gerous way. In fact, the only plausible explanation of real evil, in case there is separate evil in the world, an explanation which shall yet be consistent with the Father’s power and goodness, is the pre¬ viously mentioned explanation, that, if beings were created, as we are, free, they must needs be also free to choose the evil. But this explanation only serves to explain the evil that has directly resulted from free choice, that directly affects those who made the choice, and that was distinctly foreseen by them when they chose it. No other evil is justi¬ fiable as a result of free-will; all other evil seems absolutely mysterious, when viewed with reference to God’s goodness; and very little of the evil that we experience in this world is the direct result of the deliberate choice of those who suffer it. It is hardly necessary to illustrate these facts, which, like the most of the present chapter, belong to the best- known and most frequently misrepresented of the matters of human controversy. The poor of great cities, the men who inherit loathsome diseases, the naturally weak of will, the insane, the sufferers in accidents, the soldiers led to slaughter, the slaves, the down-trodden peasants and laborers of the world: all these, whose ills are simply inconceivable in might, have no more brought all this on themselves of their own free-will, than have the healthy and happy, the heirs of wealth, the ever-joyous, earned for themselves the good fortune to which they are born. A man can do much with and for himself; but the best part of him, and commonly of his envi¬ ronment, is determined by birth. And for most of THE WORLD OF DOUBT that “ with which the face of man is blackened,” the power is thus responsible which no free-will of man has made. This evil must either be an organic ele¬ ment in a real higher perfect unity of the world, or else free-will is no explanation or justification for its existence.
But really, the intelligent reader needs, when we get to this most familiar part of our discussion, no very lengthy repetition of the old story. His mind is doubtless made up already, and he will desire only a brief reminder of the chief points that have to do with this question and with those questions most nearly related thereto.
If, then, the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood is to be religiously useful to us, we must make up our minds whether the Father that we seek is to be the omnipotent Ruler of things, or only a limited Power, or again, something else that is not power. In the last mentioned case, he belongs to that aspect of the world which we just now purposely exclude from consideration. If the Father is a Power, then we all know the old but eternally fresh dilemma about his nature. He is either infinite or limited. If he is infinite, we find arising all the difficulties just sug¬ gested in our consideration of the hypothesis of an Infinite Reason, and one other difficulty, worse, if anything, than they all. That difficulty we shall mention soon again. But if, on the other hand, the Father is to be conceived as a limited power, if we are to accept some sort of modem Manicheanism, then no a 'priori disproof of the possibility of the hypothesis can be offered; since, a priori, any finite 274 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY power you please is a possibility; but our great trouble will then lie in the fact that only experience can establish such an hypothesis, which by its very nature needs a posteriori proof. And experience, as summed up in science, has in fact simply no need of that hypothesis. Hence we shall be left alto¬ gether in doubt, at least while we study the World as Power.
Such is the argument in its most general state¬ ment. Now as to the points in greater detail. The great difficulty mentioned above as lying in the way of the hypothesis of an infinite creative power is a difficulty in the conception of creation itself. Crea¬ tion, for the popular conception, certainly involves producing a thing of some kind by a creative act, the thing produced existing forthwith outside of the creator. To give up this separation of creator and product is to become pantheistic. And with monism we are not here concerned. But now the idea of an infinite creative Power outside of his products involves more than one difficulty. We shall not dwell on the old difficulty that this infinite Power would become finite as soon as there was in existence something outside of it. We shall proceed at once to a more fruitful and serious difficulty, which we find in the fact that the concept of producing an ex¬ ternal thing involves, of necessity, a relation to a Law, above both producer and product, which de¬ termines the conditions under which there can be a product at all. The creative power must then work under conditions, however magical and myste¬ rious its acts may be. And working under condi- THE WORLD OF DOUBT THE WORLD OF DOUBT tions, it must be finite. No device for minimizing the meaning of this separation of creative power and created thing will really escape the difficulty result¬ ing. And this difficulty will appear in all cases of supposed creation. It may be summed up once more in the statement that any creative power in act, just as much needs explanation in some higher law and power as does the thing created itself, so that whatever creates a product external to itself becomes thereby as truly dependent a power as we ourselves are. Let us exemplify.
“ Let there be light” shall represent a creative act. If the light that results is simply a fact in God, then our difficulty is avoided, but the very concep¬ tion of a power creating anything external to itself is abandoned. Then one becomes frankly pantheis¬ tic, and identifies all things with the creative power. But if the light is not the creative act, but sepa¬ rate from it, then you have an insurmountable diffi¬ culty in the conception. For the power that makes th e fiat is not itself the created thing, but, as it were, this power finds the product as a result of the fiat. God saying, Fiat lux, finds that this act, this word, or whatever process it symbolizes as actually happen¬ ing in the divine mind, is followed by the external appearance of something, namely, light. Now as creator of light, God is not yet conceived as the creator of those conditions under which just this ■fiat could be followed by just these consequences. But the external success of the fiat presupposes ex¬ ternal conditions under which the fiat can succeed. Just as when I say, “ let there be light,” and pro- 276 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY duce it by my own fiat plus the necessary physical acts, even so the conceived Deity in the conceived case, though needing no other means save his fiat, has yet needed that, and has found his fiat a suffi¬ cient cause of this external change from darkness to light. But just as my success in making light needs explanation by the laws of an external world, so God’s success in making it also needs explanation, in the case thus conceived, although his means are sup¬ posed to have been less complex than mine have to be. He too is put by this conception in a world of law external to himself, the laws of this world being such as require that, in order to produce light as an external fact he shall perform a certain act, the fiat. These laws secure him success, in the supposed case, under just these conditions. The^a£ may itself be whatever process you will.
But how then did these conditions arise? How is it that God is able to make light as an existence external to himself? The external conditions on which his present success depends may indeed have been again created by himself. Even so a man could now possibly make some ingenious mechanism, com¬ pounded of telephones and what else you will, so as to be able to light a whole building by the impulse produced by some very simple act, e. g., by speaking the words, “ Let there be light,” against some pre¬ pared membrane. But then we are involved in just the same difficulties. As the man’s mechanical skill would imply a conformity to laws of. nature preced¬ ing his present power to make light by the word of his mouth, even so, if God’s creative power has pre- THE WORLD OF DOUBT viously created the conditions of the success of this his present fiat, the same questions would arise about those conditions, and so on ad infinitum. Always even the infinite series of acts would imply, at every step of the regress, God working upon a nature ex¬ ternal to himself, and so God as a finite power, sub¬ ject to the laws that let him work.
But then may we not hereupon accept the doctrine of God’s infinity, and say that this infinite power is identical with its products? Shall we not be panthe¬ ists of the old-fashioned sort, and yet keep the doc¬ trine of God’s Fatherhood? The attempt is hope¬ less. And the difficulties in the way of the religious use of the pantheistic hypotheses have already been considered. Furthermore, many theistic thinkers have felt the force of an old set of arguments that, in this country and recently, Professor Bowne, in his “ Metaphysics,” has more than once set forth at length, namely, the thought that, if God can be as Creator identical with his other creations, he cannot as a Power well be identical with us, who feel our¬ selves to be also creative powers, and not mere forms or acts in any other power. But if we are separate from God, then in this class of cases his creation of us involves all the difficulties before pointed out. When he made us, his fiat was successful beyond himself. The success needs a preexistent law, or, if you will, a preexistent power outside of him, to ex¬ plain it; just exactly as my power to move my hand or to wink my eye implies a whole universe of being outside of me in order to give my will just this posi¬ tion of authority. Merely assume in your thought 278 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY these conceptions, namely, a power that acts and an external product resulting from its acts; and at once you need a higher power and a higher law, external to the first power, to explain how the first power, acting in just this way, could achieve just this exter¬ nal result. Hence either God creates nothing exter¬ nal to himself, or else, in creating, he works under the laws that presuppose a power higher than him¬ self, and external to himself. In the briefest form: Acts that produce external changes imply adjust¬ ment of means to ends. The creation of external things is such an act. Unless an actor is identical with the product itself, he must therefore be subject to the external conditions of adjustment, i. e., he must be finite.
Certain thinkers are accustomed to suppose that they honor God by having obscure and self-contra¬ dictory ideas about him. Hence they avoid all of the foregoing difficulties by calling the creative act a mystery. Now there are mysteries and mysteries. We do not know how trees grow, nor why the planets obey the law of gravitation. But we are sure that they do. On the other hand, we do not know how squares can be round; but we happen in this case to perceive that squares cannot be round. Now if somebody tells me that God is a round square, and appeals to me to consider reverently whether piety allows me to assert, in view of the mystery of God’s being, that God is not a round square, my answer is very plain. I say at once that it must be as irrever¬ ent to call God absurd and self-contradictory in his nature as to call him anything else discreditable; THE WORLD OF DOUBT THE WORLD OF DOUBT and that I, fot my part, hesitate not to declare very frankly that though I know very little about God, I am sure that he is no round square. Now even so, an absurd and self-contradictory account of the act of creation must not be allowed to escape us by pleading that creation is a mystery, and that nobody can see how God makes things. For, mysterious as creation may be, we can be sure that if creation is of such a nature as to involve an external power and an external law, outside of God’s creative power itself, then God is himself not infinite. And we can be equally sure that unless God as creator is identical with his products, the idea of a creative act does in¬ volve just such a power preceding the act and out¬ side of God himself. The device then by which so many thinkers seek to escape from this well-known and ancient net of dialectics, seems for us necessarily unsuccessful. There are mysteries that we have rev¬ erently to accept, and before long we ourselves shall find such, and we shall be glad to bow before them. But if creation is indeed such a mystery, at all events a self-contradiction about creation is not such a mys¬ tery.
VI.
VI.
We have dwelt at length on one of the alterna¬ tives of Theism. Disheartened, and without any en¬ thusiasm, we turn to the other. Must we after all remain content in our religion without any assur¬ ance of the supremacy of the good? *Must we be con¬ tent with this halting half Theism of the empirical Design-Argument? If we must be, we must be. But 280 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY what if that too should fail us? Let us at least try it. This unsatisfactory view says: “ What powers there may be in the world we can never wholly know. But we think that there is evidence that they that be for the moral law are more than they that be against it. And this evidence is given us by the em¬ pirically discerned marks of benevolent design about us in the world.’’ This view, whatever its relig¬ ious worth, is at all events capable only of empirical proof, and pretends only to such a rank. And it is in discussing this hypothesis, in the dim light of the weary centuries of dispute about it, that one comes at last fully to feel the bitterness of the doubt that, like a tormenting disease, assails and eternally must assail one who tries to be content with this dreary vis¬ ible world in which we have been so far vainly seek¬ ing for comfort. Wrangle upon wrangle, ceaseless balancing of probabilities this way and that, opinions and ridicule and abuse forever, and no result: such is this empirical teleology that seeks a world-manu¬ facturer, and cannot discover him. Let us take up the miserable business just where we happen to find it.
