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LECTURE I

MIND AND MATTER, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

LECTURE II

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Belief in the objectivity of our moral judgements logically implies belief in God, . . . . . . . . . . . 69 If God aims at an end not fully realized here, we have a ground for postulating Immortality, . . . . . . 77 Evil must be a necessary means to greater good, . . 79

LECTURE IV

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Note on Non-theistic Idealism, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

LECTURE V

REVELATION, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

LECTURE VI

CHRISTIANITY, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

LECTURE I

MIND AND MATTER

I suppose that to nearly everybody who sets himself down to think seriously about the riddle of the Universe there very soon occurs the question whether Materialism may not contain the solution of all difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investigation had better begin with an enquiry whether Materialism can possibly be true. I say 'can be true' rather than 'is true,' because, though dogmatic Materialists are rare, the typical Agnostic is one who is at least inclined to admit the possibility of Materialism, even when he does not, at the bottom of his mind, practically assume its truth. The man who is prepared to exclude even this one theory of the Universe from the category of possible but unprovable theories is not, properly speaking, an Agnostic. To know that Materialism at least is not true is to know something, and something very important, about the ultimate nature of things. I shall not attempt here any very precise definition of what is meant by Materialism. Strictly speaking, it ought to mean the view that nothing really exists but matter. But the existence, in some sense or other, of our sensations and thoughts and emotions is so obvious to Common-sense that such a creed can hardly be explicitly maintained: it is a creed which is refuted in the very act of enunciating it. For practical purposes, therefore, Materialism may be said to be the view that the ultimate basis of all existence is matter; and that thought, feeling, emotion--consciousness of every kind--is merely an effect, a by-product or concomitant, of certain material processes.

Now if we are to hold that matter is the only thing which exists, or is the ultimate source of all that exists, we ought to be able to say what matter is. To the unreflecting mind matter seems to be the thing that we are most certain of, the one thing that we know all about. Thought, feeling, will, it may be suggested, are in some sense appearances which might, from the point of view of superior insight, turn out to be mere delusions, or at best entirely unimportant and inconsiderable entities. This attitude of mind has been amusingly satirised by the title of one of Mr. Bradley's philosophical essays--'on the supposed uselessness of the Soul.' In this state of mind matter presents itself as the one solid reality--as something undeniable, something perfectly intelligible, something, too, which is pre-eminently important and respectable; while thinking and feeling and willing, joy and sorrow, hope and aspiration, goodness and badness, if they cannot exactly be got rid of altogether, are, as it were, negligible quantities, which must not be allowed to disturb or interfere with the serious business of the Universe.

From this point of view matter is supposed to be the one reality with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter--matter in the sense of the Materialist--is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. For in the experience which the plain man calls seeing or touching there is always present another thing. Even if we suppose that he is Justified in saying 'I touch matter,' there is always present the 'I' as well as the matter. It is always and inevitably matter + mind that he knows. Nobody ever can get away from this 'I,' nobody can ever see or feel what matter is like apart from the 'I' which knows it. He may, indeed, infer that this matter exists apart from the 'I' which knows it. He may infer that it exists, and may even go as far as to assume that, apart from his seeing or touching, or anybody else's seeing or touching, matter possesses all those qualities which it possesses for his own consciousness. But this is inference, and not immediate knowledge. And the validity or reasonableness of the inference may be disputed. How far it is reasonable or legitimate to attribute to matter as it is in itself the qualities which it has for us must depend upon the nature of those qualities. Let us then go on to ask whether the qualities which constitute matter as we know it are qualities which we can reasonably or even intelligibly attribute to a supposed matter-in-itself, to matter considered as something capable of existing by itself altogether apart from any kind of conscious experience.

It will probably be known to all of you that the first person to make this momentous inference was Bishop Berkeley. There was, indeed, an obscure medieval schoolman, hardly recognized by the historians of Philosophy, one Nicholas of Autrecourt, Dean of Metz, who anticipated him in the fourteenth century, and other better-known schoolmen who approximated to the position; and there are, of course, elements in the teaching of Plato and even of Aristotle, or possible interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, which point in the same direction. But full-blown Idealism, in the sense which involves a denial of the independent existence of matter, is always associated with the name of Bishop Berkeley.

