The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Chapter 8

by Josiah Royce

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WORLD OF DOUBT.

When we turn from our world of ideals to the world actually about us, our position is not at once a happy position. These ideals that we have agreed upon, in so far as they are our own, do not make the world, and people differ endlessly about what the world is and means. Very naturally, then, we also must ourselves begin with difficulties and doubts. For if we want a religious doctrine that in these days can stand us in good stead, we must fear nothing, and must run the risk of all the disasters of thought. The warfare of faiths is so angry and ancient, that we must be content if, with our best efforts, we get anything out of it at all. As millions of brains must toil, doubtless, for centuries before any amount of ideal agreement among men is attained or even approximated, we must be content if we do very little and work very hard. We can be tolerably certain that in a world where nearly all is dark very much of our labor will be wasted. But this is natural. There is the delight of activity in truth-seeking; but when, at the outset, you compare your hopes and claims with the shadowy and doubtful results that you may reach, the comparison cannot seem otherwise than melancholy. Through the failures of millions of devoted servants, the humanity of the future may possibly (we do not, at least at this point in our study, know that it will certainly) be led to a grand success. This far-off divine event to which, for all we know, our fragment of creation may be moving, but which at any rate we regard with longing and delight, constitutes the moral aim of our philosophic studies. It is good to strive.

In the present chapter, therefore, we shall devote ourselves for the most part to negative criticism of certain views that are or may be held about the real world.

I.

That skepticism in studying reality is to some extent useful, most people will admit. But not every one will follow us at once into the thorough-going and uncompromising skepticism that we shall have to present in the following as the very basis of our positive doctrine. It is surprising how easily the philosophic need is satisfied in the minds of most persons, even in the minds of many professed philosophic students. A few very complacent questions, readily if unintelligibly answered, put to rest the whole desire that such people feel to cross-examine reason. In fact they seem to hold that a certain disrespect would be shown by questioning reason any more sharply; and so their philosophy is like a Congressional investigation of the doings of a politician, conducted by his fellow-partisans. But we feel, in writing this book, that such a philosophy, whose only business it is to “whitewash” reason, is an insuit to reason. Reason’s investigations of its own nature are not partisan affairs conducted for the sake of effect; nor does reason seek, like a demagogue, to get a popular “vindication,” but solely to reach the deepest possible insight into its own absolute truth. Hence we refuse utterly to have the following regarded as in any narrower sense an “apology” for any religious truth, since the defensive or apologetic attitude in presence of religious problems is once for all an insult to genuine religion. If there is truth absolute, we desire to know the same, and if we ever get a glimpse of it, doubtless it will need very little apology from us. But meanwhile we propose to doubt fearlessly and thoroughly. If our limits prevent here the proper exhaustive search for all the actual difficulties of the views that we present, still we want to have, and as far as may be to show, the spirit of honest, determined, conscientious skepticism. A clerical friend of the author’s impressed him very much in early youth by the words: “God likes to have us doubt his existence, if we do so sincerely and earnestly.” These words are almost a truism; they surely ought to be a truism. Yet they have been forgotten in many a controversy. Surely if God exists, he knows at least as much about philosophy as any of us do; he has at least as much appreciation for a philosophic problem as we can have. And if his own existence presents a fine philosophic problem, he delights therein at least as much as we do. And he then does not like to see that problem half-heartedly handled by timid, whining, trembling men, who constantly apologize to God because the existence of certain fools called atheists forces them to present in very pious language certain traditional proofs of his existence. No, surely not in this spirit would a rational God, if he exists, have us approach the question. But with at least as much coolness and clearness of head as we try to have when we toil over a problem in mathematics; with at least as merciless an analysis of all that is obscure and doubtful and contradictory in our own confused ideas as we should use in studying science; with at least as much eagerness in finding out the weakness and the uncertainty of men’s wavering and ill-trained judgments as we should bring to the examination of an important commercial investment, — with at least so much of caution, of diligence, and of doubt we should approach the rational study of the Highest. For what can insult God more than careless blundering? It is shameful that men should ever have treated this matter as if it were the aim of religious philosophy to have a store-house of formulated traditional answers ready wherewith to silence certain troublesome people called doubters. In these matters the truly philosophic doubt is no external opinion of this or that wayward person; this truly philosophic doubt is of the very essence of our thought. It is not to be “answered” or “silenced” by so and so much apologetic pleading. The doubt is inherent in the subject-matter as we must in the beginning regard the same. This doubt is to be accepted as it comes, and then to be developed in all its fullness and in all its intensity. For the truth of the matter is concealed in that doubt, as the fire is concealed in the stony coal. You can no more reject the doubt and keep the innermost truth, than you can toss away the coal and hope to retain its fire. This doubt is the insight partially attained.

Such must be our spirit. And now, to apply it at once to the problems before us, where shall we begin our search for a religious truth? We are to find, if possible, some element in Reality that shall have religious significance. But how shall we do this unless we have made clear to ourselves in what sense we know Reality at all? It would seem that our religious philosophy must begin with the problem of all theoretical philosophy: What can be our knowledge of this world, and whereon can this knowledge be founded?

A dark and dismal topic, one may say. But remember, here and here only can our beloved treasure be found buried. Either there is no religious philosophy possible, or it is here; and here we must delve for it. Nor let one be too much terrified at once by the forbidding aspect of the question. It is indeed no easy one; yet to answer it is but to know the real meaning of our own thoughts. This truth that we seek is not in the heavens, nor in the depths; it is nigh us, even in our hearts. Only inattention can be hiding it from us. Let us look closer.

This real world that popular thought declares to exist outside of us — we have so far taken it on trust. But now, what right have we so to take it? What do we mean by it? When we say that we can know it, do we not mean that it is in some way bound to conform to some of our thoughts? Or, if you will put the matter in the reverse order, and will say, with seeming modesty, that our thought is so constituted as to have a certain likeness to reality, do you really make the matter clearer? The mysterious conformity between our thought and what is no thought of ours remains, and we have to make clear our assurance of that. This assurance itself, if we got it, would seem to be in just the same position as is the conformity of which it is to assure us. Itself again would be outside of the external real world, and in our thought. Yet this assurance is to tell us something about that external world, namely, its conformity to certain of our thoughts. What can we thus know about any external object at all?

The difficulty is an old one. Our solution of it, if we get any, must determine the whole of our religious thought. Let us see at all events where the difficulty arises, and why. Whether or no there is possible any solution, the difficulty plainly lies in a certain conceived relation between us and the world. All the common metaphysical and religious doctrines begin by setting a thinker over against an external world, which is declared independent of his thought, and which his thought is then required to grasp and know. This supposed relation of subject and object gives metaphysics its seemingly insoluble problems. This thinker, whose thought is one fact, while that world out there is another fact, how can he learn by what takes place in his thought, that is, in the one of these two supposed entities, what goes on in the other of these entities, namely, in the world? Once for all, this marvelous relation of preëstablished harmony between these supposed separate entities demands philosophic deduction. The relation, to be sure, may be itself a metaphysical figment. We hold that it is. We shall try to show hereafter the baselessness of this notion of a world of external fact on one side, in the barren isolation of its transcendental reality, with an equally lonesome thinker on the other side, somehow magically bound to follow after the facts of that world. We hold, to put it in plain language, that neither the external world nor the individual thinker has any such reality as traditional popular beliefs, together with most metaphysical schools, have desired us to assume. But, for the first, we cannot yet undertake to trouble the reader with this our philosophic speculation. That will come in its good time, we hope not too unintelligibly, and it will have its place in our religious doctrine.

We begin, however, with the popular metaphysical concept, of a separate external world, and of a thinker bound somehow to repeat the facts of it in his thought. We ask, with popular metaphysics: How can we be sure that he does this? And from metaphysical systems, both popular and unpopular, we get an amazing jargon of answers.

The most popular answer, after all, is a threat, a threat repeated endlessly in all sorts of apologetic books, but still a mere base, abject, wholly unphilosophical threat. It is said to us that we must believe our human thinker to be capable of thinking correctly the facts of this supposed external world, because, if he does not, the result will be disastrous to the whole common sense conception of the world. If this thinker does not somehow magically reproduce external facts in his private mind, then is our faith vain, and we are all very miserable. It is astonishing how this, the most helpless abandonment of all philosophic thought, is constantly reiterated by certain of those who pretend to be philosophers. Can a threat scare us from philosophy? To get a sure foundation for our religion, we begin by asking how a man can really know the external world at all. We get as reply the threat that, unless we admit the knowledge of the external world, we must be in eternal doubt, and therefore wretched. To doubt this knowledge, we are told, would be to doubt all that makes life worth living. But it is just because we want to find a sure basis for what makes life worth living that we begin with this doubt. We are determined to get at the root of this matter, however bitter may be the evil that will befall us if our skepticism does not succeed in getting past this guarded gateway of philosophy. We persist in asking, all threats to the contrary notwithstanding, just how and why and in what sense the external world can be known to us, if indeed this conception itself of an external world is justly formed at all.

