Chapter III: Erroneous Explanations, And Conclusion (1)

Any correct explanation of the universe must postulate an intuitive knowledge of the existence of the external world, of self, and of God. The desire for scientific unity, however, has occasioned attempts to reduce these three factors to one, and according as one or another of the three has been regarded as the all-inclusive principle, the result has been Materialism, Materialistic Idealism, or Idealistic Pantheism. This scientific impulse is better satisfied by a system which we may designate as Ethical Monism.

We may summarize the present chapter as follows: 1. _Materialism_:
Universe = Atoms. Reply: Atoms can do nothing without force, and
can be nothing (intelligible) without ideas. 2. _Materialistic
Idealism_: Universe = Force + Ideas. Reply: Ideas belong to Mind,
and Force can be exerted only by Will. 3. _Idealistic Pantheism_:
Universe = Immanent and Impersonal Mind and Will. Reply: Spirit in
man shows that the Infinite Spirit must be Transcendent and
Personal Mind and Will. We are led from these three forms of error
to a conclusion which we may denominate 4. _Ethical Monism_:
Universe = Finite, partial, graded manifestation of the divine
Life; Matter being God’s self-limitation under the law of
necessity, Humanity being God’s self-limitation under the law of
freedom, Incarnation and Atonement being God’s self-limitations
under the law of grace. Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of
one Substance, Principle, or Ground of Being, is consistent with
Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally
distinct from matter on the one hand and from God on the other.

I. Materialism.

Materialism is that method of thought which gives priority to matter, rather than to mind, in its explanations of the universe. Upon this view, material atoms constitute the ultimate and fundamental reality of which all things, rational and irrational, are but combinations and phenomena. Force is regarded as a universal and inseparable property of matter.

The element of truth in materialism is the reality of the external world. Its error is in regarding the external world as having original and independent existence, and in regarding mind as its product.

Materialism regards atoms as the bricks of which the material
universe, the house we inhabit, is built. Sir William Thomson
(Lord Kelvin) estimates that, if a drop of water were magnified to
the size of our earth, the atoms of which it consists would
certainly appear larger than boy’s marbles, and yet would be
smaller than billiard balls. Of these atoms, all things, visible
and invisible, are made. Mind, with all its activities, is a
combination or phenomenon of atoms. “Man ist was er iszt: ohne
Phosphor kein Gedanke”—“One _is_ what he _eats_: without
phosphorus, no thought.” Ethics is a bill of fare; and worship,
like heat, is a mode of motion. Agassiz, however, wittily asked:
“Are fishermen, then, more intelligent than farmers, because they
eat so much fish, and therefore take in more phosphorus?”

It is evident that much is here attributed to atoms which really
belongs to force. Deprive atoms of force, and all that remains is
extension, which = space = zero. Moreover, “if atoms _are_
extended, they cannot be ultimate, for extension implies
divisibility, and that which is conceivably divisible cannot be a
philosophical ultimate. But, if atoms _are not_ extended, then
even an infinite multiplication and combination of them could not
produce an extended substance. Furthermore, an atom that is
neither extended substance nor thinking substance is
inconceivable. The real ultimate is force, and this force cannot
be exerted by nothing, but, as we shall hereafter see, can be
exerted only by a personal Spirit, for this alone possesses the
characteristics of reality, namely, definiteness, unity, and
activity.”

Not only force but also intelligence must be attributed to atoms,
before they can explain any operation of nature. Herschel says not
only that “the force of gravitation seems like that of a universal
will,” but that the atoms themselves, in recognizing each other in
order to combine, show a great deal of “presence of mind.” Ladd,
Introd. to Philosophy, 269—“A distinguished astronomer has said
that every body in the solar system is behaving as if it knew
precisely how it ought to behave in consistency with its own
nature, and with the behavior of every other body in the same
system.... Each atom has danced countless millions of miles, with
countless millions of different partners, many of which required
an important modification of its mode of motion, without ever
departing from the correct step or the right time.” J. P. Cooke,
Credentials of Science, 104, 177, suggests that something more
than atoms is needed to explain the universe. A correlating
Intelligence and Will must be assumed. Atoms by themselves would
be like a heap of loose nails which need to be magnetized if they
are to hold together. All structures would be resolved, and all
forms of matter would disappear, if the Presence which sustains
them were withdrawn. The atom, like the monad of Leibnitz, is
“parvus in suo genere deus”—“a little god in its nature”—only
because it is the expression of the mind and will of an immanent
God.

Plato speaks of men who are “dazzled by too near a look at
material things.” They do not perceive that these very material
things, since they can be interpreted only in terms of spirit,
must themselves be essentially spiritual. Materialism is the
explanation of a world of which we know something—the world of
mind—by a world of which we know next to nothing—the world of
matter. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 297, 298—“How about your material
atoms and brain-molecules? They have no real existence save as
objects of thought, and therefore the very thought, which you say
your atoms produce, turns out to be the essential precondition of
their own existence.” With this agree the words of Dr. Ladd:
“Knowledge of matter involves repeated activities of sensation and
reflection, of inductive and deductive inference, of intuitional
belief in substance. These are all activities of mind. Only as the
mind has a self-conscious life, is any knowledge of what matter
is, or can do, to be gained.... Everything is real which is the
permanent subject of changing states. That which touches, feels,
sees, is more real than that which is touched, felt, seen.”