Do you say that in that case the tables and chairs must be supposed to disappear the moment we all leave the room? It is true that we do commonly think of the tables and chairs as remaining, even when there is no one there to see or touch them. But that only means, Berkeley explains, that if we or any one else were to come back into the room, we should perceive them. Moreover, even in thinking of them as things which might be perceived under certain conditions, they have entered our minds and so proclaimed their ideal or mind-implying character. To prove that things exist without the mind we should have to conceive of things as unconceived or unthought of. And that is a feat which no one has ever yet succeeded in accomplishing.

Here is Berkeley's own answer to the objection:

Berkeley no doubt did not adequately appreciate the importance of the distinction between mere sensations and mental relations. In the paragraph which I have read to you he tends to explain space away into mere subjective feelings: in this respect and in many others he has been corrected by Kant and the post-Kantian Idealists. Doubtless we cannot analyse away our conception of space or of substance into mere feelings. But relations imply mind no less than sensations. Things are no mere bundles of sensations; we do think of them as objects or substances possessing attributes. Indeed to call them , 'bundles of sensations' implies that the bundle is as important an element in thinghood as the sensations themselves. The bundle implies what Kant would call the intellectual 'categories' of Substance, Quantity, Quality, and the like. We do think objects: but an object is still an object of thought. We can attach no intelligible meaning to the term 'object' which does not imply a subject.

If there is nothing in matter, as we know it, which does not obviously imply mind, if the very idea of matter is unintelligible apart from mind, it is clear that matter can never have existed without mind.

So far I have endeavoured to establish the existence of God by a line of thought which also leads to the position that matter has no independent existence apart from conscious mind, that at bottom nothing exists except minds and their experiences. Now I know that this is a line of thought which, to those who are unfamiliar with it, seems so paradoxical and extravagant that, even when a man does not see his way to reply to it, it will seldom produce immediate or permanent conviction the first time he becomes acquainted with it. It is for the most part only by a considerable course of habituation, extending over some years, that a man succeeds in thinking himself into the idealistic view of the Universe. And after all, there are many minds--some of them, I must admit, not wanting in philosophical power--who never succeed in accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without first being an Idealist. From my own point of view most of the other reasons for believing in the existence of God resolve themselves into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought out. But they may be very good arguments, as far as they go, even when they are not thought out to what seem to me their logical consequences. One of these lines of thought I shall hope to develope in my next lecture; but meanwhile let me attempt to reduce the argument against Materialism to a form in which it will perhaps appeal to Common-sense without much profound metaphysical reflection.

I do not believe that the human mind is really equal to the task of thinking of a Reality which is one and yet is neither mind nor matter but something which combines the nature of both. Practically, where such a creed is professed, the man either thinks of an unconscious Reality in some way generating or evolving mind, and so falls back into the Materialism which he has verbally disclaimed; or he thinks of a mind producing or causing or generating a matter which when produced is something different from itself. This last is of course ordinary Theism in the form in which it is commonly held by those who are not Idealists. From a practical and religious point of view there is nothing to be said against such a view. Still it involves a Dualism, the philosophical difficulties of which I have attempted to suggest to you. I confess that for my own part the only way in which I can conceive of a single ultimate Reality which combines the attributes of what we call mind with those of what we know as matter is by thinking of a Mind conscious of a world or nature which has no existence except in and for that Mind and whatever less complete consciousnesses that may be. I trust that those who have failed to follow my sketch of the arguments which lead to this idealistic conclusion may at least be led by it to see the difficulties either of Materialism or of that kind of agnostic Pantheism which, while admitting in words that the ultimate Reality is not matter, refuses to invest it with the attributes of mind. The argument may be reduced to its simplest form by saying we believe that the ultimate Reality is Mind because mind will explain matter, while matter will not explain mind: while the idea of a Something which is neither in mind nor matter is both unintelligible and gratuitous.