Yet we grant that the full force and need and bitterness of our problem may not be plain to the reader, unless he has first undertaken to examine with us at some length the philosophic character and consequences of this popular metaphysical conception of the external world. To get him to share well our doubt, we must first provisionally accept this notion of popular metaphysics itself. We must waive for the moment our difficulty, that it may recur to us with greater importance by and by. Let the reader once come to see that this popular notion of an external world is an utterly vague conception, capable of numberless forms, and religiously unsatisfactory in all of them, and then we shall expect him to feel the force of the deeper philosophic problems involved. This present chapter will therefore proceed directly to an examination of the popular notions about the external world. We shall examine them, namely, to find whether they offer any religious aspect. We shall find that they do not offer any such aspect in any satisfactory sense. That the good is supreme in the external world as popularly conceived, nobody can establish. This supposed external world is once for all a World of Doubt, and in it there is no abiding place. When the reader has come to feel with us this truth, then he will be ready to look deeper into the matter. Then some other more genuinely philosophic conception of Reality will have its place. Hence in the rest of this chapter we shall be accepting provisionally notions that we are hereafter to reject, and assuming much on trust that is at best very doubtful. We shall show that, even so aided, the popular notions about the religious aspect of this world cannot bear criticism. This visible world of popular faith will lose its worth for us. We shall have to look elsewhere.

The religious significance once removed from the popular realistic philosophy, with its crudely metaphysical notion of things, we shall be ready to listen to skepticism about the foundations of this notion; and we shall be ready for some new conception. This new conception will indeed not falsify the true moral meaning of that innocent faith in a real world upon which we have so far depended in our research. The popular notion of an external world, practically useful for many purposes, and sufficient for many scientific ends, will be refuted and rejected in its contradictions and in its absurdities, but the soul of truth that is in it will be absorbed into a higher conception both of the eternal Reality and of our relation thereto. Our seeming loss will become our gain. That bad dream, the dead and worthless World of Doubt in which most of our modern teachers remain stuck fast, will be transformed for us. We shall see that the truth of it is a higher World, of glorious religious significance.

So for the first we turn to that supposed world of popular metaphysics, to test its religious value. It is conceived as a world existent in space and time, and as a world of real things which act and interact. For convenience sake, we shall in the following use the word Power to mean any one of these things, or any group of them, that in this external world may be supposed to produce effects upon any other thing or group of things. However these Powers get their efficiency, the religious significance of the supposed external world, if it has any, must lie in the supremacy of the Good in this world of the Powers. One must then view this external world historically as a mass of Powers, which work together in harmony or in discord, and which give you Products. The religious ideals must find satisfaction here, if at all, in contemplating the goodness of these powers and of their works. If the religious ideals here fail, there will be the other aspect open. Regarded in a truly philosophical way, and in its eternal nature, the world, as we shall hereafter come to see, cannot be supposed to be either a power or a heap of powers. For powers have their being only in time, and only in relation to one another. If then all fails when we consider this external world of powers, this figment of popular metaphysics, the eternal nature of reality in some deeper view of that nature may still be found of infinite value to us. In fact we shall find the search for a religious truth, among the powers of this popularly conceived external world, very disheartening. The jargon of their contending voices will not unite into any religious harmony. We shall find these powers like the thunder and the fire. The still small voice is not in them. We shall be driven to some other aspect of the world. We shall approach that aspect in ways that imply no disrespect to those who have been so long scientifically studying the history and forces of the assumed external world. Their results, with the practical consequences in daily life, and with all that Agnosticism about the nature and purposes of the powers of this visible world which such men nowadays feel bound to proclaim, we shall on the whole accept. We too shall be Agtics, namely, as to the powers that rule the visible world. But we shall find a very different way, untrodden by scientific research, and yet, we hope, not a way of mere dreams, not a way into a world of fancy, but a way that leads us to a point whence we get a glimpse into that other aspect of things. This way Modern Idealism since Kant has been busy in finding and clearing. How wearisome some of the exploring expeditions have been, we well know. Our search also may end in a wilderness; but we fancy ourselves to have found an open path that to some readers will seem at least in part new. And some of the prospects on that road may not be wholly disheartening, even to the most exacting religious seeker. But all this is anticipation. First then: The World as a theatre for the display of power, physical or metaphysical. This is the World of Doubt.

II.

Let us begin our study of the powers that work together in the supposed external reality, by accepting for a moment, without criticism, the notion of this supposed external world from which scientific experience sets out. Let us say: there it is, an objective world of moving matter, subject to certain laws. All the powers are but manifestations or forms of matter in motion. Planets revolve, comets come and go, tides swell and fall, clouds rise and rivers flow to the sea, lightning flashes, volcanoes are active, living beings are born, live, and die, all exemplifying certain universal principles, that are discoverable by experience, that are capable of being used to predict the future, and that are related to one another in such a way as to show us a vast connected whole, the natural universe. This matter however is dead; these laws are ultimate given truths. We did not make them, cannot see why just they and none other were from the beginning; we must accept them as they are. The whole world is a vast machine. A mind powerful enough might be possessed of the knowledge that La Place, and, in our own generation. Prof. Du Bois Reymond, have so finely described as the scientific ideal. Such a mind might have an universal formula, in its possession, a key to the mysteries of the succession of phenomena. Such a being could then, using this formula, calculate all events, as astronomers now predict eclipses. At every instant multitudes of air pulsations quiver about us. These, in all their forms, our mind possessed of this universal formula, would have been able to predict ages ago, just as certainly as you now can predict that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. All is predetermined: the glitter of every ice crystal on your frozen window-panes on a winter morning, the quiver of every muscle in the death agony of the fish that you pull out of a mountain-stream, the falling of every yellow leaf in the autumn woods, — each of these events could have been foreseen, mathematically calculated, and fully described, by one able to use the universal formula, and possessed, myriads of aeons ago, of an exact knowledge of the positions of the atoms of the original nebula from which our great stellar system condensed. Such is the natural world.

What religious aspect can this vast machine possess? What room is there for a higher element to be introduced into this mass of dead mathematical facts? The answer of some representatives of science in our day is well known to us. Whatever else is doubtful, say such men, there stands fast the great law of progress. Evolution in the physical world becomes actual progress in the world of human life. The world, under the influence of all these far-reaching laws, is actually growing forever better. Thus natural law agrees with morality. Thus there is a religious aspect to the mechanical laws of the universe.

Let us consider once more the law of progress. We spoke of it in a previous chapter. There it did not help us. For we wanted to agree upon the nature of morality. We were not helped towards such agreement by the knowledge that there is in the world a physical evolution. For we could not tell what ought to be, merely by considering what is. We had first to agree upon a moral law, before we could decide whether evolution is actually progress. But now, perhaps, we can make use of the law of evolution to aid our inquiry into the religious aspect of reality. For now, having defined what the good is, we may estimate whether the world is growing toward the good. And if the world is morally progressing, then one great demand of the religious consciousness is fulfilled. Then there is a power not ourselves that works for righteousness. Or is this really the consequence of the law of evolution?

The first answer is that if there is any tendency at work in the world that as time goes on more and more helps men in their struggle towards morality, this tendency is indeed, as far as it goes, what we want to find. And if such a tendency is found, as we are told, in evolution, the result is in just so far encouraging. Although the external world still often hinders moral growth, yet, we are told, as evolution reaches higher and higher stages, the world comes to harmonize more and more with man’s moral growth. This also seems to be what we seek. In time morality will become a natural product of early childhood. Men will be born with characters that we now seek in vain to develop by a life-time of labor. Natural evolution, then, does help moral progress, and the world is more moral to-day than ever before. This then is to be the religious aspect of the outer world. Does it contain enough of the truth of things to content us?

We are far from doubting the scientific worth of the natural laws that have been discovered of late years, and that have made so clear to us the great truth of far-reaching physical evolution. But let us reflect before we accept these facts as furnishing any deeply important contribution to our present problem. We thoroughly believe in evolution; but we must take, in these matters, a very high position. If the world of powers apart from man is to have a religious aspect, then this aspect must belong to this world as a whole. A minor power for good is not enough. It will not suffice to find that one bit of reality fights for our moral needs while another bit of reality fights against them, unless we can in some way harmonize these conflicting aspects, or unless we can show that they that be with us are not only more important or significant than they that be against us, but are really the deepest truth of things. Else we shall be left face to face with a gloomy world of conflict, where the good and bad are mingled in hopeless confusion. If such a world is the fact, we must accept that fact; but we cannot then say that we have made sure of an answer to our religious needs. Now suppose that in examining the world we found two tendencies at work, equally fundamental, equally active, fairly balanced in power, producing in the long run equally permanent, equally transient results, but always in deadly antagonism to each other, the one making for moral goodness, the other for moral evil. Suppose that the world appeared as the theatre and the result of this struggle of the good and of the evil principles, could we say that we had found in these facts a religious aspect of reality? We should hardly answer in the affirmative. So long as we must fix our minds on this struggle of equally balanced powers, we could not find the world a religiously encouraging vision. We should either have to regard the world in some other and higher aspect, or we should have to give up regarding it as religiously interesting. An answer to our moral needs that is drowned by a hubbub of opposing noises can be no harmonious song. Now we affirm that so long as you look upon the world as a growth in time, as a product of natural forces, as an historical development, you can never make it certain, or even probable, that this world is not such a scene of endless warfare. Hence the progress that you may observe can never overbalance the probability that this progress is a transient and insignificant fact, in the midst of a chaos of confused tendencies. Therefore progress on this planet for a few thousands or millions of years indicates nothing about any true harmony between nature and morality.

Let us call attention to one aspect, well-known, yet often neglected in recent discussions of a few familiar facts. Modern science is justly sure of physical evolution, but is no less sure that evolution on this planet is a process that began at a period distant by a finite and in fact by a not very great time from the present moment. That our planet was a nebulous mass at a date at most somewhere between twenty millions and one hundred millions of years ago, we have all heard, and we have also had explained to us some of the proofs of this fact. Our planet is still imperfectly cooled. At a comparatively recent period in the history of this stellar universe, this little point of it was a spheroid of glowing vapor, from which the moon had not yet been separated. The present heat of the earth is an indication of its youth. Furthermore, what our planet is to become in time, the moon itself tells us, having cooled, by reason of its small size, more rapidly than we have done. Cold and dead, waterless, vaporless, that little furrowed mass of rock desolately rolls through its slow days, looking with passionless stare at our stormy, ardent earth, full of motion and of suffering. What that mass is, our earth shall become. And progress here will cease with the tides. All these are the commonplaces of popular science. Progress then, as we know it here, is a fact of transient significance. Physical nature permits progress rather than renders it necessary. Progress is an incident of a certain thermal process, a kind of episode in the history of the dissipation of the energy of our particular mass of matter, and thus, in so far as we yet know, a present occurrence just in our neighborhood, a local item in the news of the universe. Now these are the familiar facts whose meaning we want to enforce in an often neglected aspect.

But, one says, all this has been anticipated hundreds of times. It is really unfair to insist upon such things. For at least here, at least now, the world does realize our moral needs by showing us progress. Is not this all that we need? May we not be content with the few millions of years of growth that remain to our race before the earth grows cold? Is it not foolish to look into futurity so curiously? What matters it whether chaos comes again in far-off ages?

But we still insist. We desire, vainly or justly, yet ardently, that the world shall answer to our moral needs not by accident, not by the way, not for a time, but from its own nature and forever. If we can see that present progress is an indication of the nature of the universe, that the present is a symbol or a specimen of eternity, we shall be content. But if this is not so, if present progress is seen to be a mere accident, an eddy in the stream of atoms, then present progress is a pleasant fact to contemplate, but not a fact of any deep significance. Still we shall be crying in the darkness for support and finding none. For nature will say to each of us; “I give support to thy moral needs so long as the temperature of thy earth crust is high enough to prevent thy oceans from being absorbed, so long as the radiant heat of the sun is given out in sufficient quantities to keep thee warm. When the next stage is reached, I propose to freeze and to dry thy fair home and all thy moral needs, until there shall be nothing found on thy planet lovelier than the ruined crags of thy hills as they glimmer in the last red rays of a torpid sun. What is thy progress to me?” Notice then where our real difficulty lies. The aspect of the facts that we now mean is this. It is not because progress is to endure on this planet for a short or for a long time, but because the world in which this progress is so to end seems, thus regarded, wholly indifferent to progress, — this is the gloomy aspect. To-day, even while progress is so swift and sure, at this moment, we are living in a world for which, as science displays it to us, this progress is as indifferent and unessential as the fleeting hues of an evaporating soap-bubble. Is the physical fact of progress, thus regarded, a moral help to us?

Yet men turn away from these plain and often-mentioned facts to all sorts of fantastic dreams of a coming golden age. They make of future humanity a saintly people, living in devotion, or a merry people, always dancing to waltzes yet undreamt of, or a scientific people, calculating by some higher algebra the relative positions and motions of the molecules in the rocks on the other side of the moon. Every dream of progress is to be realized in that blessed time, and we are invited to praise a nature that could produce all this blessedness by pure physical law. Now we must indeed wish well for the men of the year a. d. 1,000,000, but we can receive no religious support from the knowledge that if all goes right and if the sun keeps well at work, the men of that time will be better than we are. For still the world as a whole gives no support to our real moral needs, for only by a happy accident will this blessedness be possible. Or, in short, two tendencies are seen before us in the world, one working for evolution, for concentration of energy in living beings, for increase of their powers, for progress; the other for dissipation of energy, for death, for the destruction of all that is valuable on our earth. We learn that the latter tendency has triumphed quite near us, on the moon. We hear that it is certain in time to triumph on the earth, and that the other tendency is to be only of transient superiority. We know that its present predominance here is, physically speaking, a happy accident, which a cosmical catastrophe might at any moment bring to an end. And now we are asked to see in this combination of facts a religious aspect. For the writer’s part, he refuses to regard it as anything but an interesting study in physics. He delights in it as science, but it has nothing to do with religion. Yet some people talk of a Religion of Evolution.

But no doubt believers in universal progress are ready with hypotheses that shall show how significant a fact progress really is. A world that has progressed so many millions of years doubtless has resources of which we know nothing. There are all the stars with their vast stores of energy. Possibly they are infinite in number. Progress ceasing just here may flash out in renewed brilliancy elsewhere. Who knows what is in store for the future, when the present seemingly chaotic arrangement of the stars gives way to vastly higher organized systems of interacting bodies, in whose light life shall flourish eternally?

Well, all this we can all fancy as well as our scientific neighbors. Nobody would call such dreams scientific, but they are logically possible dreams, and they are very beautiful. But they have one terrible negative consideration against them. This progress is either conceived as having gone on through infinite past time, or else it has no genuine significance for the true nature of the universe. A world that has now grown, now decayed, that has sometimes progressed, sometimes become worse, is a world in which progress is an accident, not an essential feature. But now, if progress has gone on through infinite time, it has so gone on as to make possible, after all this infinite time, just the misery and imperfection that we see about us. Let us remember that fact. This poor life of ours is in the supposed case the outcome of infinite ages of growth. That must be our hypothesis, if we are to cling to progress as an essential truth about the world. Very well then, all our temptations, all our weakness, our misery, our ignorance — the infinite past ages have ended in fashioning them. Our diseases, our fears, and our sins — are they perfect ? If not, then what is the meaning of endless progress toward perfection? For we are an outcome of this infinite progress. Another infinity of progress is not certain then to remove such imperfections. Here is progress put to the simple test. Is it the removal of evil? Then can infinite progress, as facts show us, pass by with evil yet unremoved. And if progress is not the removal of evil, then what means progress? Is not the temporary removal of evil more probably a mere occasional event in the history of the world?

It is surprising that we ever think of talking about universal progress as an essential fact of the popularly conceived external world. If nothing certain can be made out about it, still the world as a whole seems, as far as we can judge by the above considerations, so indifferent to progress, that it is marvelous to behold the religious comfort that, in their shallow optimistic faith, so many amiable people take, while they wax fervent over the thought of progress. Let us have clear ideas about the matter. What is in the true nature of reality is as eternal as reality itself. Then progress is either an unessential, insignificant aspect of reality, or it is eternal. If progress has been eternal, then either the world was in the beginning infinitely bad, or else infinite progress has been unable to remove from the world the finite quantity of evil that was always in it. For here in the empirical world is evil now—if indeed there is any empirical world at all—plenty of evil unremoved.

If you found a man shoveling sand on the seashore, and wheeling it away to make an embankment, and if you began to admire his industry, seeing how considerable a mass of sand he had wheeled away, and how little remained in the sand-hill on which he was working, you might still check yourself to ask him: "How long, O friend, hast thou been at work?" And if he answered that he had been wheeling away there from all eternity, and was in fact an essential feature of the universe, you would not only inwardly marvel at his mendacity, but you would be moved to say: "So be it, O friend, but thou must then have been from all eternity an infinitely lazy fellow." Might we not venture to suspect the same of our law of universal physical progress?

But let us already hint by anticipation one further thought. Why is not any purely historical view of the world open to the same objection? If the history began by some arbitrary act of will at some time not very long since, then this history, viewed by itself apart from the creative act, may be intelligible enough in its inner unity and significance, although an arbitrary act of will can be no true explanation. But the whole physical world cannot be regarded at once as a complete, self-existent whole, with an eternity of past life, and as, in its deepest truth, an historical process of any sort. For it is of the essence of an intelligible historical process to have, like a tragedy in Aristotle's famous account of tragedy, a beginning, a middle, and an end. An infinite series of successive acts cannot be one organic historical process. Either this everlasting series of facts has no significance at all, or else it must have had essentially the same significance all the way along. So, if the world is infinite in time, it cannot as a whole have, strictly speaking, any history. The longest continued story in the most thrilling of the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to understand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an infinite continued story, with the poor lovers eternally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what an infinite historical process in the world would mean. It would of course be an eternal repetition of the same thing, no story at all. If the world, regarded in time, cannot as a whole have any genuine history at all, it is then hopeless to look in the world’s history, as distinct from the world’s nature, for anything of fundamental religious significance.

And so we are thrown back to our starting-point. This splendid conception of science, this world of unalterable mechanical law, in which all things that happen are predetermined from all eternity, this mathematical machine, has a real history no more than the ebbing and flowing sea-tides would have from day to day any history, apart from the fact that they once did not so ebb and flow at all. Eternally repeated rhythms, or ceaseless new combinations of elements, clash of atoms, quiver of ether waves, mechanical changes forever; but no eternal progress, no historical sense to the whole, — that seems the conception of the physical world as a whole to which we are driven. It is a strictly mathematical, a physically intelligible, conception, but what religious significance has it? Yet such is the conception that we must have of any eternal physical process.

We have gone through this thorny path of problems, because we want already to indicate one thing as the result of it all, namely, that not what the present world has come from, not what it is becoming, not what it will be by and by, but what it eternally is, must furnish us with the deepest religious aspect of reality. All else is subordinate. We do not care so much to know what story anybody has to tell us about what has happened in the world, as to know what of moral worth always is in the world, so that whatever has happened or will happen may possess a religious significance dependent on its relation to this reality. That which changes not, wherein is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, that must give us the real religious truth upon which all else will depend. A particular event in the world may have a religious significance, but that significance will depend on the relation of this event to eternal truth. And the eternal truth is what we want to know.

Therefore our search will become somewhat narrowed, whenever at least we grow fully convinced of this truth. The “power that makes for righteousness” will become a conception of doubtful religious value. An eternal power, that with all its past eternity of work cannot yet quite vindicate righteousness? Perhaps we shall have to find the religious aspect of things elsewhere. But let us leave, at all events, the world of pure science.

As we do so some objector may interpose the assertion that we have generalized too hastily in speak- ing of the insignificance of the historical aspect of things; for, after all, we have been talking of natural science. Let us turn then to the more philosophical theories of the powers that are at work in this supposed external world of metaphysics. There are philosophical theories that try to show us of what hidden reality this mechanical world of ours is the mere appearance, or phenomenal symbol. Let us see if any of them can give a religious interpretation to the powers that rule the world.

III.

We pass, then, from the scientific to the more metaphysical view of the world. What can we hope from realistic metaphysics? Let us first consider the value of that philosophic view nowadays most frequently held, namely, what in general is called Monism. We hear nowadays, with almost wearisome repetition, of Matter and Spirit, of Force and Intelligence, of Motion and Sensation, as being opposite aspects, or faces, or manifestations, of one ultimate Reality, until we wonder whether clear thinking is not in danger of losing itself altogether in the contemplation of a mere empty form of words. From whispers and low mutterings with bated breath about the inscrutable mystery of the ultimate unity of Being, one turns with satisfaction to efforts towards some intelligible account of the sense in which all things can be regarded as manifestations of one Power or actual Existent. Yet in truth even these efforts, in so far as they consider the world of the Powers, have thus far failed to satisfy the demands of criticism. Where they are clearly stated they are inadequate. Where they resort to figures of speech and tell us about the two sides of the shield, or the convexity and concavity of the same curve, as illustrations of the ultimate oneness of nature amid the various manifestations of experience, there these efforts merely sink back into the primitive incoherency so dear to all pre-Kantian metaphysics. The same curve is, indeed, convex and concave; but matter and spirit are simply not the two faces of a curve, and the relevant circumstance on which this metaphor turns will never be clear to us until we learn, quite literally, wholly apart from fables about shields, just how, in what sense, and by what evidence, matter and mind are known to be of like substance. And that we must do, ere this hypothesis can have for us a religious value. The failure of dogmatic Monism, if it should take place, ought, indeed, not to throw us over into the arms of an equally dogmatic Dualism; but we must refuse to accept the monistic hypothesis until it has been freed from all trace of mysticism. We shall here follow the plan announced at the outset of the chapter, and confine our attention to the realistic Monism, that regards the events in the external world as the results of the action of the one Power. A very different form of monism we shall ourselves hereafter maintain. But just now we deal in negations.

Let us begin with the attempts that have been made to interpret the results of modern physical science in a monistic sense, by regarding the ultimate physical or chemical units as endowed with some form of actual or potential consciousness. Organisms of the highest sort are combinations of atoms. The whole is the sum of its parts. Why may not the mental possessions of these highest organisms be the sum of the indefinitely small mental powers of the atoms? An atom in motion may be a thought, or, if that bo saying far too much of so simple a thing, an atom in motion may be, or may be endowed with, an infinitesimal consciousness. Billions of atoms in interaction may have as their resultant quite a respectable little consciousness. Sufficiently complex groups of these atoms of Mind-Stuff (to use Professor Clifford’s ingenious terminology) might produce a great man. One shudders to think of the base uses to which the noble mind-stuff of Shakespeare might return; but the theory tries to be an expression of natural phenomena, not merely an æsthetic creation, and must not pause before such consequences. And, if it be the truth, might it not somehow, no matter in what way, be made of religious value? Or otherwise, if true, might it not end our vain search for a religion?

Such is an outline that will suggest to the initiated thoughts common to several modern theories of being. Are these theories in a fair way to satisfy critical needs? The writer is not satisfied that they are. Time does not permit any lengthy discussion of the matter here, but let us remind ourselves of the considerations that will most readily occur to any one that is disposed for a moment to accept one of these modern forms of monism. Even if they promised us the religious aspect that we seek, we could not accept them. As it is, we need not fear them.

Can our consciousness be regarded as an aggregate of elementary facts, such as sensations or as atoms of pleasure and pain? If so, what aggregate of sensations forms a judgment, such as, “This man is my father?” Evidently here is indeed an aggregate of sensations represented, but also something more. What is this more? A product, it may be said, formed through association from innumerable past experiences. Granted for the moment; but the question is not as to the origin of this consciousness, but as to its analysis. This judgment, whereby a present sensation is regarded as in definite relation to real past experiences, as a symbol, not merely of actual sensations now remembered, not merely of future sensations not yet experienced, but of a reality wholly outside of the individual consciousness, this fact of acknowledging something not directly presented as nevertheless real — is this act possibly to be regarded as a mere aggregate of elementary mental states? Surely, at best, the act can be so regarded only in the sense in which a word is an aggregate of letters. For and in the one simple momentary consciousness, all these elements exist as an aggregate, but as an aggregate formed into one whole, as the matter of a single act. But in themselves, without the very act of unity in which they are one, these elements would be merely an aggregate, or, in Mr. Gurney’s apt words,^[1] “a rope of sand.” Our mental life then, as a union of innumerable elements into the one Self of any moment, is more than an aggregate, and can never be explained as an aggregate of elementary atoms of sensation. Nor may we say that the ultimate atomic states of consciousness may be, as it were, chemically united into a whole that is more than an aggregate. Physical atoms in space, if endowed with sufficiently numerous affinities, may unite into what wholes you will; but a mental fact is a mental fact, and no more. An ultimate independent unit of consciousness, conceived after the analogy of a sensation, can have to another like unit only one of three relations; it may coexist with this other unit, or it may precede or follow it in time. There is no other relation possible. Affinity, or attraction, or approach of one pain or pleasure, of one sensation of pressure or of motion to another, is a meaningless jingle of words, unless, indeed, such an expression is used to name figuratively the relations that in and for a comparing, contrasting, uniting, and separating active consciousness, two ideas are made to bear. Thus, then, this atomic monism brings us no nearer than before to the relation between the data of consciousness and the facts of physical nature. For the rest, how mechanical science can be satisfied to regard its material points as nothing but independently existing fragments of mind, whose whole being is intensive; how, out of these intensive units, space-relations are to be constructed at all — these questions we may for the present neglect. Atomic monism, a synthesis, or, rather, a jumble of physiological psychology with doctrines that are incompatible with any science whatever, has never answered these questions, and doubtless never will.

But let us not be over-hasty. There are other forms of monism now extant. The purely materialistic monism, for which the hard and extended atoms of naive realism are already and in themselves potentially mind, the old-fashioned materialism of days when Mind-Stuff and physiological psychology were alike undreamed of, may indeed be neglected. That doctrine needed not critical philosophy, of more than a very undeveloped sort, to do away with it once for all. Modern monism knows of supposed atoms that are in their ultimate nature psychical; and of supposed psychical forces or agents that, when seen from without, behave much like extended atoms. But the old fragment of matter that, being no more than what every blacksmith knows as matter, was yet to be with all its impenetrability and its inertia a piece of the soul, has been banished from the talk of serious philosophers. There remain, then, the numerous efforts that see in the world the expression of psychical powers as such, not mere mind-stuff atoms, but organized wholes, related in nature to what we know by internal experience as mind, yet higher or lower, subtler or mightier, wiser or more foolish, than the human intelligence. These views may be divided into two classes: those that see in nature the manifestations of a logical or intelligent power, and those that see in it the manifestations of an alogical or blind, though still psychical power. Each of these classes again may be subdivided according as the power is conceived as conscious or as unconscious in its working. How do these ontological efforts stand related to critical thought?

First let us consider logical monism. Since human intelligence is itself an activity, a working towards an end, and since the logical monist thinks the external universe after the analogy of the human reason, the constant tendency is for him to conceive the world as a process whereby his World Spirit makes actual what was potential. Modern science, in fact, when viewed speculatively, though it does not confirm, yet lends itself easily to such efforts, and we can always, if we choose, imagine the evolution of the organic kingdom as possibly the process of self-manifestation of one eternal rational Power. Only in this way we are very far from a satisfactory ontology. A world, the work or the child of the universal reason, developing in time, how can any reflective mind be content with this account of things? The universal reason surely means something by its process, surely lacks something when it seeks for higher forms. Now, on a lower stage the universal reason has not yet what it seeks, on the higher stage it attains what it had not. Whence or how does it obtain this something? What hindered the possible from being forthwith actual at the outset? If there was any hindrance, was this of the same nature with the universal reason, or was it other? If other, then we are plunged into a Dualism, and the good and evil principles appear once more. But if there was no external hindrance, no illogical evil principle in existence, then the universal reason has irrationally gone without the possible perfection that it might possess, until, after great labor, it has made actual what it never ought to have lacked. The infinite Logos thus becomes no more than the “child playing with bubbles” of the old philosopher. Everything about the process of evolution becomes intelligible and full of purpose — except the fact that there should be any process at all where all was in, and of, and for the universal reason at the outset. The infinite power has been playing with perfection as a cat with a mouse, letting it run away a few aeons in time, that it might be caught once more in a little chase, involving the history of some millions of worlds of life. Is this a worthy conception? Nay, is it not a self-contradictory one? Evolution and creative Reason — are they compatible? Yes, indeed, when the evolution is ended, the hurly-burly done, the battle lost and won; but meanwhile — ? In short, either evolution is a necessity, one of the twelve labors of this Hercules-Absolute, or else it is irrational. In the one case the Absolute must be conceived as in bonds, in the other case the Logos must be conceived as blundering. Both conceptions are rank nonsense. This kind of Monism will not satisfy critical demands.

And then there is the objection, stated by Schopenhauer, and by we know not how many before him, and that we have already insisted upon, namely, that every historical conception of the world as a whole, every attempt to look upon Being as a rational process in time, as a perpetual evolution from a lower to a higher, is beset by the difficulty that after an infinite time the infinite process is still in a very early stage. Infinitely progressing, always growing better, and yet reaching after all this eternity of work only the incoherent, troublous, blind imperfection that we feel in ourselves, and that we see in every dung-heap and sick-room and government on the earth, in every scattered mass of nebulous matter, in every train of meteor-fragments in the heavens — what is this but progress without a goal, blind toil? The world would be, one might think, after an infinity of growth, intensively infinite at every point of its extent. We mortals see no one point in the physical universe where one viewing things as we in this chapter have chosen to do, namely, from outside, might lay his hand and say: Here the ideal is attained.

Yet we should be very far from dreaming of accepting the opposing dogmatic theorem, the antithesis of this sublime Antinomy, namely, “The world is the product of an irrational force. The One is blind.” Schopenhauer undertook the defense of this antithesis, and, in bad logic, as we all know, he somewhat surpassed even that arch blunderer, the universal Will of his own system. This Will, after all, desired a good deal of trouble, and got his wish. But Schopenhauer desired a consistent statement, and, with all his admirable ingenuity and learning, he produced a statement whose inconsistencies have been exposed too often to need much more discussion. No; to the defenders of the alogical hypothesis, as a dogmatic doctrine, it has not yet been given to make out more than the purely negative case that we have stated above. Dogmatic panlogism can be assaulted, with much show of success. The opposite doctrine has not yet been dogmatically maintained without even worse confusion. Panlogism and Alogism are difficult enough in themselves, but how much worse becomes their condition when, as in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” of Von Hartmann, either one of them, or a hybrid of the two, is burdened with yet another hypothesis, namely, that the One Being is unconscious, and yet in nature psychical. Founding himself on certain physiological facts, very doubtfully interpreted, on a monstrous perversion of the mathematical theory of probabilities, on an ingenious view of the history of philosophy, on a like ingenious criticism of Kant, Von Hartmann has expounded an ontological doctrine of which, after all, serious thought can make nothing. This unconscious being, existent not for itself, for it is conscious of nothing, nor for others, because all else is a part of it (and, for the rest, nobody ever thought of it before Von Hartmann), shall be the maker and upholder of the universe. Surely all this is a philosophy of round squares, and is not to be taken very seriously.

Of course the previous criticism is absurdly inadequate to the magnitude of the problems involved, and is intended only as the merest sketch, dogmatically stated, of critical objections to certain ontologies. Seeming irreverence, in this hasty style of doing battle, must be pardoned. Only against imperfect metaphysic as such do we war. Critical philosophy holds no theoretical opinion sacred, just as it regards no earnest practical faith as other than sacred. The question is here not yet what we are to believe, but what we can in argument maintain, and what our method of search ought to be. Absolute and Infinite, Logos and not Logos, Mind-Stuff and Spirit — what are they all for critical philosophy, but, in the first place, mere ideas, conceptions of reason, to be mercilessly analyzed without regard for consequences?

One way remains whereby this realistic monism can still hope to reach a satisfactory statement of the world-problem. Suppose that, once for all, the historical form of statement is abandoned, while the notion of the Reason as a power is retained. This may be done in either of two ways. The universal reason may be conceived as manifesting itself in time, but not in a series of events that are united as the parts of a single process. The world-life may be conceived not as a single history, but as an eternally repeated product of the One reason, a process ever renewed as soon as finished, an infinite series of growing and decaying worlds — worlds that are like the leaves of the forest, that spring and wither through an eternity of changing seasons. The rationality of the world-process is thus saved for our thought by the hypothesis that reason is not like a belated traveler, wandering through the night of time, seeking for a self-realization that is never reached, but, rather, like the sun that each day begins afresh his old task, rejoicing as a giant in the fullness of his attained power. Whoever regards the world as it now is as plainly a sufficient expression of infinite rational power, is at liberty to accept this hypothesis; but he must prepare to answer those of his objectors to whom reason means perfection, and to whom the world of sense will not appear as just at present more perfect than the world of Candide’s experiences. For every one but the blind optimist there is difficulty in regarding this wind-swept battle-field of human action as obviously and altogether a drama of unhindered infinite reason, to be repeated with unwearying tautology through an unending future. Thus, then, we are tossed back and forth between the possibilities suggested by our hypothesis. “The world is the manifestation of infinite reason;” good, then, but how? “The world is a rational growth from lower to higher.” How, then, is this possible if the infinite reason rules all and desires the higher? Was it not always at the goal? So, then: “The world is not one process merely, but an eternal repetition of the drama of infinite reason, which, as infinite, is thus always active and always at the goal.” But this hypothesis is seemingly overthrown by the appearance of the least imperfection or irrationality in nature. The first starving family, or singed moth, or broken troth, or wasted effort, or wounded bird, is an indictment of the universal reason, that, always at the goal, has wrought this irrational wrong. The other possible hypothesis leaves us, after all, in the same quandary. Time may be a mere “mirage.” For the eternal One there is, then, no process; only fact. This notion of a timeless Being is, no doubt, very well worth study. But, then, the eternal One is thus always at the goal, just as in the other case. The One, we should think, cannot be infinite and rational and yet productive of the least trace of wrong, absurdity, error, falsehood. Again our Monism fails. For, after all, the world has been viewed by us only from without; and so remains dark.

IV.

Our monism fails, namely, to establish itself on any ground of experience. Absolute refutation is indeed not yet thus attained, for the defender of the hypothesis of an infinite reason always has at his disposal the suggestions of the ancient theodicy, modified to suit his needs. He can say: “The partial evil is, somehow, we cannot see how, universal good.” Or, again, “Evil results from the free-will of moral agents, who have to suffer for their own chosen sins.” The latter answer, a very plausible one in its own sphere, is for the general problem insignificant. That there is free-will we do not dispute, and that free-will, if it exists, is a cause of much mischief is undoubted. Yet if the universe is so made that the free-will of the slave-driver, or of the murderer, or of the seducer, or of the conqueror, works untold ill to innocent victims, then the fault of the suffering of the victims rests not wholly with the evil-doer, but partly with the order of the world, which has given him so much power, such a wide freedom to do the mischief that he desires. The world in which such things happen must justify its religiously inspiring nature in some other way.

The other answer, that partial evil is universal good, we have to regard as a much deeper answer, shallow as have been the uses often made of it in the past. But if it is to be a valid answer, it must take a particular form. The words are usually spoken too glibly. Their meaning, if they are to have any, we must very carefully consider, ere we can dare to accept them. Only from a higher point of view shall we in fact be able to apply them. In the world of the Powers they find no resting-place.

How can a partial evil be an universal good? Only in certain cases. The notion plainly is that the evil in the external world of popular thought is, as known to us, only a part of the whole, and the whole, it is said, may be in character opposed to the part. This must indeed be the case, if the world as a whole is to be the work of an Infinite Reason. For if so, the evil must be, not merely a bad lesser part that is overbalanced by the goodness of the larger half of the world, but non-existent, save as a separate aspect of reality, so that it would vanish if we knew more about the truth. This is what the saying asserts: not that evil is overbalanced by good (for that would leave the irrational still real), but that evil is only a deceitful appearance, whose true nature, if seen in its entirety, would turn out to be good. One could not say of a rotting apple, however small the rotten spot as yet is, that the partial rottenness is the universal soundness of the apple. If I have but one slight disorder in but one of my organs, still you cannot say that my partial disorder must be universal health. The old optimists did not mean anything so contradictory as that. They meant that there is no real evil at all; that what seems to me to be evil, say toothaches, and broken households, and pestilences, and treasons, and wars, all that together is but a grand illusion of my partial view. As one looking over the surface of a statue with a microscope, and finding nothing but a stony surface, might say, how ugly! but on seeing the whole at a glance would know its beauty; even so one seeing the world by bits fancies it evil, but would know it to be good if he saw it as a whole. And the seeming but unreal evil of the parts may be necessary in order that the real whole should be good. Such is the position of our optimists. This is the Platonic-Augustinian doctrine of the unreality of evil.

The logical possibility of ail this we do not for the first either dispute or affirm. But we are dealing with a world of difficulties, and we can only point out the antecedent difficulty of this theory. If the world of experience simply lacked here and there interest, or positive signs of rational perfection, then one might well compare it to the statue, that seen only piecemeal, and through a microscope applied to its surface, would wholly lack the beauty that appears when all is viewed at once. Then one might say, with great plausibility, that if perceptible harmony is simply lacking to our partial view, the great whole may still be a grand harmony. But the trouble lies in the seemingly positive character of evil. Not simple lack of harmony, but horrible discord, is here. How the tortures of the wounded on a field of battle can anyhow enter into a whole in which, as seen by an absolute judge, there is actually no trace of evil at all, this is what we cannot understand. It seems very improbable. Only absolute proof will satisfy us. And of course, as has been indicated, by some of our examples above, it is not the quantity of any evil (if an evil be a quantity at all), but the quality of it, that makes us urge it in opposition to the claims of reason to be the ruler of all things. Any evil will do, if it seems to be a real and positive evil. For then it seems positively at war with reason.

Actually, however, theodicies and kindred efforts, whether monistic or not, in trying to vindicate the rational in the world have seldom consistently maintained this high and slippery ground of the theory of Plato and of St. Augustine. Far from declaring that all physical evil is and must be apparent, the popular theodicies have often consented to accept the reality of this positive evil, and to minimize its significance by certain well-worn, and, for the purposes of this argument, contemptible devices. They have pointed out that the evil in the world, though a reality separate from the good, exists as a means to good. Or, again, they have said that evil is necessary as something outside of the good, setting it off by way of contrast. Both devices, if applied to a world in which good and evil are conceived as separate entities, are unworthy of philosophic thinkers.

For consider the first device. “Evil is a reality, not an illusion, but it is a means to good. Therefore in the world as a whole, good triumphs. Therefore reason, which desires the good, is the One Ruler.” But first, to mention a lesser objection, the basis in experience for this view is surely very narrow. Much evil exists whose use as a means we cannot even faintly conceive. But grant this point. Then the real evil is a means to a separate and external good end. But if the end was good, why was it not got without the evil means? Only two answers are possible to this, in case the evil is separate from the good. Either the One Reason was driven to take just this way, and could take no less expensive one; or the One Reason, not being bound to this road, still arbitrarily chose to take it instead of a better. But either answer is fatal. Was the One Reason unable to do better? Then it is not the only power at work. The Monism fails. The Reason was bound. But he who binds the strong man is stronger than he. If, however, the One chose this way rather than a better, then the One chose evil for its own sake. The dilemma is inevitable.

To exemplify: If pain is an evil, and if the evil of the pain caused you by a burn, or cut, or bruise is justified by saying that all-wise nature makes your skin sensitive to the end that you may be helped in keeping it whole; then the obvious answer is, that if nature is all-wise and all-powerful and benevolent towards you, it was her business to find a way of keeping your skin in general whole, without entailing upon you the tortures of this present injury. If a machine that we make runs poorly, we are not disposed to blame ourselves, in case we are sure that we have done our very best with it. But the machines of all-wise nature must not run with destructive friction, unless all-wise nature intends destructive friction. The same remark applies to all the eloquent speeches about the educative value of our sufferings. If nature could make us perfect without suffering, and if suffering is not itself an organic part of our perfection, but only an external means thereto, then it was nature’s rational business to develop us differently. But if nature could not perfect our characters save through this imperfect means, then nature’s means were limited. Nature was not all-powerful. Reason had some irrational power beyond it that it could not conquer. Even so we cannot yet run certain engines without smoke. When we are more civilized, we shall abolish smoke, because we shall get more power over the processes of combustion. At present, by this hypothesis, nature can only make characters perfect through suffering, this smoke of the engine of life. So much the worse for nature, unless indeed, in some unknown way, suffering is really no true evil at all, but itself a perfection that, if seen from above, would become plainly universal good. And does that as yet look probable?

Even worse is the other device often suggested for explaining evil. “Evil is a reality, but it is useful as a foil to good. The two separate facts, good and evil, set each other off. By its contrast, evil increases the importance of good.” When this remark is made about us personally with our limitations of body and circumstance, with our relativity of feeling and of attention, the remark has some psychological interest. Made to justify the supposed universal reason, the remark is childish. Always, indeed, it is possible that evil as a separate entity may be made out to be an illusion; and that good and evil have some higher unity that involves the perfection of the world. But if evil is real, and separate from goodness, then the talk about explaining it as a useful contrast is of no worth in the present argument. For we ask: Could not the One create a perfect good save by making good more attractive as set off against the foil evil? Shall we say that Reason could do better than to depend upon this contrast? Then why the evil? If, however, the One Reason could not do better, but had to use the contrast, then the One was less powerful in its devices than is the maker of a concert-programme, who has no need to introduce into his concert any saw-filing or tin-trumpeting or pot-scraping to set off the beauty of his songs and symphonies. But as a fact of experience, is most evil seemingly even thus useful? Are the sick needed to make the healthy joyous? Was Judas necessary in order that Jesus should show himself wholly good? Tradition, in this latter case, says yes, and adds the mystical speech about the need that the offense should come. But what enlightened man nowadays will have it that, supposing good and evil to be separate facts, there can be logically possible nothing thoroughly good, in case some of this evil were removed? Could not Jesus have been what he was without Judas? One doubts here the fact of the necessity of the evil, even in our own little lives; and one is indignant at the trifling that supposes so weak a device as mere external contrast to be the sole device at the disposal of the One Reason. Yet this weak hypothesis of good and evil as externally contrasting separate entities is, after all, provokingly near in form to what we shall hold to be the true solution of the great problem. But that solution is still far away from us and from this world of sense. Thus far, then, monism seems, if not an impossible, still a decidedly doubtful, view of the world. Its value as furnishing religious support seems small. We cannot yet by experience prove that the rational power is supreme in the world; and we fail to make clear to ourselves a priori how it should be supreme. So far we remain agnostics. Our only escape would seem to be through the still doubtful doctrine of the unreality of Evil. And that way seems very dark.

V.

Dualistic Theism here confronts us, the doctrine in which the wise of so many ages have found so much support, the doctrine of a Father, separate from the world of created finite beings, who directs all things, pities and loves his children, and judges with supreme truthfulness all human acts. The religious value of this doctrine, on one side at least, nobody can possibly question. The Father, as Jesus conceives him, has in a very high sense the character that we desire to find in reality. To be sure, there is the other side. This God of the dualistic view is seemingly limited. As a Father pitieth his children, so this God pitieth. But this pity seems to be the love of one who yet cannot or will not save us from all our evil. And if the evil is a reality, and is meant to work for our good, still there is the unanswerable objection that if the Father is not bound by an irrational power beyond him, he need not have put us into so evil a state, but might have wrought us our good in some less painful and dangerous way. In fact, the only plausible explanation of real evil, in case there is separate evil in the world, an explanation which shall yet be consistent with the Father’s power and goodness, is the previously mentioned explanation, that, if beings were created, as we are, free, they must needs be also free to choose the evil. But this explanation only serves to explain the evil that has directly resulted from free choice, that directly affects those who made the choice, and that was distinctly foreseen by them when they chose it. No other evil is justifiable as a result of free-will; all other evil seems absolutely mysterious, when viewed with reference to God’s goodness; and very little of the evil that we experience in this world is the direct result of the deliberate choice of those who suffer it. It is hardly necessary to illustrate these facts, which, like the most of the present chapter, belong to the best-known and most frequently misrepresented of the matters of human controversy. The poor of great cities, the men who inherit loathsome diseases, the naturally weak of will, the insane, the sufferers in accidents, the soldiers led to slaughter, the slaves, the down-trodden peasants and laborers of the world: all these, whose ills are simply inconceivable in might, have no more brought all this on themselves of their own free-will, than have the healthy and happy, the heirs of wealth, the ever-joyous, earned for themselves the good fortune to which they are born. A man can do much with and for himself; but the best part of him, and commonly of his environment, is determined by birth. And for most of that “with which the face of man is blackened,” the power is thus responsible which no free-will of man has made. This evil must either be an organic element in a real higher perfect unity of the world, or else free-will is no explanation or justification for its existence.

But really, the intelligent reader needs, when we get to this most familiar part of our discussion, no very lengthy repetition of the old story. His mind is doubtless made up already, and he will desire only a brief reminder of the chief points that have to do with this question and with those questions most nearly related thereto.

If, then, the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood is to be religiously useful to us, we must make up our minds whether the Father that we seek is to be the omnipotent Ruler of things, or only a limited Power, or again, something else that is not power. In the last mentioned case, he belongs to that aspect of the world which we just now purposely exclude from consideration. If the Father is a Power, then we all know the old but eternally fresh dilemma about his nature. He is either infinite or limited. If he is infinite, we find arising all the difficulties just suggested in our consideration of the hypothesis of an Infinite Reason, and one other difficulty, worse, if anything, than they all. That difficulty we shall mention soon again. But if, on the other hand, the Father is to be conceived as a limited power, if we are to accept some sort of modern Manicheanism, then no a priori disproof of the possibility of the hypothesis can be offered; since, a priori. any finite power you please is a possibility; but our great trouble will then lie in the fact that only experience can establish such an hypothesis, which by its very nature needs a posteriori proof. And experience, as summed up in science, has in fact simply no need of that hypothesis. Hence we shall be left altogether in doubt, at least while we study the World as Power.

Such is the argument in its most general statement. Now as to the points in greater detail. The great difficulty mentioned above as lying in the way of the hypothesis of an infinite creative power is a difficulty in the conception of creation itself. Creation, for the popular conception, certainly involves producing a thing of some kind by a creative act, the thing produced existing forthwith outside of the creator. To give up this separation of creator and product is to become pantheistic. And with monism we are not here concerned. But now the idea of an infinite creative Power outside of his products involves more than one difficulty. We shall not dwell on the old difficulty that this infinite Power would become finite as soon as there was in existence something outside of it. We shall proceed at once to a more fruitful and serious difficulty, which we find in the fact that the concept of producing an external thing involves, of necessity, a relation to a Law, above both producer and product, which determines the conditions under which there can be a product at all. The creative power must then work under conditions, however magical and mysterious its acts may be. And working under conditions, it must be finite. No device for minimizing the meaning of this separation of creative power and created thing will really escape the difficulty resulting. And this difficulty will appear in all cases of supposed creation. It may be summed up once more in the statement that any creative power in act, just as much needs explanation in some higher law and power as does the thing created itself, so that whatever creates a product external to itself becomes thereby as truly dependent a power as we ourselves are. Let us exemplify.

“Let there he light,” shall represent a creative act. If the light that results is simply a fact in God, then our difficulty is avoided, but the very conception of a power creating anything external to itself is abandoned. Then one becomes frankly pantheistic, and identifies all things with the creative power. But if the light is not the creative act, but separate from it, then you have an insurmountable difficulty in the conception. For the power that makes the fiat is not itself the created thing, but, as it were, this power finds the product as a result of the fiat, God saying. Fiat lux, finds that this act, this word, or whatever process it symbolizes as actually happening in the divine mind, is followed by the external appearance of something, namely, light. Now as creator of light, God is not yet conceived as the creator of those conditions under which just this fiat could be followed by just these consequences. But the external success of the fiat presupposes external conditions under which the fiat can succeed. Just as when I say, “let there be light,” and produce it by my own fiat plus the necessary physical acts, even so the conceived Deity in the conceived case, though needing no other means save his fiat, has yet needed that, and has found his fiat a sufficient cause of this external change from darkness to light. But just as my success in making light needs explanation by the laws of an external world, so God’s success in making it also needs explanation, in the case thus conceived, although his means are supposed to have been less complex than mine have to be. He too is put by this conception in a world of law external to himself, the laws of this world being such as require that, in order to produce light as an external fact he shall perform a certain act, the fiat. These laws secure him success, in the supposed case, under just these conditions. The fiat may itself be whatever process you will.

But how then did these conditions arise? How is it that God is able to make light as an existence external to himself? The external conditions on which his present success depends may indeed have been again created by himself. Even so a man could now possibly make some ingenious mechanism, com- pounded of telephones and what else you will, so as to be able to light a whole building by the impulse produced by some very simple act, e.g., by speaking the words, “Let there be light,” against some prepared membrane. But then we are involved in just the same difficulties. As the man’s mechanical skill would imply a conformity to laws of nature preceding his present power to make light by the word of his mouth, even so, if God’s creative power has previously created the conditions of the success of this his present fiat, the same questions would arise about those conditions, and so on ad infinitum. Always even the infinite series of acts would imply, at every step of the regress, God working upon a nature external to himself, and so God as a finite power, subject to the laws that let him work.

But then may we not hereupon accept the doctrine of God's infinity, and say that this infinite power is identical with its products? Shall we not be pantheists of the old-fashioned sort, and yet keep the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood? The attempt is hopeless. And the difficulties in the way of the religious use of the pantheistic hypotheses have already been considered. Furthermore, many theistic thinkers have felt the force of an old set of arguments that, in this country and recently. Professor Bowne, in his “Metaphysics,” has more than once set forth at length, namely, the thought that, if God can be as Creator identical with his other creations, he cannot as a Power well be identical with us, who feel ourselves to be also creative powers, and not mere forms or acts in any other power. But if we are separate from God, then in this class of cases his creation of us involves all the difficulties before pointed out. When he made us, his fiat was successful beyond himself. The success needs a preexistent law, or, if you will, a preëxistent power outside of him, to explain it; just exactly as my power to move my hand or to wink my eye implies a whole universe of being outside of me in order to give my will just this position of authority. Merely assume in your thought these conceptions, namely, a power that acts and an external product resulting from its acts; and at once you need a higher power and a higher law, external to the first power, to explain how the first power, acting in just this way, could achieve just this external result. Hence either God creates nothing external to himself, or else, in creating, he works under the laws that presuppose a power higher than himself, and external to himself. In the briefest form: Acts that produce external changes imply adjustment of means to ends. The creation of external things is such an act. Unless an actor is identical with the product itself, he must therefore be subject to the external conditions of adjustment, i.e., he must be finite.

Certain thinkers are accustomed to suppose that they honor God by having obscure and self-contradictory ideas about him. Hence they avoid all of the foregoing difficulties by calling the creative act a mystery. Now there are mysteries and mysteries. We do not know how trees grow, nor why the planets obey the law of gravitation. But we are sure that they do. On the other hand, we do not know how squares can be round; but we happen in this case to perceive that squares cannot be round. Now if somebody tells me that God is a round square, and appeals to me to consider reverently whether piety allows me to assert, in view of the mystery of God’s being, that God is not a round square, my answer is very plain. I say at once that it must be as irreverent to call God absurd and self-contradictory in his nature as to call him anything else discreditable; and that I, for my part, hesitate not to declare very frankly that though I know very little about God, I am sure that he is no round square. Now even so, an absurd and self-contradictory account of the act of creation must not be allowed to escape us by pleading that creation is a mystery, and that nobody can see how God makes things. For, mysterious as creation may be, we can be sure that if creation is of such a nature as to involve an external power and an external law, outside of God’s creative power itself, then God is himself not infinite. And we can be equally sure that unless God as creator is identical with his products, the idea of a creative act does involve just such a power preceding the act and outside of God himself. The device then by which so many thinkers seek to escape from this well-known and ancient net of dialectics, seems for us necessarily unsuccessful. There are mysteries that we have reverently to accept, and before long we ourselves shall find such, and we shall be glad to bow before them. But if creation is indeed such a mystery, at all events a self-contradiction about creation is not such a mystery.

VI.

We have dwelt at length on one of the alternatives of Theism. Disheartened, and without any enthusiasm, we turn to the other. Must we after all remain content in our religion without any assurance of the supremacy of the good? Must we be content with this halting half Theism of the empirical Design- Argument? If we must be, we must be. But what if that too should fail us? Let us at least try it. This unsatisfactory view says: “What powers there may be in the world we can never wholly know. But we think that there is evidence that they that be for the moral law are more than they that be against it. And this evidence is given us by the empirically discerned marks of benevolent design about us in the world.” This view, whatever its religious worth, is at all events capable only of empirical proof, and pretends only to such a rank. And it is in discussing this hypothesis, in the dim light of the weary centuries of dispute about it, that one comes at last fully to feel the bitterness of the doubt that, like a tormenting disease, assails and eternally must assail one who tries to be content with this dreary visible world in which we have been so far vainly seeking for comfort. Wrangle upon wrangle, ceaseless balancing of probabilities this way and that, opinions and ridicule and abuse forever, and no result: such is this empirical teleology that seeks a world-manufacturer, and cannot discover him. Let us take up the miserable business just where we happen to find it.

There is no doubt about this, that the doctrine of evolution has rendered the popular empirical proof of a special designing power much harder than we used to suppose. And when we pass to this aspect of our question, we must confess at once that we have nothing to say which can be new to any reader of modern discussion. This empirical teleology will always remain a doubtful subject for human inquiry. Any dogmatic disproof of intelligent finite powers or daemons above us must be regarded as impossible. The only question to be here solved is the possibility of purely inductive proof of the existence of such higher intelligent agencies. And here, as we hold, just the ancient difficulties as to the proof of any empirical teleological theory survive, and are, in spite of all that recent writers have done, rather increased by our knowledge of the facts of evolution. Especially does evolution make the empirical hypothesis of the existence of any finite and good daemonic power, intelligently and morally working in the world, continually more and more obscure. For first, as to the intelligence of the higher powers, what the theory of evolution has done for us in this respect is simply to make us feel that we know not, and cannot yet even guess, how much what we empirically call bare mechanism can do to simulate the effects of what, in an equally empirical and blind way, men call intelligence. Therefore no empirical design-argument has longer anywhere nearly the same amount of persuasive power that it once seemed to have. The matter stands thus: An empirical design-argument might very plausibly reason that, if I find a child’s blocks arranged to make a house or to spell words, I can assume that some designing human hand has so placed them. But the inductive force of the argument rests on my previous knowledge that nothing is so apt to put blocks in that order, in this present visible world, as just a designing human hand. But if I discovered certain physical conditions that did very frequently work, and that did often so arrange blocks, then I should no longer consider the given arrangement good proof of human design. Even so, until I see that natural selection can simulate the designing power of human beings, I may be disposed to regard a given case of apparent design in nature as a fair inductive proof of some great carpenter or watch-maker working there. But the induction, never overwhelming, becomes very weak when I learn that there are so-called physical conditions such as we or chance can produce, which, however, do nevertheless result in things that my eye woidd have called full of design. For then I am led to feel as if I could pass no judgment at all upon concrete cases. Yet only by concrete cases can an empirical hypothesis be proved. Therefore unless a pebble proves design an eye does not prove design.