H. N. Gardner, Presb. Rev., 1885:301, 665, 666—“Mind gives to
matter its chief meaning,—hence matter alone can never explain the
universe.” Gore, Incarnation, 31—“Mind is not the _product_ of
nature, but the necessary _constituent_ of nature, considered as
an ordered knowable system.” Fraser, Philos. of Theism: “An
immoral act must originate in the immoral agent; a physical effect
is not _known_ to originate in its physical cause.” Matter,
inorganic and organic, presupposes mind; but it is not true that
mind presupposes matter. LeConte: “If I could remove your brain
cap, what would I see? Only physical changes. But you—what do you
perceive? Consciousness, thought, emotion, will. Now take external
nature, the Cosmos. The observer from the outside sees only
physical phenomena. But must there not be in this case also—on the
other side—psychical phenomena, a Self, a Person, a Will?”

The impossibility of finding in matter, regarded as mere atoms,
any of the attributes of a cause, has led to a general abandonment
of this old Materialism of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius,
Condillac, Holbach, Feuerbach, Büchner; and Materialistic Idealism
has taken its place, which instead of regarding force as a
property of matter, regards matter as a manifestation of force.
From this section we therefore pass to Materialistic Idealism, and
inquire whether the universe can be interpreted simply as a system
of force and of ideas. A quarter of a century ago, John Tyndall,
in his opening address as President of the British Association at
Belfast, declared that in matter was to be found the promise and
potency of every form of life. But in 1898, Sir William Crookes,
in his address as President of that same British Association,
reversed the apothegm, and declared that in life he saw the
promise and potency of every form of matter. See Lange, History of
Materialism; Janet, Materialism; Fabri, Materialismus; Herzog,
Encyclopädie, art.: Materialismus; but esp., Stallo, Modern
Physics, 148-170.

In addition to the general error indicated above, we object to this system as follows:

1. In knowing matter, the mind necessarily judges itself to be different in kind, and higher in rank, than the matter which it knows.

We here state simply an intuitive conviction. The mind, in using
its physical organism and through it bringing external nature into
its service, recognizes itself as different from and superior to
matter. See Martineau, quoted in Brit. Quar., April, 1882:173, and
the article of President Thomas Hill in the Bibliotheca Sacra,
April, 1852:353—“All that is really given by the act of
sense-perception is the existence of the conscious self, floating
in boundless space and boundless time, surrounded and sustained by
boundless power. The material moved, which we at first think the
great reality, is only the shadow of a real being, which is
immaterial.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 317—“Imagine an
infinitesimal being in the brain, watching the action of the
molecules, but missing the thought. So science observes the
universe, but misses God.” Hebberd, in Journ. Spec. Philos.,
April, 1886:135.

Robert Browning, “the subtlest assertor of the soul in song,”
makes the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, say: “Mind is not
matter, nor from matter, but above.” So President Francis Wayland:
“What is mind?” “No matter.” “What is matter?” “Never mind.”
Sully, The Human Mind, 2:369—“Consciousness is a reality wholly
disparate from material processes, and cannot therefore be
resolved into these. Materialism makes that which is immediately
known (our mental states) subordinate to that which is only
indirectly or inferentially known (external things). Moreover, a
material entity existing _per se_ out of relation to a cogitant
mind is an absurdity.” As materialists work out their theory,
their so-called matter grows more and more ethereal, until at last
a stage is reached when it cannot be distinguished from what
others call spirit. Martineau: “The matter they describe is so
exceedingly clever that it is up to anything, even to writing
Hamlet and discovering its own evolution. In short, but for the
spelling of its name, it does not seem to differ appreciably from
our old friends, Mind and God.” A. W. Momerie, in Christianity and
Evolution, 54—“A being conscious of his unity cannot possibly be
formed out of a number of atoms unconscious of their diversity.
Any one who thinks this possible is capable of asserting that half
a dozen fools might be compounded into a single wise man.”

2. Since the mind’s attributes of (_a_) continuous identity, (_b_) self-activity, (_c_) unrelatedness to space, are different in kind and higher in rank than the attributes of matter, it is rational to conclude that mind is itself different in kind from matter and higher in rank than matter.

This is an argument from specific qualities to that which
underlies and explains the qualities. (_a_) Memory proves personal
identity. This is not an identity of material atoms, for atoms
change. The molecules that come cannot remember those that depart.
Some immutable part in the brain? organized or unorganized?
Organized decays; unorganized = soul. (_b_) Inertia shows that
matter is not self-moving. It acts only as it is acted upon. A
single atom would never move. Two portions are necessary, and
these, in order to useful action, require adjustment by a power
which does not belong to matter. Evolution of the universe
inexplicable, unless matter were first moved by some power outside
itself. See Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 92. (_c_) The highest
activities of mind are independent of known physical conditions.
Mind controls and subdues the body. It does not cease to grow when
the growth of the body ceases. When the body nears dissolution,
the mind often asserts itself most strikingly.

Kant: “Unity of apprehension is possible on account of the
transcendental unity of self-consciousness.” I get my idea of
unity from the indivisible self. Stout, Manual of Psychology,
53—“So far as matter exists independently of its presentation to a
cognitive subject, it cannot have material properties, such as
extension, hardness, color, weight, etc.... The world of material
phenomena presupposes a system of immaterial agency. In this
immaterial system the individual consciousness originates. This
agency, some say, is _thought_, others _will_.” A. J. Dubois, in
Century Magazine, Dec. 1894:228—Since each thought involves a
molecular movement in the brain, and this moves the whole
universe, mind is the secret of the universe, and we should
interpret nature as the expression of underlying purpose. Science
is mind following the traces of mind. There can be no mind without
antecedent mind. That all human beings have the same mental modes
shows that these modes are not due simply to environment. Bowne:
“Things act upon the mind and the mind reacts with knowledge.
Knowing is not a passive receiving, but an active construing.”
Wundt: “We are compelled to admit that the physical development is
not the cause, but much more the effect, of psychical
development.”