And this line of thought may be supplemented by another. Whatever may be thought of the existence of matter apart from mind, every one will admit that matter possesses no value or worth apart from mind. When we bring into account our moral judgements or judgements of value, we have no difficulty in recognizing mind as the highest or best kind of existence known to us. There is, surely, a certain intrinsic probability in supposing that the Reality from which all being is derived must possess at least as much worth or value as the derived being; and that in thinking of that Reality by the analogy of the highest kind of existence known to us we shall come nearer to a true thought of it than by any other way of thinking possible to us. This is a line of argument which I hope to develope further when I come to examine the bearing upon the religious problem of what is as real a part of our experience as any other--our moral experience.

I will remind you in conclusion, that our argument for the existence of God is at present incomplete. I have tried to lead you to the idea that the ultimate Reality is spiritual, that it is a Mind which knows, or is conscious of, matter. I have tried to lead you with the Idealist to think of the physical Universe as having no existence except in the mind of God, or at all events to believe that the Universe does not exist without such a Mind. What further relation exists between physical nature and this Universal Spirit, I shall hope in the next lecture to consider; and in so doing to suggest a line of argument which will independently lead to the same result, and which does not necessarily presuppose the acceptance of the idealistic creed.

LITERATURE

I do not mean of course that in the earliest stages of consciousness this distinction is actually made; but, if there are stages of consciousness in which the 'I' is not realized, the idea of matter or even of an 'object' or 'not-self' existing apart from consciousness must be supposed to be equally absent.

LECTURE II

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE

In my last lecture I endeavoured to show that matter, so far from constituting the ultimate Reality, cannot reasonably be thought of as existing at all without mind; and that we cannot explain the world without assuming the existence of a Mind in which and for which everything that is not mind has its being. But we are still very far from having fully cleared up the relation between the divine Mind and that Nature which exists in it and for it: while we have hardly dealt at all with the relation between the universal Mind and those lesser minds which we have treated--so far without much argument--as in some way derived from, or dependent upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line of argument goes, we might have to look upon the world as the thought of God, but not as caused by Him or due to His will. We might speak of God as 'making Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I make Nature when we think it or experience it. 'The world is as necessary to God as God is to the world,' we are often told--for instance by my own revered teacher, the late Professor Green. How unsatisfactory this position is from a religious point of view I need hardly insist. For all that such a theory has to say to the contrary, we might have to suppose that, though God is perfectly good, the world which He is compelled to think is very bad, and going from bad to worse. To think of God merely as the Mind which eternally contemplates Nature, without having any power whatever of determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies no ground for hope or aspiration--still less for worship, adoration, imitation. I suggested the possibility that from such a point of view God might be thought of as good, and the world as bad. But that is really to concede too much. A being without a will could as little be bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a character. From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either of them. Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the demand which most reflecting people feel, that the world shall be regarded as a Unity of some kind. If God is thought of as linked by some inexplicable fate to a Nature over which He has no sort of control--not so much control as a mere human being who can produce limited changes in the world,--we can hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity. The old Dualism has broken out again: after all we still have God and the world confronting one another; neither of them is in any way explained by the other. Still less could such a world be supposed to have a purpose or rational end. For our own mere intellectual satisfaction as well as for the satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to ask whether we are not justified in thinking of God as the Cause or Creator of the world, as well as the Thinker of it.

This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem of Causality. The sketch which I gave you last time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up. He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter: he also waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the physical consequent. On this side his work was carried on by Hume. Berkeley resolved our knowledge into a succession of 'ideas.' He did, no doubt, fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if it were a mere succession of feelings: he ignored far too much--though he did not do so completely--that other element in our knowledge, the element of intellectual relation, of which I said something last time. Here, no doubt, Berkeley has been corrected by Kant; and, so far, practically all modern Idealists will own their indebtedness to Kant. Even in the apprehension of a succession of ideas, in the mere recognition that this feeling comes after that, there is an element which cannot be explained by mere feeling. The apprehension that this feeling came after that feeling is not itself a feeling. But can I detect any relation between these experiences of mine except that of succession? We commonly speak of fire as the cause of the melting of the wax, but what do we really know about the matter? Surely on reflection we must admit that we know nothing but this--that, so far as our experience goes, the application of fire is always followed by the melting of the wax. Where this is the case we do, from the point of view of ordinary life, speak of the one phenomenon as the cause of the other. Where we don't discover such an invariable succession, we don't think of the one event as the cause of the other.

