Chapter III: Part 3

We have led up to the idea of God's existence. But so far we have discovered nothing at all about His character or purposes. And it is clear that without some such knowledge the belief in God could be of little or no value from any religious or moral point of view. How are we to learn anything about the character of God? I imagine that at the present day few people will attempt to prove the goodness or benevolence of God from an empirical examination of the facts of Nature or of History. There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much to suggest a directly opposite conclusion. Few of us at the present day are likely to be much impressed by the argument which Paley bases upon the existence of the little apparatus in the throat by which it is benevolently arranged that, though constantly on the point of being choked by our food, we hardly ever are choked. I cannot help reminding you of the characteristic passage: 'Consider a city-feast,' he exclaims, 'what manducation, what deglutition, and yet not one Alderman choked in a century!' Such arguments look at the matter from the point {61} of view of the Alderman: the point of view of the turtle and the turkey is entirely forgotten. I would not for a moment speak disrespectfully of the argument from design. Darwinism has changed its form, but anybody who reads Edouard von Hartmann's _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ is not likely to rise from its perusal with the idea that the evidences of design have been destroyed by Darwinism, whatever he may think of Hartmann's strange conclusion that the design can be explained by the operation of an unconscious Mind or Will. The philosophical argument of Mr. R. B. Haldane in _The Pathway to Reality_,[1] and the purely biological argument of Dr. John Haldane in his two lectures on _Life and Mechanism_, and still more recently the brilliant and very important work of M. Bergson, _L'Evolution Creatrice_ have, as it seems to me, abundantly shown that it is as impossible as ever it was to explain even the growth of a plant without supposing that in it and all organic Nature there is a striving towards an end. But the argument from design, though it testifies to purpose in the Universe, tells us nothing about the nature of that purpose. Purpose is one thing; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be derived--from the evidence of our own moral consciousness.

Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some pleasures are better than others--such judgements are as much the work of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two and two must make {63} four. We have just as much right to assume that our moral ideas--our ideas of value--must come from God too. For God too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the good; and our judgements of value--judgements that such and such an end is good or worth striving for--in so far as they are true judgements, must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good--the same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God.

Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, authority, objective validity of Conscience would lead us too far away into the region of Moral Philosophy for our present subject. I will only attempt very briefly to guard against some possible misunderstandings, and to meet some obvious objections:

(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the assertion of the existence of the Moral Consciousness is not in the slightest degree inconsistent with recognising its gradual growth and development. The {64} moral faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or activity of the human soul, has grown gradually. No rational man doubts the validity--no Idealist doubts the _a priori_ character--of our mathematical judgements because probably monkeys and possibly primitive men cannot count, and certainly cannot perform more than the very simplest arithmetical operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of mathematical reasoning because not only children and savages, but sometimes even distinguished classical scholars--a Macaulay, a Matthew Arnold, a T. S. Evans,--were wholly incapable of understanding very simple mathematical arguments. Equally little do we deny a real difference between harmony and discord because people may be found who see no difference between 'God save the King' and 'Pop goes the Weasel.' Self-evident truth does not mean truth which is evident to everybody.

(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral ideas--our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular cases--has been largely influenced by education, environment, association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural selection--in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary system {65} invented by the ingenious and interested devices of those who want to get money by teaching it. Arithmetic was invented largely as an instrument of commerce; but it could not have been invented if there were really no such things as number and quantity, or if the human mind had no original capacity for recognizing them. Our scientific ideas, our political ideas, our ideas upon a thousand subjects have been partly developed, partly thwarted and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. But, however great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. If a class of forty small boys are asked to do a sum, they will probably not all bring out the same answer: but nobody doubts that one answer alone is right, though arithmetical capacity is a variable quantity. What is meant is merely that, if I am right in affirming that this is good, you cannot be likewise right in saying that it is bad: and that we have some capacity--though doubtless a variable capacity--of judging which is the true {66} view. Hence our moral judgements, in so far as they are true judgements, must be taken to be reproductions in us of the thought of God. To show that an idea has been gradually developed, tells us nothing as to its truth or falsehood--one way or the other.

