LECTURE XX PLURALISM EVIL AND SUFFERING WE have touched in the preceding lecture on the pluralistic position and the idea of a finite God, but Pluralism in various forms is so current--I had almost said, so fashionable-at the present moment, that it seems to call for some further examination on its merits. We have already encountered it, in connexion with the idea of Creation, in Professor Howison's doctrine of eternal finite selves. Founding on the characteristic feature of a self or person, that it cannot be made or fashioned like a thing, ab extra, but seems rather to make itself, and that it acts, moreover, always from its own centre, and unhesitatingly regards its acts as its own, Professor Howison insisted, as we saw, on treating finite persons as ontologically underived, or existent in their own right. He acknowledged at the same time that, as regards their animating ideals, they all reflect the nature of a divine or central Mind, and thus constitute, together with it, a single system of reality. As in Leibnitz, a real or ontological Pluralism is thus combined with an ideal harmony', and the unity of the universe is supposed to be thereby saved. But again, just as Leibnitz forgets the independent selfsubsistence of the monads when he treats them as created by God and speaks of them as 'fulgurations' of the divine, so we found that Professor Howison's statements as to the constant reference of the finite selves to their divine centre, and his view of the divine nature as the final cause of the development which takes place in these selves, constitute a virtual abandonment of the ontological Pluralism which he champions. XX DR. RASHDALL'S THEORY 387 Dr. Rashdall, inasmuch as he expressly holds the finite selves to be created, would disavow the imputation of Pluralism. But he has repeatedly introduced the idea of the finiteness of God as limited by other selves, and has contended, accordingly, for a distinction between God and the Absolute. 'The Absolute cannot be identified with God, so long as God is thought of as a self-conscious Being. The Absolute must include God and all other consciousnesses, not as isolated and unrelated beings, but as intimately related (in whatever way) to Him and to one another, and as forming with Him a system or Unity. . . . God and the spirits are the Absolute-not God alone. Together they form a Unity, but that Unity is not the unity of self-consciousness.' Reality is thus a community of persons', or in Dr. McTaggart's phrase 'a society'.2 It is true, he protests against the idea of a limitation ab extra, by a hostile power or an independent matter; the limitation in question. is, in the language of the theologians, a self-limitation. But, as Professor Ward pertinently says, commenting on this phrase, 'self-limitation seems to imply a prior state in which it was absent, whereas a limitation held to be permanentas we hold creation to be-suggests some ultimate dualism rather than an ultimate unity'. And if we hold, as Professor Ward says, that God is God only as being creative',4 1 1 The Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 239-40. Realm of Ends, p. 243. ་ 'If creation means anything,' says Professor Ward in the same context, 'it means something so far involved in the divine essence that we are entitled to say, as Hegel was fond of saying, that "without the world, God is not God ".' The saying which Professor Ward thus frankly adopts, suggests to Dr. Rashdall the picture of God as perpetually annexed by some unintelligible fate to a world quite alien to His own inner nature as to some Siamese twin from whom He would perchance, but cannot, part' (Contentio Veritatis, p. 33). But this is inconsistent with his own subsequent description of the limitation implied in the creation of other spirits as 'not an arbitrary self-limitation but one which necessarily springs from the nature and character of God' (p. 37). Why should the necessity of the divine nature be resented the deceptive prius disappears, and with it the wholly inappropriate conception of limitation. This was the gist of our argument in Lecture VII. Why should the creation of finite spirits be treated like a pegging out of claims in a hinterland. by each of which the rights and privileges of the original proprietor are proportionately diminished? Surely the older theologians were right in regarding the existence of spirits not as an impoverishment but as an enrichment of the divine life. The divine life is, in short, the concrete fact of this inter-communion. In this sense there is no difficulty in accepting Professor Ward's definition of the Absolute as God-and-the-world '1 regarded as the single eternal Fact. But it is not quite the same with Dr. Rashdall's phrase, ' God and the spirits'; for in spite of the creative function assigned to God, the suggestion of the phrase is co-existence on terms of mutual exclusion. And this impression is strengthened when we are told that the ultimate Being is a single Power, if we like we may even say a single Being, who is manifested in a plurality of consciousnesses, one consciousness which is omniscient and eternal, and many consciousnesses which are of limited knowledge, which have a beginning, and some of which, it is possible or probable, have an end ' And when Dr. Rashdall goes on to say that we may 'regard all the separate "centres of consciousness" as "manifestations" of a single Being', or even as a single 'Substance which reveals itself in many different consciousnesses', we as an unintelligible fate? Dr. Rashdall emphasizes the importance of recognizing ‘a causative relation between the supreme Spirit and the other spirits' (p. 34), but if I may quote Professor Ward again in this connexion, 'Creation is not to be brought under the category of transient causation. Nor can we, regarding it from the side of God, bring it under the category of immanent causation as being a change in Him, unless indeed we abandon the position that God is God only as being creative' (Realm of Ends, p. 234). Theory of Good and Evil, vol. ii, p. 241. 