The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Epilogue
EPILOGUE.
Yet some reader, to whom, as to the author, philosophic questions are directly matters of vocation, may possibly linger. To him are due one or two statements more, to set at rest certain of his doubts about our meaning. Perhaps he will ask the very natural, yet, after all, not very fruitful, question, “Is the foregoing theory of things Theism or Pantheism? Has it been your purpose to defend the essential portions of the older Theistic doctrines, or to alter them in favor of some newer faith?” This question expresses a difficulty that some plain people must feel when they read, not merely this book, but also many recent discussions. There are writers who have undertaken to defend Theism, and who have actually in all sincerity argued for the necessity of the Universal Thought. The plain people have reason to suspect such of trying to substitute for the “God of our Fathers” something else, to be called by the same name, and so to be passed off for the same thing. We therefore answer very plainly that we desire to do nothing of the sort. If in the foregoing we have on occasion used the word God, no reader is obliged to suppose that our idea agrees with his idea, for we have fully explained what our idea means. We repeat: As my thought at any time, and however engaged, combines several fragmentary thoughts into the unity of one conscious moment, so, we affirm, does the Universal Thought combine the thoughts of all of us into an absolute unity of thought, together with all the objects and all the thoughts about these objects that are, or have been, or will be, or can be, in the Universe. This Universal Thought is what we have ventured, for the sake of convenience, to call God. It is not the God of very much of the traditional theology. It is the God of the idealistic tradition from Plato downwards. Our proof for it is wholly different from those baseless figments of the apologetic books, the design-argument, and the general argument from causality. Since Kant, those arguments must be abandoned by all critical philosophers, and we have indicated something of their weakness. They have been aptly compared to medieval artillery on a modern battle-field. We accept the comparison. Kant gave to modern philosophy new instruments, and these it is our duty to apply as we can to the old questions that the whole history of thought has been trying to understand. Our special proof for the existence of an Universal Thought has been based, in the foregoing, upon an analysis of the nature of truth and error as necessary conceptions. We do not regard the Universal Thought as in any commonly recognized sense a Creator. A creator would be finite, and his existence would have to be learned from experience. The Universal Thought is infinite, and its existence is proved independently of experience. For the rest, we have insisted that experience furnishes no evidence of single creative powers that are at once unlimited and good. We have however shown how all the Powers that be exist as necessary facts in the Infinite Thought, and how, apart from this thought, nothing is that is. Such is our conception. It is no new one in philosophy. We have tried with no small labor, and after tedious doubting, to make it our own. We have independently given our own reasons for it And we have asserted that here is an object of infinite religious worth.
And now we must add that we are quite indifferent whether anybody calls all this Theism or Pantheism. It differs from the commoner traditional forms of both. Both usually consider God as a Power, and either leave him off on one side to push things occasionally, or to set them going at the outset, or else identify him with his products. The former way of conceiving God is never more than half-philosophic. The latter way is apt to degenerate into wholly poetical rhapsodies. We take neither of these ways. For us Causation is a very subordinate idea in philosophy. It expresses only one form of the rational unity of things, and that an imperfect form. The world of the Powers is not yet an universe. Thought must be truer than Power, comprehending all the Powers, and much more besides, in its infinite unity. God as Power would be nothing, or finite. God as Thought can be and is all in all. And if this is philosophy, traditional Theism can do what it wishes to do about the matter.
In short, the present doctrine is the doctrine that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So far, said St. Augustine, Plato had gone. So far we have gone. Beyond that, said St. Augustine, the truth was not revealed to human wisdom, but only to humble faith. Beyond that, with the rational consequences that we have been able to draw from it in the foregoing, we are frankly agnostic. If any man knows more about the Powers in the world than science has found out by patient examination of the facts, let him rejoice in his knowledge. We are not in possession of such knowledge. We believe in the Conservation of the physical forces, in the Law of Evolution as it is at present and for a limited past time found to express the facts of nature, and in the fact of the Dissipation of Energy. All this we believe as the scientifically probable view, and we do so on the authority of certain students of physical science, who, having examined the facts, seem to agree upon so much as capable of popular exposition. We believe in such other results of science as are known to us. But beyond this nothing as to the Powers in the world is clear to us. We know nothing about individual immortality, nothing about any endless future progress of our species, nothing about the certainty that what men call from without goodness must empirically triumph just here in this little world about us. All that is dark. We know only that the highest Truth is already attained from all eternity in the Infinite Thought, and that in and for that Thought the victory that overcometh the world is once for all won. Whatever happens to our poor selves, we know that the Whole is perfect. And this knowledge gives us peace. We know that our moral Vindicator liveth, and that in his sight all the good that we do is not labor lost.
Yet the purpose of these chapters is not to give at any point a mere negation, even when we speak of the traditional theology. We do not want to exaggerate our quarrel with anybody. If thinkers who accept some traditional form of theology find truth or help in our doctrine, we shall be glad. After all, the religious interest wants, not so much this or that view about some man’s special creed, but a foundation for the faith that somehow righteousness is in deepest truth triumphant in the world. If there is no proof, then, as we said in Chapter IX., we must resort to the Postulates. If we can get proof, so much the better.