Paul Carus, Soul of Man, 52-64, defines soul as “the form of an
organism,” and memory as “the psychical aspect of the preservation
of form in living substance.” This seems to give priority to the
organism rather than to the soul, regardless of the fact that
without soul no organism is conceivable. Clay cannot be the
ancestor of the potter, nor stone the ancestor of the mason, nor
wood the ancestor of the carpenter. W. N. Clarke, Christian
Theology, 99—“The intelligibleness of the universe to us is strong
and ever present evidence that there is an all-pervading rational
Mind, from which the universe received its character.” We must add
to the maxim, “Cogito, ergo sum,” the other maxim, “Intelligo,
ergo Deus est.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:273—“The whole
idealistic philosophy of modern times is in fact only the carrying
out and grounding of the conviction that Nature is ordered by
Spirit and for Spirit, as a subservient means for its eternal
ends; that it is therefore not, as the heathen naturalism thought,
the one and all, the last and highest of things, but has the
Spirit, and the moral Ends over it, as its Lord and Master.” The
consciousness by which things are known precedes the things
themselves, in the order of logic, and therefore cannot be
explained by them or derived from them. See Porter, Human
Intellect, 22, 131, 132. McCosh, Christianity and Positivism,
chap. on Materialism; Divine Government, 71-94; Intuitions,
140-145. Hopkins, Study of Man, 53-56; Morell, Hist. of
Philosophy, 318-334; Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 403; Theol.
Eclectic, 6:555; Appleton, Works, 1:151-154; Calderwood, Moral
Philos., 235; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688-725, and synopsis, in
Bap. Quar., July, 1873:380.

3. Mind rather than matter must therefore be regarded as the original and independent entity, unless it can be scientifically demonstrated that mind is material in its origin and nature. But all attempts to explain the psychical from the physical, or the organic from the inorganic, are acknowledged failures. The most that can be claimed is, that psychical are always accompanied by physical changes, and that the inorganic is the basis and support of the organic. Although the precise connection between the mind and the body is unknown, the fact that the continuity of physical changes is unbroken in times of psychical activity renders it certain that mind is not transformed physical force. If the facts of sensation indicate the dependence of mind upon body, the facts of volition equally indicate the dependence of body upon mind.

The chemist can produce _organic_, but not _organized_,
substances. The _life_ cannot be produced from matter. Even in
living things progress is secured only by plan. Multiplication of
desired advantage, in the Darwinian scheme, requires a selecting
thought; in other words the natural selection is artificial
selection after all. John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature,
109—“Cerebral physiology tells us that, during the present life,
although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection
with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought
and feeling be in any sense the product of matter. Nothing could
be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis,
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is
not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What
goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular
movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way
correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants.”

Leibnitz’s “preëstablished harmony” indicates the difficulty of
defining the relation between mind and matter. They are like two
entirely disconnected clocks, the one of which has a dial and
indicates the hour by its hands, while the other without a dial
simultaneously indicates the same hour by its striking apparatus.
To Leibnitz the world is an aggregate of atomic souls leading
absolutely separate lives. There is no real action of one upon
another. Everything in the monad is the development of its
individual unstimulated activity. Yet there is a preëstablished
harmony of them all, arranged from the beginning by the Creator.
The internal development of each monad is so adjusted to that of
all the other monads, as to produce the false impression that they
are mutually influenced by each other (see Johnson, in Andover
Rev., Apl. 1890:407, 408). Leibnitz’s theory involves the complete
rejection of the freedom of the human will in the libertarian
sense. To escape from this arbitrary connection of mind and matter
in Leibnitz’s preëstablished harmony, Spinoza rejected the
Cartesian doctrine of two God-created substances, and maintained
that there is but one fundamental substance, namely, God himself
(see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 172).

There is an increased flow of blood to the head in times of mental
activity. Sometimes, in intense heat of literary composition, the
blood fairly surges through the brain. No diminution, but further
increase, of physical activity accompanies the greatest efforts of
mind. Lay a man upon a balance; fire a pistol shot or inject
suddenly a great thought into his mind; at once he will tip the
balance, and tumble upon his head. Romanes, Mind and Motion,
21—“Consciousness causes physical changes, but not _vice versa_.
To say that mind is a function of motion is to say that mind is a
function of itself, since motion exists only for mind. Better
suppose the physical and the psychical to be only one, as in the
violin sound and vibration are one. Volition is a cause in nature
because it has cerebration for its obverse and inseparable side.
But if there is no motion without mind, then there can be no
universe without God.”... 34—“Because within the limits of human
experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does
not follow that mind cannot exist without brain. Helmholtz’s
explanation of the effect of one of Beethoven’s sonatas on the
brain may be perfectly correct, but the explanation of the effect
given by a musician may be equally correct within its category.”

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1:§ 56—“Two things,
mind and nervous action, exist together, but we cannot imagine how
they are related” (see review of Spencer’s Psychology, in N.
Englander, July, 1873). Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 120—“The
passage from the physics of the brain to the facts of
consciousness is unthinkable.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion,
95—“The metamorphosis of vibrations into conscious ideas is a
miracle, in comparison with which the floating of iron or the
turning of water into wine is easily credible.” Bain, Mind and
Body, 131—There is no break in the physical continuity. See Brit.
Quar., Jan. 1874; art. by Herbert, on Mind and the Science of
Energy; McCosh, Intuitions, 145; Talbot, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871.
On Geulincx’s “occasional causes” and Descartes’s dualism, see
Martineau, Types, 144, 145, 156-158, and Study, 2:77.