(3) In comparing the self-evidence of moral to that of mathematical judgements, it is not suggested that our moral judgements in detail are as certain, as clear and sharply defined, as mathematical judgements, or that they can claim so universal a consensus among the competent. What is meant is merely (_a_) that the notion of good in general is an ultimate category of thought; that it contains a meaning intelligible not perhaps to every individual human soul, but to the normal, developed, human consciousness; and (_b_) that the ultimate truth of morals, if it is seen at all, must be seen immediately. An ultimate moral truth cannot be deduced from, or proved by, any other truth. You cannot prove that pleasure is better than pain, or that virtue is better than pleasure, to any one who judges differently. It does not follow that all men have an equally clear and delicate moral consciousness. The power of discriminating moral values differs as widely as the power of distinguishing musical sounds, or of appreciating what is excellent in music. Some men may be almost or altogether without such a power of moral discrimination, just as some men are wholly {67} destitute of an ear for music; while the higher degrees of moral appreciation are the possession of the few rather than of the many. Moral insight is not possessed by all men in equal measure. Moral genius is as rare as any other kind of genius.

(4) When we attribute Morality to God, it is not meant that the conduct which is right for men in detail ought to be or could possibly in all cases be practised by God. It is a childish objection (though it is sometimes made by modern philosophers who should know better) to allege with Aristotle that God cannot be supposed to make or keep contracts. And in the same way, when we claim universal validity for our moral judgements, we do not mean that the rules suitable for human conduct would be the same for beings differently organized and constituted. Our rules of sexual Morality are clearly applicable only to sexually constituted beings. What is meant in asserting that these rules are universally and objectively valid is that these are the rules which every rational intelligence, in proportion as it is rational, will recognize as being suitable, or conducive to the ideal life, in beings constituted as we are. The truth that permanent monogamous marriage represents the true type of sexual relations for human beings will be none the less an objectively valid ethical truth, because the lower animals are below it, while superior beings, {68} it may be, are above it. Universal love is none the less the absolute moral ideal because it would be absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong in devouring other creatures, or because war is sometimes necessary as a means to the end of love at our present imperfect stage of social and intellectual development. The means to the highest good vary with circumstances; the amount of good that is attainable in such and such circumstances varies also; consequently the right course of conduct will be different for beings differently constituted or placed under different circumstances: but the principles which, in the view of a perfect intelligence, would determine what is the right course for different beings in different circumstances will be always the same. The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, _e.g._ that love is better than hate, are just as applicable to God as they are to us. Our conception of the highest good may be inadequate; but we certainly shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a nearer approach to ultimate truth, by flatly contradicting our own moral judgements. It would be just as reasonable to argue that because the law of gravitation might be proved, from the point of view of the highest knowledge, to be an inadequate statement of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some error, therefore we had better assume that from the point of view of God there is no difference whatever {69} between attraction and repulsion. All arguments for what is called a 'super-moral' Deity or a 'super-moral' Absolute are open to this fatal objection: moral judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything but the moral consciousness, and yet these doctrines contradict the moral consciousness. The idea of good is derived from the moral consciousness. When a man declares that from the point of view of the Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea of good from his own moral consciousness, and is assuming the objective validity of its dictates. His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as mine when I say that to me some things in this world appear very bad. If he is not entitled to assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled to assume their validity, why should he distrust that same moral consciousness when it affirms (as it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever bad, and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists suggest) additional artistic touches which only add to the aesthetic effect of the whole?

I shall now proceed to develop some of the consequences which (as it appears to me) flow from the doctrine that our belief in the goodness of God is an inference from our own moral consciousness:

(1) It throws light on the relations between Religion and Morality. The champions of ethical {70} education as a substitute for Religion and of ethical societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, but actually destructive of, the intrinsic authority of the moral law. If we supposed with a few theologians in the most degenerate periods of Theology (with William of Occam, some extreme Calvinists, and a few eighteenth-century divines like Archdeacon Paley) that actions are right or wrong merely because willed by God--meaning by God simply a powerful being without goodness or moral character, then undoubtedly the Secularists would be right. If a religious Morality implies that Virtue means merely (in Paley's words) 'the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness' (so that if God were to will murder and adultery, those practices would forthwith become meritorious), then undoubtedly it would be better to teach Morality without Religion than with it. But that is a caricature of the true teaching of Christ or of any considerable Christian theologian. Undoubtedly we must assert what is called the 'independence' of the moral judgement. The judgement 'to love is better than to hate' has a meaning complete in itself, which contains no reference whatever to any theological presupposition. It is a judgement which is, and which can intelligibly be, made by people of all religions or of none. But {71} we may still raise the question whether the validity of that judgement can be defended without theological implications. And I am prepared most distinctly to maintain that it cannot. These moral judgements claim objective validity. When we say 'this is right,' we do not mean merely 'I approve this course of conduct,' 'this conduct gives me a thrill of satisfaction, a "feeling of approbation," a pleasure of the moral sense.' If that were all that was meant, it would be perfectly possible that another person might feel an equally satisfactory glow of approbation at conduct of a precisely opposite character _without either of them being wrong_. A bull-fight fills most Spaniards with feelings of lively approbation, and most Englishmen with feelings of acute disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere feelings, neither of them would be wrong. There could be no question of objective rightness or wrongness. Mustard is not objectively nice or objectively nasty: it is simply nice to some people and nasty to others. The mustard-lover has no right to condemn the mustard-hater, or the mustard-hater the mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a matter of feeling or emotion, actions would not be objectively right or objectively wrong; but simply right to some people, wrong to others. Hume would be right in holding the morality of an action to consist simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it. Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,' I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I may be wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I do mean that I think I am right; and that, if I am right, you cannot also be right when you affirm that this same action is wrong. This objective validity is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or moral obligation. That is why it is so important to assert that moral judgements are the work of Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any other kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any of them being in the wrong; red really is the same as green to a colour-blind person. What we mean when we talk about the existence of Duty is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think about them--that the laws of Morality {73} are quite as much independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws of Nature. That is what is meant by the 'objectivity' of the moral law.

Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?' Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be, we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may be thought about physical laws) the moral law, {74} which expresses not any matter of physical fact but what _ought_ to be thought of acts, cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought' can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is _asserted_, believed in, acted upon without reference to any theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be _that_, unless we assume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when analysed, implies the idea of God. Whatever else Plato meant by the 'idea of the good,' this at least was one of his meanings--that the moral law has its source in the source of all Reality.

And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right in holding that religious belief is necessary to Morality. Of course I do not mean to say that, were {75} religious belief to disappear from the world, Morality would disappear too. But I do think Morality would become quite a different thing from what it has been for the higher levels of religious thought and feeling. The best men would no doubt go on acting up to their own highest ideal just as if it did possess objective validity, no matter how unable they might be to reconcile their practical with their speculative beliefs. But it would not be so for the many--or perhaps even for the few in their moments of weakness and temptation, when once the consequences of purely naturalistic Ethics were thoroughly admitted and realized. The only kind of objective validity which can be recognized on a purely naturalistic view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. The tendency of all naturalistic Ethics is to make a God of public opinion. And if no other deity were recognized, such a God would assuredly not be without worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the temptation to follow a debased public opinion--the opinion of our age, our class, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous God whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of God a postulate of Morality.

From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching it--especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons--seems to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of God. Would that it were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the twin ideas of God and of Duty!

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of God is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when the idea of a righteous God has once been accepted, the idea of Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will of a rational and moral Being without the assumption of a future life for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage, argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary deduction from their belief in God.

I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief--not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death--is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea; and an ethical conception of God carries with it the idea of Immortality.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm
and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally constituted that the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration, does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability. Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death? Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element in life.

(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height--the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy--it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly righteous Being? In only one way that I know of--by supposing they are means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81} Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be amused.

I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. A human being may, it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition. To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested that the limit to the power of God must necessarily spring from the existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so. Everybody admits that God cannot change the past; few Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that God could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain His ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is no limitation of God not to be able to change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for God to change the past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited quantity--a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much pleasure and so much virtue--when he could have created twice that number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would not be perfectly good or loving. And so on _ad infinitum_, no matter how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this--that God possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that are in their own nature possible.[5]

But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose God not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from the fact of God's goodness. A limited God might be a defeated God. I admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by God. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a greater good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose that the world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient reason for assuming that, at least for the higher order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual conscious being--at least each individual capable of any high degree of good--there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.

