s Gospel tells us how the disciples begged Him to forbid a man who did not follow them from casting out devils in His name; and how He refused to do so, and laid down the great universal rule of all-embracing generosity: “He that is not against us, is with us.”[7]
2. This rich unity of life occasions three special presentations of it, the “Petrine,” “Pauline,” “Joannine.”
Now it is this very reality and depth, and hence the rich Unity, the growth, variety, and manifold fruitfulness of His life and teaching, which explain, as a necessity and an advantage, that we should have those successive pictures and conceptions of Him which already the New Testament presents. Because Socrates was so great and impressive, we have the two successive, remarkably divergent, portraits of him: the external, historical, by Xenophon; the internal, typical one, by Plato; and that is all. Because our Lord is so unspeakably greater, and continues, with inexhaustible freshness, to be the very life of the lives of Christians, we have three or four classical portraits of Him in the New Testament; and, in a certain true manner and degree, each successive age, in a measure each single soul, forms, and has to form, its own picture of Him.
We can roughly classify these pictures under the three successive types of the “Petrine,” the “Pauline,” and the “Joannine,” provided we do not forget that the precise limits of the first of these divisions are difficult to draw, and that there are growths and diversities of aspect to be found within the Pauline type. For the Petrine type will here be sought in the Synoptic Gospels, and in particular in those accounts and sayings there which appear to give us the closest reproduction of our Lord’s very acts and words and of the impressions produced by these upon the original witnesses. The Pauline type will embrace four main stages or developments: that of the four or five of the earlier Epistles--the two to the Thessalonians and those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans; that of the Epistles of the Captivity, Colossians, Philippians, Ephesians; that of the Pastoral Epistles; and that of the Epistle to the Hebrews. And even in the least diversified, the Joannine type, there is the variation between the Gospel and Epistles on the one hand, and the Apocalypse on the other.
But taking these three types as each a unity, we shall hardly be guilty of an empty schematization, if the Petrine or Primitive-Apostolic group represents to us mainly the simplest statement of the external facts, and specially of the traditional, the Jewish side of our Lord’s teaching; and if the Pauline and Joannine groups each mainly represent to us, in various degrees and combinations, the two manners in which the hidden significance of these facts, as intended for all men and for all time, can be penetrated, viz. by thought and speculation, and by feeling and operative experience.
Of course none of the three groups is without a large element common to it and to the other two: it is the same facts that are looked at and loved, by means of the same powers of the soul, and within the same great common principles and convictions. Only the precise antecedents, point of view, temper of mind; the selection, presentation, and degree of elaboration of the facts and of their spiritual meaning; the preponderance of this or that mental activity; the reasons and connections sought and seen, are often widely different in each, and produce a distinctiveness of impression which can be taken to correspond roughly to the three main powers of the soul: to the range of sense-perception and of memory; to that of reasoning; and to that of intuition, feeling, and will. If each group had only that element which can be taken as being its predominant one, then any single group would be of little value, and each group would imperatively require ever to be taken in conjunction with the other two. But, as a matter of fact, neither are the “Petrine” writings free from all reasoning and mystical affinities; nor are the “Pauline,” free from the historic, positive spirit, or, still less, from the mystical habit; nor the “Joannine” free from the deepest teaching as to the necessity of external facts, or from some argument and appeals to reason. Hence each group, indeed each writing even singly, and still more all three groups if taken together, profoundly embody and proclaim, by the rich variety of their contents and spirit, the great principle and measure of all life and truth: unity in and through variety, and steadfastness in and through growth.
Specially easy is it to find in all three types the two chief among the three modalities of all advanced religion: the careful reverence for the external facts of nature (so far as these are known), and for social religious tradition and institutions; and the vivid consciousness of the necessity and reality of internal experience and actuation, as the single spirit’s search, response, and assimilation of the former.[8]
