ASPECTS OF THEISM

WILLIAM KNIGHT

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PREFACE

IN the year 1870, I gave a course of twelve lectures in Dundee, on the subject of Theism. These were mainly historical, and were intended to be wrought out more fully for publication; but the pressure of other interests prevented the completion of this project. Most of the conclusions reached were embodied in an article published in The British Quarterly Review in July 1871, and afterwards included in a volume of Studies in Philosophy and Literature (1879). In 1890 I was asked to give a short course of lectures on the same subject to the Theological College at Salisbury. These I repeated in London in 1891.

In the present volume these lectures are enlarged, with several addenda. It contains little of the history of the proofs, which I endeavoured to trace in detail, in 1868; but it discusses the problem of Theism under aspects which may perhaps be more useful at the present time. In any case, it is for the student of Theology, rather than of Philosophy, to supply the former—which remains a desideratum in our British literature.

It is obvious that, to understand the precise nature of the problem, and what has really to be proved, is an indispensable preliminary to any solution of it; and, while I believe—and have tried in the following pages to show—that the theistic interpretation of the Universe is the most luminous, the most comprehensive, and the least likely to be undermined by future critical assault, I at the same time suggest that we should include much within it, which has at times been excluded, and even supposed to be antagonistic.

It is scarcely necessary to add that it is impossible to deal with the problem, either as one of experience or of history, while ignoring its philosophical basis. Just as a psychology—whether psychical or physiological—which ignores metaphysic, is disqualified, at the outset, from reaching conclusions which the human race can ultimately endorse; so a Theism, which dispenses with Philosophy, can have neither an adequate basis nor a root of endurance. If based on mere authority, or unsifted dogma, it can have no evidential warrant that is trustworthy or lasting. I have treated it throughout these pages as a problem of Philosophy.

It was my original intention to fill the latter half of the volume with notes, referring to the literature of the subject; and, with this end in view, I have kept it back for two years. That literature, however, is so vast, and is becoming so increasingly complex, that I have thought it better to print these Aspects of Theism¹ very much as they were spoken, and to offer them without notes, as a short study of a great problem. Something in the way of history may be written by and by.

The discussion of the subject has brought me into partial antagonism with men whom I greatly honour, with friends deceased, and many contemporaries of eminence. It is difficult to exaggerate the debt we owe—in Criticism, Philosophy, and Science—to such writers as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Tyndall, and others, from whose opinion, on ultimate problems I nevertheless dissent. My appreciation of their work is not to be measured by the extent of the speculative difference which separates us.

W. K.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER II

THE EVOLUTION OF THEISM

CHAPTER III

ITS HISTORIC TYPES

CHAPTER IV

INADEQUATE AND PARTIAL THEORIES

CHAPTER V

INADEQUATE AND PARTIAL THEORIES—Continued

CHAPTER VI

THE METAPHYSIC OF PHYSICS

CHAPTER VII

CAUSALITY

CHAPTER VIII

THE EVIDENCE OF INTUITION

CHAPTER IX

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFINITE

CHAPTER X

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE INFINITE

CHAPTER XI

PERSONALITY AND THE INFINITE

CHAPTER XII

THE ETHICAL ARGUMENT

CHAPTER XIII

THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS RELATION TO THEISM

CHAPTER XIV

THE FAILURE OF AGNOSTICISM

CHAPTER XV

A SOLUTION BY WAY OF COMPREHENSION, AND NOT OF EXCLUSION

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

IN the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that any one will be able to discover a new theistic argument. The subject has been already dealt with, in almost every conceivable way, and from the most opposite points of view. It has been, before all others, a problem of the ages. Nevertheless, in each successive era, a re-statement, which is a new statement, of the question at issue has been found to be necessary. The nineteenth century cannot—and it ought not—to rest contented with the way in which preceding centuries have discussed it; and those who most of all inherit the spirit of philosophical inquiry—that of reverent criticism and construction combined—will be the least satisfied with traditional modes of proof, even when profoundly grateful for them. In saying this, I know that I am in antagonism to the spirit which dominated Mediæval Philosophy, and to which many nowadays desire to bring us back; i.e. the unreasoning attitude of intellectual deference to Authority, presented ab extra. Those, however, who have the profoundest admiration for Scholasticism—and who themselves owe a thousand things to it—may, at the same time, differ from its characteristic note, and its dominant tendency.

But when, in this century, Theism is represented, even in highly intellectual quarters, as an old-fashioned tradition—an effete superstition, transmitted from weak and credulous ages—as a relic of Mediævalism now quite out of date, as well as out of touch with the spirit and results of modern Science; when, in other quarters, it is regarded as a miserable half-way house—to live in which is worse than to be an agnostic, or speculative nihilist—it is evident that the discussion of the subject cannot be inopportune. It is not only from those who are explicitly agnostic, however, that opposition to a theistic view of the Universe comes. Its claim is set aside, and the evidence of its fundamental truth is quite as much obscured, by those who have built around it a superstructure of dogma, which does not belong to it by natural affinity; and the addenda, which specialists have annexed to it, must be removed, before its simple foundations can be be laid bare.

The proofs of Theism are not philosophically recondite. They do not require any great, or original, speculative power to apprehend them. If they did, it would be extremely unfortunate for the masses of mankind—the dim common populations, who must be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the rest of the world. To see, and to feel the force of, some of these proofs rather demands the cessation of a strictly philosophic struggle with problems, and the exercise instead of what one poet calls a wise passiveness; along with the possession of sundry moral virtues, such as reverence, candour, and openness of mind to evidence when it is presented ab intra, as well as ab extra. It was almost a commonplace of Hebraism that we cannot by searching find out God; and this has found notable expression in the language of one of our modern idealistic poets, who, while he glorifies the exercise of Reason in its higher synthetic flights, distrusts the meddling intellect in its incessant analyses of things. To him, as to the seers in Palestine, it was not by the nimblest intellectual scrutiny that we could find the secret of the world, but by simple receptivity; in other words, and in his own language, by bringing with us, when we enter the temple of Nature, a heart that watches and receives.

