being lifted in a sense above time and bringing in the eternal. If we were really absolutely subject to time, incapable of transcending it, we should be imprisoned each of us as a single point of particularity in its own moment of time. We should be absolutely unchanging because we should be reduced to the abstraction of a bare point of existence. To think of time as a process is therefore, ipso facto, to think of a reality which transcends time, and whose nature is revealed in the process. The truth, once more, is the Whole. We cannot, as philosophers, rest in any principle of explanation short of that which we name the Absolute or God. All experience might not unfitly be described, from the human side, as the quest of Godthe progressive attempt, through living and knowing, to reach a true conception of the Power whose nature is revealed in all that is. Man, accordingly, does not step outside of this universal life when he develops the qualities of a moral being; the specifically human experiences cannot be taken as an excrescence on the universe or as a self-contained and underived world by themselves. Man is the child of nature, and it is on the basis of natural impulses and in commerce with the system of external things, that his ethical being is built up. The characteristics of the ethical life must be taken, therefore, as contributing to determine the nature of the system in which we live. Nay, according to the interpretation we have put upon the principle of value and upon the evolutionary distinction between lower and higher ranges of experience, the ethical predicates must carry us nearer to a true definition of the ultimate Life in which we live than the categories which suffice to describe, for example, the environmental conditions of our existence. This fair universe', says Carlyle, in the famous chapter in Sartor Resartus on Natural Supernaturalism, 'is in very deed the star-domed city of God; through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every living soul, the glory of VIII MAN THE TRUE SHEKINAH 157 a present God still beams.' Man,' he quotes elsewhere. from Chrysostom, 'Man is the true Shekinah'—the visible presence, that is to say, of the divine. We are far too apt to limit and mechanize the great doctrine of the Incarnation which forms the centre of the Christian faith. Whatever else it may mean, it means at least this—that in the conditions of the highest human life we have access, as nowhere else, to the inmost nature of the divine. God manifest in the flesh' is a more profound philosophical truth than the loftiest flight of speculation that outsoars all predicates and, for the greater glory of God, declares Him unknowable. And this, we saw, was the central truth of the Religion of Humanity to which it owes what vitality it possesses. It was one of Comte's boasts that the new God of his religion, as contrasted with the abstract deities of theology or metaphysics, was positive, verifiable like a scientific fact, an object which one could, as it were, directly see and touch. But it is only so far as he presses the organic point of view, so as to unite the Future with the Present and the Past in one mystical body, that ideal humanity assumes for the Comtist the features and proportions of deity. But humanity in the idea, humanity with the light of the ideal upon its upward path and the same light projected on the infinite possibilities of the future-is not a fact of the historical order. It is an idea every whit as mystical as that of God. For just in so far as we do not identify humanity with its own past and present, but endow it with the potency of an ampler and nobler future, just so far do we take man and his history as the expression of a principle of perfection, whose presence at every stage constitutes the possibility of advance beyond that stage. Humanity is, in short, the organ and expression of the divine, just as the individual, in Comte's way of putting it, is the organ and expression of his race. Mankind has no more an entitative independence of God, the larger Providence, than the individual possesses such independence of the proximate and lesser Providence which the pious Positivist recognizes in Humanity. Comte complains, with some show of justice, that the God of traditional theism, and still more Nature, which he says metaphysics substitutes for God, is an abstract and empty term. A critic might say that it is just the bare idea of potentiality or faculty, into which we refund the actual characteristics of the actual world. And in a sense this is true, just as it is true that the essence, if separated from its manifestation, becomes at once the blank abstraction of the unknowable. But to complain of this is to betray one's own bondage to a false and exploded metaphysics. Certainly, apart from our actual experience, God or the Absolute is a subject waiting for predicates, an empty form waiting to be filled. But we need be at no loss for predicates in