3. The “Petrine” attestations: their special message.
Thus the “Petrine” group gives us, as evidence for the observation and love of the external world: “Behold the birds of the air, how they sow not, neither harvest nor gather into barns”; “Study the lilies of the field how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these”; “The seed sprouts and shoots up, whilst the man knows not; the earth beareth fruit of itself, first the stalk, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear”; “When now the fig-tree’s shoot grows tender and putteth forth leaves, you know that summer is nigh”; and, “When it is evening, you say: ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning: ‘It will be foul weather to-day, for the heaven is red and lowering.’”[9]
And as to reverence for tradition we get: “Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets; I have come not to destroy but to fulfil.” And this respect extends to existing religious practices: “Beware,” He says, “lest you do your justice before men, to be seen by them,” but then describes the spirit in which they are to practice their “sedaka,” this “justice” which they are to do, with its three quite traditional divisions of alms-deeds, prayer, fasting, the three Eminent Good Works of Judaism. And again: “If thou offer thy gift upon the altar,” the doing so is in nowise criticised.[10]
Indeed there is no shrinking from the manifestation, on the part of the crowd, of new and even rude forms of trust in the visible and external: “A woman who had been suffering from an issue of blood during twelve years, … coming in the crowd behind Him, touched His garment, for she said: ‘If I but touch His garments I shall be saved.’ And straightway the issue of blood was dried up”; and the crowds generally “put the sick in the open places, and begged Him that they might but touch the hem of His garment; and such as touched it were healed”; and this “hem” consisted doubtless in the blue tassels, the Zizith, worn by every religious Jew at the four corners of his cloak.[11]
And the twelve Apostles, whom He sends out with special instructions, “going forth preached that men should repent, and went casting out many devils, and anointing many sick with oil and healing them.” Indeed there is, as the act preliminary to His public ministry, His baptism in the Jordan; and there is, as introductory to His Passion, the supremely solemn, visible, and audible act which crowns the Last Supper.[12]
But this same group of documents testifies also to a mystical, interior element in Our Lord’s temper and teaching. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God,” are Beatitudes which cannot be far from the ipsissima verba of Our Lord. “In that hour Jesus answering said: ‘I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: yea, Father, for this hath been well-pleasing before Thee.’ … ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find refreshment for your souls: for My yoke is sweet and My burden is light.’” is deeply mystical passage doubtless expresses with a vivid exactitude the unique spiritual impression and renovation produced by Him within the souls of the first generations of His disciples. And the three Synoptists give us five times over the great fundamental mystical paradox: “If a man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whosoever shall be determined to save his soul, shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his soul for My sake, shall find it.” And the great law of interiority is recorded in St. Mark: “Listen unto Me, ye all, and understand: nothing that entereth from without into a man can defile him, but only the things that proceed from a man are the things that defile a man.”[13]
And we get in Mark the fundamental interior virtue of childlikeness, and the immanence of Christ in the childlike soul: “If anyone wish to be first, let him be the last of all men and all men’s servant.” “And taking a little child He placed it in the midst of them; and having embraced it, He said unto them: ‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter therein.’” “Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”[14]
And the spirituality of the soul’s life in heaven, and the eternal Now of God, as the Living and Vivifying Present, are given in all three Synoptists: “In the Resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven. But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken by God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”[15]
4. The “Pauline” group of writings: its special teaching.
The Pauline group furnishes by far the greater amount of the explicit reasoning to be found in the New Testament; where, e.g., does the New Testament furnish a parallel to the long and intricate argument of chapters Third to Eleventh of the Epistle to the Romans, with its constant “therefores” and “buts” and “nows”? Yet this same group of writings also emphasizes strongly, though more rarely, the external-fact side of religion, and is deeply penetrated by the intuitive-emotional, the mystical spirit of Christianity.
The external, historical side is represented by the careful description and chronological arrangement observable in the account of six successive apparitions of the Risen Christ; and by the reference back to the acts and words used in the Eucharistic act at the Last Supper.[16]
Yet throughout the writings of St. Paul and of his school, it is the mystical, interior, experimental element that permeates the argumentative-speculative and the historical constituents. The chief manifestations of this mystical spirit and conviction, which really penetrates and knits together the whole of the Pauline teaching, can perhaps best be taken in a logical order.