These cases of unvaried succession among phenomena, it should be observed, are quite different from cases of real necessary connexion. We don't want to examine thousands of instances of two added to two to be quite sure that they always make four, nor in making the inference do we appeal to any more general law of Uniformity. We simply see that it is and always must be so. Mill no doubt tells us he has no difficulty in supposing that in the region of the fixed stars two and two might make five, but nobody believes him. At all events few of us can pretend to such feats of intellectual elasticity. No amount of contradictory testimony from travellers to the fixed stars, no matter whether they were Bishops of the highest character or trained as Professors of physical Science, would induce us to give a moment's credence to such a story. We simply see that two and two must make four, and that it is inconceivable they should ever, however exceptionally, make five. It is quite otherwise with any case of succession among external phenomena, no matter how unvaried. So long as we confine ourselves to merely physical phenomena nowhere can we discover anything but succession; nowhere do we discover Causality in the sense of a necessary connexion the reversal of which is inconceivable.

Now, it would be just possible to contend that we have got the bare abstract concept or category of Causality in our minds, and yet that there is nothing within our experience to give it any positive content--so that we should have to say, 'Every event must have a cause, but we never know or can know what that cause is. If we are to talk about causes at all, we can only say "The Unknowable is the cause of all things."' Such a position can be barely stated without a contradiction. But surely it is a very difficult one. Nature does not generally supply us with categories of thought, while it gives us no power or opportunity of using them. It would be like holding, for instance, that we have indeed been endowed with the idea of number in general, but that we cannot discover within our experience any numerable things; that we have got the idea of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., but have no capacity whatever for actually counting--for saying that here are three apples, and there four marbles. And, psychologically, it would be difficult to find any parallel to anything of the kind. Nature does not first supply us with clearly defined categories of thought, and then give us a material to exercise them upon. In general we discover these abstract categories by using them in our actual thinking. We count beads or men or horses before we evolve an abstract idea of number, or an abstract multiplication table. It is very difficult to see how this idea of Cause could possibly have got into our heads if we had never in the whole course of our experience come into any sort of contact with any actual concrete cause. Where then, within our experience, if not in the succession of external events, shall we look for a cause--for something to which we can apply this category or abstract notion of causality? I answer 'We must look within: it is in our experience of volition that we actually find something answering to our idea of causal connexion.' And here, I would invite you not to think so much of our consciousness of actually moving our limbs. Here it is possible to argue plausibly that the experience of exercising causality is a delusion. I imagine that, if I will to do so, I can move my arm; but I will to stretch out my arm, and lo! it remains glued to my side, for I have suddenly been paralysed. Or I may be told that the consciousness of exerting power is a mere experience of muscular contraction, and the like. I would ask you to think rather of your power of directing the succession of your own thoughts. I am directly conscious, for instance, that the reason why I am now thinking of Causality, and not of Tariff Reform, is the fact that I have conceived the design of delivering a course of lectures on this subject; the succession of ideas which flow through my mind as I write or speak is only explicable by reference to an end--an end which I am striving to bring into actual being. In such voluntarily concentrated purposeful successions of thought I am immediately exercising causality: and this causality does further influence the order of events in physical nature. My pen or my tongue moves in consequence of this striving of mine, though no doubt for such efforts to take place other physical conditions must be presupposed, which are not wholly within my own control. I am the cause, but not the whole or sole cause of these physical disturbances in external nature: I am a cause but not an uncaused cause. My volition, though it is not the sole cause of the event which I will, is enough to give me a conception of a cause which is the sole cause of the events.

Once more to distant ages of the world Let us revert, and place before our thoughts The face which rural solitude might wear To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece. --In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft grass through half a summer's day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed That timely light, to share his joyous sport: And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs, Across the lawn and through the darksome grove, , Swept in the storm of chace; as moon and stars Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven, When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills Gliding apace, with shadows in their train, Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings, Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque, Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age, From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth In the low vale, or on steep mountain side; And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard,-- These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood Of gamesome Deities; or Pan himself, The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God!

Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the interdependence of all the various forces and departments of Nature, have made such a view of it impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the cause of any one phenomenon , must be the cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the undesigned concurrence of a number of independent agencies: and perhaps we may go on further to argue that this one cause must be the ultimate cause even of those events which are directly and immediately caused by our own wills. But that is a question which I will put aside for the present. At least for the events of physical nature there must be one Cause. And if the only sort of cause we know is a conscious and rational being, then we have another most powerful reason for believing that the ultimate reality, from which all other reality is derived, is Mind--a single conscious Mind which we may now further describe as not only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.

Let me add this additional consideration in support of the conclusion that the world is not merely thought by God but is also willed by God. When we talk about thought without will, we are talking about something that we know absolutely nothing about. In all the consciousness that we know of, in every moment of our own immediate waking experience, we find thought, feeling, willing. Even in the consciousness of animals there appears to be something analogous to these three sides or aspects of consciousness: but at all events in developed human consciousness we know of no such thing as thinking without willing. All thought involves attention, and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian Idealists, we have been led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought and--I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to insist upon that--Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like Schopenhauer and Edouard von Hartmann, we are conducted by the appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless abstraction, and that Schopenhauer's Will without Reason was as impossible an abstraction as the apparently will-less universal Thinker of the Hegelian: while against Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of them, exactly half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.

And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side with the same distinctness and irreducibility that they do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too involves generalization, and in universal concepts much that was present in the living experience of actual perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of reproduction--and a very imperfect reproduction--of actual, living, sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the same distinction between actual present experience and the universal concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again, willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not cause and the tiny fragment of the Universe which by means of this knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and Feeling--emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind--that we shall attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge? Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters--of what goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not so with our knowledge of God? The Gnosticism which forgets the immensity of the difference between the Divine Mind and the human is not less unreasonable--not less opposed to the principles on which we conduct our thinking in every other department of life--than the Agnosticism which rejects probabilities because we cannot have immediate certainties, and insists on knowing nothing because we cannot know everything.

Now, I think this is one of the passages which would justify Mr. Bradley's well-known epigram, that Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more about the Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has ever ventured to tell us about God.

Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the mistakes about Causality against which this lecture has been a protest--I mean the tendency to resolve it into necessary connexion--did in the end come to admit that in the large resort we come into contact with Causality only in our own Wills. I owe the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the paragraph in which he introduces it:--

LITERATURE

Of course deeply religious men like Green who have held this view did not admit, or did not realize, such consequences. The tendency here criticized is undoubtedly derived from Hegel, but passages suggestive of the opposite view can be extracted from his writings, e.g.: 'God, however, as subjective Power, is not simply will, intention, etc., but rather immediate Cause' .

Of course passages can be quoted from Hegel himself which suggest the idea that God is Will as well as Thought; I am speaking of the general tendency of Hegel and many of his disciples. Some recent Hegelians, such as Professor Boyce, seem to be less open to this criticism, but there are difficulties in thinking of God as Will and yet continuing to speak of ultimate Reality as out of Time.

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of God--that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties--the relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds, the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended for. All that I need insist on for my present purpose is--

That God is personal in the sense that He is a self-conscious, thinking, willing, feeling Being, distinguishable from each and all less perfect minds.

That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to the extent which I have just defined--that it is the real cause of its own actions. It is capable of self-determination. The man's actions are determined by his character. That is quite consistent with the admission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of such and such a character coming into existence at such and such a time.

I will not say that the conception of those who regard the human mind as literally a part of the divine, so that the human consciousness is in no sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those who hold it, inconsistent with the conception of personality both in God and man: I will only say that I do not myself understand such an assertion. I regard the human mind as derived from God, but not as being part of God. Further discussion of this question I reserve for my next lecture.

Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some pleasures are better than others--such judgements are as much the work of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two and two must make four. We have just as much right to assume that our moral ideas--our ideas of value--must come from God too. For God too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the good; and our judgements of value--judgements that such and such an end is good or worth striving for--in so far as they are true judgements, must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good--the same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God.

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