Thus, however, we have suggested to ourselves another question. These Postulates of Chapter IX., what has become of them now? Are they wholly lost in our insight? No indeed. They remain just what they were, rational forms of our activity, not perfect in their rationality, but constantly valuable to us in our work. The scientific postulates are not superseded, but rather only strengthened, by the insight into the ultimate rationality of things. They become now the assurance that there must be a rational solution to every scientific problem, and that the simplest solution, being the most rational, is the most probable, in case it is actually adequate to all the facts. Just as before, it remains true of us finite beings that our finite external world is at each instant the product of our activity, working with the postulates, upon the material of our sensations. And that activity remains as before the proper object of a moral judgment. Only now we see that the highest form of our activity is likely to be the one most conforming to the truth. What remains true of the scientific postulates, remains true of the religious postulates. They are not superseded. For what they can still do for us is to insist that our idea of the Infinite shall not remain a cold, barren abstraction, but that we shall appeal to our experience for evidence of what is truly highest and best, and that we shall then say: “The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are, the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think of, all these things are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that He must fully know and experience.” Therefore the religious postulates can accompany us everywhere, making all our experience appear to us as an ever-fresh lesson concerning the mind of God.
The postulates, then, we retain, with the insight. We abandon, however, the use of these postulates to demonstrate further special articles of faith as to supernatural powers or events of any sort. We know of no miracle save the Infinite himself. And so we have no interest in many of the forms of popular idealism. To prove that this world is the home of a Spiritual Life, many good people have been and are concerned to prove that certain phenomena which we see about us are in and of themselves direct evidences of the spiritual nature of things. To such persons a Spirit that is not constantly producing noteworthy effects, and so getting himself into the newspapers, would seem unreal. Therefore, to such persons Religious Idealism depends for its life and warmth upon the vividness and the impressiveness of these phenomenal indications of the action of the great Spirit. Such persons, if they have given up traditional superstitions, still find their delight in dwelling on the mystery of “vital force,” on the occurrence of all sorts of wonderful things, on the theories of occult powers, or of ethereal essences. To them one of the best evidences of the spiritual nature of things is the inability of the biologist to tell us under what conditions life could be produced from dead matter. The mysterious nature of nervous action, the influence of the mind upon the body, and, above all, the occurrence of certain strange emotional experiences in us, such as the visions of mystics, these are to them the main proof that the world is divine and is full of spiritual life. We do not sympathize with this method of idealism. We respect its good intentions, but we are unwilling to look upon it as rationally significant. For us it makes absolutely no difference in our faith about the ultimate spiritual nature of things, whether the world that we see makes our hair stand on end or not, or whether the biologists ever come to succeed in making living matter or not. That we can make a fire, does not prove the world less divine. Nor would the truth of things be less spiritual, if we could also manufacture not only protoplasm, but whole whales or Shakespeares in our laboratories. If we could do so, materialism as a philosophical doctrine would remain just as absurd as it now is. Genuine idealism, like the foregoing, is utterly careless whether this or that particular surprising thing appears in the phenomenal world, since it once for ail knows that the Whole is divine, an eternal surprise. It seeks no confirmation from the laboratories; but only for illustrations of rationality; nor for its own part does it venture to dictate to the special workers in science what they shall find. It is not forced to beg Nature to contain some occult agency, some vague ethereal essence, or some mysterious and wondrous visible being, whose presence shall be a guaranty to the gaping onlooker that there exists an Ideal. All this mendicant idealism our view rejects as unworthy of any clear-headed thinker. It says, “Look at the facts as they are. Study them as experience gives them. Know them in their naked commonplace reality. But know also that the Ideal Divine Life dwells in them and throughout their whole boundless realm.”
In Plato’s “Parmenides,” the young Socrates confesses that he sometimes hesitates to say that there is an Idea for everything, even for mud. He is rebuked for this fear that men may laugh at him. He is told that mud also is rational. Even so we must fear nobody’s laughter in such a matter. We must see the Divine everywhere. And therefore we must not be going about faithlessly looking for something that shall be wondrous enough to force us to say “Here is God.”
And now, last of all, as the writer bids farewell to this single lingering fellow-student, he cannot refrain from suggesting to so patient a friend one little thought more concerning the proof that has been given for the doctrine of these later pages of our discussion. “Possibly it is all false,” the fellow-student may say. “This fair picture of a Truth that is also Goodness, may be but another illusion.” Be it so, dear friend, if we have said nothing to convince thee. Perchance all this our later argument is illusion. Only remember: If it is Error, then, as we have shown thee, it is Error because and only because the Infinite knows it to be such. Apart from that knowledge, our thought would be no error. At least, then, the Infinite knows what we have attributed to it. If it rejects our ideal, then doubtless there is something imperfect, not about the Infinite, but about our Ideal. And so at worst we are like a child who has come to the palace of the King on the day of his wedding, bearing roses as a gift to grace the feast. For the child, waiting innocently to see whether the King will not appear and praise the welcome flowers, grows at last weary with watching all day and with listening to harsh words outside the palace gate, amid the jostling crowd. And so in the evening it falls fast asleep beneath the great dark walls, unseen and forgotten; and the withering roses by and by fall from its lap, and are scattered by the wind into the dusty highway, there to be trodden under foot and destroyed. Yet all that happens only because there are infinitely fairer treasures within the palace than the ignorant child could bring. The King knows of this, yes, and of ten thousand other proffered gifts of loyal subjects. But he needs them not. Rather are all things from eternity his own.