This, then, is the complex question which now confronts us—the Christian religion, which is here taken as the highest type of ethical monotheism, postulates, as its heritage from the religion of Israel, the one personal God, eternal and self-complete, the absolute creator of all that is, immanent in the whole creative process, but also transcendent, perfect in goodness as in wisdom and power, and awful in holiness, the judge and rewarder of all free spirits, pervading His creation by His providence, and guiding all things onward to the assured victory of good. It makes this further postulate—that this one God, while never in His essential perfection fully comprehensible to finite intelligence, yet has been in gradual process revealing Himself in sufficient measure to the conscience and intelligence of men, until this self-revelation reached its climax in Jesus Christ, at once perfect man and the adequate “image of God.”

On the other hand many modern idealists of different schools, while agreeing in maintaining the name and idea of God, object to the attribution to Him of personality, as being an anthropomorphic conception; and also of such transcendence and self-completeness as is implied in the idea of the absolute creator.1 They would have us regard the world as being as necessary to God as God is to the world; or if they shrink from going so far in identifying God with the world, they bid us think of God as the name for all the sum of ideal values—truth, beauty, goodness—which emerge in the process of evolution as elements in Reality, which is spiritual as well as material; and, while thus regarding the universe as a whole as in some sense the revelation or self-expression of God, they would decline to ascribe to God any such particular intention to reveal Himself along a definite historical line, or any such particular redemptive action, or any such final disclosure of Himself in a particular historical person, as the Christian monotheism postulates.

Now, the latter part of this large contention between rival intellectual claimants is reserved for a later lecture (XI). In this lecture we are only concerned with the ideas of the personality, the unity and the transcendence of the one God, the creator; we are to consider, negatively, the idealist objections to these conceptions, and positively we are to enquire which of the two groups of ideas has the juster claim to be called rational. The notions involved are those of (1) the personality of God; (2) His unity; (3) His absolute priority and self-completeness; (4) the conception of absolute creation.

§ 1

But before proceeding to consider these four points in detail, I must ask you to recognize how intimately the recognition of the group of ideas just enumerated, which find their best expression in the Christian religion, is associated in history with the actual moral advance of mankind. The leaders of this advance, Zarathustra, Plato, the prophets of Israel and Jesus Christ, have demanded the inseparable union of religion with morality; and this merging of religion in morality or ethical conduct has always involved—as we have seen even in Plato—the giving greater definiteness to the idea of God.

We are not here concerned with the origins of religion. Thus I need not argue the question raised by Otto whether the “numinous sense,” the sense of the tremendous mystery, at once terrifying and alluring, which is, no doubt, a most important element in religion, arose out of the belief in personal spirits or was prior to it as its ground2; but we are bound to recognize that religion, when it appears in history, is not generally what we can call “ethical” in its ideas or effects.3 The accompaniments and rites of primitive religion are mostly non-ethical. That is chiefly what we mean when we call them superstitions. Religion again, in its mystical form, as it appears in India, can develop itself to a high intellectual level, while retaining its ethical indifference—thinking of God as above good or evil. It is the moral prophets, such as those just named, who have demanded the inseparable union of religion with character, and the conscience of the best part of mankind has responded to their demand; and, wherever the alliance or unification of religion and morality has been accomplished, it has carried with it a rationalizing and clarifying of the religious ideas. It has demanded the recognition of the personal and righteous God, and His unquestionable moral sovereignty, and the manifestation of His righteous will. The pantheon has been purged of pluralism, in being purged of moral indifference, or of the mixture among the gods of good or bad; and the righteous God, whose authority is experienced in conscience, has been elevated absolutely above the world.

Recognizing in the Christian religion the example of this process carried to its highest level,4 we must admit that there, as nowhere else, the best moral aspirations of men can find their satisfaction. They find it in the idea of God, the one, the creator, the judge, the father, manifesting Himself in His prophets and in His Son, communicating Himself by His Spirit, taking men up here and now into intimate fellowship with Himself and with His purpose in creation, and yet bidding them regard this tumultuous life as only the first stage of their experience, a place of soul-making and also of kingdom-building, whereof the assured fruit and fulfilment lies in the Beyond.

In this teaching about God the soul of man, as represented in its moral aspirations, finds at once profound encouragement and severe chastisement; it gains at once the deepening of the sense of sin and also of the sense of freedom to move and vigour to advance; it enters into possession of a wealth of motives and a storehouse of power; and what, for the mass of mankind, is an incalculable boon, it has constantly before it the embodiment of the moral ideal and standard in a living person, Jesus Christ. Many of those who have stood outside the Christian faith on intellectual grounds have recognized all this, and have expressed in pathetic language their sense of loss in not being able, as honest men, to repeat this creed; while others, more dangerously, have strained their intellectual conscience so as to use a language of devotion which is more than their intellectual convictions warrant.