4. The materialistic theory, denying as it does the priority of spirit, can furnish no sufficient cause for the highest features of the existing universe, namely, its personal intelligences, its intuitive ideas, its free-will, its moral progress, its beliefs in God and immortality.

Herbert, Modern Realism Examined: “Materialism has no physical
evidence of the existence of consciousness in others. As it
declares our fellow men to be destitute of free volition, so it
should declare them destitute of consciousness; should call them,
as well as brutes, pure automata. If physics are all, there is no
God, but there is also no man, existing.” Some of the early
followers of Descartes used to kick and beat their dogs, laughing
meanwhile at their cries and calling them the “creaking of the
machine.” Huxley, who calls the brutes “conscious automata,”
believes in the gradual banishment, from all regions of human
thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity: “A spontaneous
act is an absurdity; it is simply an effect that is uncaused.”

James, Psychology, 1:149—“The girl in Midshipman Easy could not
excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying that ‘it was a very
small one.’ And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate
birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes
to explain all facts by continued evolution.... Materialism denies
reality to almost all the impulses which we most cherish. Hence it
will fail of universal adoption.” Clerk Maxwell, Life, 391—“The
atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking
about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to
form a man of feeling.... 426—I have looked into most
philosophical systems, and I have seen none that will work without
a God.” President E. B. Andrews: “Mind is the only substantive
thing in this universe, and all else is adjective. Matter is not
primordial, but is a function of spirit.” Theodore Parker: “Man is
the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds
nothing so tall or grand as himself, nothing so valuable to him.
The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope—the star
that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at.”

Materialism makes men to be “a serio-comic procession of wax
figures or of cunning casts in clay” (Bowne). Man is “the
cunningest of clocks.” But if there were nothing but matter, there
could be no materialism, for a system of thought, like
materialism, implies consciousness. Martineau, Types, preface,
xii, xiii—“It was the irresistible pleading of the moral
consciousness which first drove me to rebel against the limits of
the merely scientific conception. It became incredible to me that
nothing was possible except the actual.... Is there then no _ought
to be_, other than _what is_?” Dewey, Psychology, 84—“A world
without ideal elements would be one in which the home would be
four walls and a roof to keep out cold and wet; the table a mess
for animals; and the grave a hole in the ground.” Omar Khayyám,
Rubaiyat, stanza 72—“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, Lift not your hands to
It for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.” Victor Hugo:
“You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers?
Why then is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to
fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart....
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear the immortal
symphonies of the worlds which invite me.”

Diman, Theistic Argument, 348—“Materialism can never explain the
fact that matter is always combined with force. Coördinate
principles? then dualism, instead of monism. Force cause of
matter? then we preserve unity, but destroy materialism; for we
trace matter to an immaterial source. Behind multiplicity of
natural forces we must postulate some single power—which can be
nothing but coördinating mind.” Mark Hopkins sums up Materialism
in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1879:490—“1. Man, who is a person, is made
by a thing, _i. e._, matter. 2. Matter is to be worshiped as man’s
maker, if anything is to be (_Rom. 1:25_). 3. Man is to worship
himself—his God is his belly.” See also Martineau, Religion and
Materialism, 25-31, Types, 1: preface, xii, xiii, and Study,
1:248, 250, 345; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief,
145-161; Buchanan, Modern Atheism, 247, 248; McCosh, in
International Rev., Jan. 1895; Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1875, art.: Man
Transcorporeal; Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain; Laycock,
Mind and Brain; Diman, Theistic Argument, 358; Wilkinson, in
Present Day Tracts, 3:no. 17; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:487-499; A.
H. Strong, Philos. and Relig., 31-38.

II. Materialistic Idealism.

Idealism proper is that method of thought which regards all knowledge as conversant only with affections of the percipient mind.

Its element of truth is the fact that these affections of the percipient mind are the conditions of our knowledge. Its error is in denying that through these and in these we know that which exists independently of our consciousness.

The idealism of the present day is mainly a materialistic idealism. It defines matter and mind alike in terms of sensation, and regards both as opposite sides or successive manifestations of one underlying and unknowable force.

Modern subjective idealism is the development of a principle found
as far back as Locke. Locke derived all our knowledge from
sensation; the mind only combines ideas which sensation furnishes,
but gives no material of its own. Berkeley held that externally we
can be sure only of sensations,—cannot be sure that any external
world exists apart from mind. Berkeley’s idealism, however, was
objective; for he maintained that while things do not exist
independently of consciousness, they do exist independently of
_our_ consciousness, namely, in the mind of God, who in a correct
philosophy takes the place of a mindless external world as the
cause of our ideas. Kant, in like manner, held to existences
outside of our own minds, although he regarded these existences as
unknown and unknowable. Over against these forms of objective
idealism we must put the subjective idealism of Hume, who held
that internally also we cannot be sure of anything but mental
phenomena; we know thoughts, feelings and volitions, but we do not
know mental substance within, any more than we know material
substance without; our ideas are a string of beads, without any
string; we need no cause for these ideas, in an external world, a
soul, or God. Mill, Spencer, Bain and Tyndall are Humists, and it
is their subjective idealism which we oppose.

