Such is the way of the postulates. And yet we desire to find, if we can, a more excellent way. These postulates must be confirmed if possible, and then subordinated to higher results. It was the skeptical work of the last chapter to turn attention away from false or inconclusive methods of estab¬ lishing religious faith. There we saw how much must seem, according to all the ordinary apologetic methods, theoretically doubtful. In this chapter we have seen how postulates, theoretically uncertain, but practically worth the risk, are at the foundation of our whole lives. Hereafter we shall seek to dig beneath these foundations to that other sort of theo¬ retical certainty whereof we have made mention. If we get it, then all our work will have been worth 332 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY while. Our skepticism will have saved us from an¬ tiquated methods, and from worn-out dogmas. Our faith will have been purified by being reduced to certain simple postulates that are not identical with the traditional creeds, although those creeds tried to express them. And both our skepticism and our faith will then finally become elements of a broader Religious Insight.
The dead external reality, into whose darkness we had to peer in vain for light, has indeed transformed itself. It is no more merely dead, or merely exter¬ nal. It is ours and for us. It was a world of doubt in the last chapter, just because we made it dead and external. Now that we have seen how it was the expression of postulates, it seems to have become plastic and ideal. Yet what it has gained in plas¬ ticity, it has lost in authority. After all, is not this business of postulating into the void a dangerous one? Is it not a hollow and empty activity this, if we really reflect upon it? Courage indeed we must have; but is religion no more than courage? Nay; we must have if possible some eternal Truth, that is not our postulate, to rest upon. Can we not get some such comfort? And may there not be some higher relation of our lives to that truth, — such a relation that the truth shall be neither the arbitrary product of our subjective postulates, nor a dead ex¬ ternal reality such as was the world of doubt? We are bound still to search.
CHAPTER X.
IDEALISM Et$ rbv oAov ovpavov a7ro/?A.e^a? to $v elvai <pTj<ri tov Oeov • Aristotle, concerning the doctrine of Xenophanes.
Still we are seeking the Eternal. Postulates about it we must indeed make, or else we shall do nothing. But can we not go beyond the mere postu¬ lates? Is there no other road open to the heart of things? In fact many other ways have been sug¬ gested. The religiously interesting efforts towards a suggestion of such ways have been the special work of philosophical Idealism in the past. Let us then see to what results philosophical Idealism offers to lead us.
I.
“The world of dead facts is an illusion. The truth of it is a spiritual life.” That is what philo¬ sophical idealism says. This spiritual life may be defined in many ways. But the multitude of the ways of defining it do not altogether obscure the sense of the doctrine. Plato and St. Augustine and Berkeley and Fichte and Hegel give us very various accounts of the spiritual life that is to be at the heart of things, but they agree about the general thought. As to the proof of the doctrine, very many 334 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY writers have presented this idealism as a sort of prod¬ uct of poetical fantasy, and have thereby helped to bring it into disrepute. We profess no such enthu¬ siasm. If we are to give any foundation for our postulates by means of an idealistic doctrine, then this foundation must be no mere poetic fancy, but a well-framed philosophic doctrine, able to stand crit¬ icism, and to satisfy very unemotional aims, as well as the higher moral aims themselves. But if ideal¬ ism is to receive rigid theoretical tests, we may still, in view of our present discussion and its needs, be helped on our way more directly if we first consider very generally and briefly what idealism could do for us if it were established, thereafter going on to the theoretical consideration of its claims.
That the Eternal is a world of spiritual life is what the idealists of the past have maintained, and the religious force of their doctrine lay not so much in the insight that was thus offered concerning the nature of the powers that are in the world, as in an¬ other insight. Just here idealistic doctrine and its outcome has been seldom comprehended, even by the idealists themselves. The world, merely viewed as a heap of warring Powers, cannot be a world of spiritual life. If the real world is nevertheless a world of such spiritual life, it must be so because, beyond and above the Powers, there is this higher spiritual Life that includes them and watches over them as the spectator watches the tragedy, — a Life in which they live and move and have their being. The characters in a tragedy do not constitute as war¬ ring powers, in their separate existence, the si^nifi- IDEALISM IDEALISM cance of the tragedy. The spectator, the overseeing thought, for which and in which these fancied pow¬ ers contend, this it is that gives them unity and sig¬ nificance. Even so the highest spiritual life that the idealist finds in the world is not to be a power among other powers, but a thought for which exists all that is. Hence the deepest assertion of idealism is not that above all the evil powers in the world there is at work some good power mightier than they, but rather that through all the powers, good and evil, and in them all, dwells the higher spirit that does not so much create as constitute them what they are, and so include them all.