The late Dr. F. H. Bradley bade us freely take for granted all “the ideas which best express our highest religious needs and their satisfaction,” for they “must certainly be true”—but “ultimate truth they do not possess.” The ideas that are to express the practical requirements of religion “must be more or less inconsistent, and in a word mythological.”5 Now, later on (Lecture XII) we shall be recognizing that our knowledge of things terrestrial, and still more of things celestial, is relative and not absolute. We see at the best but “through a glass darkly.” But surely we are bound to keep our religious creed on the highest level of truth that we can attain to in our present state of existence.

It is lowering the standard of truthfulness to suggest that we can use for the purposes of religion a language which we know to be less true than it might be, or a language that we know to be inconsistent with science or history or metaphysical enquiry. It seems to me to be wholly impossible for a man, who is both a religious man and also a scientific student, to use with sincerity one language in his studies and a language inconsistent with that in his prayers and professions of faith. Such inconsistency can only result in his using the traditional language for convention’s sake or for the edification of others, while he speaks to his own soul and to his more intimate fellows in another non-mythological language. I cannot but believe that Jesus Christ would have called such duplicity of speech and thought hypocrisy. Plato surely falls from his highest level when he discusses the possibility of persuading the common people once for all to believe a “noble lie,” just as he falls similarly in another direction when, in the organization of his commonwealth, he substitutes compulsion for persuasion, and institutes his court of inquisition to administer death or imprisonment to the heretics. What we are bound to consider with all sincerity is whether the ideas about God which our ethical aspirations postulate are, intellectually considered, also the most rational that we can form, and compatible with all that science, history and metaphysical enquiry can teach us. Prof. W. Wallace is surely right when he bids us remember that “in the long run a truth in theology indifferent to a truth in science is intolerable to humanity.”6

And on this great problem we are bound to exercise our own minds. These lectures, as given under the will of the Founder, are to embody the principle of free thought; and to think freely means that, while giving all due deference to the authority of philosophers—and they are very far from agreement among themselves—we must refuse simply to accept the verdict of a school among them in place of our own considered judgment, so far as we have the opportunity to form one. Free thought means this in the school of philosophy as much as in the school of theology.

§ 2

Now, I believe that we all have, in different degrees, no doubt, but really, the faculty necessary for forming a judgment in the matter now in question. I believe also that if my hearers will examine themselves they will find that the conception of absolute values, and especially of moral values, as an essential element in reality, independent of our personal realization of them, is a conception inseparable from that of mind and purpose in nature as a whole, which is (in part) what we mean by God. That Right can absolutely claim the allegiance of all men is an idea which only a responsible, thinking and willing person can entertain. If, then, there inheres in the nature of things this absolute claim, this must mean that in the nature of things there subsists a righteous mind and will—that is, something not less than supreme personality.

Speaking for myself, I find that I cannot extricate myself from this conclusion. I cannot attach a meaning to moral values except as values for a person. It is perhaps hardly less obvious that the conception of truth as an absolute value, making an absolute claim on every intellect, cannot be otherwise interpreted than as the claim of a supreme mind who knows and wills truth—that is, a personal being. Once more the conception and feeling of beauty is something which only a mind or spirit can entertain.7 But though the minds of all men can, more or less richly, entertain it, it is not the product of their individual minds: it inheres somehow in nature. Nature provides the materials which evoke the latent sense of beauty—materials on which the human mind can responsively work and on which it absolutely depends to enable it to work. In J. B. Mozley’s famous phrase, “Nature … in the very act of labouring as a machine is also sleeping as a picture.”8 This means in other words that there is that in nature which corresponds to our sensibility to beauty—which intends beauty, as it intends goodness and truth—though alike goodness, truth and beauty are at present mainly unrealized ideals; and what can that be but a personal spirit of beauty, as of truth and goodness?

Plato at one period of his thought certainly imagined a world of self-subsistent universals—the “forms” or models of all the objects apparent in the world of sensible experience (of concrete objects as well as of values such as the virtues) centring in the Form of the Good—without any definite theism. Later, as we have seen, he subjected this imagination to criticism, and it vanishes from his later dialogues; and finally, in the Timæus he becomes definitely theistic and postulates the Supreme Soul, the one creative God, who fashions the world in accordance with certain mathematical and ethical principles. I suppose that we all, with Aristotle, reject Plato’s earlier and cruder imagination. But I dare to say that we ought no less decisively to reject the modern conception of values as somehow inherent in nature without personification. Truth, beauty and goodness are surely not otherwise really conceivable by us than as qualities of a personal being.

