Chapter XIII (1)

THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY, MYSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE. MYSTICISM AND THE NATURE OF EVIL

I take the ultimate questions involved in the religious positions which are taken up by Catherine, and indeed by the Christian Mystics generally, and which we have studied in the preceding two chapters, to be four. In the order of their increasing difficulty they are: the question as to the relations between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy, and Religion; that as to the Limits of Human Knowledge, and as to the special character and worth of the Mystics’ claim to Trans-subjective Cognition; that as to the Nature of Evil and the Goodness or Badness of Human Nature; and that as to Personality,--the character of, and the relations between, the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. The consideration of these deepest matters in the next two chapters will, I hope, in spite of its inevitable element of dimness and of repetition, do much towards binding together and clarifying the convictions which we have been slowly acquiring,--ever, in part, with a reference to these coming ultimate alternatives and choices.

I. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY AND MYSTICISM PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

Now the first of these questions has not, for most of the more strenuous of our educated contemporaries, become, so far again, a living question at all. A morally good and pure, a socially useful and active life,--all this in the sense and with the range attributed to these terms by ordinary parlance: this and this alone is, for doubtless the predominant public present-day consciousness, the true object, end, and measure of all healthy religion; whatever is alongside of, or beyond, or other than, or anything but a direct and exclusive incentive to this, is so much superstition and fanaticism. According to this view, at least one half of Catherine’s activity at all times, and well-nigh the whole of it during her last period, would be practically worthless. Thus only certain elements of such a life would be retained even for and in religion, and even these would be bereft of all that has hitherto been held to be their specifically religious sense and setting.

1. _Kant’s non-mystical religion._

It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has been the most consistent and influential in inculcating such non-Mystical Religion. “Religion,” he says in 1793, “is, on its subjective side, the cognition of all our duties as so many Divine Commandments.” “The delusion that we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by means of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism.… Such a feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being, and such a discrimination between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would imply a capacity for an intuition, which is without any corresponding organ in human nature.… If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or to prevent all religious delusion, it must,--over and above its statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely dispense,--contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”[306]

It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight, solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and philosophers of religion of the present day,--heirs, let us not forget in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.--Thus that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof. Simmel of Berlin, writes in 1904: “Kant has, I think, simply passed by the essentials of religion,--that is to say, of that reality which historically bears the name of religion. Only the reflection, that the harmony of complete happiness with complete morality is producible by a Divine Being alone, is here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the Divine by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which characterizes all genuine piety. And the religious sense is not recognized as an organism with a unity of its own, as a growth springing from its own root. The entirely specific character of religion, which is resolvable neither into morality nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct self-surrender of the soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking, the unification and differentiation,--that quite organic unity of the religious experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by a multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this, there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant. What was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he was unable to reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this type, he readily rejects as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both of his own nature and of his own times.”[307]

The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more entirely just: “As Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day. Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially practical character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to conceive the ‘practical’ otherwise than as the moral, it had looked upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical concomitants. And as soon as this psychology had become the very backbone of his conception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind,--considerably, indeed, beyond his own personal feelings and perceptions.” For he remains deeply penetrated by “the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of a soul’s good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the Supersensible”: and “all these” conceptions “are no more simply moral, they are specifically religious thoughts.”[308]

Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on by that penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy, Prof. Windelband: “Actual Religion, in its complete reality, belongs to all the spheres of life, and yet transcends them all, as something new and _sui generis_. It is first an interior life--an apprehending, cognizing, feeling, willing, accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to being also an exterior life: an acting out, according to their various standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward expression of that inner life in general, in ritual acts and divine worship. Yet this worship takes it beyond the little circle of the individual, and constitutes the corporate acts of a community, a social, external organization with visible institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to be more than the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it ever transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse with the inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a life in and with God, a metaphysical life. All these elements belong to the complete concept of actual religion.”[309] I would add, that they each stimulate the other, the external, _e.g._ being not only the expression of the awakened internal, but also the occasion of that awakening.

And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. C. P. Tiele, unexcelled in the knowledge of the actual course taken by the great religions of the world, declares: “All progress, not only in Morality, but also in Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily exerts an influence upon that of Religion. But … Religion is not, on that account, identical with Ethics any more than with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations of the human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none of them, not even Morality, is capable of supplying the want which Religion alone can satisfy.… Religion differs from the other manifestations of the human mind” in this, that whereas “in the domain of Art, the feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of Philosophy, abstract thought is paramount”; and “the main object of Science is to know accurately, whilst Ethics are chiefly concerned with the emotions and with the fruit they yield: in Religion all these factors operate alike, and if their equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious condition is the result.”[310]

2. _Ritschlian modification of Kant’s view._

It is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in which Kant’s impoverishment of the concept of religion has been in part retained, in part modified, by the Ritschlian school,--I am thinking especially of that vigorous writer, Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.