How all this is to be more fully explained, and how it is to be justified, if at all, by idealism, we shall see further on. But for the present we may suggest that such idealism as this has a peculiar ad¬ vantage in dealing with the problems that we found insoluble in the discussion of the world of the Powers. There we found a world of contending elementary forces, A, B, C, etc. As contending powers they must needs appear finite. If one was good, another was or might be evil. And as we had to deal only with the warring elements, the thought that partial evil may, after all, be universal good seemed not very plausible, and quite indemonstrable. The world being the collection of the powers that are in it, the good and evil of the whole seemed to be the sum of the separate good and evil elements. But now we have a thought that may make possible the existence of universal goodness. If the tragedy as a whole is good, although its elements are evil, so like the trag- 336 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY edy may the world be universally good if the single evils of reality, like the single parts of the tragedy, are elements in a whole that exists for an all-see¬ ing, all-inclusive Spirit, in whom are all things, and whose nature as a whole is good. Thus, then, if we cannot yet see just how the partial evil is universal good in the all-inclusive mind, we can already, from the outset at least, fancy that it may so be. The All- Enfolding may be good even although of necessity there are elements in his world of infinite experience that, separately considered, may be evil. So ideal¬ ism offers as its theodicy not that the world contains a surplus of good powers, or that the creative power, when it made the devilish powers, still meant well; but the theodicy of idealism suggests a way in which evil may be, after all, a partial view of an all-em¬ bracing goodness.
Hence the importance, for our present discussion, of an effort to treat calmly and critically the main doctrine of philosophic idealism. Here at least is some suggestion of a chance that we may, in time, come to rise above mere postulates, and may found a positive religious theory. For the postulates are indeed, in themselves, not enough. We want, if possible, to get beyond them, though we are ready to accept them as final if we can do no better. Yet we are still forced to begin our account of idealistic doctrine with nothing better than postulates.
IDEALISM II.
The imperfection of the author’s private under¬ standing of deeper tr ith has forced him to come to idealism in the first instance by a very straight and easy path, that most deeper idealists would deride. After he had by that road reached the definite con¬ ception of one form of idealism, he found a further thought by which this idealism seemed to be trans¬ formed into a doctrine of greater philosophical and religious significance. At the same time, the proof of the doctrine first seemed to him to become clear and all-embracing. Now a reader cares little for the contents of an author’s note-book, or for a his¬ tory of his opinions; but sometimes the exposition of a view is a little helped by presenting it in suc¬ cessive parts that follow in their order somewhat the line of the author’s own development. Hence the present chapter shall suggest philosophic ideal¬ ism as a mere hypothesis, that still only tries to ex¬ press our fundamental postulates. Then we shall go on to see what deeper foundation for it we can find. And furthermore, our first suggestion of ideal¬ ism shall be a purely theoretical conception, not assumed to satisfy directly an ethical postulate, but merely to express theoretical postulates about the world. Then we shall be able to see what religious doctrine can be built upon this foundation. This way commends itself as avoiding the greatest dan¬ ger of idealism, namely, fantastic speculation with noble purposes, but with merely poetical methods. Our present method shall be coldly theoretical, how- 338 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ever deeply our religious philosophy is concerned in the outcome.
For the first then we shall suppose our whole task to be the suggestion of a plausible, i. e. of a simple, adequate, and consistent hypothesis about the nature of external reality. Hereafter we shall consider more critically the foundation of such hypotheses. Provisionally, then, we shall suppose that, by a per¬ fect theory of knowledge, the following result has been reached: Human beings are able to form ideas that correspond in some way with a real world, out¬ side of themselves. That is, the sequence of human ideas corresponds to sequences of external events, or to relations of coexistence among external things. The necessary or uniform connections of human ideas correspond to regular or to universal connec¬ tions among external things. Or, in the brief form of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s phraseology, to each nec¬ essary relation a: b in human consciousness there corresponds a relation A: B in the external world. Suppose, then, that all this has been established. No one will admit more readily than the writer that this supposition is at this point merely tentative. Our theory of knowledge is yet to be completed, and be¬ tween its conception and its realization there are still wide oceans of doubt. We shall, in fact, deal with the problems of this theory in the next chapter. But for the moment suppose admitted what scientific thought generally takes for granted, namely, the cor¬ respondence of inner and outer relations in such wise that the former are naturally copies of the lat¬ ter. And, on this foundation, suppose that we in- IDEALISM tend to consider what hypothesis as to the nature of the related terms A and B in the external world is, on the whole, the most plausible.
For the sake of avoiding controversy we may for the moment leave out of account two old questions. We cannot really escape either, and both will sternly confront us before we get in at the door of the tem¬ ple of certainty. But here at the outset we are playing with hypotheses, and may be absolved from the responsibility of securing ourselves beforehand from all possible attacks. The first is the question of the idealists: How can any reality be conceived unless as implying or including states of conscious¬ ness? For the moment we will waive this part of the Berkeleyan contention altogether; for we are not yet concerned to prove by metaphysical analysis the universal coincidence of consciousness and reality. We wish merely a plausible hypothesis to be ad¬ vanced as to the nature of what more popular thought means by reality. The second question that at the outset we avoid is the one concerning the ground of the assumed agreement between the external and the internal orders of facts. Whether this ground lies in a causal determination of our consciousness by the external world, or in a preestablished harmony of both, matters not. W e first take our stand, then, upon the facts admitted by popular belief. Here are feelings, sequences of feelings, thoughts, trains of thought, systems of scientific belief: all internal facts. Beyond the consciousness of these internal facts stretches (so we now assume, and only assume) another world of facts, in which something corre- 340 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY sponds to each one of these feelings, some order of facts to each sequence of feeling, some system of facts and of laws to each properly constituted system of beliefs. The external order of the world beyond corresponds to the order of this internal world of our consciousness, but is not this order. A plausi¬ ble hypothesis is required as to the nature of this corresponding external order.
Let us examine Berkeley’s familiar hypothesis, which, as a mere hypothesis, we can examine apart from any study of Berkeley’s philosophical argu¬ ments for his idealism. According to Berkeley there exist conscious beings, more or less like ourselves, of whom the head and father is God. Now external to all beings besides God there is a real world. This real world is made up of the eternal system of God’s thoughts.
“ When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind, since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is some other mind wherein they exist, dur¬ ing the intervals between the times of my perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it nec¬ essarily follows, there is an Omnipresent Eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules as he himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the laws of nature.” 1 1 Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, III.
IDEALISM This so familiar hypothesis of Berkeley is in part founded upon a thought that for the present we have agreed to neglect, i. e. upon the notion of the exter¬ nal world as the cause of our internal impressions. Not being caused by myself, my ideas, reasons Berke¬ ley, must have an external cause. And the only intelligible cause is an active spirit. Yet for our present purpose this thought is not important. We are not asking about the cause of our conscious states, but about the way in which we can most plau¬ sibly conceive of an external world corresponding to these states. The correspondence is assumed. Into its ground, be it preestablished harmony or physical influence, we do not just now inquire. Our only criteria of plausibility, if causal explanation is dropped, are therefore adequacy, simplicity, and con¬ sistency. Is Berkeley’s hypothesis consistent with itself, and is it the simplest hypothesis possible? Stripped of non-essential features, the hypothesis is that there corresponds to our consciousness another higher and farther-reaching consciousness, containing all that is abiding in our consciousness, and much more besides. This consciousness is in form and matter a rational spirit, having definite purposes in the creation and education of the various finite spir¬ its. These purposes require for their accomplishment that our conscious states should within certain limits agree with this higher consciousness, — should corre¬ spond to it in form and to a certain extent. This corre¬ spondence constitutes what we mean by truth. There is no external world but this other consciousness.
To Berkeley, as we know, the essential part of 342 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY this doctrine was the teleological part. That God’s thoughts and our correspondence thereto result from and express God’s purposes in creating the world, this was for Berkeley the main point to be proven. But if the teleological element of the doctrine be for this first left out of account, there is another part that we just now wish to hold fast. Our thought is true by reason of its correspondence to the fads of an actual consciousness, external to our own: this hypothesis has an interest apart from its origin and from its original use. Why in philosophy should we be afraid of doctrines because they have an as¬ sociation with some dreaded theological dogma, or with some enthusiastic and over-confident system of the past? About the nature of the external world we have at the outset nothing but hypotheses. Be¬ fore we test them in any very exact way, we may with safety try to understand them. Perhaps what seemed the wildest of them all may turn out to be the very best. Because a certain hypothesis was put forward rather as a demonstrable and eternal truth than as a hypothesis, shall we reject it without further examination? Perhaps it may in fact turn out to be part of the eternal truth.
The hypothesis now before us is Berkeley’s with the teleological element omitted, along with the causal. How this external consciousness comes to affect us, and why it takes just such forms as it does, we say not. This we ask: What is this supposed external consciousness? How does it correspond to our own? We shall not call the supposed conscious¬ ness by question-begging names. It is not for us IDEALISM just now either absolute or divine. It is simply con¬ sciousness, and external. The hypothesis is that truth consists in some kind of correspondence be¬ tween our thought and this outer reality. What kind of correspondence?
Two conscious beings can have corresponding states of consciousness, without having like states. The notes of a melody could have corresponding to them the variations in intensity of some source of light. The light-flashes or beats would correspond to the notes of music by having the like rhythm; yet there would be no resemblance in the content. Correspondence may be yet more obscured. The dashes on a piece of paper that has passed under the point of a telegraphic pen, the series of characters printed from the press in a dozen languages, the sounds of the voice of a reader, the series of signals flashed from shore to a distant vessel, all these dis¬ similar series of events might correspond exactly and throughout, if it were their purpose to convey in va¬ rious ways the same meaning. In order, then, that my consciousness should correspond to some other consciousness, external to mine, it is only necessary that for each event or fact in my consciousness there should exist some event or fact in the other con¬ sciousness, and that some relation existing among my conscious states should be like or parallel to the relation existing among the conscious states external to mine. The more numerous the points of resem¬ blance between the two series of states, the closer the correspondence. But correspondence in the ab¬ stract implies only some one definite and permanent resemblance found throughout the two series.
344 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY Such being the nature of correspondence in gen¬ eral, let us consider our hypothesis more in detail. Suppose the clock yonder has some such reality as this hypothesis supposes. There is the clock, with its pendulum beating. For me now that clock is a combination of sensations, joined with a belief in certain possible sensations. For one in the same room with me, the clock has a like existence. But suppose that the clock has, apart from my conscious¬ ness, apart from the consciousness of any other hu¬ man being or animal, an existence for some other, as yet undefined, consciousness. Suppose that for this consciousness the clock in its whole present condi¬ tion exists, not at all as a “ possibility of sensations,” but solely and in all its parts as a present group of sensible facts, standing in definite relations. Sup¬ pose that the sensible facts that constitute this clock as it is given to this hypothetical consciousness are in quality unlike the sensations that for me consti¬ tute the clock; but that in their relations, in their number, in their grouping, in their differences from one another, these sensible facts as they are for the hypothetical consciousness agree with the sensations and with the “ possibilities of sensation ” that for me constitute the clock. Suppose that the clock as it is in the hypothetical consciousness endures for a considerable time, and is called the real clock. Then when I shut my eyes or go away or die, there exists still the real clock, i. e. the clock in the hy¬ pothetical consciousness. Though all my fellows die, there is still the real clock, independent of our con¬ sciousness. The clock may for a time go on run- IDEALISM ning; that is, in the hypothetical consciousness there may be a rhythm of sensible events, corresponding to what for me, were I present, would be the rhythm of the pendulum - beats and the movement of the hands.