First then it is St. Paul who, himself or through writers more or less dependent on him, gives us by far the most definite and detailed presentation of by far the most extraordinary experiences and events to be found in the New Testament outside of the Gospels themselves. For the author of the Acts of the Apostles gives us the lengthy description of the Pentecostal Visitation, and, three times over, that most vivid account of Our Lord’s apparition to Saul on the way to Damascus. And St. Paul himself describes for us, at the closest first hand, the ecstatic states of the Christian communities in their earliest charismatic stage; he treats the apparition on the way to Damascus as truly objective and as on a complete par with the earlier apparitions accorded to the chosen Apostles in the first days after the Resurrection; and he gives us the solemn reference to his own experience of rapture to the third Heaven.[17] We should, however, note, in the next place, as the vital complement, indeed as the necessary pre-requisite, to this conviction and to the effectiveness of these facts,--facts conceived and recorded as external, as temporal and local,--St. Paul’s profound belief that all external evidences, whether of human reasoning and philosophy or of visible miracle, fail to carry conviction without the presence of certain corresponding moral and spiritual dispositions in those to whom they are addressed. “The word of the Cross,” the very same preaching, “is to those that are perishing foolishness, but to us that are being saved the power of God.” And the external, taken alone, can so little convince, that even the seeking after the external, without requisite dispositions, will but get us further away from its hidden function and meaning. “The Jews ask for signs (miracles), and the Greeks seek wisdom (philosophy); but we preach Christ crucified, who is to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And the cause of this difference of interpretation is shown to lie in the various interior dispositions of the hearers: “The animal man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is incapable of understanding them, because they are spiritually discerned; but the spiritual man discerneth all things.”[18]
And yet this mystery of religion has to be externally offered, to be preached to us, and is preached to all men; it is intended by God to be known by all, and hence it is He who stimulates men to external preaching and external hearing, as to one of the pre-requisites of its acceptance: “The mystery which was hidden from the ages has now been made manifest”; he desires the Colossians to be strengthened in “the knowledge of the mystery of God and Christ”; and has to “speak the mystery of the Christ,” to “make it manifest.”[19]
And since this preaching, to be effective, absolutely requires, as we have seen, interior dispositions and interior illumination of the hearers, and since these things are different in different men, the degrees of initiation into this identical mystery are to be carefully adapted to the interior state of those addressed. “We preach wisdom amongst the perfect τέλειοι,” the technical term in the heathen Greek Mysteries for those who had received the higher grades of initiation. “I was not able to speak unto you as unto spiritual men, but (only) as unto fleshly ones, as unto infants in Christ. I have fed you with milk, not strong food, for you were not yet able.”[20]
And since all good, hence also the external preaching, comes from God, still more must this all-important interior apprehension of it come from Him. In a certain real sense the Spirit is thus organ as well as object of this interior light. “God has revealed unto us the wisdom of God through the Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, unless the spirit of man that is in him? even so no man knoweth the things of God, except the Spirit of God.”[21]
But further, the mystery revealed in a unique degree and form in Christ’s life, is really a universal spiritual-human law; the law of suffering and sacrifice, as the one way to joy and possession, which has existed, though veiled till now, since the foundation of the world. “The mystery of Christ, which in former generations was not made manifest unto the sons of men, but has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the spirit.” And this law, which is Christ’s life, must reappear in the life of each one of us. “We have been buried together with Him through Baptism unto death, in order that, as Christ rose again from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in the newness of life”; “We know that our old man has been crucified together with Him. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall live with Him”; “If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will quicken your mortal bodies through His Spirit dwelling within you.”[22]
Christ’s life can be thus the very law of all life, because “He is the first-born of all creation, for in Him all things were created in heaven and on earth,” “all things were created through Him”; “and He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”; “all things are summed up in Christ”; “Christ is all in all.” So that in the past, before His visible coming, the Jews in the desert “drank from the spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ.” And as He Himself is the perfect image of God, so all things are, in varying degrees, created in the image of Christ: “(Christ) who is the image of the living God”; “all things were created unto Him.” And since man is, in his original and potential essence, in a very special sense “the image and glory of God,” his perfecting will consist in a painful reconquest and development of this obscured and but potential essence, by becoming, as far as may be, another Christ, and living through the successive stages of Christ’s earthly life. We are bidden “all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” so that, in the end, we may be able to say with the Apostle himself: “I live no more in myself, but Christ lives in me”; a consummation which appears so possible to St. Paul’s mind, that he eagerly, painfully longs for it: “My children, with whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you.” And indeed “we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.”[23]
We have then in St. Paul not only a deeply mystical element, but mysticism of the noblest, indeed the most daringly speculative, world-embracing type.
5. The “Joannine” group: its characteristic truths.
And finally the Joannine group furnishes us with an instance, as strong as is conceivable within the wide pale of a healthy Christian spirit, of the predominance of an interior and intuitive, mystical, universalistic, spiritual and symbolic apprehension and interpretation both of external fact and of explicit reasoning.
The Visible and Historical is indeed emphasized, with a full consciousness of the contrasting Gnostic error, in the culminating sentence of the solemn Prologue of the Gospel, “And the Word was made Flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we saw His glory,” and in the equally emphatic opening sentence of the First Epistle: “That which was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have beholden, and our hands have handled, … we announce unto you.” Hence too the Historical, Temporal Last Judgment, with its corporal resurrection, remains as certainly retained in this Gospel as in St. Matthew: “The hour cometh in which all those that are in the monuments shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those that have done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life, but those that have worked evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.”[24]
And Reasoning of a peculiarly continuous, rhythmically recurrent pattern, is as present and influential everywhere, as it is difficult to describe or even to trace. For it is here but the instrument and reflex of certain Mystical conceptions and doctrines, of a tendency to see, in everything particular and temporal, the Universal and Eternal; to apprehend Unity, a changeless Here and Now, in all multiplicity and succession, and hence to suppress explicit reasoning and clear distinctions, movement, growth, and change, as much as may be, both in the method of presentation and in the facts presented. If the Synoptists give us the successive, and write, unconsciously but specially, under the category of Time: the Fourth Gospel consciously presents us with simultaneity, and works specially under the category of Space.