(1) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflection upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible means of their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get the Categorical Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has been replaced by the historic figure of Jesus Christ. “Two forces of different kinds,” he says, “ever produce the certainty of Faith: the impression of an Historic Figure which approaches us in Time; and the Moral Law which, when we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth. Faith arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of Jesus, that symbol of his own existence which gives him the courage to recognize in the Eternal, which claims him in the Moral Imperative, the source of true life for his own self.”[311]--And these two sole co-efficients of all entirely living religion are made to exclude, as we have already seen, especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. “True, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But a Christian is bound to declare the mystical experience of God to be a delusion. Once he has experienced his elevation, by Christ alone, above his own previous nature, he cannot believe that another man can attain the same result, simply by means of recollection within his own self.… We are Christians precisely because we have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon a fact which is incomparably richer in content than the feelings that arise within ourselves.” “Only because Christ is present for us can we possess God with complete clearness and certainty.” And, with Luther,--who remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;--“right prayer is a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but Christ.”[312]

(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable, indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of Christ is profoundly true.--Yet three counter-considerations have ever to be borne in mind.

(i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything, to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,” either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]--But Hermann is so haunted by the bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity.

(ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity, he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, _viz._ in a state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; _there_ is Mystical Piety.”[314]

Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing. Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of its own processes.

Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till 1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no direct consciousness”; and “the field of our obscure apprehensions,--that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we have them,--is immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315] This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet, William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness, have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions. Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more certain than this.

And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of Beethoven, Dante’s _Paradiso_; or when lost in the contemplation of the seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even their collectivity--we are as little occupied with the facts of our engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which, nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention, or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of quite peculiar cogency.--All this leaves ample room for that prayer of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and indeed for all such states of recollection which, though the soul, on coming from them, cannot discover definite ideas or picturings to have been contained in them, leave the soul braced to love, work, and suffer for God and man, beyond its previous level. Prof. William James is too deeply versed a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete normality of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such tests.[317]

(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to us, at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history, more fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all the stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner, in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a true immanence of the Divine in the Human; and that it is folly to attempt the finding or the making of any shorter way to God than that of the closest contact with His own condescensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and fully Christian attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an excessive Christocentrism, indeed such _Panchristism_, as that of Prof. Hermann.

We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-down of the various religions of the world. For, as Prof. Robertson Smith, who knew so well the chief great religions, most wisely said, “To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to Pure Mysticism. In point of fact it is not true of any man that what he believes and knows of God, has come to him directly through the voice of nature and conscience.” And he adds: “History has not taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. Jesus Christ still stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme head of the fellowship of all true religion.”[318]

Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord into so exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to cause Him to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely God-forgetting world, a world which did not and could not, in any degree or manner whatsoever, rightly know, love, or serve God at all; and against so conceiving the religion, taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it of all affinity with, or room for, such admittedly universal forces and resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are dim apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion, and the sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the very God, Who is also Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various degrees and ways, in every place and time. Indeed, these two forces: the diffused Religiosity and more or less inchoate religion, readily discoverable, by a generous docility, more or less throughout the world of human souls, and the concentrated spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic Religion, which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of Jesus Christ: are interdependent, in somewhat the way in which vague, widely spread Subconsciousness requires, and is required by, definite, narrowly localized Consciousness in each human mind. Precisely because there have been and are previous and simultaneous lesser communications of, and correspondences with, the one “Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world”; because men can and do believe according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees and ways, in God and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition, without a knowledge of the Historic Christ (although never without the stimulation of some, often world-forgotten, historic personality, and ever with some real, though unconscious approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore can Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation and measure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain supreme, even though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and indeed, in their own other degrees and ways, Plato and Plotinus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all revered as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly, spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be fully realized.

