The Varieties Of Religious Experience, By William James

 

Lecture XVIII

 

Philosophy

 

The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true?  We turned first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority.  But philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy.  Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's sense of the divine?

 

I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending.  I have undermined the authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to discredit that of philosophy.  Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples.  It is essentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of formulation; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess. 

 

In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name.

 

To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.  But all such statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean.

 

When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed.  I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess.  Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science they would have left a certain amount of "psychical research," even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount.  But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities.  These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.

 

But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which feeling suggested?  Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself.  It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd.  Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude.  Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches.  To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal.  To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason's task.

 

I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task.[288] We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.  Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually.  Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits.  The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us.  Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do.

 

It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree.

 

[288] Compare Professor W. Wallace's Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.

 

 

 

Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another.  Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on.  We have the beginnings of a "Science of Religions," so-called; and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I should be made very happy.

 

But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject-matter.  They are interpretative and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.

 

The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be something altogether different from this.  It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts.  It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call them science of religions.  It reaches them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.

 

Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls.  All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true;--what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain.  Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion:--

 

"Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart, but in order to elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard.  That which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be TRUE.  It must be seen as having in its own nature a RIGHT to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feeling must be judged.[289] In estimating the religious character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but what they think and believe--not whether their religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the CONCEPTIONS of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth.  Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the CONTENT or intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its character and worth are to be determined."[290]

 

[289] Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.

 

[290] Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.

 

 

 

Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.[291] Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word.  I will tell you, he says, what it is not-- not "physical evidences" for God, not "natural religion," for these are but vague subjective interpretations:--

 

[291] Discourse II.  Section 7.

 

 

 

"If," he continues, "the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful, just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more if this be the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its behalf an hypocrisy.  Then, pious as it is to think of Him while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be the better for adopting.  It is but the theology of Nature, just as we talk of the PHILOSOPHY or the ROMANCE of history, or the POETRY of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contemplation.  I do not see much difference between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain about Him."

 

What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these things:  "I simply mean the SCIENCE OF GOD, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology."

 

In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us:  Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally.  The test is a perfectly plain one of fact.  Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally.  If it did not, wherein would its superiority consist?  If it only formed sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness?  This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure to-day.  I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be "objectively" convincing.  In fact, philosophy does so fail.  It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does.  I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.  It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it HAS to find them.  It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility.  It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.[292]

 

[292] As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs see the striking work of H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written.  "Creeds," says the author, "are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech.  Words are the expression of our wants grammar is the theory formed afterwards.  Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse.  As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow" (p. 313).  The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.

 

 

 

Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology.  You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas.  I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature.[293]

 

[293] For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. Stockl's Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Autlage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii.  B.  Boedder's Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C. Hodge:  Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. Strong:  Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.

 

 

 

The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints.  If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right.  The proofs are various.  The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains.  The "argument from design" reasons, from the fact that Nature's laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The "moral argument" is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver.  The "argument ex consensu gentium" is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it.

 

As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion's all-sufficient foundation.  Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness.  Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology.  As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it.  Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument.[294] The fact is that these arguments  do but follow the combined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling.  They prove nothing rigorously.  They only corroborate our preexistent partialities.

 

[294] It must not be forgotten that any form of DISorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder.  The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example:  the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies.  No other train of causes would have been sufficient.  And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions.  To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation.  The first is physical:  Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.

 

This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable.  The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation.  No arrangement that for us is "disorderly" can possibly have been an object of design at all.  This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.

 

 

 

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions.  We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral--so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention.  The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively.  It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos.  If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material.  Our dealings with Nature are just like this.  She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions.  We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things "unadapted" to each other in this world than there are things "adapted"; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them.  But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory.  It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopaedias.  Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.

 

The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products.  So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knockdown proof of his existence.  It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already.

 

If philosophy can do so little to establish God's existence, how stands it with her efforts to define his attributes?  It is worth while to look at the attempts of systematic theology in this direction.

 

Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence a se.  From this "a-se-ity" on God's part, theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections.  For instance, he must be both NECESSARY and ABSOLUTE, cannot not be, and cannot in any way be determined by anything else.  This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself.  This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect.  Moreover, God is ONE, and ONLY, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer.  He is SPIRITUAL, for were He composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine them into the total, and his aseity would thus be contradicted.  He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature.  He is SIMPLE METAPHYSICALLY also, that is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect.  Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse must be given at one stroke.  This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes.  We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view.  In God all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.

 

This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be IMMUTABLE.  He is actuality, through and through.  Were there anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his perfection.  He cannot, therefore, change.  Furthermore, He is IMMENSE, BOUNDLESS; for could He be outlined in space, He would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore OMNIPRESENT, indivisibly there, at every point of space.  He is similarly wholly present at every point of time--in other words ETERNAL.  For if He began in time, He would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity.  If He ended it would contradict his necessity.  If He went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability.