The Successive is here conceived as but the appearance of the Simultaneous, of the Eternal and Abiding. Hence the historical development in the earthly experiences, teachings, and successes of Christ is ignored: His Godhead, that which is, stands revealed from the first in the appearances of His earthly life. Hence too the various souls of other men are presented to us as far as possible under one eternal and changeless aspect; they are types of various abiding virtues and iniquities, rather than concrete, composite mortals.
God appears here specially as Light, as Love, and as Spirit. Yet these largely thing-like attributions co-exist with personal qualities, and with real, ethical relations between God and the world: “God so loved the world, as that He gave His only begotten Son, in order that anyone who believeth in Him may not perish, but may have everlasting life.” The Father “draws” men, and “sends” His Son into the world.[25]
And this Son has eternally pre-existed with the Father; is the very instrument and principle of the world’s creation; and “is the true Light that enlightened every man that cometh into the world.” And this Word which, from the first, was already the Light of all men, became Flesh specially to manifest fully this its Life and Light. Indeed He is the only Light, and Way, and Truth, and Life; the only Door; the Living Bread; the true Vine.[26]
This Revelation and Salvation is indeed assimilated by individual souls and is received by them at a given moment, by a birth both new and from above, and is followed by a new knowledge. But this knowledge is not absolute nor unprogressive. Everywhere the Evangelist has indeed the verb γιγνώσκω, but nowhere the noun Gnosis; and the full meaning of the Revelation of the Father by the Son is to be only gradually revealed by the Holy Spirit. And this special new knowledge is not the cause but the effect of an ethical act on the part of the human soul,--an act of full trust in the persons of God and of His Christ, and in the intimations of the moral conscience as reflections of the divine will and nature. “If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be from God, or whether I speak from myself”; “He who doeth the truth, cometh to the light.”[27]
And this trust, and the experimental knowledge which flows from it, lead to an interior conviction so strong as to make us practically independent of external evidences. Hence in the First Epistle, this “we know” is repeatedly emphasized: “We know, that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him”; “You know, that He was made manifest, that He might take away sins.” And this knowledge is communicated by the Spirit of God to man’s soul; the spirit bearing witness, there within, to the truth of Christ’s words, communicated from without. “The Spirit it is that beareth witness, for the Spirit is the Truth.”[28]
External signs (miracles), and a certain un-ethical assent given to them and their implications, these things are, even at their best, but preliminary, and, of themselves, insufficient. Hence Our Lord can find “many who believed in His name, seeing His signs (miracles) which He did”; and yet could “not trust Himself to them.” Nicodemus indeed can come to Our Lord, moved by the argument that “thou hast come a teacher from God, for no man can do the signs (miracles) that thou doest, unless God be with him.” But then Our Lord’s whole conversation with him renders clear how imperfect and ignorant Nicodemus is so far,--he had come by night, his soul was still in darkness. So also “many Samaritans believed in Him, because of His sign,”--His miraculous knowledge of her past history, shown to the Woman at the Well; but more of them believed because of His own words to them: “We ourselves have (now) heard, and we know that this man is of a truth the Saviour of the world.” Hence He can Himself bid the Apostles, in intimation of their full and final privilege and duty, “believe in Me” (that is, My words and the Spirit testifying within you to their Truth), “that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me”; and, only secondarily and failing that fulness, “but if not, then believe, because of the very works.” And the whole Joannine doctrine as to the object and method of Faith is dramatically presented and summed up in the great culminating scene and saying of the Fourth Gospel: “Thomas” (the Apostle who would see a visible sign first, and would then build his Faith upon that sight) “saith to Him: ‘My Lord and my God.’ Jesus saith to him: ‘Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.’”[29]
And this Faith and Knowledge arising thus, in its fulness, at most only on occasion, and never because, of spacial and temporal signs, are conceived as a timeless, Eternal Life, and as one which is already, here and now, an actual present possession. “He who believeth in the Son, hath eternal life”; “He who heareth and believeth My word, hath eternal life”; “We know that we have passed from death unto life”; “We know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.”[30] There is then a profound immanence of Christ in the believing soul, and of such a soul in Christ; and this mutual immanence bears some likeness to the Immanence of the Father in Christ, and of Christ in the Father. “In that day” (when “the Father shall give you the Spirit of Truth”) “ye shall know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you.”[31]
Iii. Science: The Apprehension And Conception Of Brute Fact And Iron Law
But now, athwart both the Hellenic and the Christian factors of our lives, the first apparently so clear and complete and beautiful, the latter, if largely dark and fragmentary, so deep and operative, comes and cuts a third and last factor, that of Science, apparently more peremptory and irresistible than either of its predecessors.[32] For both the former factors would appear to melt into mid-air before this last one. They evidently cannot ignore it; it apparently can ignore them. If Metaphysics and Religion seem involved in a perpetual round of interminable questions, solved, at most and at best, for but this man and for that, and with an evidence for their truth which can be and is gainsaid by many, but cannot be demonstrated with a peremptory clearness to any one: Science, on the other hand, would appear to give us just this terra firma of an easy, immediate, undeniable, continually growing, patently fruitful body of evidence and of fact.
And not only can Metaphysics and Religion not ignore Science, in the sense of denying or even overlooking its existence; they cannot apparently, either of them, even begin or proceed or end without constant reference, here frank and open, there tacit but none the less potent, to the enterprises, the methods, the conclusions of the Sciences one and all, and this even in view of establishing their own contentions. And more and more of the territory formerly assigned to Metaphysics or Religion seems in process of being conquered by Science: in Metaphysics, by experimental psychology, and by the simple history of the various philosophical systems, ideas, and technical terms, and of the local and temporal, racial and cultural antecedents and environments which gave rise to them; in Religion, by an analogous observation and study of man in the past and present, of man studied from within and from without.
1. Three characteristics of this scientific spirit.
Now this scientific spirit has hitherto, since its birth at the Renaissance, ever tended to the ever-increasing development of three main characteristics, which are indeed but several aspects of one single aim and end. There was and is, for one thing, the passion for Clearness, which finds its expression in the application of Mathematics and of the Quantitative view and standard to all and every subject-matter, in so far as the latter is conceived as being truly knowable at all. There was and is, for another, the great concept of Law, of an iron Necessity running through and expressing itself in all things, one great Determinism, before which all emotion and volition, all concepts of Spontaneity and Liberty, of Personality and Spirit, either Human or Divine, melt away, as so many petty subjective wilfulnesses of selfish, childish, “provincial” man, bent on fantastically humanizing this great, cold thing, the Universe, into something responsive to his own profoundly unimportant and objectively uninteresting sensations and demands. There was and is, for a third thing, a vigorous Monism, both in the means and in the end of this view. Our sources of information are but one,--the reasoning, reckoning Intellect, backed up by readily repeatable, directly verifiable Experiment. The resultant information is but one,--the Universe within and without, a strict unbroken Mechanism.
If we look at the most characteristically modern elements of Descartes, and, above all, of Spinoza, we cannot fail to find throughout, as the reaction of this Scientific spirit upon Philosophy, the passion for those three things: for Clearness and ready Transferableness of ideas; for one universal, undeniable Common Element and Measure for all knowledge of every degree and kind; and for Law, omnipresent and inexorable. That is, we have here a passion for Thing as over against, as above, Person; for the elimination of all wilfulness, even at the cost of will itself, of all indetermination, obscurity and chance, even at the cost of starving and drying up whole regions of our complex nature, whole sources of information, and of violently simplifying and impoverishing the outlook on to reality both within us and without.
2. Fundamental motive of entire quest, deeply legitimate, indeed religious: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant.
And yet how unjust would he be who failed to recognize, in the case of Spinoza especially, the noble, and at bottom deeply religious, motives and aspirations underlying such excesses; or the new problems and necessities, the permanent growth and gain, which this long process of human thought has brought to Religion itself, especially in indirect and unintentional ways!
For as to the motives, it ought not to be difficult to any one who knows human history and human nature, to see how the all but complete estrangement from Nature and Physical Fact which, from Socrates onwards, with the but very partial exception of Aristotle, had, for well-nigh two thousand years, preceded this reaction; how the treatment of Matter and the Visible as more or less synonymous with Non-Being and Irrationality, as a veil or even a wall, as a mere accident or even a positive snare, lying everywhere between us and Reality, could not fail to require and produce a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. This study was perceived, even by the shallower thinkers, to be fair and rational and fruitful in itself; and it was found, by some few deep spirits, to be a strangely potent means of purifying, enlarging, “deprovincializing” man himself. The severe discipline of a rigorous study of man’s lowly, physical conditions and environment, things hitherto so despised by him, was now at last to purify him of his own childish immediacy of claim. The pettily selfish, shouting Individual was to pass through the broad, still, purgatorial waters of a temporary submergence under the conceptions, as vivid as though they were direct experiences, of ruthless Law, of Mechanism, of the Thing; so as to pass out, purified and enlarged, a Person, expressive of the Universal and Objective, of Order and of Law.