There is certainly much in Our Lord’s own attitude, as we have already found, to demand such a view; and Clement of Alexandria, Origen and St. Justin Martyr have emphasized it continually. And there is no necessary Naturalism here--for the position is entirely compatible with the profoundest belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere produces the various degrees of God-pleasing religion to be found scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has admirably said: “God’s salutary workings in man’s heart have always been directed, however remotely, to the life of Grace and Glory; of ‘the Order of mere nature,’ and its exigencies, we have no experimental knowledge … In the present order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity is but developed Theism: ‘purely natural’ religion is what might have been, but never was.”[319]

(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between (Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown why I cannot but regret that so accomplished a scholar as Prof. Morice Jastrow should class all and every Mysticism, whether Pure or Mixed, as so far forth a religious malady; why I rejoice that so admirably circumspect an investigator as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the form of a strenuous insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the ontological action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit, as the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably reinforce the fundamental importance of the Mystical apprehensions; why I most warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff’s presentment of Mysticism as, with Intellectualism and Moralism, one of the three psychological forms of religion, which are each legitimate and necessary, and which each require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate each into some corruption special to the exclusive development of that particular form; and why I cordially applaud the unequalled analysis and description by Prof. Eucken of the manner in which “Universal Religion” is at work, as an often obscure yet (in the long run) most powerful leaven, throughout all specifically human life,--Sciences, Art, Philosophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the answering force and articulation of “Characteristic Religion,” each requiring and required by the other, each already containing the other in embryo, and both ever operating together, in proportion as Man and Religion attain to their fulness.[320]

3. _Hermann’s impossible simplification concerning philosophy._

But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion and Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous champion of a very prevalent and plausible simplification. “There exists no Theory of Knowledge for such things as we hold to be real in the strength of faith. In such religious affirmations, the believer demolishes every bridge between his conviction and that which Science can recognize as real.” Indeed Hermann’s attitude is here throughout identical with that of his master, Albrecht Ritschl: Metaphysics of any and every kind appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially unnecessary, unreal, misleading, as so much inflation and delusion of soul.--Yet this again is quite demonstrably excessive, and can indeed be explained only as an all but inevitable recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of the Hegelian school.

(1) Since the culmination of that reaction, “it has,” as Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and so free from all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, “become quite impossible any further to deny the metaphysical factors which had a share in constituting such types of New Testament doctrine as the Pauline and Joannine. Indeed, not even if we were to reduce the New Testament to the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the other hand, would the elements which spring from speculative sources be entirely eliminated. And since, again, the Old Testament religion, in its last stage, assimilated similarly metaphysical materials from the East and from the West; since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian branches, did the same with regard to the older civilized religions of Middle and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so that they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously: we are forced to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a concomitant of religion is satisfactorily explicable as a mere symptom of falsification or decay.” And whilst answering that the primary organ for religion is Feeling and Conscience, he points out how large an amount of Speculation was, nevertheless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after his unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon Sin, and of their cure by Grace alone.[321]

(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,--the historic and other facts,--of Religion, without certain subjective organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces: neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and developments of his own true personality in and through contact with the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the rest of what he is and knows.

(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof. Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact, get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion. Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]

(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow, and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental, Immanental Ethics.

(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immediately impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely made up of men and of movements not usually reckoned as exclusively or directly religious, whose very greatness,--one which humanity will not let die,--is closely interwoven with Mystical and Metaphysical affirmations. There are, among philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz, a Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the later stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a Lessing and a Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm, a Droysen and a Ranke; among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, a Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and among men of action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein. Shear any of these men of their Mystical and Metaphysical elements, and you will have shorn Samson of his locks.

And if we can frame a contrary list of men of force and distinction, who have represented an un- or even an anti-Mystical and anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal, Napoleon and Bismarck, Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must ever remember the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,--the strict necessity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollection; the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as found in the average practice of life, which cannot but produce a reaction and contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of what this second type has got of positiveness and of corrective criticism. Yet here too the greatness will consist directly in what these men are and have, not in what they are not; and wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of the apparent brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a higher world and of a deeper reality, _there_ something fuller and more true has been attained than is reached by such strong but incomplete humanity alone.

4. _Religion and Morality, their kinship and difference._

And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note how that the men, who deny all essential connection between Religion and Mysticism and Religion and Philosophy, ever, when they do retain Religion at all, tend to identify it with Morality, if not as to the motives, yet as to the contents of the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to show that, if the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than that between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is that between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism: Religion and Morality are nevertheless not identical.

(1) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact that, though the development of Religion tells upon that of Morality, and _vice versa_: yet that the rate of development of these two forces is practically never the same, even in one and the same soul, still less in any one country or race. In each case we get various inequalities between the two developments, which would be impossible, were the two forces different only in name.

