Reality

The purpose of this book is to outline, in the simplest and clearest language I can command, a position in which my own mind has found rest after thirty years of search. But in order that the point of view from which it is written may be the more easily apprehended I have, after some hesitation, thought it well to preface it with a few details of an autobiographical nature.

I came up to Oxford with a scholarship in Classics in 1893, fully determined to follow my father in the profession of the Law. But about the end of my second year---I was reading 'Greats'-I realised quite suddenly that the religious beliefs in which I had been brought up rested on a very slender intellectual foundation; and I awoke one day to find myself an agnostic. After a year or so of thought and reading, and discussion with older friends, I reached, through the gateway of T. H. Green's philosophy, what at the time seemed to me an adequate intellectual basis of religion largely taken over, in a not too well-digested form, from the earlier writings of Illingworth and Gore. The conviction was then borne in upon me that it was my duty to give my life to the task of further working out, and passing on to others, the truth which I had seen; and I decided to seek ordination. After taking my Degree I read Theology, and there opened up a possibility, which had not previously occurred to me, that my work might be in Oxford; but it was not till some little time after I had been elected to a Fellowship that I realised how very far from being intellectually water-tight was the position which I had reached. The restraining advice of a senior friend kept me from relinquishing my Orders; but I think that I should ultimately have taken this step but for the reinvigorating inspiration of the Summer Conferences of the Student Christian Movement, which I began to attend 'in 1905. Here I gained a renewed confidence that in Religion man can attain to a genuine apprehension of Reality, of that 'Beyond which is also Within', in a way and of a kind which any intellectual theory of the Universe must account for or confess itself bankrupt.

I started again on my quest with a new courage, but with no weakening of my old conviction that religion in its mystical, emotional or practical expression was, to me at any rate, of little value if divorced from intellectual integrity. 1 endeavoured to work on in the spirit of the philosopher who, in Samuel Butler's famous phrase,'should have given up all,even Christ Himself,for Christ's sake'.

It has been my peculiar good fortune to have come into a personal contact, which admitted of long and repeated discussion of large problems, with an exceptional number of fellow-seekers after truth-philosophers, scientists, and others whose interest was mainly in art, literature or practical life, as well as theologians of many Christian denominations, and students or adherents of the great religions of the East. Looking back over my life, I feel that I have learnt more in this way than from the books which I have read. I owe a special debt to those friends who were associated with me in the series of ' group-books'-Foundations, Concerning Prayer, Immortality, and The Spirit. The method of systematic group discussion employed in the preparation of these was an invaluable intellectual discipline, besides suggesting to me avenues of further investigation which otherwise I might never have explored.

Before the last of these symposia was published, I had set to work on a scheme, long ago projected but often interrupted, for a book which would clear up my own mind by presenting in a reasonable compass a synthetic summary of the position which I had reached up to date. A good deal of what is here printed is a re-writing of material put together then (1919-21). Towards the end of 1921 1 laid this work aside in order to gather up the results of investigations, started at a much earlier date, into the origins of the Gospels; these were published under the title The Four Gospels, late in 1924. The interruption was fortunate, since it enabled me, by sitting at the feet of scientific friends, to get some inkling (if only at second hand) of the general trend of some of the modern developments in Physics, and to read some of the more recent literature bearing on that new conception of the nature of scientific knowledge which is being put forward by workers in that field. This has led to a considerable re-orientation of much that I had previously drafted.

It is now many years since it first began to dawn upon me that, during the earlier years of my search, I had been doing, what, so far as I see, most other searchers after truth in the sphere of Religion have done -I had been asking the wrong question. I will explain my meaning. Instinctively any one brought up in the Christian tradition-provided always he does not belong to the number of those who would prefer to think it false-frames his question in the form, Is Christianity true? But merely to state the question thus precludes a satisfactory answer; for the very form of the question implies that Religion is itself the problem, whereas the truth of Religion is a matter worth inquiring about only if, and in so far as, it offers a solution of the problems which are posed by life-of which the problem of evil is the chief.