 

He has INTELLIGENCE and WILL and every other creature- perfection, for we have them, and effectus nequit superare causam.  In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their OBJECT, since God can be bounded by naught that is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself.  He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite self-pleasure.[295] Since He must of logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called "free" ad intra, with the freedom of contrarieties that characterizes finite creatures.  Ad extra, however, or with respect to his creation, God is free.  He cannot NEED to create, being perfect in being and in happiness already.  He WILLS to create, then, by an absolute freedom.

 

[295] For the scholastics the facultas appetendi embraces feeling, desire, and will.

 

 

 

Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a PERSON; and a LIVING person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless.  He is thus absolutely SELF-SUFFICIENT:  his SELF-KNOWLEDGE and SELF-LOVE are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them.

 

He is OMNISCIENT, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all creature things and events by implication.  His knowledge is previsive, for He is present to all time.  Even our free acts are known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his immutability.  He is OMNIPOTENT for everything that does not involve logical contradiction.  He can make BEING --in other words his power includes CREATION.  If what He creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non-divine in substance.  If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God's definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something caused already.  The things he creates, then, He creates ex nihilo, and gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to himself.  The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes in his ideas.  But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the way in which our minds externally imitate them.  We must attribute them to Him only in a TERMINATIVE sense, as differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.

 

God of course is holy, good, and just.  He can do no evil, for He is positive being's fullness, and evil is negation.  It is true that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good, for bonum totius praeeminet bonum partis. Moral evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness.  By creating free beings He PERMITS it only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.

 

As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory.  From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring of felicity.  In so far forth one may say that God's secondary purpose in creating is LOVE.

 

I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther, into the mysteries of God's Trinity, for example.  What I have given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants.  Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time.[296]  He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will.  He gives us scholastic philosophy "touched with emotion," and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood.  Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman's.  It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point I make a short digression.

 

[296] Op. cit., Discourse III. Section 7.

 

 

 

What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with his conduct.  It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view.  The guiding principle of British philosophy has in fact been that every difference must MAKE a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true.  What is the particular truth in question KNOWN AS?  In what facts does it result?  What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience?  This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question.  In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he.  That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance.  All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied.  So Berkeley with his "matter."

 

The cash-value of matter is our physical sensations.  That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception.  That, therefore, is the whole meaning of the term "matter"--any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words.  Hume does the same thing with causation.  It is known as habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come.  Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume.  Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness.  When all is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced "the critical method" into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men.  For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action?  And what could it matter, if all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should agree to call true or which false?

 

An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a Greek name.  He calls it the principle of PRAGMATISM, and he defends it somewhat as follows:[297]--

 

[297] In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.

 

 

 

Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest.  Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin.  Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits.  If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance.  To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.  To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true.  Our conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

 

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections, whether some be not far less significant than others.

 

If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. Take God's aseity, for example; or his necessariness; his immateriality; his "simplicity" or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his "personality," apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self-sufficiency, self-love, and absolute felicity in himself:--candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life?  And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false?

 

For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true.  Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God's simplicity?  Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete?  In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out-of-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the "closet-naturalists," as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins.  When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet- naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense.  What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word "God" by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood.  They have the trail of the serpent over them.  One feels that in the theologians' hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life.  Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent.  Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors.  All these things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves in saecula saeculorum in the lives of humble private men.

 

So much for the metaphysical attributes of God!  From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.

 

What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life.  It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.

 

God's holiness, for example:  being holy, God can will nothing but the good.  Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph.  Being omniscient, he can see us in the dark.  Being just, he can punish us for what he sees.  Being loving, he can pardon too.  Being unalterable, we can count on him securely.  These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them.  That God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life.  Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries.  If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment.  But verily, how stands it with her arguments?

 

It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence.  Not only do post-Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it.  To prove God's goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being in his essence would sound to such a witness simply silly.

 

No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively.  Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity:  "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee."  An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence--such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still.[298]

 

[298] Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice.  But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic?  Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation, and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason.  But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination.  It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.

 

 

 

We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good-by to dogmatic theology.  In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant.  Modern idealism, I repeat, has said goodby to this theology forever.  Can modern idealism give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness?

 

The basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception.  By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness "I think them" must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects.  Former skeptics had said as much, but the "I" in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual.  Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.

 

It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of Bewusstsein uberhaupt, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being.  It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was in point of fact effected.  Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian school, which to-day so deeply influences both British and American thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.

 

The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of disjecta membra, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.

 

The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already virtually to be beyond it.  The mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite in posse.

 

Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each thing never attains to.  The objects of our thought now ACT within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience.