nature, as a self-communicating life. The divine Eremite, as a pre-existent Creator, is a figure, if one may so speak, of the logical imagination: it indicates what God is not, it does not tell us what He once was.

NOTE ON PROFESSOR BOSANQUET'S USE OF THE SOCIAL ANALOGY

Professor Bosanquet himself, on more than one occasion, suggests that in the conception of society we have the best analogy of the absolute experience. So far as there is formed a social mind', he says, 'the particular centres begin to be adapted as members of an individuality transcending their own. . . . Their qualities begin to be reinforced by others, their deficiencies supplied, in a word, their immanent contradictions removed by readjustment and supplementation, so that the body of particularised centres begins to take on a distinct resemblance to what we know must be the character of the absolute.'1 So, again, he speaks of the social whole and civilisation' as ‘a realised anticipation of the absolute '.2 Ultimate reality is for [the metaphysical] argument', he says, 'what the social collectivity is for the social student.'3 But there is the same wavering of point of view which we have noted throughout, due to the defective sense of personality. It is the supra-individual and, as it were, impersonal character of the social mind or the social collectivity that seems to commend it to Professor Bosanquet as an analogy. He speaks, in the context of the passage first quoted, of the tendency of the social process as being 'towards an individuality in which centres, formed and further formed by such a process, tend to be, as particular centres, transcended and absorbed '. And, on the other hand, inasmuch as the social collectivity has no self-consciousness, no centralized existence of its own, apart from the particular centres in which it is realized, the suggestion of the analogy, when thus applied, is that the Absolute also is not to be regarded as a self-centred life. In that way the personality both of the finite centres and of the Absolute tends to disappear. But, as we have seen, the development of 1 Value and Destiny, p. 90. 2 Ibid., p. 142. 3 Ibid., p. 11.

3 XV

THE SOCIAL ANALOGY

297 society, so far from absorbing' its individual members, is a continual development of their self-consciousness, and furnishes no grounds, therefore, for inferring their disappearance, as particular centres, in the Absolute. And if we take the idea of centrality or individuation in bitter earnest' as the characteristic of everything that is concretely real, we shall not speak or think of the Absolute as a vast continuum' of which 'finite self-conscious creatures' are fragments ', but rather as the focal unity of a world of self-conscious worlds, to which it is not only their sustaining substance but also the illumination of their lives. Society, taken by itself, is an abstraction hypostatized, but the idea of a divine Socius has been one of the most abiding inspirations of religious experience.

1 'We approach the study of finite self-conscious creatures, prepared to find in them the fragments of a vast continuum' (Value and Destiny, p. 11). Cf. p. 12, the continuum of the whole '.

LECTURE XVI

THE IDEA OF CREATION

AT the close of the last lecture we found ourselves insensibly involved in criticism of a certain conception of Creation. The word Creation recurs so constantly in philosophical and theological discussions of the relation of God to the world that it is desirable to submit the idea to a somewhat more careful examination, in order to discover the meaning, or meanings, which have been attached to the conception. This should enable us to determine whether, in any of its senses, it is to be taken as expressing or pointing to a philosophical truth.

The idea forms a natural part of any theory which treats God deistically as a purely transcendent Being-a Cause or Author of the universe, entirely distinct from an effect which is spoken of metaphorically as the work of his hands'. But it occurs also in theories which claim to be immanental, and in some of its forms it may not be incompatible with such a doctrine. Historically, the idea carries us back to a primitive stage of pictorial thought like that of the Zulus, mentioned by Tylor, who trace their ancestry back to Unkulunkulu, the Old-old-one, who created the world. It meets us with something of a sublime simplicity in the opening words of Genesis-' In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' Such a statement yields a temporary satisfaction to the craving for causal explanation, though it is not necessary to go beyond the child's question, Who made God?', to become aware of its metaphysical insufficiency. As it has been not unjustly said,1

1 Von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, iii. 196 (English translation).

XVI

AN EVENT IN THE PAST

299

'Contentment with the regress to a God-creator or some similar notion is the true mark of speculative indolence.'

The first feature in the ordinary idea of creation to which I wish to draw attention is that creation is regarded as an event which took place at a definite date in the past, to which we can remount by a temporal and causal regress. The old chroniclers in their naïve fashion record the event methodically with the other entries that seemed to call for notice, such as the death of a monarch, an invasion of the enemy, a plague, or an exceptionally bad winter. We know that the date was long fixed by Biblical chronology as the year 4004 B. C. And so it remained till the rise of geological science brought about a vast extension of cosmic time. Theology accommodated itself, not without some friction, to the demands of the new science; but, although the actual date was thrust back, the view of creation as an event that happened at some definite period in the past still continued to be held by ordinary theological thought. Perhaps I should say still continues to be held, for I find so able a theologian as the late Professor Flint telling us, in his lectures on Theism, that the question in the theistic argument from causality' is to prove the universe to have been an event-to have had a commencement. . . . Compared therewith, all other questions which have been introduced into, or associated with, the argument are of very subordinate importance.'1 And accordingly, in order to answer the question, he proceeds to an examination of the universe 'in order to determine whether or not it bears the marks of being an event'. And because such an examination reveals mutability stamped upon every particular fact in the universe, even its apparently most stable formations-so that each may be treated as an event dependent on a preceding event, a phase in a universal process of transformation-we have Theism, 8th ed.,

P. 101.

the extraordinary conclusion drawn that the universe as a whole is an event or effect in the same sense. But surely such an argument is an example in excelsis of the fallacy of Composition. A little later the author is found grasping at Lord Kelvin's then current deductions from the theory of heat. If this theory be true,' he says, ' physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past.' But Sir William Thomson's speculation, based on the ultimate dissipation or, rather, degradation of energy -an end or running-down of the cosmic mechanism, implying a beginning or start of the same within a measurable time entirely depended on the conception of the universe as a finite closed system, and therefore begged the whole question. It has ceased to agitate the scientific world, as the conditions of scientific theorizing have come to be more clearly realized; and the recent discovery of the immense quantities of energy generated through the disintegration of radium, by completely upsetting the basis of the calculation, has made men more than ever disinclined to draw definite and final conclusions from theories which are in a process of continual revision. In this connexion it is a significant fact, on which I cannot help remarking, that, although the whole face of physical science has been changed by the remarkable discoveries of the last twenty years, there has been no attempt to exploit the changes either in a theological or an anti-theological interest.

It is difficult to understand the importance attached by many theologians to a temporal origin of the physical universe, if we have once abandoned the geocentric hypothesis and its corollaries. The spectacle of the birth and death of worlds may actually be seen by the astronomer as 1 Theism, p. 117.