the words of the apostle, 'the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead'. Where, indeed, should we gain a knowledge of God except from his manifestation? In precisely the same way, our knowledge of the character of a fellow-man is gained from his words and deeds. But, as Carlyle phrases it, 'Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish'. And among the foolish are enrolled not a few philosophical writers who clamour for a knowledge of God, not as He reveals himself in nature and in human experience, but as something to be known, it would seem, directly, apart from his manifestation altogether. And when this craving for the impossible is not satisfied, they either deny his existence or proclaim his nature to be unknowable. This false ideal of knowledge has crossed our path several times, and now that it meets us in this supreme instance, it may be well to examine it more closely so as finally to lay the spectre. Locke and Kant, as we have already seen in the sixth VIII FALSE IDEAL OF KNOWLEDGE 159 lecture,1 are the typical modern examples of the working of this false ideal, and the chief sources to which its prevalence in popular philosophy may be traced. In Locke it connects itself with the distinction between the qualities and the substance, in Kant with the distinction (fundamentally similar) between phenomenon and noumenon, the appearance and the thing-in-itself. Substance and quality are correlative terms by which we interpret what is given or presented in perception. The distinction corresponds to that between subject and predicate or substantive and adjective, and neither member of the pair has any separate existence. Qualities do not fly loose as abstract entities, and substance does not exist as an undetermined somewhat -a mere 'that '-to which they are afterwards attached. The idea of substance is the idea of the qualities as unified and systematized, and indicating, through this unity or system, the presence of a concrete individual. The two ideas, therefore, are in the strictest sense inseparable-the two aspects of every reality-its existence and its nature. Nothing exists except as qualitatively determined; and its existence as such and such an individual is, in fact, determined or constituted by the systematic unity of the qualities. But the scholastic tradition of the substance as a substratum -something in which the qualities inhere-suggests the notion that substance and qualities are two separate facts, the substance or 'support of accidents' being something behind the qualities, over and above them, a bit of realitystuff, so to speak, an atom or core of mere existence, on which the qualitative determinations are hung. And the next step is to conclude, as Locke does, that this substance is a mystery which must remain for ever impenetrable by human faculties; for it is clear that the most exhaustive knowledge of the qualities does not advance us one step towards a knowledge of what is, by definition, beyond or 1 Cf. supra, pp. 116–19. behind all qualities. As Locke puts it, 'By the complex a idea of extended, figured, coloured, and all other sensible B qualities, which is all that we know of it, we are as far from the idea of the substance of body, as if we knew nothing at m all'. Our ignorance in this respect is universal. The inc substance of spirit and the substance of body, he in the same chapter, are equally unknown to us. not know the real essence of a pebble or a fly or of our ¡Po own selves.' says in We do 'wh irc In Kant the contrast is between the thing-in-itself and th the thing as it appears, between the noumenon and the ve phenomenon, and is more expressly connected with the idea. of knowledge as a subjective affection. But his manner of la arguing is often almost a verbal repetition of Locke's. Be 'Supposing us to carry our empirical perception even to the da very highest degree of clearness,' he tells us, for example, Sc 'we should not thereby advance a step nearer to a knowledge of the constitution of objects as things-in-themselves.' 2 Or, again, All in our cognition that belongs to perception or contains nothing more than mere relations. Now by e means of mere relations a thing cannot be known in itself, and it may therefore be fairly concluded that the presenta-is tions of the external sense can contain only the relation of an object to the subject but not the internal nature th of the object as a thing-in-itself.' And he complains of sa the nature of our intelligence as an instrument of research unfitted to discover anything more than always fresh phenomena '.4 act To this strange duplication of appearance and essence, e and the substantiation of the one over against the other as he 1 Essay, II. 23. 16. 2 General Remarks on Transcendental Aesthetic, Werke, vol. iii, p. 73 (Hartenstein). 'Das Innere, was dem Objekte an sich zukommt' (ibid., p. 76). • Remark on the Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection (ibid., p. 235). 1 |