12. Intellectualism and moralism: reason and will. -Hegelianism, we have seen, finds it a necessary condition of the establishment of an intelligible theory of the universe, that God be conceived in terms of the subject, rather than in terms of the object; it is, to this extent, anthropomorphic. But if we are to find the key to the interpretation of the Absolute in the subject rather than in the object, with what right do we exclude the ethical and emotional elements of the subject's life, and retain only the intellectual? Intellectualism, gnosticism, or pure rationalism must always prove itself an inadequate exposition of a universe which includes the human subject, and must continue to call forth moralism or the philosophy of will and emotion, as its needed complement. A metaphysical scheme which invalidates our judgments of moral value by refusing to them objective significance is no less inadequate than a metaphysic which invalidates our intellectual or our æsthetic judgments. The good must find its place, beside the true and the beautiful, in our metaphysical system. And if, as an intellectual being, man might resolve himself into unity with God, and regard himself as a mere mode or aspect of the one Subject, a moral being must round itself to a separate whole. The reality of the moral life implies man's independence of God as well as of nature, and forces upon him, to that extent, a pluralistic rather than a monistic view of the universe. And if a moral theology is no less legitimate than an intellectual theology, it follows that we may interpret God not merely as thought, but as will. It was with a true insight that Aristotle and the Schoolmen thought of God as 'pure activity.' Im Anfang war die That is as true as Im Anfang war das Wort. But we can no more separate will from intelligence than intelligence from will. Will, separated from intelligence, would not be will. What Schopenhauer calls 'will' is only blind brute force; its activity is necessarily disastrous, and » 2 what it does has to be undone when intelligence is born. Aristotle's ultimate reality, on the other hand, is the unity of intelligence and will; the divine life is for him identical in its essence with the ideal life of man, rational activity. Perfection of will implies perfection of intelligence, and perfection of intelligence and will implies also emotional perfection. In us, it is true, "feeling, thought, and volition have all defects which suggest something higher." But the "something higher" which these defects suggest is something higher in the same kind, the perfection of these elements, their harmonious unity. To think of God as perfect Personality, to conceive the divine life as the harmonious activity of perfect will informed by perfect intelligence, and manifested in the feeling of this harmony, is to conceive God as like ourselves, but with our human limitations removed, and to conceive our relation to God as a moral and emotional, and not merely as an intellectual, relation. If, therefore, we are to maintain a spiritual, and more particularly an ethical, view of the universe, we must be in earnest with the conception of personality. Hegelianism is altogether too vague in its utterances here. According to the latest exposition of this philosophy, that of Mr Bradley, God is to be conceived as " super-personal" rather than as "impersonal." "It is better to affirm personality than to call the Absolute impersonal. But neither mistake should be necessary. The Absolute stands above, and not below, its internal distinctions. It does not reject them, but it includes them as elements in its fulness. To speak in concrete language, it is not the indifference but the concrete identity of all extremes. But it is better in this connection to call it super-personal." 3 Yet Mr Bradley closes his book with the statement that, according to "the essential message of Hegel, outside of spirit 1 By Aristotle, of course, this activity is apt to be conceived as an activity of the pure intellect. 3 Ibid., p. 533. 2 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 182. there is not, and there cannot be, any reality, and the more anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real."1 But is not spirit essentially personal, and must we not think of the infinite Spirit rather as complete personality than as super-personal ? It is objected that to conceive God as personality is to contradict his infinity. "The Deity which they want is of course finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and feelings limited and mutable in the process of time. . . . Of course for us to ask seriously if the Absolute can be personal in such a way would be quite absurd." 2 "For me a person is finite or is meaningless."3 "Once give up your finite and mutable person, and you have parted with everything which, for you, makes personality important. . . . For me it is sufficient to know, on one side, that the Absolute is not a finite person. Whether, on the other side, personality in some eviscerated remnant of sense can be applied to it, is a question intellectually unimportant and practically trifling." Such statements as these-and they are typical of the criticism constantly made upon ethical Theism-seem to me to rest upon the ambiguity of the term 'personality.' When we think of personality as essentially finite, we are confounding personality with individuality. The individual is essentially finite, the person is essentially infinite. So far is personality from contradicting the infinite, that, as Lotze says, "only the Infinite is completely personal." If we think of God as being all that we ought to be, as the Reality of the moral ideal, must we not say that, as we gradually constitute our personality, we are tracing the divine image in ourselves, and learning more fully the very nature of God? "The Absolute is not a finite person;" but to say that personality is necessarily finite, "with thoughts and feelings limited and mutable in the 5 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 552. 5 Philosophy of Religion, ch. iv. § 41. 2 Ibid., p. 532. 'Ibid., p. 533. process of time," is to beg the whole question at issue. The question is whether the 'infinite' and the 'personal' are, or are not, contradictory conceptions. The essentially unethical character of an impersonal or super-personal universe is finely suggested by Professor Royce in a little fable of his own invention: And so at worst we are like a child who has come to the palace of the king on the day of his wedding, bearing roses as a gift to grace the feast. For the child, waiting innocently to see whether the king will not appear and praise the welcome flowers, grows at last weary with watching all day and with listening to harsh words outside the palace gate amid the jostling crowd. And so in the evening it falls asleep beneath the great dark walls, unseen and forgotten; and the withering roses by and by fall from its lap, and are scattered by the wind into the dusty highway, there to be trodden under foot and destroyed. Yet all that happens only because there are infinitely fairer treasures within the palace than the ignorant child could bring. The king knows of this-yes, and of ten thousand other proffered gifts of loyal subjects. But he needs them not. Rather are all things from eternity his own." 1 but to the very palace of the king every child of man can bring a gift and treasure which he will not despise -the priceless gift of a free and loving service, the treasure, more precious than all besides, of a will touched to goodness. We cannot believe that man's good and evil are indifferent to God, that evil is only "an element, and a necessary element, in the total goodness of the Universal Will," that in God our "separateness is destroyed," and, with our separateness, our sin, that our goodness follows, like our sin, from the necessity of the divine nature. our good, as in our evil, we feel that our life is our own, personal, separate from God as it is separate from nature, our own—to give to him who gave it to us, or to withhold even from him. 1 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 483. Nay, In religious life. Instead of surrendering the idea of personality, we must, therefore, cherish it as the only key to the moral and It is the hard-won result of long experiThe depth and spirituality of grown with the growth of the It is the presence and opera It is the The ence and deep reflection. the conception of God have idea of human personality. tion of this idea that distinguishes Christianity from other religions, that makes Hebraism a religion, while the lack of it makes Hellenism hardly more than a mythology. As man has learned to know himself, he has advanced in the knowledge of God. Our age is the age of science, its prevailing spirit is what we may call the intellectualism of the scientific mind. Its ambition is to understand, and to understand nature. As in the earliest age of Greek philosophy, the eye of thought is directed outward. task is a great one; no wonder that the energies of the time are wellnigh exhausted by it. But, sooner or later, the view must be turned again inwards, and, when it is, the eternal spiritual realities will be found there still, and the lessons which were not written upon the face of nature will be found graven on the living tablets of the human heart. Man is not all intellect; and if intellect now thrives at the expense of the rest of his nature, as in the Middle Ages intellect was itself in large measure starved and sacrificed that morality and religion might develop, it only means that the education of the human race is conducted, like the education of the individual, bit by bit, step by step. But the education cannot stop until, in insight as in life, humanity has attained the measure of its divine perfection. |