We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr. Edward Caird has so well pointed out, “the imperfection of the subjective religion of the prophets and psalmists of Israel,”--who nevertheless already possessed a very advanced type of profoundly ethical religion,--“shown by its inability to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of worship to which it was opposed”; as, “in like manner, Protestantism … has never been able decisively to conquer the system of Rome.”[324] For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to absorb and supersede Hindooism, evidently implies that Religion cannot find its full development and equilibrium in an exclusive concentration upon Morality Proper, as alone essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces other things besides Morality.

Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics directly postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics immediately required by the Family, Society, the State, Art, Science, and Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts it, “the special characteristic of our modern consciousness resides in the insistence both upon the Religious, the That-world Ends, _and_ upon the Cultural, This-World Ends, which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it is precisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior tension and its difficult problems.” “As in Christian Ethics we must recognize the predominance of an Objective Religious End,--for here certain relations of the soul to God are the chief commandments and the supreme good,--so in the Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective Moral Ends of an Immanental kind.” And in seeking after the right relations between the two, we shall have to conclude that “Ethics, for us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amongst a number of moral ends, the unification of which is his life’s task and problem, and not its starting-point.” And this multiplicity “is” more precisely “a polarity in human nature, for it contains two poles--that of Religious and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be brought under a common formula.” “We can but keep a sufficient space open for the action of both forms, so that from their interaction there may ever result, with the least possible difficulty, the deepening of the Humane Ends by the Christian Ethics, and the humanizing of the Christian End by the Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God within the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may transfigure the world.”[325]

We can perceive the difference between the two forces most clearly in Our Lord’s life and teaching--say, the Sermon on the Mount; in the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper. Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men, and that his maxims contained but the best instruction towards an entirely reasonable life.”[326]

(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems to be teaching certain moral rules and motives as appropriate to this visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller, deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and as the justification of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality Proper, the concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward, Irretrievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual Renovation are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not accidental, although of course not necessary, that we often find men with a keen religious sense but with a defective moral practice or even conception, and men with a strong moral sense and a want of religious perception; that Mystics, with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and that, in such recent cases (deeply instructive in their very aberrations) as that of Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism combined with a thirst for a higher and deeper world than this visible one, which not all its fantastic form, nor even all Nietzsche’s later rant against concrete religion, can prevent from being essentially religious.[327]

(3) We have then, here, the deepest instance of the law and necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallower levels of the spirit’s life. For here, once more, there is one apprehension, force, life,--This-world Morality,--which requires penetration and development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power, That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself. For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life, growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range, of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy.

II. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE.

But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is its worth?--I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known--as to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to Pantheism and Personality--for the next chapter, and can here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension.

1. _Positivist Epistemology an error._

As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following positions.

(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,--since no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step, and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here also, an immediately experienced certitude.”[328]

We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of themselves already constitute a knowledge,--our first knowledge, and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”--“And this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind: for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,--we do not come to see objective reality simply face to face.”[329] And we find thus that “_in principle_ the entire range of reality, right down to its last depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle, thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought, this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint and pressure.”[330]

(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics, necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely isolated thought,”--which, in actual life ever more or less of a fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,--“is, however intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”--And, concurrently with the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate Substance or Power of and in the world,”--that objective reality which is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,--“is something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim, and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own nature.”[331]

(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself, into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that Reality,--he simply _knows_ that it is _utterly heterogeneous_ to our conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that we could possibly choose.”[332] Thus the epistemological difference between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is _my_ presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.

As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements “are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.” Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.” If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there; but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as the purely objective.”[333]

Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term “consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there. “There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor in experience is not _datum_ but _recipiens_: it is not ‘there’ but ‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’”[334] Nothing of this, I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement of the latter’s estimations,--the three elements which, according also to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.

(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “--this is largely true of those of theology also,--are “in part essentially determined by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history, subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow, intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned, in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels “of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually advance it most essentially.”[335]--Here then we get a still further enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan, the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit stupendously rich in spiritual energy.

(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of its complexity, is the first we know.”[336] And this means that we have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face, say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension, which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great, never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.

There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate world,--Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference, in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.

There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary, mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings, rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts; and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general, philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.

And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite, and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians; it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider, and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe, it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit, transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.

(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird, in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories, categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself: but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.--And let the reader note that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but from living forces and their operativeness.