1 Realm of Ends, p. 241. Philosophy and Religion, p. 105. XX GOD AS ONE OF THE SELVES' 389 feel irresistibly that by such expressions we are being committed to a view of God as 'one of the eaches', for we are treating Him not as the ultimate Reality but as one of a number of ' separate' appearances. But there is surely a singular impropriety in placing God and men in the same numerical series, and in speaking as if we and God together, in a species of joint-ownership, constituted the sum-total of existence. Dr. Rashdall speaks of ' that all-fertile source of philosophical error, the misapplication of spatial metaphors. Minds are not Chinese boxes that can be put inside" one another '.1 But we do not get away from spatial metaphors by speaking of separate and mutually exclusive centres of consciousness. And if the assertion of the personality of God is to lead us to the result that ' all the conclusions which are applicable to each particular self in his relation to another seem to be equally applicable to the relations between God and any other spirit ',2 we must reply that it is ultimately unmeaning to treat the universal as one of the particulars. To speak of God in this sense as one of the selves' is to justify all the criticisms which treat personality as a limitation inapplicable to the sustaining and containing Life of all the worlds. Besides the unescapable associations of spatial metaphor, the controversy seems to me to be due to the substantiation of the form of consciousness apart from its content or constituent nature. It was the substantiation of the logical form of consciousness, as I argued long ago,3 which led to the 1 Personal Idealism, p. 388. Ibid., p. 386. In the concluding pages of Hegelianism and Personality. I have many times regretted, in view of the interpretations put upon it and the applications made of it, my use in these pages of the term 'impervious ' to describe the nature of a self or personality. The exclusiveness of the self, especially in its relations to the divine, was, I have little doubt, too strongly emphasized in my argument. But the obnoxious term has to be understood in the context in which it occurs. The argument was directed against the fusion of real selves in a logical universal or (to put it in a frankly spatial metaphor) the identification of all selves at a single point of being. What I emphasized, as against this attempt, was the uniqueness of each theory of the universal Self, as an identical Subject which thinks in all thinkers. And this unification of consciousness in a single Self was fatal, I argued, to the real selfhood either of God or man. But we are equally substantiating a formal unity, if we cut loose the individual selves from the common content of the world and treat them as selfexistent and mutually independent units. We are then obliged to proceed to represent the universal Life in which they share as another unit of the same type, and difficulties immediately arise as to the relation between the great Self and its minor prototypes. Thought sways between a Pluralism, disguised or undisguised, and a Pantheism which obliterates all real individuality. But by the existence of the personality of God we do not mean the existence of a self-consciousness so conceived. We mean that the universe is to be thought of, in the last resort, as an Experience and not as an abstract content-an experience not limited to the intermittent and fragmentary glimpses of this and the other finite consciousness, but resuming the whole life of the world in a fashion which is necessarily incomprehensible save by the Absolute itself.1 self. I took the self, and I still take it, as the apex of the principle of individuation by which the world exists. Hence the phrase that each self is impervious '—not, it may be observed, to all the influences of the universe but to other selves '—' impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue'. In other words, to suppose a coincidence or literal identification of several selves, as the doctrine of the Universal Self demands, is even more transparently self-contradictory than that two bodies should occupy the same space. Apart from crudity of expression this still seems to me obvious, and it may be considered to underlie the argument in several of the preceding lectures. But I trust there is now more justice done to the identity of content which binds the selves together as members of one universe. We call God personal because in personality is revealed the highest we know, and it is better, therefore, as Mr. Bradley says, to affirm personality than to call the Absolute impersonal. The epithet, like the statements of the creeds, is the denial of an error rather than a definitely articulated affirmation of ascertained fact. And if the affirmation of personality were taken to imply identity of conditions, then, but for its tendency to become a merely empty name, supra-personal would obviously more appropriately express our meaning. |