All these regard the material atom as a mere centre of force, or a
hypothetical cause of sensations. Matter is therefore a
manifestation of force, as to the old materialism force was a
property of matter. But if matter, mind and God are nothing but
sensations, then the body itself is nothing but sensations. There
is no _body_ to have the sensations, and no _spirit_, either human
or divine, to produce them. John Stuart Mill, in his Examination
of Sir William Hamilton, 1:234-253, makes sensations the only
original sources of knowledge. He defines matter as “a permanent
possibility of sensation,” and mind as “a series of feelings aware
of itself.” So Huxley calls matter “only a name for the unknown
cause of the states of consciousness”; although he also declares:
“If I am compelled to choose between the materialism of a man like
Büchner and the idealism of Berkeley, I would have to agree with
Berkeley.” He would hold to the priority of matter, and yet regard
matter as wholly ideal. Since John Stuart Mill, of all the
materialistic idealists, gives the most precise definitions of
matter and of mind, we attempt to show the inadequacy of his
treatment.

The most complete refutation of subjective idealism is that of Sir
William Hamilton, in his Metaphysics, 348-372, and Theories of
Sense-perception—the reply to Brown. See condensed statement of
Hamilton’s view, with estimate and criticism, in Porter, Human
Intellect, 236-240, and on Idealism, 129, 132. Porter holds that
original perception gives us simply affections of our own
sensorium; as cause of these, we gain knowledge of extended
externality. So Sir William Hamilton: “Sensation proper has no
object but a subject-object.” But both Porter and Hamilton hold
that through these sensations we know that which exists
independently of our sensations. Hamilton’s natural realism,
however, was an exaggeration of the truth. Bowne, Introd. to
Psych. Theory, 257, 258—“In Sir William Hamilton’s desire to have
no go-betweens in perception, he was forced to maintain that every
sensation is felt where it seems to be, and hence that the mind
fills out the entire body. Likewise he had to affirm that the
object in vision is not the thing, but the rays of light, and even
the object itself had, at last, to be brought into consciousness.
Thus he reached the absurdity that the true object in perception
is something of which we are totally unconscious.” Surely we
cannot be immediately conscious of what is outside of
consciousness. James, Psychology, 1:11—“The terminal organs are
telephones, and brain-cells are the receivers at which the mind
listens.” Berkeley’s view is to be found in his Principles of
Human Knowledge, § 18 _sq._ See also Presb. Rev., Apl.
1885:301-315; Journ. Spec. Philos., 1884:246-260, 383-399;
Tulloch, Mod. Theories, 360, 361; Encyc. Britannica, art.:
Berkeley.

There is, however, an idealism which is not open to Hamilton’s
objections, and to which most recent philosophers give their
adhesion. It is the objective idealism of Lotze. It argues that we
know nothing of the extended world except through the forces which
impress our nervous organism. These forces take the form of
vibrations of air or ether, and we interpret them as sound, light,
or motion, according as they affect our nerves of hearing, sight,
or touch. But the only force which we immediately know is that of
our own wills, and we can either not understand matter at all or
we must understand it as the product of a will comparable to our
own. Things are simply “concreted laws of action,” or divine ideas
to which permanent reality has been given by divine will. What we
perceive in the normal exercise of our faculties has existence not
only for us but for all intelligent beings and for God himself: in
other words, our idealism is not subjective, but objective. We
have seen in the previous section that atoms cannot explain the
universe,—they presuppose both ideas and force. We now see that
this force presupposes will, and these ideas presuppose mind. But,
as it still may be claimed that this mind is not self-conscious
mind and that this will is not personal will, we pass in the next
section to consider Idealistic Pantheism, of which these claims
are characteristic. Materialistic Idealism, in truth, is but a
half-way house between Materialism and Pantheism, in which no
permanent lodging is to be found by the logical intelligence.

Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 152—“The objectivity of our
cognition consists therefore in this, that it is not a meaningless
play of mere seeming; but it brings before us a world whose
coherency is ordered in pursuance of the injunction of the sole
Reality in the world, to wit, the Good. Our cognition thus
possesses more of truth than if it copied exactly a world that has
no value in itself. Although it does not comprehend in what manner
all that is phenomenon is presented to the view, still it
understands what is the meaning of it all; and is like to a
spectator who comprehends the æsthetic significance of that which
takes place on the stage of a theatre, and would gain nothing
essential if he were to see besides the machinery by means of
which the changes are effected on the stage.” Professor C. A.
Strong: “Perception is a shadow thrown upon the mind by a
thing-in-itself. The shadow is the symbol of the thing; and, as
shadows are soulless and dead, physical objects may seem soulless
and dead, while the reality symbolized is never so soulful and
alive. Consciousness is reality. The only existence of which we
can conceive is mental in its nature. All existence _for_
consciousness is existence _of_ consciousness. The horse’s shadow
accompanies him, but it does not help him to draw the cart. The
brain-event is simply the mental state itself regarded from the
point of view of the perception.”

Aristotle: “Substance is in its nature prior to relation” = there
can be no relation without things to be related. Fichte:
“Knowledge, just because it is knowledge, is not reality,—it comes
not first, but second.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 216, 217, 292,
293—“Thought can do nothing, except as it is a synonym for
Thinker.... Neither the finite nor the infinite consciousness,
alone or together, can constitute an object external, or explain
its existence. The existence of a thing logically precedes the
perception of it. Perception is not creation. It is not the
thinking that makes the ego, but the ego that makes the thinking.”
Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Divine thoughts presuppose a
divine Being. God’s thoughts do not constitute the real world. The
real force does not lie in them,—it lies in the divine Being, as
living, active Will.” Here was the fundamental error of Hegel,
that he regarded the Universe as mere Idea, and gave little
thought to the Love and the Will that constitute it. See John
Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, 1:75; 2:80; Contemp. Rev., Oct. 1872:
art. on Huxley; Lowndes, Philos. Primary Beliefs, 115-143; Atwater
(on Ferrier), in Princeton Rev., 1857:258, 280; Cousin, Hist.
Philosophy, 2:239-343; Veitch’s Hamilton, (Blackwood’s Philos.
Classics,) 176, 191; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 58-74.