This I certainly affirm to be true of myself, and I believe the vast majority of thinking persons will give the same verdict, if they can summon courage to give a verdict at all.

It is said, of course, that this is mere anthropomorphism. Now, it must be acknowledged that mankind inevitably thinks anthropomorphically, that is, thinks as man, and thus dangerously tends to make God in its own image. That was the fault of the Greek pantheon, and the fault which the Hebrew psalmist derides when he represents God as protesting, “Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am even such a one as thyself.” Equally man thinks anthropomorphically about animals, and falls thereby into sentimental delusions—but nevertheless with a certain justification in so far as the animal soul appears to be akin to the human, and an anticipation of it. Dr. Streeter also truly remarks that science itself cannot avoid anthropomorphism, as in the expression “potential energy,” which appears to be as really anthropomorphic as the term “force” which it was intended to replace.9 The fact is that we cannot think at all except on the assumption that the mind of man corresponds to cosmic reality—to mind in the universe. But essentially, and as used by those who think and speak carefully, the language about the personal God presented to us by ethical monotheism is not anthropomorphic language about God but theomorphic language about man. It expresses the idea that nature reflects God, carried up to the highest point. For physical energy must express or reflect God10; animal life also in a higher degree; but the best and fullest reflection or expression of God must be found in nature’s highest product—moral personality. True it is that personality in us men is limited by external and internal conditions, and is an imperfect thing, only in process of realization; while the personality we ascribe to God is, if in any sense limited, yet only self-limited, and perfect from the beginning—you may call it, if you will, super-personality. But it remains true that the conception of a supremely personal being, though it certainly transcends human faculties of imagination, is as really a postulate of the reasoning man as it is of the ethical and worshipping man—if, that is, spiritual values are to be kept in mind as essential elements of the real.

The only way to escape this conclusion is, it appears to me, the way of pure subjectivism—by which I mean the doctrine that we know (if knowledge it can be called) nothing but the contents of our own private minds—a position which cuts at the root of any knowledge of objects in nature independent of us, or of our fellow-men, as much as of God—indeed, it cuts at the root of any knowledge of a real subsistent self. That is a radical agnosticism of which I shall have something more to say in my last lecture. It is, as I think, a denial of the fundamental faith which lies at the basis of all rationality.11

§ 3

Now we must pass to the conceptions of the transcendence, self-completeness, unity, and absolute priority of God.

As I have said, there can be no doubt that in proportion as religion among mankind passes to higher levels and joins in indissoluble association with morality, it postulates for the God whom it both worships and serves an unconditional supremacy. It finds in conscience an inner witness to such a supremacy—the supremacy of the one good God. We see this tendency at work in China and Greece, but more obviously in Zoroastrianism and in Muhammadanism and in the religion of Israel. But we find it as a settled conviction in its highest form in the religion of Christ. The absoluteness of God is not indeed there presented in so crude a form as in Muhammadanism—for His transcendence is conditioned by His immanence in nature and man: I mean especially that the recognition of the witness of God in the conscience of man prevents the ascription to Him of what violates the postulates of the conscience. “The being of God” to which conscience bears witness must be “a kind of law to His working.” If His power is over and in all things, yet He cannot do everything.12 He cannot be unjust. He cannot deny Himself.

Thus in the Old Testament the drama of the Book of Job, culminating in the final approval of Job by God, is a magnificent vindication of the right of man to challenge the divine justice in the light of his own conscience; and elsewhere in the Old Testament God is represented as appealing to man to recognize that He has behaved towards him both justly and mercifully. In the Gospels nothing is more impressive than the reserve of Jesus in the expression of sheer authority, and His constant appeal to the conscience and reason of common men to recognize for truth what He is telling them. There is a famous passage in the Epistle to the Romans where St. Paul appears to speak of God’s omnipotent will as if it were arbitrary and absolute,13 but it is commonly forgotten that he goes on to correct such an idea in the argument which follows. It must be found ultimately conformable to justice as man at his best conceives it.

There are passages in the writings of two contemporary German teachers who are exercising a great and widespread influence—I mean Otto and Karl Barth—where the emphasis is laid so heavily on the “otherness” of God as to suggest that they have overlooked that the voice of God from without or from above must correspond with His voice from within the heart of man in his conscience and reason. But while this misunderstanding of God’s transcendence is corrected by the recognition of His immanence, it remains true that Christianity, and the higher monotheism generally, postulates the one supreme God, as in Himself perfect and also self-sufficient, containing in Himself the fullness of being—such as is expressed in the words of Emily Brontë, which the late Lord Haldane used to repeat with such enthusiasm:

Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

The most obvious objection to this exalted and thorough-going monotheism lies of course in the portentous and enormous fact of moral evil in the world, which seems to suggest, at times almost irresistibly, that we cannot believe in a God who is both powerful in all things and also perfect goodness. It is this momentous objection which will confront us in the next lecture.