Is there not wrong too bitter for atoning? What are these desperate and hideous years? Hast Thou not heard Thy whole creation groaning, Sighs of the bondsmen, and a woman's tears?

It is the Universe itself that compels us to ask questions. First there are theoretical questions. Are we to think of It as alive or dead? If alive, what is It after? Or, in more formal words, must Reality be thought of only in terms of quantity, or is quality (or value) also real? Then comes the fact of evil ever forcing us to face the practical question, Is there any way in which 1 personally can overcome, and help others to overcome, the suffering and the wrong?

By those who first heard it the Christian message was called 'Gospel', that is, 'good news'. It was so named because to them it did seem to give an answer both to the theoretical and to the practical questions. Life posed the riddle; Religion had found an answer. Life has not ceased to pose its riddle; but who to-day has an answer which to the majority seems to have the authentic ring? Those who are without Religion admit they have no answer. The Christian theologian stands on the defensive. Having once begun by asking the wrong question, he finds himself 'defending the faith'; in effect, he has got himself into the position of being anxious to save Religion, instead of expecting Religion to save him.

This book, then, is not a 'Defense of Christianity'; indeed, in Christianity as traditionally presented there are some things which (if I had any taste for theological controversy) I should be more inclined to attack than to defend. It is an endeavour to discover Truth.

Accordingly I start off to interrogate the Universe afresh. I ask whether Quality as well as Quantity is of the essence of Reality. When I go on to inquire whence and how we may get light on this Quality, I cannot but see that much of the evidence to be studied consists in the phenomena--social, historical, psychological-of human religion, of which the most important is the fact that Christ once lived and taught and died. From a consideration of this evidence there seems to me to emerge a new way of approaching certain old ideas. This, unless I am mistaken, enables one to see that there is an answer to the riddle set by life in a Religion which has the quality of Vision and Power-the vision of truth and the power to overcome.

The questions I discuss-whatever be the value of answers which I seem to myself to have found-are living questions to every human being; and I shall have failed in my object if this book is intelligible only to philosophers, scientists and theologians. It is addressed in the first instance to the man who has no special training in any of these subjects. That the book as a whole will prove easy reading, I am fairly confident. In the earlier chapters, while the general position set out is in itself simple and straightforward, it has, in order to expound this, been necessary to criticise certain features in Materialism, Absolutism and other theories; and some of the sections in which this is attempted naturally make a more serious claim on the reader's attention. I believe, however, that even here I have succeeded in so writing that the main draft of the argument will be clear to any person of ordinary education, even if he has no technical knowledge of the subject. Moreover, the Synopses at the head of each chapter will enable the reader, if he finds any particular section difficult or uninteresting, to skip it without losing sight of the general purport of the chapter. Perhaps, however, any one who has no previous knowledge of either Science or Philosophy might do well to postpone the reading of Chapters I. - II. and IV.until he has gone through the rest of the book.

Nevertheless, although this book is not primarily intended for philosophers and theologians, it is my hope that some of these will deign to read it. For, apart from certain sections, it is in no sense a popularisation of currently accepted views. It is an attempt to limn out a position which, taken as a whole, is a new one. My debt, of course, to the thought and writings of others will be obvious on every page; but if regard be had, not so much to detailed considerations, as to the mode of co-ordinating the essential data and to the trend of the argument as a whole, 1 believe that I am justified in speaking of it as a new correlation of Science and Religion.

In Chapters II. and IV. I sketch out what is, in effect, a new Theory of Knowledge. To this, if it were worked out into a formal system, I should be inclined to give the name BiRepresentationism. But to have worked out such a system with an elaborate apparatus of technical terminology might have resulted in a wrong impression of the main conception of the book. For if I am right in maintaining that the language natural to Religion is more closely akin to Art than to Science, then a Philosophy of Religion is likely the better to reflect the spirit of that which it endeavours to interpret, the more its exposition avoids technicalities and is expressed in a way that can be imaginatively, as well as conceptually, realised. At any rate, so far as this theory is concerned, I shall be more than satisfied if I have suggested an outline which others more competent than myself may develop or amend.

To various friends who have read the whole or part of the book in MS. or proof I owe a debt of gratitude, more especially to Miss Chilcott of Lady Margaret Hall, Mr. Will Spens of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, Mr. A. S. L. Farquharson of University College, Oxford, Archdeacon Lilley of Hereford, Mr. W. Force Stead, and Mr. Norman Ault; and to Miss Earp of Cumnor, both for this and also for the preparation of the Indexes.

B. H. STREETER.

OXFORD, Sept. 1926.

SYNOPSIS

NEWTON AND DARWIN

By discovering a mechanism in the movements of the heavenly bodies, Newton made Materialism a plausible explanation of the Universe apart from living beings.

Darwin, by his theory of Natural Selection, seemed to have found a mechanism capable of explaining the origin of living beings as well. All questions became reducible to problems of molecular physics.

From this it would follow that consciousness in any of its forms whether thought, feeling or will-can initiate nothing; it is merely an epiphenomenon', i.e. a functionless shadow cast by the material process.

But the view that consciousness is no more than a passive shadow entails certain paradoxical conclusions-among others that Science itself is an illusion.

THE POWER OF METAPHOR

The human mind naturally thinks in pictures; when it thinks of the Totality of things this is inevitable. But it is important to choose the picture, metaphor or myth which is most illuminating.

Theism pictures the Power behind the Universe as in some way resembling human personality; this is decried as anthropomorphism, i.e. as a making of God in the image of man. Materialism pictures the Universe as an Infinite Machine; this by analogy may be called mechanomorphism.

Mechanomorphism is essentially myth; but the dazzling triumphs of machinery in the nineteenth century made it imaginatively an attractive myth. Yet every machine is an instrument designed to effect a definitely realised purpose, and is itself the expression of the concentrated intelligence of an inventor. It is fallacious to overlook this, and then apply the metaphor of a machine to the Universe as if the oversight made no difference.

THE CONCEPTION OF MECHANISM

In origin Mechanism is an abstract quality corresponding to the concrete thing machine; that is to say, it is a quality, not of any object existing in Nature, but of certain artificial constructions made by man.Hence to apply the conception to Nature in anything like its original sense is to be guilty of anthropomorphism in a double degree.

As employed by Science the conception of Mechanism definitely excludes certain of the most essential elements in the original meaning. That being so, it is no longer an abstract term corresponding to an actually existing object; it has become a pure symbol. It ceases, therefore, to be an explanation of anything. Still less can the Universe be explained in terms of something which never has existed, nor could exist, but is a symbol of an abstract relationship. (An objection to this argument from the standpoint of the science of Mechanics is discussed in a footnote.)

Recent Science rejects the old conceptions of Matter, Force and Causation, making it hard to frame a 'model' of how the Mechanism works. Moreover, the apparent inconsistency between the laws seeming to apply to the behaviour of the atom has done away with the clear-cut simplicity which made Mechanism an attractive explanation. Professor Whitehead's view that the atom should be regarded rather as an organism than as a mechanism.

MATTER

The resolution of the atom into proton and electrons, though its importance from the philosophical standpoint is probably not great, strikes at the imaginative basis of popular Materialism. It has also served to call the attention of scientific workers to the philosophical problems raised by the fact of knowledge.