To this view we make the following objections:

1. Its definition of matter as a “permanent possibility of sensation” contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of matter, we have direct knowledge of substance as underlying phenomena, as distinct from our sensations, and as external to the mind which experiences these sensations.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 432—“How the possibility of an odor and a
flavor can be the cause of the yellow color of an orange is
probably unknowable, except to a mind that can see that two and
two may make five.” See Iverach’s Philosophy of Spencer Examined,
in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 29. Martineau, Study, 1:102-112—“If
external impressions are telegraphed to the brain, intelligence
must receive the message at the beginning as well as deliver it at
the end.... It is the external object which gives the possibility,
not the possibility which gives the external object. The mind
cannot make both its _cognita_ and its _cognitio_. It cannot
dispense with standing-ground for its own feet, or with atmosphere
for its own wings.” Professor Charles A. Strong: “Kant held to
things-in-themselves back of physical phenomena, as well as to
things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena; he thought
things-in-themselves back of physical might be identical with
things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena. And since mental
phenomena, on this theory, are not specimens of reality, and
reality manifests itself indifferently through them and through
physical phenomena, he naturally concluded that we have no ground
for supposing reality to be like either—that we must conceive of
it as ‘weder Materie noch ein denkend Wesen’—‘neither matter nor a
thinking being’—a theory of the Unknowable. Would that it had been
also the Unthinkable and the Unmentionable!” Ralph Waldo Emerson
was a subjective idealist; but, when called to inspect a farmer’s
load of wood, he said to his company: “Excuse me a moment, my
friends; we have to attend to these matters, just as if they were
real.” See Mivart, On Truth, 71-141.

2. Its definition of mind as a “series of feelings aware of itself” contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of mind, we have direct knowledge of a spiritual substance of which these phenomena are manifestations, which retains its identity independently of our consciousness, and which, in its knowing, instead of being the passive recipient of impressions from without, always acts from within by a power of its own.

James, Psychology, 1:226—“It seems as if the elementary psychic
fact were not _thought_, or _this thought_, or _that thought_, but
_my thought_, every thought being owned. The universal conscious
fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think,’ and ‘I
feel.’ ” Professor James is compelled to say this, even though he
begins his Psychology without insisting upon the existence of a
soul. Hamilton’s Reid, 443—“Shall I think that thought can stand
by itself? or that ideas can feel pleasure or pain?” R. T. Smith,
Man’s Knowledge, 44—“We say ‘my notions and my passions,’ and when
we use these phrases we imply that our central self is felt to be
something different from the notions or passions which belong to
it or characterize it for a time.” Lichtenberg: “We should say,
‘It thinks;’ just as we say, ‘It lightens,’ or ‘It rains.’ In
saying ‘Cogito,’ the philosopher goes too far if he translates it,
‘I think.’ ” Are the faculties, then, an army without a general,
or an engine without a driver? In that case we should not _have_
sensations,—we should only _be_ sensations.

Professor C. A. Strong: “I have knowledge of _other minds_. This
non-empirical knowledge—transcendent knowledge of
things-in-themselves, derived neither from experience nor
reasoning, and assuming that like consequents (intelligent
movements) must have like antecedents (thoughts and feelings), and
also assuming instinctively that something exists outside of my
own mind—this refutes the post-Kantian phenomenalism. _Perception_
and _memory_ also involve transcendence. In both I transcend the
bounds of experience, as truly as in my knowledge of other minds.
In memory I recognize a _past_, as distinguished from the present.
In perception I cognize a possibility of _other_ experiences like
the present, and this alone gives the sense of permanence and
reality. Perception and memory refute phenomenalism.
Things-in-themselves must be assumed in order to fill the gaps
between individual minds, and to give coherence and
intelligibility to the universe, and so to avoid pluralism. If
matter can influence and even extinguish our minds, it must have
some force of its own, some existence in itself. If consciousness
is an evolutionary product, it must have arisen from simpler
mental facts. But these simpler mental facts are only another name
for things-in-themselves. A deep prerational instinct compels us
to recognize them, for they cannot be logically demonstrated. We
must assume them in order to give continuity and intelligibility
to our conceptions of the universe.” See, on Bain’s Cerebral
Psychology, Martineau’s Essays, 1:265. On the physiological method
of mental philosophy, see Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1871:1; Bowen, in
Princeton Rev., March, 1878:423-450; Murray, Psychology, 279-287.

3. In so far as this theory regards mind as the obverse side of matter, or as a later and higher development from matter, the mere reference of both mind and matter to an underlying force does not save the theory from any of the difficulties of pure materialism already mentioned; since in this case, equally with that, force is regarded as purely physical, and the priority of spirit is denied.

Herbert Spencer, Psychology, quoted by Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy,
2:80—“Mind and nervous action are the subjective and objective
faces of the same thing. Yet we remain utterly incapable of
seeing, or even of imagining, how the two are related. Mind still
continues to us a something without kinship to other things.”
Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, quoted by Talbot, Bap. Quar., Jan.
1871:5—“All that I know of matter and mind in themselves is that
the former is an external centre of force, and the latter an
internal centre of force.” New Englander, Sept. 1883:636—“If the
atom be a mere centre of force and not a real thing in itself,
then the atom is a supersensual essence, an immaterial being. To
make immaterial matter the source of conscious mind is to make
matter as wonderful as an immortal soul or a personal Creator.”
See New Englander, July, 1875:532-535; Martineau, Study, 102-130,
and Relig. and Mod. Materialism, 25—“If it takes mind to construe
the universe, how can the negation of mind constitute it?”