Apart, however, from this menacing difficulty, monotheism, such as the Christian scheme postulates, finds itself still confronted in our modern world with a fundamental pluralism14—including the always seductive form of fundamental dualism—and on the other hand with a monism which (in some sense) identifies God with the world and affirms the world to be as necessary to God as God is to the world, and also with various theories of a finite and emergent deity who (or which) is gradually coming into being in the process of development.

Using, then, my own reason, to the utmost of my capacity and with the utmost freedom, I cannot but find all forms of ultimate pluralism inferior as regards rationality to monotheism. I do not speak of monotheism as demonstrably true, because I cannot (as will appear) eliminate an element of faith from our most fundamental convictions. There does not seem to be any theory of the universe based on absolute demonstration possible to man. Thus I am content to claim for monotheism as compared with pluralism or dualism a superior rationality. There is a certain kind of pluralism indeed which is inherent necessarily in every theory of the world which includes a belief in free spirits; for in a world where free spirits exist we must be prepared for evidences of their independent action; and there is a certain dualism inherent in every ethical theory which postulates the rebellion of free spirits, and sees in this world, at least over a prolonged epoch, the conflicts of rebel wills with the supreme will. The creation of free spirits ex hypothesi involves on the part of the supreme God a real and voluntary, if only a temporary, self-limitation. Of this more hereafter.

But the rational spirits of whom we have experience are a late production in the development of the world; and they are not the creators (as far as we can discover) of either organisms or values. There is no sense in calling them “gods many.” The question is whether the ultimate creative energy in the universe, which alone can be rightly called by the name of God, is one or many. And in answer to this question, I contend that it is not only the moral conscience which postulates the oneness of God. Physical science also has surely wiped out polytheism by its progressive disclosure of the essential coherence of the universe in all its parts—as one universal system. This leaves no place for the conception of physical nature as the scene of conflict between two rival powers or between many spirits. It is too closely knit to admit of any such idea. Again, whatever explanation is to be found of the apparent moral conflict between hostile wills, that must be recognized as lying only in the upper stratum of nature, i.e. in the moral world with which we shall be concerned later. Throughout all its vast physical bulk we find only one coherent system, one process, one law or system of laws, and, if there be a divine energy there revealed—then one God.

This essential inter-relatedness of all the elements of nature modern physics carries back to its very foundations. There is no room left for any ultimate atomism. Clerk Maxwell taught us long ago that “the atoms have all the appearance of manufactured articles.” But more recent physicists go behind the atoms. We are not allowed to think of them as ultimate entities, having each an independent existence, and subsequently entering into relation and combination with other similar and self-contained entities. The protons and electrons which are constituents of the atoms already belong to the larger world. The whole, we learn, is already implied in all the parts. Organization is found in the very basis of nature as well as throughout its whole bulk. “The stellar system,” says Eddington, “is one great organization.”15

But can we conceive organization apart from mind? A universe organized on a rational plan from its foundations upwards, as modern physics represents it, surely involves the priority of one rational mind.16

The monotheism, however, the reasonableness of which we are considering, attributes to God not only unity and consciousness and priority of existence, but creative will and purpose; it can find, for instance, no satisfaction in the Aristotelian conception of the supreme being as pure intellect contemplating itself, without interest in the world of things below it, or in the kindred Neo-Platonic conception of the One which is beyond good and evil. It demands one God who made and cares for all things, who has a purpose in His whole creation one day to be realized, and is calling us to co-operate in its realization.

It is sometimes said that it is only in the moral and mental region that the idea of purpose or design in nature presses itself strongly on the mind. And it is true that only there do we get any indication of what the purpose or design in nature is. But I am not at all disposed to admit that the whole bulk of physical nature is capable of rational interpretation without the hypothesis of plan or purpose. As to the nature of that purpose, I am not arguing at present. I am postponing therefore to the next lecture what are called the evidences of dysteleology—that is, the evidences that the purpose in nature is not at any rate wholly good or effective—I am arguing only that when physical nature as a whole is contemplated, we cannot eliminate from it the evidences of directive purpose either in detail or in general.

The evidences of directive purpose in the details of biological evolution are very strongly brought out in what has been, I think, an unduly neglected work—J. N. Shearman’s Natural Theology of Evolution—and in a more recent book—J. H. Best’s From the Seen to the Unseen. We cannot reasonably say that the stricter adherents of Charles Darwin have succeeded in eliminating from nature irresistible evidences of a positive design in the details of its structure. There is indeed a general trend in the world of recent thought to acknowledge some positive tendency in evolution towards specific forms not yet realized, which cannot really be distinguished from design,17 to which Dr. Whitehead gives the name of “the principle of concretion,” which he finds it necessary to postulate throughout nature, and to which he gives the name of God.18 This “principle” does not seem to me to be rationally conceivable as anything less than a presiding purposeful mind present from the beginning.

This sort of argument has recently been stated in a new form and with fresh force by J. E. Turner, in his Personality and Reality.19 His point is that, in our experience, the increasing dominance of mind over external conditions, which we should all agree to be the mark of civilization, manifests itself, and cannot but manifest itself, in the construction of mechanisms—not only material machines of increasing complexity and perfection, but also social institutions whereby human society realizes and maintains itself; further, that the more perfect the mechanism, the more “autonomous”20 it becomes—the more it “goes of itself,” and the less, or less frequently, any interference of the inventing or directing mind is required; with the result that to the “untrained intelligence of a savage” the machine is mistaken for a demon or God, that is to say, for something really autonomous. This sort of apparent autonomy applies to social arrangements, where they are successful, as well as to machinery.

With this indisputable and constant experience in his mind, then, the philosopher looks out upon the material world of nature. What is presented to us there is a whole of which the unity, intricacy and apparent automatism are indisputable. It is the very perfection of these qualities which seems to render unnecessary for scientific purposes the postulate of a creative or directive mind. But such a conclusion is contradicted by our whole experience of mechanism. The perfection of the machine always tends to the apparent obliteration of its designer or operator; the thing appears to go of itself; but to the competent intelligence it is obvious that the creative or inventive mind is not the less but the more to be postulated, because he is so effectively concealed. Now, designing mind is an essential element in the highest stage of developing nature—that is in man; and when it appears, it begins to dominate the material world in which it finds itself by way of increasing mechanization; that is the characteristic of mind. Is it not reasonable, then, for the mind of man, if, as it grows to know more and more of the world, it finds it more and more clearly to possess the characteristics of an organized machine of vast range and intricate coherence, which appears to go of itself, to argue—not “there is no God,” but “verily thou art a God that hidest thyself”? And this designing mind, which partly conceals and partly manifests itself in nature, we cannot but think of as prior to a universe which, as we are bound to acknowledge, exhibits, with gradually increasing clearness, a rational purpose.

But there is a further consideration to be entertained.21 The humanly constructed machines (leaving out of account social machinery) are not plastic. It belongs to the very nature of such mechanism that it is absolutely impossible for it ever to alter its own structural arrangements, except of course destructively through wear and tear: thus mankind must be continually scrapping old machines and devising new ones; on the other hand, the better the mechanism of human society, the more plastic it is; the more it can improve and adjust itself. The more self-adjusting machinery is, the more clearly it reveals mind; and it is just this sort of plasticity which the mechanism of nature tends to exhibit. It is an evolving machine, such as suggests all the more inevitably the action of the mind which has conceived the whole.

To quote Turner’s conclusion: “The material universe being in itself a mechanism which, as mechanism, cannot evolve, while at the same time it actually does evolve—and evolves farther on the vastest of scales which seems to possess no final limitation—necessarily implies the real existence of a mind which so dominates the whole realm of matter as progressively to embody therein, by means of perfectly definite, unalterable, and indestructible mechanisms, its own constructive—if not indeed creative—ideas. Such a mind therefore is a supreme self—the personal factor of the psycho-physical universe within which it is omnipotent.”22

§ 4

There is, as I have said, a widespread tendency in the current philosophy of science to recognize purposefulness of some sort in nature as a whole. The intellectual atmosphere appears to be freeing itself from theoretical materialism. But some sort of monism is still largely dominant. By monism we describe all the theories which are pantheistic—that is, which identify God and the world; or which bid us find God in the world (immanent),23 and not prior to it or transcendent; or which declare the universe to be as essential to God as God is to the world.

But all monistic theories seem to me, pondering as deeply as I can, to have such fundamental weaknesses as give to the monotheist doctrine an evidently prerogative claim to rationality. Perhaps the primary objection to all identification of God with the world—such as Spinoza’s—lies in its inability to give any explanation of moral evil and the existence of sin.

Any realization of what sin is, such as we find under monotheism, refuses to let us be content with minimizing interpretations; we can see in it nothing less than rebellion against God. But sin is a vast fact in the higher developments of nature. It seems to postulate a rebellion within nature against God; thus it postulates a distinction between nature and God. But with this we shall be dealing in the next lecture. All the monistic theories, however, seem to me to fail on the field of metaphysical argument also.

