Naturalism And Religion Part 16

There is another consideration that affects parallelism alone. Since the theory credits each of the two series with a closed and sufficient causal sequence, each of which excludes the other, it does away with causality altogether. That the one line runs parallel with the other excludes the idea that a unique system of laws prevails, determining the character and course of each line. One of the two lines must certainly be dependent, and one must lead. Otherwise there can be no distinctness of laws in either.

Let us recall our ill.u.s.tration of the cloud shadows once more; the changing forms of the shadows correspond point for point with those of the clouds only because they are entirely dependent upon them. We may ill.u.s.trate it in this way: a parallel may be drawn to an ellipse, it also forms a closed curved line. But it is by no means again an ellipse, but is an entirely dependent figure without any formula or law of its own.

Parallelism must make one of its lines the leading one, which is guided and directed by an actual causal connection within itself. The other line may then run parallel with this, but its course must certainly be determined by the other. And as the line of corporeal processes, with its inviolable nexus of sequences, is not easily broken, parallelism, after many hard words against materialism, frequently returns to that again or becomes inconsistent. But if one says that the two aspects of phenomena are only the forms of one fundamental phenomenon, that means taking away actual causality from both alike, and leaving only a temporal sequence.

For then the actually real is the hidden something that throws the cloud-shadows to right and left. But in the sequence of shadows there is no causal connection, only a series of states succeeding one another in time, and this points to a causal connection elsewhere.

It is easy enough to find examples to prove that the mental in us influences the bodily. But the most convincing, deepest and most trustworthy of these are not the voluntary actions which are expressed in bodily movements, nor even the pa.s.sions and emotions, the joy which makes our blood circulate more quickly, and the shame which brings a flush to our foreheads, the suggestions which work through the mind towards the reviving, vitalising or healing of the body, but the cold and simple course of logical thought itself. Through logical thinking we have the power to correct the course of our conceptions, to inhibit, modify, or logically direct the natural course, as it would have been had it been brought about by our preceding physiological and psychical states, if they were dominant and uncontrolled. But if so, then we must also have the power, especially if it be widely true that physiological states correspond to psychical states, to influence, inhibit, modify the nerve-processes in our brain, or to liberate entirely new ones, namely, those that correspond to the corrected conceptions.

The law of the conservation of energy is here applied in as distorted a sense as we detected before in regard to the general theory of life. And what we said there holds good here also. That something which is in itself not energetic should determine processes and directions of energy is undoubtedly an absolute riddle. But to recognise this is less difficult than to accept the impossibilities which mechanism and automatism offer us here, even more p.r.o.nouncedly than in regard to the theory of life. Perhaps one of the familiar antinomies of Kant shows us the way, not, indeed, to find the solution of the riddle, but to recognise, so to speak, its geometrical position and a.s.sociations. We have already seen that inquiry into the causal conditions of processes lands us in contradictions of thought, which show us that we can never really penetrate into the actual state of the matter.

Perhaps we have here to do only with the obverse side of the problem dealt with there. There the chain of conditions could not be finished because it led on to infinity, where, however, it was required that it should be complete. Here again the chain is incomplete. In the previous case a solution is found through the nave proceeding of simply breaking the empirical connection of conditions and postulating beginnings in time. In this case, the admission of an _influxus physicus_ transforms consciousness almost unnoticed into a mechanically operative causality.

The proper att.i.tude in both cases is a critical one. We must admit that we cannot penetrate into the true state of the case, because the world is deeper than our knowledge, we must reject parallelism as being, like the _influxus physicus_, an unsatisfactory cutting of the critical knot, and we must frankly recognise the incontrovertible fact, never indeed seriously called in question, of the controlling power of the mind, even over the material.

The Supremacy of Mind.

From the standpoint we have now reached we can look back once more on those troublesome naturalistic insinuations as to the dependence of the mind upon the body, which we have already considered. It is evident to us all that our mental development and the fate of our inner life are closely bound up with the states and changes of the body. And it did not need the attacks and insinuations of naturalism to point this out. But the reasons brought forward by naturalism are not convincing, and all the weighty facts it adduces could be balanced by facts equally weighty on the other side. We have already shown that the apparently dangerous doctrine of localisation is far from being seriously prejudicial. But if the dependence of the mind upon the body be great, that of the body upon the mind is greater still. Even Kant wrote tersely and drily about "the power of our mind through mere will to be master over our morbid feelings." And every one who has a will knows how much strict self-discipline and firm willing can achieve even with a frail and wretched body, and handicapped by exhaustion and weakness. Joy heals, care wastes away, and both may kill. The influence which "blood" and "bile" or any other predisposition may have upon temperament and character can be obviated or modified through education, or transformed and guided into new channels through strong psychical impressions and experiences, most of all by great experiences in the domain of morals and religion. No one doubts the reality of those great internal revolutions of which religion is well aware, which arise purely from the mind, and are able to rid us of all natural bonds and burdens. This mysterious region of the influence of the mind in modifying bodily states or producing new ones is in these days being more and more opened up. That grief can turn the hair grey and disgust bring out eruptions on the skin has long been known. But new and often marvellous facts are being continually added to our knowledge through curious experiments with suggestion, hypnosis, and auto-suggestion. And we are no longer far from believing that through exaltations, forced states of mind a.s.sociated with auto-suggestion, many phenomena, such as "stigmata," for instance, which have hitherto been over hastily relegated to the domain of pious legend, may possibly have a "scientific" background.

"The Unconscious".

But one has a repugnance to descending into this strange region. And religion, with its clear and lofty mood, can never have either taste for or relations.h.i.+p with considerations which so easily take an "occult" turn.

Nor is its mysticism concerned with physiologies. But it is instructive and noteworthy that the old idealistic faith, "It is the mind that builds up the body for itself," is becoming stronger again in all kinds of philosophies and physiologies of "the unconscious," as a reaction from the onesidedness of the mechanistic theories, and that it draws its chief support from the dependence of nervous and other bodily processes upon the psychical, which is being continually brought into greater and greater prominence. The moderate and luminous views of the younger Fichte, who probably also first introduced the now current term "the unconscious,"

must be at least briefly mentioned. According to him, the impulse towards the development of form which is inherent in everything living, and which builds up the organism from the germ to the complete whole, by forcing the chemical and physical processes into particular paths, is identical with the psychical itself. In instincts, the unconscious purposive actions of the lower animals in particular, he sees only a special mode of this at first unconscious psychical nature, which, building up organ after organ, makes use in doing so of all the physical laws and energies, and is at first wholly immersed in purely physiological processes. It is only after the body has been developed, and presents a relatively independent system capable of performing the necessary functions of daily life, that it rises beyond itself and gradually unfolds to conscious psychical life in increasing self-realisation. Edward von Hartmann has attempted to apply this principle of the unconscious as a principle of all cosmic existence.

And wherever, among the younger generation of biologists, one has broken away from the fascinations of the mechanistic theory, he has usually turned to "psychical" co-operating factors.

Is there Ageing of the Mind?

Naturalism is also only apparently right in a.s.serting that the mind ages with the body. To learn the answer which all idealism gives to this comfortless theory, it is well to read Schleiermacher's "Monologues," and especially the chapter "Youth and Age." The arguments put forward by naturalism, the blunting of the senses, the failing of the memory, are well known. But here again there are luminous facts on the other side which are much more true. It is no wonder that a mind ages if it has never taken life seriously, never consolidated itself to individual and definite being through education and self-culture, through a deepening of morality, and has gained for itself no content of lasting worth. How could he do otherwise than become poor, dull and lifeless, as the excitability of his organ diminishes and its susceptibility to external impressions disappears? But did Goethe become old? Did not Schleiermacher, frail and ailing as he was by nature, prove the truth of what he wrote in his youth, that there is no ageing of the mind?

The whole problem, in its highest aspects, is a question of will and faith. If I know mind and the nature of mind, and believe in it, I believe with Schleiermacher in eternal youth. If I do not believe in it, then I have given away the best of all means for warding off old age. For the mind can only hold itself erect while trusting in itself. And this is the best argument in the whole business.

But even against the concrete special facts and the observable processes of diminution of psychical powers, and of the disappearance of the whole mental content, we could range other concrete and observable facts, which present the whole problem in quite a different light from that in which naturalism attempts to show it. They indicate that the matter is rather one of the rusting of the instrument to which the mind is bound than an actual decay of the mind itself, and that it is a withdrawing of the mind within itself, comparable rather to sleep than to decay. The remarkable power of calling up forgotten memories in hypnosis, the suddenly re-awakening memory a few minutes before death, in which sometimes the whole past life is unrolled with surprising clearness and detail, the flaming up anew of a rusty mind in moments of great excitement, the great clearing up of the mind before its departure, and many other facts of the same nature, are rather to be regarded as signs that in reality the mind never loses anything of what it has once experienced or possessed. It has only become buried under the surface. It has been withdrawn from the stage, but is stored up in safe treasure-chambers. And the whole stage may suddenly become filled with it again.

The simile of an instrument and the master who plays upon it, which is often used of the relation between body and mind, is in many respects a very imperfect one; for the master does not develop with and in his instrument. But in regard to the most oppressive arguments of naturalism, the influence of disease, of old age, of mental disturbances due to brain changes, the comparison serves our turn well enough, for undoubtedly the master is dependent upon his instrument; upon an organ which is going more and more out of tune, rusting, losing its pipes, his harmonies will become poorer, more imperfect. And if we think of the a.s.sociation between the two as further obstructed, the master becoming deaf, the stops confused, the relation between the notes and pipes altered, then what may still live within him in perfect and unclouded purity, and in undiminished richness, may present itself outwardly as confused and unintelligible, may even find only disconnected expression, and finally cease altogether; so that no conclusion would be possible except that the master himself had become different or poorer. The melancholy field of mental diseases perhaps yields proofs against naturalism to an even greater degree than for it. It is by no means the case that all mental diseases are invariably diseases of the brain, for even more frequently they are real sicknesses of the mind, which yield not to physical but to psychical remedies. And the fact that the mind can be ill, is a sad but emphatic proof that it goes its own way.

Immortality.

It is in a faith in a Beyond, and in the immortality of our true being, that what lies finely distributed through all religion sums itself up and comes to full blossoming: the certainty that world and existence are insufficient, and the strong desire to break through into the true being, of which at the best we have here only a foretaste and intuition. The doctrine of immortality stands by itself as a matter of great solemnity and deep rapture. If it is to be talked about, both speaker and hearers ought to be in an exalted mood. It is the conviction which, of all religious convictions, can be least striven for consciously; it must well forth from devotional personal experience of the spirit and its dignity, and thus can maintain itself without, and indeed against much reasoning.

To educate and cultivate it in us requires a discipline of meditation, of concentration, and of spiritual self-culture from within outwards. If we understood better what it meant to "live in the spirit," to develop the receptivity, fineness, and depth of our inner life, to listen to and cultivate what belongs to the spirit, to inform it with the worth and content of religion and morality, and to integrate it in the unity and completeness of a true personality, we should attain to the certainty that personal spirit is the fundamental value and meaning of all the confused play of evolution, and is to be estimated on quite a different scale from all other being which is driven hither and thither in the stream of Becoming and Pa.s.sing away, having no meaning or value because of which it must endure. And it would be well also if we understood better how to listen with keener senses to our intuitions, to the direct self-consciousness of the spirit in regard to itself, which sleeps in every mind, but which few remark and fewer still interpret. Here, where the gaze of self-examination reaches its horizon, and can only guess at what lies beyond, but can no longer interpret it, lie the true motives and reasons for our conviction of immortality. An apologetic cannot do more than clear away obstacles, nor need it do much more than has. .h.i.therto been done. It reminds us, as we have already seen, that the world which we know and study, and which includes ourselves, does not show its true nature to us; hidden depths lie behind appearances. And it gathers together and sums up all the great reasons for the independence and underivability of the spiritual as contrasted with the corporeal. The spiritual has revealed itself to us as a reality in itself, which cannot be explained in terms of the corporeal, and which has dominion over it. Its beginning and its end are wholly unfathomable. There is no practical meaning in discussing its "origin" or its "pa.s.sing away," as we do with regard to the corporeal.

Under certain corporeal conditions it is there, it simply appears. But it does not arise out of them. And as it is not nothing, but an actual and effective reality, it can neither have come out of nothing nor disappear into nothing again. It appears out of the absolutely transcendental, a.s.sociates itself with corporeal processes, determines these and is determined by them, and in its own time pa.s.ses back from this world of appearance to the transcendental again. It is like a great unknown sea, that pours its waters into the configuration of the sh.o.r.e and withdraws them again. But neither the flowing in nor the ebbing again is of nothing or in nothing. Whether and how it retains the content, form, and structure that it a.s.sumes in other spheres of animate and conscious nature, when it retires into the transcendental again; or whether it dissolves and breaks up into the universal we do not know; nor do we attribute everlastingness to those individual forms of consciousness which we call animal souls. But of the self-conscious, personal spirit religion knows that it is everlasting. It knows this from its own sources. In its insight into the underivability and autonomy of the spiritual it finds warrant and freedom to maintain this knowledge as something apart from or even in contrast to the general outlook on the world.

CHAPTER XII. THE WORLD AND G.o.d.

The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not "divine"! The formula "_natura sive deus_" is a monstrous misuse of the word "_deus_," if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. G.o.d is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask "Why?" G.o.d is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. G.o.d is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a G.o.d, but a demiG.o.d, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed, "_natura sive deus_," makes s.h.i.+pwreck. The words of this _credo_ are either a mere tautology, and "_deus_" is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of "G.o.d."

On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, da????a, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating G.o.d, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration. "The world is an odd fellow; may G.o.d soon make an end of it," said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious parallel to the words of Aristotle, ? ??? f?s?? da????a ???? ?? ?e?a, (Aristot. "De Divin. in Somn.," c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of G.o.d to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an a.n.a.logue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).

If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution.

It challenges attention and interpretation, and a.n.a.logies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large ma.s.ses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage-crystal formation-which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as "nature advances upwards step by step," "it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage."

And it is with us as it was with Plato; we inform the world with a soul, with a desire and endeavour which continually expresses itself in higher and higher forms. And it is with us also as with Fichte; we speak of the will which, unconscious of itself, pours itself forth in unconscious and lifeless nature, and then on this foundation strives forward, expressing its activity in ever higher developments, breaking forth in life, sensation, and desire, and finally coming to itself in conscious existence and will. The whole world seems to us a being which wills to become, presses restlessly forward, and pa.s.ses from the potential to the actual, realising itself. And the height of its self-realisation is conscious, willing life.

This outlook is lofty and significant, it supplies a guiding clue by which the facts of life and nature can be arranged. The religious outlook, too, when it wishes to indulge in speculation, can make use of this guiding thread. It will then say: G.o.d established the world as "a will to existence, to consciousness, to spirit." He established it, not as complete, but as becoming. He does not build it as a house, but plants it, like a flower, in the seed, that it may grow, that it may struggle upwards stage by stage to fuller existence, aspiring with toil and endeavour towards the height where, in the image of the Creator, as a free and reasonable spirit capable of personality, it may realise the aim of its being. Thus the world is _of_ G.o.d, that is, its rudiments came from G.o.d, and it is _to_ G.o.d, in the purpose of likeness to G.o.d. And it is imbued with the breath of G.o.dhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from gra.s.s to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the gradations; the relations.h.i.+p of all living creatures, the unity of all psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes; the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature, unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This G.o.d-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and "entelechy," it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as "soul."

Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in an entirely new phase of real free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared for in natural evolution is completed.

The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes, for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than ready-made existence incapable of independent action.

This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as "world-soul" or as "will" or as the "unconscious," is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with G.o.d. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot wors.h.i.+p what only reaches its full development in ourselves. But that we _can_ wors.h.i.+p, and that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves better than anything else that G.o.d is above all "World-will." It was more than allegory when Plato in Timaeus set the "eternal father and creator of the world" above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke through when Fichte in his little book, "Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,"

set being before becoming, and G.o.d above the creatures struggling towards self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence, conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a world "evolving itself" out of its potentiality, of a will to existence, and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to "actuality," to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed within it the "tendencies," the "rudiments" which realise themselves in evolution? Invariably "the actual is before the potential" and Being before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by an everlasting Being. G.o.d planting the world-flower that it might radiate forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may well symbolise for religion the relation between G.o.d and the world. And thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined in Fichte's too much forgotten but unforgettable books "Bestimmung des Menschen" and "Anweisung zum seeligen Leben," and it is thus a new creation of the great German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious, semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.

One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only a.n.a.logies and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular, the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this "will"

towards form, its relations.h.i.+p with instinct and the relations.h.i.+p of instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of ill.u.s.trations, and an ill.u.s.tration of the step-ladder of the "will towards existence,"

which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think definitely of a general world-will, which wills and aspires in individual beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual "souls" of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative construction of theories of the world. But "you shall know that it is your imagination which creates the world for you."(108) And if a speculative construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other.

For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the soul, creationism, or the current traducianism-which to-day, with its partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as nave as the older-all reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we have hinted at, if it gives no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict centralisation, the natural relations.h.i.+p of the psychical in man to the psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to all the world.

But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative ill.u.s.trations of the relation of G.o.d to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world G.o.d is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation, providence, self-revelation of G.o.d in the world, and it lives by the mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves it recognises in vague or nave forms of conception long before it attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines of _concursus_, of _influxus ordinarius_ and _extraordinarius_ usually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the "_causae secundariae_"; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their true end, and which may also reveal itself as "_extraordinaria_" in miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and natural revelation.

This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite "simple." Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded "Deism."

According to the deistic view, G.o.d made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther a.s.sistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is incredibly profane, and strikes G.o.d out of the world, and nature, and history at a single stroke, subst.i.tuting for Him the course of a well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makes.h.i.+ft as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if G.o.d arranged these _causae secundariae_, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingenious _concursus_, _influxus_, _determinationes_, _gubernationes_, and the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories, all the things we have named above, and especially and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and to G.o.d what is alleged to be of G.o.d. But it is permissible to point to the insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pa.s.s. Every qualitative effect and change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or quant.i.ty goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action, often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are guided by the Kantian antinomy regarding the conditions of what is "given." It destroys the charm of the "purely causal" point of view by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory. Moreover, in the phenomena of life, and in the fact that consciousness and will control our corporeal processes, and yet can hardly be thought of as a cause "co-operating" with other causes, we found an a.n.a.logy, if a weak and obscure one, of the relation that a divine teleology and governing of the world may bear to mundane phenomena. Thus mystery remains in all its strength and is not replaced by the surrogate of a too simple and shallow dogmatic theory. In confessing mystery and resting content with it we are justified by reflection on the nature and antinomy of our knowledge.

All this is true also of what religion means by creation. In the feeling of complete humility, in its experience of absolute dependence and conditionedness, the creature becomes conscious of itself as a creature, and experiences with full clearness what it means to be a "creature" and "created." The dogmatic theory is here again only a surrogate of mystery.

And again critical self-reflection proves a better guide than any theory of creation, which is quite in its place as a means of expression in religious discourse and poetry, but is quite insufficient as true knowledge. That we must but cannot think of this world either as beginning or as not-beginning is the a.n.a.logue in knowledge of what religion experiences in mystery; and that this contingent and conditioned world is founded in everlasting, necessary, true Being, is the a.n.a.logue of what religion possesses and knows through devout feeling, more directly and clearly than by any thinking, of the relations of G.o.d to the world.

FOOTNOTES