David J. Hill, in his Genetic Philosophy, 200, 201, seems to deny
that thought precedes force, or that force precedes thought:
“Objects, or things in the external world, may be elements of a
thought-process in a cosmic subject, without themselves being
conscious.... A true analysis and a rational genesis require the
equal recognition of both the objective and the subjective
elements of experience, without priority in time, separation in
space or disruption of being. So far as our minds can penetrate
reality, as disclosed in the activities of thought, we are
everywhere confronted with a Dynamic Reason.” In Dr. Hill’s
account of the genesis of the universe, however, the unconscious
comes first, and from it the conscious seems to be derived.
Consciousness of the object is only the obverse side of the object
of consciousness. This is, as Martineau, Study, 1:341, remarks,
“to take the sea on board the boat.” We greatly prefer the view of
Lotze, 2:641—“Things are acts of the Infinite wrought within minds
alone, or states which the Infinite experiences nowhere but in
minds.... Things and events are the sum of those actions which the
highest Principle performs in all spirits so uniformly and
coherently, that to these spirits there must seem to be a world of
substantial and efficient things existing in space outside
themselves.” The data from which we draw our inferences as to the
nature of the external world being mental and spiritual, it is
more rational to attribute to that world a spiritual reality than
a kind of reality of which our experience knows nothing. See also
Schurman, Belief in God, 208, 225.

4. In so far as this theory holds the underlying force of which matter and mind are manifestations to be in any sense intelligent or voluntary, it renders necessary the assumption that there is an intelligent and voluntary Being who exerts this force. Sensations and ideas, moreover, are explicable only as manifestations of Mind.

Many recent Christian thinkers, as Murphy, Scientific Bases of
Faith, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52, would define mind as a function of
matter, matter as a function of force, force as a function of
will, and therefore as the power of an omnipresent and personal
God. All force, except that of man’s free will, is the will of
God. So Herschel, Lectures, 460; Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127;
Wallace on Nat. Selection, 363-371; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 121,
145, 265; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 146-162. These writers are
led to their conclusion in large part by the considerations that
nothing dead can be a proper cause; that will is the only cause of
which we have immediate knowledge; that the forces of nature are
intelligible only when they are regarded as exertions of will.
Matter, therefore, is simply centres of force—the regular and, as
it were, automatic expression of God’s mind and will. Second
causes in nature are only secondary activities of the great First
Cause.

This view is held also by Bowne, in his Metaphysics. He regards
only personality as real. Matter is phenomenal, although it is an
activity of the divine will outside of us. Bowne’s phenomenalism
is therefore an objective idealism, greatly preferable to that of
Berkeley who held to God’s energizing indeed, but only within the
soul. This idealism of Bowne is not pantheism, for it holds that,
while there are no second causes in nature, man is a second cause,
with a personality distinct from that of God, and lifted above
nature by his powers of free will. Royce, however, in his
Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in his The World and the
Individual, makes man’s consciousness a part or aspect of a
universal consciousness, and so, instead of making God come to
consciousness in man, makes man come to consciousness in God.
While this scheme seems, in one view, to save God’s personality,
it may be doubted whether it equally guarantees man’s personality
or leaves room for man’s freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt.
Bowne, Philos. Theism, 175—“ ‘Universal reason’ is a class-term
which denotes no possible existence, and which has reality only in
the specific existences from which it is abstracted.” Bowne claims
that the impersonal finite has only such otherness as a thought or
act has to its subject. There is no substantial existence except
in persons. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Neo-Kantianism
erects into a God the mere form of self-consciousness in general,
that is, confounds consciousness _überhaupt_ with a _universal_
consciousness.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 318-343, esp. 328—“Is
there anything in existence but myself? Yes. To escape solipsism I
must admit at least other persons. Does the world of apparent
objects exist for me only? No; it exists for others also, so that
we live in a common world. Does this common world consist in
anything more than a similarity of impressions in finite minds, so
that the world apart from these is nothing? This view cannot be
disproved, but it accords so ill with the impression of our total
experience that it is practically impossible. Is then the world of
things a continuous existence of some kind independent of finite
thought and consciousness? This claim cannot be demonstrated, but
it is the only view that does not involve insuperable
difficulties. What is the nature and where is the place of this
cosmic existence? That is the question between Realism and
Idealism. Realism views things as existing in a real space, and as
true ontological realities. Idealism views both them and the space
in which they are supposed to be existing as existing only in and
for a cosmic Intelligence, and apart from which they are absurd
and contradictory. Things are independent of _our_ thought, but
not independent of _all_ thought, in a lumpish materiality which
is the antithesis and negation of consciousness.” See also
Martineau, Study, 1:214-230, 341. For advocacy of the substantive
existence of second causes, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 582-588;
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:596; Alden, Philosophy, 48-80; Hodgson,
Time and Space, 149-218; A. J. Balfour, in Mind, Oct. 1893: 430.

III. Idealistic Pantheism.

Pantheism is that method of thought which conceives of the universe as the development of one intelligent and voluntary, yet impersonal, substance, which reaches consciousness only in man. It therefore identifies God, not with each individual object in the universe, but with the totality of things. The current Pantheism of our day is idealistic.

The elements of truth in Pantheism are the intelligence and voluntariness of God, and his immanence in the universe; its error lies in denying God’s personality and transcendence.