We can legitimately find in nature, taken by itself apart from any idea of God, no consciousness or conscious purpose till we arrive at the higher animals, or more clearly at man. Hence it is that some of our contemporary philosophers have enunciated the theory of the gradually emergent God, who first in man becomes conscious of Himself and of the values of truth and beauty and goodness which it is man’s destiny to realize. But either these values had their origin in the mind of man and have no validity outside his mind—an idea which this school of philosophers repudiates, for they feel bound to recognize the values as properly inherent in nature, or in reality as a whole—or we are driven back upon our previous conclusion that the gradual development of nature as one grand organization culminating in rational man postulates an original Creative Mind in which the idea of the whole was already in conscious existence before ever the gradual development of the universe began.24 If, then, it is to reason that we appeal, it must be acknowledged (so I have argued) that reason cannot accept the idea of unconscious purpose.

I cannot but think that Matthews and McDougall are right in their idea that the theory of emergent evolution is not more than a convenient halting-place in the passage of contemporary philosophy from mechanistic materialism to the general recognition of design or purpose throughout nature—which surely involves the idea of God the Creator.25

§ 5

Epistemology again seems to point to an original Creative Mind. The man of common sense postulates both the self which knows the world and the world of natural objects which he comes to know through his senses, including people like himself who share this knowledge. As soon as the scientific analysis of knowledge begins, it appears that the verdict of common sense requires profound correction. The world of natural objects appears not to be a direct product of sensations, but a mental construction upon the basis of sensations. As a result of this analysis, a series of famous philosophers have formulated a subjective idealism which declares that all is mind; and they appear to the plain man to be denying that the existence of a world external to the individual mind, or of other individuals external to himself, is more at best than a precarious conjecture. This is from the point of view of common sense, with its agelong experience of the verification of its instinctive assumptions, a ridiculous conclusion.

Now, common sense, in making this protest (in the manner of Dr. Johnson), is in part “kicking against the pricks,” and will find itself obliged to give in. The subjective contribution in our knowledge of external objects is too evident as a result of analysis to be denied. It must be admitted also that the world, as known to the common sense of mankind, is not absolutely the real world. The world which we can imagine that a dog or a dragon-fly, with its very different faculties, knows is not the same as our world; nor is our world of common experience the same as the world which the imagination of the physicist strives to realize—the world in which apparent solids are really almost entirely empty spaces. The common-sense knowledge of the world, then, is a relative knowledge—but all the same it is the knowledge to which experience has always corresponded and continues to correspond. As Dr. Eddington reminds us, the physicist has quite to forget his physics if he is to walk into a room comfortably or transact the ordinary activities of the living man. And his physics must somehow construct such an apparatus of “strains and stresses” as shall account for a “complex of nearly vacant spaces,” behaving as if it were a solid body, which can inflict summary vengeance on that other complex of nearly vacant spaces, which we call his body, if it presumes to behave as if solid bodies were not actually what they appear to be. Thus the common-sense knowledge of external Nature is proved to be, if not absolutely real, yet the conception of reality which best conforms to the requirements of common experience. So common sense protests against both the scientific and the idealist analysis.

In face of this justifiable protest, the idealist explains that in saying that “all is mind” he is not speaking of the mind of the individual considered apart; the construction of the individual mind is a very partial thing. Relative to the universe we are to conceive of the universal mind. The process which we call sensitive experience is the process through which the universal mind gradually communicates itself to the particular mind which is only its fragmentary representative. Thus philosophers have proposed, as substitutes for the conception of permanent natural objects external to us the experiencers, the conception of “permanent possibilities of sensation” or “permanent possibilities of experience.” But such phrases seem utterly ridiculous to common sense, which, it protests, “knows” that the objects in the external world are subsisting quite independently of the experiencing selves, and were there before they were born, and whether they are awake or asleep.

The independent existence of natural objects, moreover, is really borne out by the best analysis of sensation which we are able to make. For if this analysis reveals the constructive action of the mind upon the data of sensation, it also reveals the absolute dependence of the action of the mind upon the sensations not only for the supply of its material, but also for the supply of the material in such constant and regular order as force upon it a particular construction. The sensations of pressure, colour, smell, sound, taste, arrive with a constancy of order and relation, over which the knowing subject has no control, which give it no alternative but to construct an image of a particular kind and an image of an enduring object. Thus the sensations dictate the mental result, quite as truly as the “synthetic unity of apperception” constructs the object.

Is not the rational conclusion from all this, that the reality of both the perceiving subject and the object perceived is involved, from the beginning, in all experience—that common sense (granted the relativity of its knowledge of reality) is quite right in its instructive assumption that it is living in a world of real objects, and is itself an intelligent person surrounded by other intelligent persons?26 This is, in fact, the formula best suited to express the reality for man in his present world of experience; and philosophy only makes itself ridiculous when it seeks to gainsay it. But, granted this sort of realism, is it not necessary to go farther, and to affirm that the conception of God as the creator alike of natural objects and of men, each fitted to each and dependent one on the other, but having each its own independent reality, the most rational conception, because the one which corresponds best to experience and best interprets its meaning? No doubt this belief about God was in its full force the outcome of (what claimed to be) God’s own revelation of Himself. With that we are not yet concerned. But is it not also the conception which rationally considered is best able to reconcile the postulates of common sense with the demands of the analytic reason?