I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.

LITERATURE

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_, and Kant's _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_ and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my _Theory of Good and Evil_.

[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.

[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (_Treatise_, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 311.)

[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without Metaphysic, _i.e._ a theory about the ultimate nature of things.

[4] Tennyson's _Wages_.

[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'Cum possit Deus omnia efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, omnipotens merito dicitur.' (_Summa Theol_., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)

{87}

LECTURE IV

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS

In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some of the difficulties which will probably have been arising in your minds in the course of the last three; and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent various points which have been left obscure.

(1) _Creation_. I have endeavoured to show that the world must be thought of as ultimately an experience in the mind of God, parts of which are progressively communicated to lesser minds such as ours. This experience--both the complete experience which is in His own mind and also the measure of it which is communicated to the lesser minds--must be thought of as willed by God. At the same time I suggested as an alternative view that, even if we think of things as having an existence which is not simply in and for minds, the things must be caused to exist by a rational Will. Now the world, as we know it, consists of a number of changes taking place in time, changes which are undoubtedly represented in thought as changes happening to, or {88} accidents of, a permanent substance, whether (with the Idealist) we suppose that this substance is merely the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of being independent of Mind. But what of the first of these events--the beginning of the whole series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end? What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable _a priori_ dogmatism--quite as much so as the closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature is an _a priori_ necessity of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute beginning of all things is unthinkable enough: if we think of God as creating the world at a definite point of time, then we must suppose God Himself to have existed before that creation. We cannot think of an event in time without thinking of a time before it; and time cannot be thought of as merely empty time. Events of some kind there must necessarily have been, even though those events are thought of as merely subjective experiences involving no relation to space. A beginning of existence is, {89} indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in supposing that this particular series of phenomena which constitutes our physical Universe may have had a beginning in time. On the other hand there is no positive evidence, for those who cannot regard the early chapters of Genesis as representing on such a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by a later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. It is no doubt more difficult to represent to ourselves a beginning of space; and the notion of an empty space, eternally thought but not eternally filled up by any series of phenomena of the space-occupying kind, represents a rather difficult, though not (as it seems to me) an absolutely impossible conception. The question, therefore, whether there was a beginning of the series of events which constitute the history of our physical world must (so far as I can see) be left an open one.

Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be accepted, if he is justified in arguing on purely physical grounds that the present distribution of energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have resulted from an infinite series of previous physical changes, if Science can prove that the series is a finite one, the conclusions of Science must be accepted.[1] Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against such a view. That is a question of Physics on which {90} of course I do not venture to express any opinion whatever.

(2) _The time-series_. I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the particular series which constitutes our physical Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than space with an end to it would be space. On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented with an antinomy--an apparent contradiction in our thought--which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the classical antinomies recognized by the Kantian Philosophy--the only one, I may add, which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present. The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly, when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present together--of course it may all be _known_ together as even we know the past and the future--but when you try to think of God as contemplating the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of series--practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the present at least--I strongly suspect for ever--we must acquiesce on this matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems enough to believe that each member of the time-series--no matter how many such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or not--is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]

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(3) _The creation of spirits_. It may seem to some of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world cannot be explained without the assumption of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will. But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls. Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis--sometimes spoken of as Pluralism[3]--has many attractions: from the time of Origen onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature. If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an independent and original nature of their own capable of offering resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and independent beings not forming a part of the divine scheme. At all events, the result of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, within the psychical sphere as much as within the purely physical sphere. And in particular the body is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. We never find the intellect of a Shakespeare in connexion with the facial angle of a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance of being really the fruit of that union. Further, before birth the souls must be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of the kind, so as to rid them of all memory of their previous experiences. Such a conception seems to {96} me to belong to the region of Mythology rather than of sober philosophical thought. I do not deny that Mythology may sometimes be a means of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to which Philosophy vaguely points but which it cannot express in clearly apprehensible detail. But such a Mythology as this seems to be intellectually unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to explain the facts: there is nothing in our experience to suggest it, and much which is _prima facie_ opposed to it. It really removes no single difficulty: for one difficulty which it presents some appearance of removing, it creates a dozen greater ones. It is a hypothesis which we shall do well to dismiss as otiose.