But design, we hear, is not incompatible with evolution. Of course not. And if there is a designer, who works through evolution, then indeed he shows wonderful foresight and mastery. But the question is, not what is compatible with evolution, but what can be proven from bare experience. And what the modern man has very justly come to see is that mere experience must leave him in utter doubt about what powers, intelligent or not intelligent, are the sources of all our experience. We can find laws; but they take us only a short way. And the more we know about nature, the less inclined we feel to dogmatize on the basis of mere experience about what powers are behind the scenes. They may be intelligent, and they may be what we call in this world of sense mechanical. But as finite powers, given in experience, we men know them solely by their effects. And their effects are very remote hints of their real nature. It is really painful to read the elaborate wastes of effort made in our day to prove that some theological dogma about some power beyond experience is not refuted by experience. As if such proof made anybody’s creed either more or less doubtful. A really well-founded Theism would not be, in this tedious way, eternally on the defensive.

But there is the other aspect of the matter. An intelligent power, were it admitted, would not need to be moral. If there is design, is the designer demonstrably good? Let us pass over to that question.

VII.

If evolution has done anything for us, it has tended to increase our sense of the mystery of the world of experience, and therefore the philosophically minded religious student is in truth, for yet this other reason, weary of all this empirical Theism, namely, because he despairs of finding out, by such an empirical process, anything about the actual purposes of any designer, even if there be a designer. To study English literature in the rubbish heaps of a book-binder’s work-shop, would seem to a wise man a much more hopeful undertaking than to seek any one notion of the real plan on which this world is made from a merely empirical study of our little fragment of nature. Science is right in abandoning such undertakings wholly and for all its now probable future work. Religion must find the religious aspect of reality in a totally different direction. The higher the realities that we study, the harder the task. The heavens declare very many things not wholly clear to us; but the earth and man declare, as natural facts, very many more and more confusing things. Only a poetical abstraction can show us any one plan of religious value in the world of sense, any one declaration of anybody’s glory therein. An equally strong opposing interest would find just as good evidence for what it sought if it should hold another view of what is designed. Nature is, so regarded, a confused hum of voices. “Nature,” says one voice, “is meant to provide bountifully for the wants of sentient life.” “Therefore,” says another voice, “all the weak, the sick, the old, must starve, and all the carnivorous destroy their neighbors.” “Nature aims at the evolution of the highest type of life,” says the first voice. “Therefore,” it is replied, “she bountifully provides swarms of parasites of all sorts to feed on higher life.” “Nature desires order and unity,” says the voice from the heavens. “Therefore she makes meteors and comets,” replies the echoing voice. — And if now the Fiend appears, and suggests, as the only satisfactory design-hypothesis, something of this sort, how could experience answer him? — “Nature,” he says, “is designed by a being who delights in manifold activity of all sorts, in variety of organization throughout the world, in the fine contrasts of the numberless forms of sentient life, and in whatever means vigor. He likes to see many living creatures, and he likes to see them fight. He likes the sight of suffering, as well as of joy; because both mean variety of action. He delights in the triumphs of the victors, in the groans of the conquered, in the sportiveness of young animals, in the writhing of a poor beast that dies in torture, in the insidious struo-o-le for existence that the Entozoa carry on, in the hopeless sighs that men send up to him in their woe, and in the ideal raptures and agonies of saints, artists, and lovers. All these things he likes, because they are just so many forms of existence. He wants plenty of life and vigor to contemplate, as a boy wants stiff soap-suds to make pretty bubbles for his pleasure as he lies idle. This being is doubtless finite (like his brother, the Setebos of the inimitable monologue that Browning has put into Caliban’s mouth). But just now he reigns hereabouts, even as Caliban’s Setebos reigned in the island. And his designs are so obviously shown in nature, that anybody ought to believe in him who simply looks at the facts of experience.”

Of this horrible doctrine we apprehend that experience as such offers no disproof. For all that science can say, we might be in the hands of just such a demon. Hence it behooves religious students to cease looking for the living God among the dead facts of physical science, and to betake themselves to their own proper field. Science simply leaves all such hypotheses utterly doubtful. Our little corner of the world may have become what it is in any one of numberless physically definable ways. And, if designed, its immediate purpose may be any one of numberless purposes. It is not probable that experience can tell us much about that matter. Science is very right in appealing to experience with wholly different aims, namely, for the sake of understanding the laws of the sequence of phenomena, to the end that we may be able to know what the world-plan, however it may be formed, does actually render us capable of accomplishing just now and here in our concrete dealings with things. And if science, in doing all this, has to make certain postulates, and to accept them on faith, then such faith, though it needs indeed a deeper foundation, is at least not identical with the presumption that, undertaking not simply to postulate, but to prove beyond doubt, pretends to discover with certainty, from bare experience, that the world-maker’s plans do agree with our plans. After all, such empirical Theism is assuming its safest and most characteristic form when it appears no longer as a genuine investigator, but poses as the defendant’s attorney, takes prudent refuge behind the rules of debate, and demands that other people shall assume the burden of proof, and either show it to be certainly false, or else accept it for the sake of propriety.

VIII.

We turned to the supposed external World of Powers, and we have found it either dumb, or else given to dark and doubtful speeches. The Powers may indeed be somehow of the highest worth. But to us, even if we accept unquestioningiy the supposed external world, the worth of it all seems doubtful, and more so the longer we study the matter. The partial evil may be universal good; but we could not in this external world see how, nor could we find proof of the fact. What a Power causes, that the power seems responsible for. And so the Powers that cause the inestimable might of evil in the world seem of very doubtful religious worth.

We have already suggested in outline why this doubtful residt was to be expected. These Powers were assumed to exist apart from our thought, in tiuie and space, and to work in time. They have, as workers in time, no certain and eternal significance. A single Infinite Power is, properly speaking, a misnomer. If a power produces something that is external to itself, then the very idea of such an occurrence implies another power, separate from the first, and therefore limiting it. If however the power is identical with its own products, then the name power no longer properly belongs to it. For, as we shall see when we come to speak of the world in its other aspect, namely, as eternal, the conceptions of power and product, of cause and effect, and of all like existences, are found to be only subordinate to the highest conception of the world as Thought. For the Eternal Thought are all these powers; but in themselves they belong to the flux of things. Each one of them says. Not in me, when you ask it for the significance of the world as a whole. Each power says: “I work here along with the others. I fight, I strive, I conquer, I obey, I seek my ends as I can. But beyond me are the conditions that limit me.” And these conditions are the other powers. The world of powers is the world of the children of the dragon’s teeth. Their struggles are endless. The only religion that they can teach is the religion of endurance and of courage. Or one may compare them to the warriors in king Atli’s house. Only the all-seeing Eternal Thought can possibly discover their significance. Of themselves they are just the fighters in the blood and dust of the banqueting hall.

All this we just now affirm without full proof. But our previous discussion has been one long illustration of it. You find or think you find in the world a religiously valuable power or tendency at work. But at once there stands beside it its sworn foe. Is it Evolution that you have found? There stands beside it Dissolution. Is it the tender care of a fatherly nature for the very sparrows? Then appears beside it the cruelty and deceit of nature. Is it the beauty of the world that suggests a power-loving beauty? Nay, but the rottenness and the horror of natural disease and decay assert as boldly the workings of a power that hates beauty. Are all these seeming powers just mere phantoms, whose truth is in the laws of physics? Then the world is a vast wreck of colliding molecules. Are these powers real tendencies? Then their fight is seemingly endless. The world of the powers is indeed full of physical law, because and only because its facts are found, by means of thought that has a deeper foundation, to be cases of certain general rules. But for our religious purpose, this world of the powers seems a chaos.

“But,” says some one, “all this is no disproof of the existence of a real but to us not perfectly clear harmony of all the powers. This is simply absence of proof.” Yes; but if proof is what we want, and if every single power sends us beyond itself for the interpretation of the meaning of the whole, we cannot hope to grasp that meaning so long as we avoid studying the world in its eternal aspect. The powers themselves make and unmake. We understand them not. They remind us of the night-scene of Faust: —

Faust. Was weben die dort um den Rabenstein?

Mephistopheles. Weiss nicht was sie kochen uud schaffen.

Faust. Schweben auf, schweben ab, neigen sich, beugen sich.

Mephistopheles. Eine Hexenkunst.

Faust. Sie streuen und weihen.

Mephistopheles. Vorbei! Vorbei!

And if we will hear the wisdom of Mephistopheles about all this, he has elsewhere given his view, which, as an opinion about the world of powers by one of the more authoritative powers in it, is worthy of as much respect as any other suggestion from an equally limited being: —

“Was soll uns dann das ewige Schaffen!

Gescbaffenes zu nichts hinwegzuraffen!

‘Da ist’s vorbei!’ Was ist daran zu lesen?

Es ist so gut als wär’es nicht gewesen.

Und treibt sich doch im Kreis, als wenn es wäre.

Ich liebte mir dafür das Ewig-Leere.”

And possibly it would be hard for us to be sure of much more meaning in this world of powers as such, than Mephistopheles has found.

For us, we turn, not with despair, but with hope, elsewhere. We go to seek the Eternal, not in experience, but in the thought that thinks experience. Our hope is not less because we have found in the temporal a world of doubt. Our song is simply the “Good-by proud world, I’m going home,” of the religious minds of all ages. The truly religious elements of theism are not hurt by the destruction of traditions about theistic arguments. It is only an example of shallow thought when either the destructive or the constructive thinkers imagine that the battle is decided if the world of the powers is judged in one way or in another. Religion is as independent of all that as Sirius is independent of the north wind.

Notes

1. Mind for April, 1881, article, “Monism.”