§ 6

There is, however, one grave objection to the conception of the one personal God, the absolute creator, as prior to all His creations, and self-complete, which must be faced. Any strictly unitarian conception of God appears to be rationally impossible. What is postulated is a living God independent of and prior to His creatures. But life, and especially personal life, involves relations. It appears to be essentially relative and social.27 There can be no thought which is not thought of something other than the thinking subject. There can be no effective will without the production of some effect. Still more obviously there can be no love which is not the love of person for person. This necessity appears to inhere not in any of the limiting conditions which belong to human personality, but in the essential nature of the thing in itself.

Neither Zarathustra, nor the Jewish prophets, nor Muhammad, show any consciousness of this difficulty. They were not the least metaphysically minded. And Jesus touched on no such difficulty. But the effect of His teaching—of the language He used about the Father, and Himself as Son of the Father, and about the Spirit of God—was such that we find the first Christians recognizing the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as the new name of the one God in whom their fathers believed; and this primitive recognition of the threefold Name came to explicit expression in the doctrine of the Triune God—three “persons” in one God. (The terms used for “persons” in Greek and Latin were elaborately apologised for as having a necessary inadequacy, but as being the best that could be found.) This trinitarian theology was developed, quite independently of any philosophical considerations, under the necessity of maintaining the Christian experience of redemption by the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. But later, considered philosophically, and with due recognition of the relativity of all human thoughts about God, there was found in this theology the resolution of the formidable difficulty which we are considering.

God was living and personal; but He was not to be thought of as one eternally solitary or atomic person. The supreme One involves relationship and reciprocity within Himself. Prior to all creation He is alive with the full life of Will and Thought and Love—the Father eternally generating His Word or Son, and knowing Himself in Him as His adequate image, and loving Him in the Spirit who is His life. It was never pretended that such a thought of God could have been arrived at a priori by human insight. What was claimed was (and is) that this thought of God as triune was implicit—necessarily implicit—in the actual experience which the apostles had of the divine redemption through Jesus Christ; and that as made explicit (though human language could never do justice to the reality) it did relieve the Christianized intelligence of a formidable difficulty.28 It did suggest how, prior to all creation, the fullness of life could be in the one God: and it found in the unfathomable depths of the divine being the ground and principle of that fellowship which is of the essence of personal life as we know it.

The idea of the “triunity” of God is, then, I contend, if not discoverable by reason, yet satisfying to reason. It corresponds to the requirement of Hermann Lotze. “If reason,” he says, “is not of itself capable of finding the highest truth, but on the contrary stands in need of a revelation, still reason must be able to understand the revealed truth, at least so far as to recognize in it the satisfying conclusion of those upward soaring trains of thought which reason itself began, led by its own needs, but was not able to bring to an end.”29

But here I am anticipating the question of revelation. In this lecture I have been limiting my argument to one point—that the idea of God presented to us in Christian monotheism, the idea of His personality, His unity, His absolute priority and self-completeness, and His creativity of all that is, is strictly more rational, or more acceptable to the enlightened reason, than the various substitutes for it suggested by divers schools of modern idealism.30

• 1.

  The question whether God is to be identified with the Absolute seems to be, from the Christian point of view, a verbal question. Undoubtedly the Absolute may be so identified with the totality of being as to result in a pure pantheism, so that whatever occurs in the universe must be ascribed to God, whether it be good or evil. On the other hand a Christian philosophy, while it must identify God with the Absolute in the sense that whatever exists exists by His creative will and depends on Him for its continuance in being (“In Him we live and move and are”), yet must draw a distinction. There is indeed no rival source or ground of existence other than God. But He has willed to create and maintain in being free spirits, and in them at least there is a relative independence, and their actions may be, and in fact have been, in flat contradiction to the will of God. And this may be regarded as a limitation on His absoluteness, though a self-caused limitation. Thus whether God can be identified with the Absolute is a matter for the definition of terms.

• 2.

  Idea of the Holy, p. 15.

• 3.

  If you include in the term ethical all that belongs to human conduct, then indeed all religions must be called ethical. But we rightly restrict the term ethical to what demands a particular type of character, and not merely particular actions conforming to “the manner of the God of the land.”

• 4.

  Otto, op. cit., p. 146.

• 5.

  See Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 430-432.

• 6.

  Lectures on Natural Theology, pp. 84, 563.

• 7.