There is no doubt about this, that the doctrine of evolution has rendered the popular empirical proof of a special designing power much harder than we used to suppose. And when we pass to this aspect of our question, we must confess at once that we have nothing to say which can be new to any reader of modern discussion. This empirical teleology will al¬ ways remain a doubtful subject for human inquiry. Any dogmatic disproof of intelligent finite powers THE WORLD OF DOUBT or daemons above us must be regarded as impossi¬ ble. The only question to be bere solved is the possibility of purely inductive proof of the existence of such higher intelligent agencies. And here, as we hold, just the ancient difficulties as to the proof of any empirical teleological theory survive, and are, in spite of all that recent writers have done, rather increased by our knowledge of the facts of evolution. Especially does evolution make the empirical hypoth¬ esis of the existence of any finite and good daemonic power, intelligently and morally working in the world, continually more and more obscure. For first, as to the intelligence of the higher powers, what the theory of evolution has done for us in this re¬ spect is simply to make us feel that we know not, and cannot yet even guess, how much what we em¬ pirically call bare mechanism can do to simulate the effects of what, in an equally empirical and blind way, men call intelligence. Therefore no empirical design-argument has longer anywhere nearly the same amount of persuasive power that it once seemed to have. The matter stands thus: An empirical de¬ sign-argument might very plausibly reason that, if I find a child’s blocks arranged to make a house or to spell words, I can assume that some designing human hand has so placed them. But the inductive force of the argument rests on my previous knowledge that nothing is so apt to put blocks in that order, in this present visible world, as just a designing human hand. But if I discovered certain physical conditions that did very frequently work, and that did often so arrange blocks, then I should no longer 282 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY consider the given arrangement good proof of human design. Even so, until I see that natural selection can simulate the designing power of human beings, I may be disposed to regard a given case of appar¬ ent design in nature as a fair inductive proof of some great carpenter or watch-maker working there. But the induction, never overwhelming, becomes very weak when I learn that there are so-called physical conditions such as we or chance can produce, which, however, do nevertheless result in things that my eye would have called full of design. For then I am led to feel as if I could pass no judgment at all upon concrete cases. Yet only by concrete cases can an empirical hypothesis be proved. Therefore unless a pebble proves design an eye does not prove design.
But design, we hear, is not incompatible with evo¬ lution. Of course not. And if there is a designer, who works through evolution, then indeed he shows wonderful foresight and mastery. But the question is, not what is compatible with evolution, but what can be proven from bare experience. And what the modern man has very justly come to see is that mere experience must leave him in utter doubt about what powers, intelligent or not intelligent, are the sources of all our experience. We can find laws; but they take us only a short way. And the more we know about nature, the less inclined we feel to dogmatize on the basis of mere experience about what powers are behind the scenes. They may be intelligent, and they may be what we call in this world of sense mechanical. But as finite powers, given in experience, we men know them solely by THE WORLD OF DOUBT their effects. And their effects are very remote hints of their real nature. It is really painful to read the elaborate wastes of effort made in our day to prove that some theological dogma about some power beyond experience is not refuted by expe¬ rience. As if such proof made anybody’s creed either more or less doubtful. A really well-founded Theism would not be, in this tedious way, eternally on the defensive.
But there is the other aspect of the matter. An intelligent power, were it admitted, would not need to be moral. If there is design, is the designer demon¬ strably good? Let us pass over to that question.
VII.
If evolution has done anything for us, it has tended to increase our sense of the mystery of the world of experience, and therefore the philosoph¬ ically minded religious student is in truth, for yet this other reason, weary of all this empirical Theism, namely, because he despairs of finding out, by such an empirical process, anything about the actual pur¬ poses of any designer, even if there be a designer. To study English literature in the rubbish heaps of a book-binder’s work-shop, would seem to a wise man a much more hopeful undertaking than to seek any one notion of the real plan on which this world is made from a merely empirical study of our little fragment of nature. Science is right in abandoning such undertakings wholly and for all its now prob¬ able future work. Religion must find the religious 284 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY aspect of reality in a totally different direction. The higher the realities that we study, the harder the task. The heavens declare very many things not wholly clear to us; but the earth and man declare, as natural facts, very many more and more confusing things. Only a poetical abstraction can show us any one plan of religious value in the world of sense, any one declaration of anybody’s glory therein. An equally strong opposing interest would find just as good evidence for what it sought if it should hold another view of what is designed. Nature is, so re¬ garded, a confused hum of voices. “ Nature,” says one voice, “ is meant to provide bountifully for the wants of sentient life.” “ Therefore,” says another voice, “ all the weak, the sick, the old, must starve, and all the carnivorous destroy their neighbors.” “ Nature aims at the evolution of the highest type of life,” says the first voice. “ Therefore,” it is replied, “ she bountifully provides swarms of parasites of all sorts to feed on higher life.” “ Nature desires or¬ der and unity,” says the voice from the heavens. “ Therefore she makes meteors and comets,” replies the echoing voice. — And if now the Fiend appears, and suggests, as the only satisfactory design-hypoth¬ esis, something of this sort, how could experience answer him? — “ Nature,” he says, “ is designed by a being who delights in manifold activity of all sorts, in variety of organization throughout the world, in the fine contrasts of the numberless forms of sentient life, and in whatever means vigor. He likes to see many living creatures, and he likes to see them fight. He likes the sight of suffering, as well as of joy; THE WORLD OF DOUBT because both mean variety of action. He delights in the triumphs of the victors, in the groans of the con¬ quered, in the sportiveness of young animals, in the writhing of a poor beast that dies in torture, in the insidious struggle for existence that the Entozoa carry on, in the hopeless sighs that men send up to him in their woe, and in the ideal raptures and agonies of saints, artists, and lovers. All these things he likes, because they are just so many forms of ex¬ istence. He wants plenty of life and vigor to con¬ template, as a boy wants stiff soap-suds to make pretty bubbles for his pleasure as he lies idle. This being is doubtless finite (like his brother, the Sete- bos of the inimitable monologue that Browning has put into Caliban’s mouth). But just now he reigns hereabouts, even as Caliban’s Setebos reigned in the island. And his designs are so obviously shown in nature, that anybody ought to believe in him who simply looks at the facts of experience.”
Of this horrible doctrine we apprehend that ex¬ perience as such offers no disproof. For all that science can say, we might be in the hands of just such a demon. Hence it behooves religious students to cease looking for the living God among the dead facts of physical science, and to betake themselves to their own proper field. Science simply leaves all such hypotheses utterly doubtful. Our little comer of the world may have become what it is in any one of numberless physically definable ways. And, if designed, its immediate purpose may be any one of numberless purposes. It is not probable that expe¬ rience can tell us much about that matter. Science 286 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY is very right in appealing to experience with wholly different aims, namely, for the sake of understanding the laws of the sequence of phenomena, to the? end that we may be able to know what the world-plan, however it may be formed, does actually render us capable of accomplishing just now and here in our concrete dealings with things. And if science, in doing all this, has to make certain postulates, and to accept them on faith, then such faith, though it needs indeed a deeper foundation, is at least not identical with the presumption that, undertaking not simply to postulate, but to prove beyond doubt, pretends to discover with certainty, from bare experience, that the world - maker’s plans do agree with our plans. After all, such empirical Theism is assuming its safest and most characteristic form when it appears no longer as a genuine investigator, but poses as the defendant’s attorney, takes prudent refuge behind the rules of debate, and demands that other people shall assume the burden of proof, and either show it to be certainly false, or else accept it for the sake of pro¬ priety.
VIII.
VIII.
We turned to the supposed external World of Powers, and we have found it either dumb, or else given to dark and doubtful speeches. The Powers may indeed be somehow of the highest worth. But to us, even if we accept unquestioningly the supposed external world, the worth of it all seems doubtful, and more so the longer we study the matter. * The partial evil may be universal good; but we could not THE WORLD OF DOUBT in this external world see how, nor could we find proof of the fact. What a Power causes, that the power seems responsible for. And so the Powers that cause the inestimable might of evil in the world seem of very doubtful religious worth.
We have already suggested in outline why this doubtful result was to be expected. These Powers were assumed to exist apart from our thought, in time and space, and to work in time. They have, as workers in time, no certain and eternal signifi¬ cance. A single Infinite Power is, properly speak¬ ing, a misnomer. If a power produces something that is external to itself, then the very idea of such an occurrence implies another power, separate from the first, and therefore limiting it. If however the power is identical with its own products, then the name power no longer properly belongs to it. For, as we shall see when we come to speak of the world in its other aspect, namely, as eternal, the conceptions of power and product, of cause and effect, and of all like existences, are found to be only subordinate to the highest conception of the world as Thought. For the Eternal Thought are all these powers; but in themselves they belong to the flux of things. Each one of them says, Not in me, when you ask it for the significance of the world as a whole. Each power says: “ I work here along with the others. I fight, I strive, I conquer, I obey, I seek my ends as I can. But beyond me are the conditions that limit me.” And these conditions are the other