It is especially in Spinoza that this deeper, universally human and ethical, indeed we can say religious, implication and ideal of the rigorously scientific spirit is present in all its noble intuition and aspiration, and that at the same time, alas, this deep truth is forced into a ruinously inappropriate method and formulation. For the original end of the entire quest, an end which is still emotionally dominant and which furnishes the hidden dialectic of the whole,--Man, his nobility and interior purification and beatitude,--has here, intellectually, become but a means; Man, in the real logic of this system, is, hopelessly and finally, but a wheel in the huge mechanism of that natura naturata which Spinoza’s own richness and nobility of character transcends with potent inconsistency. And this very system, which is so nobly human and Christian in its ethical tone and in its demand of a Conversion of the whole man, in its requiring man to lose and sacrifice his petty self that he may gain his true self and become a genuine constituent of the Universe and Thought of God, is also the very one which, by its ruthless Naturalism and Determinism of Doctrine and its universally Mathematical and Quantitative form and method, logically eliminates all such qualitative differentiation and conversion as impossible and futile.
The prima facie view of life as it presents itself to the clarifying, Scientific Intellect, namely the omnipresence of the determinist mechanism, has never been more impressively felt and pictured than by Spinoza; the dispositions and happiness of the purified, disinterested soul have rarely been experienced and described with more touching elevation and power. But there is no real transition, indeed no possibility of such, in his system, from that first aspect to this latter state; for that first aspect, that apparent determinism, is for his logic not merely apparent or secondary, but the very truth of truths, the very core and end of things.
And this bondage of mind to matter, this enslavement of the master to the servant, this narrow, doctrinaire intellectualism and determinism, is more hidden than cured in Leibniz, who, if he brings the immense improvement because enrichment of a keen sense and love of the Historical, loses, on the other hand, Spinoza’s grandly Conversional tone and temper. A cheerful, easy, eminently sane but quite inadequate bustle of manifold interests; a ready, pleasant optimism; an endless laboriousness of the reasoning faculty; all this, even though carried out on a scale unique since the days of Aristotle, is necessarily unequal to face and bear “the burthen of all this unintelligible world.”
And yet here, in him who may not unfitly be called the last of the Dogmatic Rationalists and Optimists, we have already those great perceptions which were destined more and more to burst the bonds of this cold, clear, complete, confining outlook. For one thing, as already stated, there is, alongside the love of the Material and Mathematical, an almost equal love of the Historical and Human. There is, for another thing, the deep consciousness of the Individuality and Interiority of all real existences,--all that is at all, has an inside to it. And, finally, in further enforcement of this latter doctrine, there is the fruitful conception of Subconscious States of feeling and of mind in all living things.
Yet it is only in Kant that,--with all his obscurities and numberless demonstrable inconsistencies, with all his saddening impoverishment of the outlook in many ways,--we get, little conscious as he himself is of such a service, the deep modern explanation of the ancient pre-scientific neglect and suspicion of natural research. Here we are led to see that the strictly Scientific view of Nature is necessarily quantitative, but that the strictly Ethical, Spiritual view of man is as necessarily qualitative; that the analysis of all natural phenomena but leads to judgments as to what is, whereas the requirements of human action lead to judgments of what ought to be. Here the weak point lies in the contrast, established by him and pushed to the degree of mutual exclusion, between Reason and Will. For the contrast which we find in actual life is really between the deeper reason, ever closely accompanied by deep emotion, this reason and emotion occasioning, and strengthened by, the action of the whole man,--and all this is not directly transferable; and the more superficial reasoning, having with it little or no emotion,--the action of but one human faculty,--and this action is readily transferable.
3. Place and function of such science in the totality of man’s life.
The mistake in the past would thus lie, not in the doctrine that the Visible cannot suffice for man and is not his mind’s true home; nor in the implication that the Visible cannot directly and of itself reveal to him the Spiritual world. The error would lie entirely in the double implication or doctrine, that there is really nothing to be known about Nature, or that what can be known of it can be attained by Metaphysical or Mystical methods; and again that strictly quantitative, severe scientific method and investigation can, even in the long run, be safely neglected by the human soul, as far as its own spiritual health is concerned.
We take it then that mankind has, after endless testings and experiences, reached the following conclusions. We encounter everywhere, both within us and without, both in the physical and mental world, in the first instance, a whole network of phenomena; and these phenomena are everywhere found to fall under certain laws, and to be penetrable by certain methods of research, these laws and methods varying indeed in character and definiteness according to the subject-matter to which they apply, but in each case affording to man simply indefinite scope for discovery without, and for self-discipline within.
And all this preliminary work and knowledge does not directly require religion nor does it directly lead to it; indeed we shall spoil both the knowledge itself, and its effect upon our souls and upon religion, if religion is here directly introduced. The phenomena of Astronomy and Geology, of Botany and Zoology, of human Physiology and Psychology, of Philology and History are and ought to be, in the first instance, the same for all men, whether the said men do or do not eventually give them a raison d’être and formal rational interest by discovering the metaphysical and religious convictions and conclusions which underlie and alone give true unity to them and furnish a living link between the mind observing and the things observed. Various as are these phenomena, according to the department of human knowledge to which they severally belong, yet they each and all have to be, in the first instance, discovered and treated according to principles and methods immanent and special to that department.
And the more rigorously this is accomplished, both by carrying out these principles and methods to their fullest extent, and by conscientiously respecting their limits of applicability and their precise degree of truth and of range in the larger scheme of human activity and conviction, the more will such science achieve three deeply ethical, spiritually helpful results.
Such science will help to discipline, humble, purify the natural eagerness and wilfulness, the cruder forms of anthropomorphism, of the human mind and heart. This turning to the visible will thus largely take the place of that former turning away from it; for only since the Visible has been taken to represent laws, and, provisionally at least, rigorously mechanical laws characteristic of itself, can it be thus looked upon as a means of spiritual purification.
Such science again will help to stimulate those other, deeper activities of human nature, which have made possible, and have all along preceded and accompanied, these more superficial ones; and this, although such science will doubtless tend to do the very opposite, if the whole nature be allowed to become exclusively engrossed in this one phenomenal direction. Still it remains true that perhaps never has man turned to the living God more happily and humbly, than when coming straight away from such rigorous, disinterested phenomenal analysis, as long as such analysis is felt to be both other than, and preliminary and secondary to, the deepest depths of the soul’s life and of all ultimate Reality.
And finally, such science will correspondingly help to give depth and mystery, drama and pathos, a rich spirituality, to the whole experience and conception of the soul and of life, of the world and of God. Instead of a more or less abstract picture, where all is much on the same plane, where all is either fixed and frozen, or all is in a state of feverish flux, we get an outlook, with foreground, middle distances, and background, each contrasting with, each partially obscuring, partially revealing, the other; but each doing so, with any freshness and fulness, only in and through the strongly willing, the fully active and gladly suffering, the praying, aspiring, and energizing spiritual Personality, which thus both gives and gets its own true self ever more entirely and more deeply.
4. Science to be taken, throughout our life, in a double sense and way.
In such a conception of the place of Science, we have permanently to take Science, throughout life, in a double sense and way. In the first instance, Science is self-sufficing, its own end and its own law. In the second instance, which alone is ever final, Science is but a part of a whole, but a function, a necessary yet preliminary function, of the whole of man; and it is but part, a necessary yet preliminary part, of his outlook. Crush out, or in any way mutilate or deautonomize, this part, and all the rest will suffer. Sacrifice the rest to this part, either by starvation or attempted suppression, or by an impatient assimilation of this immense remainder to that smaller and more superficial part, and the whole man suffers again, and much more seriously.
And the danger, in both directions,--let us have the frankness to admit the fact,--is constant and profound: even to see it continuously is difficult; to guard against it with effect, most difficult indeed. For to starve or to suspect, to cramp or to crush this phenomenal apprehension and investigation, in the supposed interest of the ulterior truths, must ever be a besetting temptation and weakness for the religious instinct, wherever this instinct is strong and fixed, and has not yet itself been put in the way of purification.
For Religion is ever, qua religion, authoritative and absolute. What constitutes religion is not simply to hold a view and to try and live a life, with respect to the Unseen and the Deity, as possibly or even certainly beautiful or true or good: but precisely that which is over and above this,--the holding this view and this life to proceed somehow from God Himself, so as to bind my innermost mind and conscience to unhesitating assent. Not simply that I think it, but that, in addition, I feel bound to think it, transforms a thought about God into a religious act.
Now this at once brings with it a double and most difficult problem. For Religion thus becomes, by its very genius and in exact proportion to its reality, something so entirely sui generis, so claimful and supreme, that it at once exacts a two-fold submission, the one simultaneous, the other successive; the first as it were in space, the second in time. The first regards the relations of religion to things non-religious. It might be parodied by saying: “Since religion is true and supreme, religion is all we require: all things else must be bent or broken to her sway.” She has at the very least the right to a primacy not of honour only, but of direct jurisdiction, over and within all activities and things. The second regards the form and concept of religion itself. Since religion always appears both in a particular form at a particular time and place, and as divine and hence authoritative and eternal; and since the very strength and passion of religion depend upon the vigorous presence and close union of these two elements: religion will ever tend either really to oppose all change within itself, or else to explain away its existence. Religion would thus appear doomed to be either vague and inoperative, or obscurantist and insincere.