Wordsworth saw, as very few have ever seen, that an incessant apocalypse is going on in Nature, which many of us altogether miss, and to which we all at times are blind; and that, in the apprehension of this—which is a real disclosure of the Infinite to the finite, as constant as the sunrise, or as the ebbing and the flowing of the tide—we find the basis of Theism laid for us. There are many other lines of evidence besides this, which we shall try to follow out. Probably we shall find none of them more interesting, or more satisfactory.

The agnostic position on the subject of Theism has assumed many phases, but none is more curious than the following. It has been said that no evidence for the being of God exists, or in the nature of things is possible; but that, nevertheless, the belief is most useful to the race, because it has an uplifting influence on conduct. It is a buttress to morality. It is therefore wise to hold to it, in one form or another, although it is altogether unverifiable when we apply a logical test, and rigorously scrutinise its evidence; because in abandoning it we lose one of the moral forces of the world, and to that extent weaken the elements of social order and stability.

It is impossible to despise any conclusion honestly come to by the agnostic, who finds no evidence of the Divine Existence—although it might be better, both for him and for the world, that whatsoever can be shaken, in the way of proof, should also be removed out of the way, in order that what cannot be shaken may remain—but this clinging to one of the immemorial traditions of the race, in the absence of any evidence in support of it, may be adduced as indirect testimony to the belief in question; one of those latent tributes—sub-conscious to the individual—which are more interesting to the student of evidence than direct testimony can be. If there be no real Object corresponding to the theistic belief, the phenomena of religious history may be at once set down as abnormal ones. They are aspects of social disease; and the fact that this belief is welcomed, for any purpose whatsoever, by one who is speculatively agnostic, is an indirect witness in its favour. A philosophical illusion can have no moral value in the sphere of belief.

It will be the aim of the following chapters to approach by degrees to a solution of the problem, which will combine the truth of Theism with what has been called the higher Pantheism, and will also represent the theistic view of the Universe as a focus, at which the conclusions of Speculative Philosophy, Science, Poetry, Art, History, and Religion meet—a focus at which the personal and the impersonal view of the ultimate mystery combine; and at which the wonder, in which all Philosophy begins, may unite with the admiration and the ecstasy in which Poetry culminates, and the worship in which Religion lives, and moves, and has its being. It will perhaps be seen that the most comprehensive solution of the problem—when God is regarded as the master light of all our seeing—is at the same time the most precise.

In certain moods of mind one may recognise separate powers in Nature, cooperating to effect great cosmic ends; in other moods, we may construe the whole life of the Cosmos as the outcome of a single protean Force; and, again, we may see a real alter ego, transcending ourselves, in that immeasurable Personality before which we bow in worship. At the same time it is necessary to bring these different views of the Universe—which may be separately legitimate as they appeal to the imagination, the reason, and the heart—to a focus, that we may find them authenticated by the humanity to which each appeals, and which alone can interpret the whole. If we break up our theodicy, or doctrine of God, into a number of separate sections—and try to pass from one to the other of them, as we would go from room to room in a house, or from province to province in Nature, or even from one science to another in the realm of knowledge—we run the risk of the whole conception becoming attenuated, nebulous, and vague. It is for this reason that the encyclopædic view, which an eclectic Theism presents to us, is as unsatisfactory to the mind and the heart, as the irreverent precision, which pretends to be as familiar with the ways of the Infinite as with the procedure of a next-door neighbour.

A point worthy of consideration at this stage belongs almost to the prolegomena of theistic discussion. It is that no single mind could by any possibility construct for itself a theodicy, or doctrine of God. It was a fancy of Rousseau's that the intellectual evidence of Theism is such that were one placed in childhood on an uninhabited desert island, he would grow up in the unsophisticated recognition of one Supreme Being. In such circumstances a nineteenth century child would not probably develop into anything else than a savage. We have all grown into the beliefs we now entertain, through the myriad influences of civilisation, and by education as much as by inheritance. By this it is not meant that the theistic belief has been created, either by tradition or by education; but it has certainly been elicited and evolved by both of them. It has not been built up, in the case of any single individual of the human race, by the labour of his own understanding; but has been, at one and the same time, communicated ab extra, and evolved ab intra, and has thus been handed on throughout the ages. The notions which we now entertain on this subject have been expanded and enriched by the thoughts of all our predecessors. Theism is our heritage; and we are now the heirs of all the ages, of Indian, Semitic, Greek, Zoroastrian, Arabic, and Christian thought upon the subject; but Theism has not been left behind, as Comte affirmed, in the scientific age of the world, as the relic of a primitive theological period. On the contrary, this belief—which, on the evidence of history, may validly be called a central conviction of the human race—has expanded, and has assumed phases, both of strength and of refinement, which it did not possess in the infancy of the world.

Even if we suppose that many of the celebrated modes of proof, by which philosophers have sought to establish the Divine Existence, are unsatisfactory—and I shall have to show this in subsequent chapters, although it brings me into opposition with many contemporary writers—they have failed for the most part only when taken by themselves, when detached from one another, and from their source; and however extravagant their separate pretensions, they all started from a root of truth. Suppose that we admit, to begin with, (what we must concede at the end,) that by no process of reasoning, or argumentative deduction, the inference of Theism can be reached, it is simply because it is the premiss we are in search of. That stupendous premiss—the very greatest in the universe—may have other proof, however, than the evidence of ratiocination; and the human race, in which it has arisen, may carry about with it a vast and many-sided