Pantheism denies the real existence of the finite, at the same
time that it deprives the Infinite of self-consciousness and
freedom. See Hunt, History of Pantheism; Manning, Half-truths and
the Truth; Bayne, Christian Life, Social and Individual, 21-53;
Hutton, on Popular Pantheism, in Essays, 1:55-76—“The pantheist’s
‘I believe in God’, is a contradiction. He says: ‘I perceive the
external as different from myself; but on further reflection, I
perceive that this external was itself the percipient agency.’ So
the worshiped is really the worshiper after all.” Harris,
Philosophical Basis of Theism, 173—“Man is a bottle of the ocean’s
water, in the ocean, temporarily distinguishable by its limitation
within the bottle, but lost again in the ocean, so soon as these
fragile limits are broken.” Martineau, Types, 1:23—Mere immanency
excludes Theism; transcendency leaves it still possible;
211-225—Pantheism declares that “there is nothing but God; he is
not only sole cause but entire effect; he is all in all.” Spinoza
has been falsely called “the God-intoxicated man.” “Spinoza, on
the contrary, translated God into the universe; it was Malebranche
who transfigured the universe into God.”

The later Brahmanism is pantheistic. Rowland Williams,
Christianity and Hinduism, quoted in Mozley on Miracles, 284—“In
the final state personality vanishes. You will not, says the
Brahman, accept the term ‘void’ as an adequate description of the
mysterious nature of the soul, but you will clearly apprehend
soul, in the final state, to be unseen and ungrasped being,
thought, knowledge, joy—no other than very God.” Flint, Theism,
69—“Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed for as
the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there is marked
inability to think of God as cause or will, and constant
inveterate tendency to pantheism.”

Hegel denies God’s transcendence: “God is not a spirit beyond the
stars; he is spirit in all spirit”; which means that God, the
impersonal and unconscious Absolute, comes to consciousness only
in man. If the eternal system of abstract thoughts were itself
conscious, finite consciousness would disappear; hence the
alternative is either _no God_, or _no man_. Stirling: “The Idea,
so conceived, is a blind, dumb, invisible idol, and the theory is
the most hopeless theory that has ever been presented to
humanity.” It is practical autolatry, or self-deification. The
world is reduced to a mere process of logic; thought thinks; there
is thought without a thinker. To this doctrine of Hegel we may
well oppose the remarks of Lotze: “We cannot make mind the
equivalent of the infinitive _to think_,—we feel that it must be
that which thinks; the essence of things cannot be either
existence or activity,—it must be that which exists and that which
acts. Thinking means nothing, if it is not the thinking of a
thinker; acting and working mean nothing, if we leave out the
conception of a subject distinguishable from them and from which
they proceed.” To Hegel, Being _is_ Thought; to Spinoza, Being
_has_ Thought + Extension; the truth seems to be that Being _has_
Thought + Will, and _may_ reveal itself in Extension and Evolution
(Creation).

By other philosophers, however, Hegel is otherwise interpreted.
Prof. H. Jones, in Mind, July, 1893: 289-306, claims that Hegel’s
fundamental Idea is not Thought, but Thinking: “The universe to
him was not a system of thoughts, but a thinking reality,
manifested most fully in man.... The fundamental reality is the
universal intelligence whose operation we should seek to detect in
all things. All reality is ultimately explicable as Spirit, or
Intelligence,—hence our ontology must be a Logic, and the laws of
things must be laws of thinking.” Sterrett, in like manner, in his
Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, 17, quotes Hegel’s
Logic, Wallace’s translation, 89, 91, 236: “Spinoza’s _Substance_
is, as it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours all
definite content as utterly null, and produces from itself nothing
that has positive subsistence in itself.... God is Substance,—he
is, however, no less the Absolute Person.” This is essential to
religion, but this, says Hegel, Spinoza never perceived:
“Everything depends upon the Absolute Truth being perceived, not
merely as Substance, but as Subject.” God is self-conscious and
self-determining Spirit. Necessity is excluded. Man is free and
immortal. Men are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose
their identity, although they _find themselves_ truly only in him.
With this estimate of Hegel’s system, Caird, Erdmann and Mulford
substantially agree. This is Tennyson’s “Higher Pantheism.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 440—“Hegel conceived the superiority of
his system to Spinozism to lie in the substitution of Subject for
Substance. The true Absolute must contain, instead of abolishing,
relations; the true Monism must include, instead of excluding,
Pluralism. A One which, like Spinoza’s Substance, or the Hegelian
Absolute, does not enable us to think the Many, cannot be the true
One—the unity of the Manifold.... Since evil exists, Schopenhauer
substituted for Hegel’s Panlogism, which asserted the identity of
the rational and the real, a blind impulse of life,—for absolute
Reason he substituted a reasonless Will”—a system of practical
pessimism. Alexander, Theories of Will, 5—“Spinoza recognized no
distinction between will and intellectual affirmation or denial.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:107—“As there is no
reason in the conception of pure space why any figures or forms,
lines, surfaces, solids, should arise in it, so there is no reason
in the pure colorless abstraction of Infinite Substance why any
world of finite things and beings should ever come into existence.
It is the grave of all things, the productive source of nothing.”
Hegel called Schelling’s Identity or Absolute “the infinite night
in which all cows are black”—an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, part
2, act 1, where the words are added: “and cats are gray.” Although
Hegel’s preference of the term Subject, instead of the term
Substance, has led many to maintain that he believed in a
personality of God distinct from that of man, his over-emphasis of
the Idea, and his comparative ignoring of the elements of Love and
Will, leave it still doubtful whether his Idea was anything more
than unconscious and impersonal intelligence—less materialistic
than that of Spinoza indeed, yet open to many of the same
objections.

We object to this system as follows:

1. Its idea of God is self-contradictory, since it makes him infinite, yet consisting only of the finite; absolute, yet existing in necessary relation to the universe; supreme, yet shut up to a process of self-evolution and dependent for self-consciousness on man; without self-determination, yet the cause of all that is.