And it is equally clear that the other parts of man’s nature and of his outlook cannot simply accept such a claim, nor could religion itself flourish at all if they could and did accept it. They cannot accept the claim of religion to be immediately and simply all, for they are fully aware of being themselves something also. They cannot accept her claim to dictate to them their own domestic laws, for they are fully aware that they each, to live truly at all, require their own laws and their own, at least relative, autonomy. However much man may be supremely and finally a religious animal, he is not only that; but he is a physical and sexual, a fighting and artistic, a domestic and social, a political and philosophical animal as well.
Nor can man, even simply qua religious man, consent to a simple finality in the experience and explication, in the apprehension and application of religion, either in looking back into the past; or in believing and loving, suffering and acting in the present; or in forecasting the future, either of the race or of himself alone. For the here and now, the concrete “immediacy,” the unique individuality of the religious experience for me, in this room, on this very day, its freshness, is as true and necessary a quality of living religion as any other whatsoever. And if all life sustains itself only by constant, costing renovation and adaptation of itself to its environment, the religious life, as the most intense and extensive of all lives, must somehow be richest in such newness in oldness, such renovative, adaptive, assimilative power.
5. All this seen at work in man’s actual history.
Now it is deeply instructive to observe all this at work historically. For here we find every variety of attitude towards this very point. There are men of Religion who attempt to do without Science, and men of Science who attempt to do without Religion. Or again, men of Religion attempt to level up,--to assimilate the principles and results of the various sciences directly to religion, or at least to rule those scientific principles and results directly by religion. Or men of Science attempt to level down, to make religion into a mere philosophy or even a natural history. Yet we find also,--with so persistent a recurrence in all manner of places and times, as itself to suggest the inherent, essential, indestructible truth of the view,--another, a far more costing attitude. This attitude refuses all mutilation either of normal human nature or of its outlook, all oppression of one part by the other; for it discovers that these various levels of life have been actually practised in conjunction by many an individual in the past and in the present; and that, where they have been practised within a large organization of faith and love, they have ever led to a fuller reality and helpfulness both of the science and of the religion concerned. Hence the mind thus informed cannot doubt the truth of this solution, however difficult at all times may be its practice, and however little final at any time can be its detailed intellectual analysis.
Iv. Summing Up: Hellenism Or Harmonization, Christianity Or Spiritual Experience, And Science Or Acceptance Of A Preliminary Mechanism, All Three Necessary To Man
To sum up all this first chapter, we have got so far as this. We have seen that humanity has, so far, found and worked out three forces and conceptions of life, forces which are still variously operative in each of us, but which find their harmonious interaction in but few men, their full theoretical systematization in none.[33]
There is the ancient, Greek contribution, chiefly intellectual and aesthetic, mostly cold and clear, quick and conclusive, with, upon the whole, but a slight apprehension of personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin, and little or no sense of the difference and antagonism between these realities and simply Mathematical, Mechanical laws and concepts. It is a view profoundly abstract, and, at bottom, determinist: the will follows the intellect necessarily, in exact proportion to the clearness of information of the former. And the strength of this view, which was possible even to that gifted race just because of the restrictedness of its knowledge concerning the length and breadth of nature and of history, and still more with regard to the depths of the human character and conscience, consists in its freshness, completeness, and unity. And this ideal of an ultimate harmonization of our entire life and of its theory we must never lose, more and more difficult though its even approximate realization has of necessity become.
There is next the middle, Christian contribution, directly moral and religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching, immensely costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and exemplification of the mysterious depth and range and complexity of human personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view profoundly concrete and at bottom libertarian. The goodwill here first precedes, and then outstrips, and determines the information supplied by the intellect: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” And the strength of this position consists in its being primarily not a view, but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring, implying, indeed proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and man, and their relations to each other, but never exhausted by these doctrines even in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in their turn are by their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and end.
There is finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a sense than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions, those of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation of nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this mysterious union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous, is itself at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions and on the admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union that has turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is incapable of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths and lives discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.
Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and observe with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed provided with other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him and within him to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-experimental process alone, could there be any serious question of such a final suppression of by far the greater and deeper portion of himself. Instead of any such deadlock the facts of these last four centuries bear out the contention that neither can the religious life suppress or do without the philosophical and the scientific, nor can either of these other two lives suppress or permanently do without its fellow or without religion.
But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust, become much clearer as we proceed.