  If animals can appreciate beauty, that is only so far as they approach towards personality.

• 8.

  Mozley’s University Sermons, p. 139.

• 9.

  Streeter’s Reality, p. 19.

• 10.

  The old Christian hymn for the Ninth Hour begins by the invocation of God as “the persistent energy of things” (Deus, rerum tenax vigor).

• 11.

  See below, pp. 323 f.

• 12.

  Etymologically, the Latin word omnipotens, and the Greek παντοκράτωρ mean “powerful in or over all things,” not “able to do anything.”

• 13.

  Rom. ix. 19 ff., modified in x. and xi.

• 14.

  Such as was represented in the thought of the late Dr. McTaggart.

• 15.

  Nature, vol. iii, p. 18; cf. his work referred to in the next note, pp. 103 f.; cf. W. McDougall, Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution, p. 72-73. McDougall, however, denies that Whitehead has the right to say that “the whole of Nature consists of organisms” (p. 131). “Organization pervades nature everywhere” (p. 72), but “organisms” do not appear in inorganic nature.

• 16.

  Some mathematical physicists of to-day (see Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 75 ff., 220 f., 309 f.) are demanding from us the recognition of a certain indeterminateness at the very roots of the universe, which would apparently conflict with the old-established idea of the “universal reign of law.” I am not enough of a mathematician to understand the grounds of this demand. But it is surely too early to take this bewildering conclusion for granted. May not the layman be satisfied for the present with the recognition that there is that at the very basis of the material world which cannot at present be brought under any conception of law?

• 17.

  See McDougall, op. cit., p. 152.

• 18.

  Science and the Modern World, p. 216, but see below, p. 257, n. 1.

• 19.

  Published by Allen & Unwin. See chap. vi, onward; cf. Streeter’s Reality, pp. 10 ff.

• 20.

  But see below, p. 260.

• 21.

  See J. E. Turner, op. cit., p. 156.

• 22.

  J. E. Turner, Personality and Reality, p. 158. To the whole of Turner’s argument cf. F. R. Tennant, in the Journal of Theological Studies, Oct. 1929, p. 76: “If Nature’s manifold interlacing adaptations (vastly more suggestive than the adaptiveness within organisms) bespeak design or wisdom, and otherwise are inexplicable marvels and mysteries, it is hardly the case … that it is a matter of indifference whether we say that Nature, or that God, has wisely arranged things so; for the simple reason that Nature has no wisdom to arrange anything.”

• 23.

  But the word “immanence” is in truth misapplied where it is used as not implying “transcendence.” “As a pantheist, Spinoza could not hold the idea of God’s immanence, properly so called, in the world or in man; His so-called immanence is really identity” (F. R. Tennant, in Journal of Theol. Studies, Oct. 1929, p. 78).

• 24.

  I have elsewhere examined in detail what seem to me to be the inconsistencies in Dr. Pringle-Pattison’s article on “Immanence and Transcendence” (in the volume entitled The Spirit, edited by Dr. Streeter). See the Reconstruction of Belief, pp. 69 ff.

• 25.

  McDougall, op. cit., p. 156, quoting Dr. W. R. Matthews.

• 26.

  See Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 226, 285-286.

• 27.

  Wilfrid Richmond’s Essay on Personality.

• 28.

  Perhaps Marius Victorinus Afer, the Christianized Neo-Platonist of the fourth century, was the first to perceive this (see Dict. of Christian Biography, s.v. Victorinus).

• 29.

  Microcosmus (English Trans.), vol. ii, p. 660; cf. S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol., i, qu. 32, art. 1, ad. 2.

• 30.

  I feel the great importance of the cosmology which Dr. A. N. Whitehead is expounding, but I find him very difficult to understand. I suppose him to give strong support to the interpretation of nature as one vast organization, and of the creative process as involving a rational purpose. Every step in the process, every “event” or “occasion,” looks before and after: it embodies the old in a new “concretion,” which again prepares for a further step. Throughout the entire process Dr. Whitehead postulates God as “the principle of concretion.” But though God is eternal, and though His nature embodies the whole sum of “eternal objects”—a phrase which seems to be almost equivalent to the Platonic “forms”—which are gradually to be realized in the process of evolution, yet He Himself is conceived of as unconscious and merely “potential” apart from the world, so that if “God creates the world” it is also as true to say that “the world creates God,” both being alike dependent upon “creativity,” which is the ultimate power. (See Process and Reality, pt. v, cap. ii.) I cannot but feel that all that Dr. Whitehead is seeking to express might find better expression in the terms of Trinitarian theology. But this is obviously not his intention. I can only refer to an article in Theology (of August 1930) by Dr. E. A. Taylor which both respectfully interprets Dr. Whitehead and also criticizes him.