FORCE

Recent physicists object that the old conception of Force as 'something which pulls or pushes' is anthropomorphic, and would substitute the conception of Energy, Potential and Kinetic. (Is not potentiality an explanation in terms of expectation and therefore equally anthropomorphic?) But, if the old conception of Force is surrendered, the meaning of Mechanism becomes still more attenuated.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

The meaning of Causation is a highly debatable question. Unless, however, we are prepared to follow the lead of the Philosophical Idealists, we must admit that it is a symbolic representation of an element in Ultimate Reality as to the real nature of which we know nothing. In either case the old mechanistic materialism is ruled out.

RELATIVITY

The resolution of space and time into 'space-time' raises in an acute form the question, What is matter? and Materialism loses its prima facie plausibility in proportion as matter ceases to be a simple, solid, permanent reality.

MATERIALISM

NEWTON AND DARWIN

MATERIALISM as a system goes back past Epicurus to Democritus, four hundred years B.C. and more. It did not become plausible till after Newton.

I had rather [wrote Bacon, the apostle of the inductive methods of modern science] believe all the fables in the Legend and the Talmud and the Alcoran than that this universal frame is without a mind.

And such is still the common-sense verdict of ordinary humanity. The discoveries of Newton unveiled a mechanism. It was this that woke the scepticism of the thinking few. Before that, men instinctively looked to the heavens and there saw declared the glory of God and a firmament that showed His handiwork. Newton explained the working of it all on a few simple mechanical principles. It was left to others to draw the moral to which Laplace gave classical expression-when asked why, in a treatise on Astronomy, God was nowhere mentioned-' Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis'.

But that hypothesis still seemed to be needed in the domain of Natural History, and it seemed indispensable to account for the origin of Man. In the delicate adjustment of each and every one of the bodily organs to the function it subserves-the eye for seeing, the fin for swimming, the wing for flight-and even more in the fact of Reason manifest in the mind of man, there still appeared to be evidence unmistakable of the conscious purpose and intelligent design of a wise Creator.

Then came Darwin, indicating a mechanism, automatic in its working, which might explain this too.

Darwin started from two facts of familiar observation. (1) The several offspring of any living organism, plant or animal, are never all exactly alike; they 'vary' slightly both from the parent and from one another. (2) Variations from the type form appearing in an individual may be inherited by its descendants.

Upon his creative imagination flashed the idea of applying to these facts the conception of 'Natural Selection '. He argued that a variation from the standard type might often be of such a character as to make it easier for the individual to procure food, to escape its enemies, or in some other way have a better chance in the struggle for existence. Whenever this happened, the individual so equipped would survive longer than the rest and would leave behind it more descendants. If its descendants inherited the useful variation, they, too, would do the same. On the other hand, the descendants of those individuals of the stock which lacked this new equipment would in every generation die sooner, or leave behind them less offspring, than their more fortunate cousins. Hence the new type would gradually, at least in certain areas, replace the old. A stock-farmer deliberately ' selects ' for parentage such individuals as display some quality he most desires. According as his aim is milk or meat, he breeds from one or another set of cattle. Thus by selective breeding from individuals which exhibit some measure of variation in the direction he desires, gradually in the course of several generations he, so to speak, piles up small variations into great, and produces a herd which, with some degree of exaggeration, might be styled a new sub-species. Darwin conceived of Natural Selection as a mechanism capable of producing new species by a similar piling up of small variations spread over an immense period of time. And it was a mechanism which could function automatically. For the mere fact that a particular variation happens to give an individual an advantage in the struggle for existence means that that individual has a chance above the average of propagating its kind. The discrimination which the stock-farmer effects by selective breeding, in Nature results from the earlier death of the less well-equipped. Automatically, therefore, in every generation those best adapted to their environment increase and multiply, the rest diminish and may ultimately become extinct. So long as the crop of variation is sufficiently abundant, individuals will constantly occur which are in some ways better adapted to their environment than any heretofore existent, and Nature will automatically select and breed, from these. The human eye is an instrument extraordinarily elaborate and wonderfully adapted for its purpose-so wonderfully, said' Paley, that it is conclusive evidence of the conscious design of an intelligent Creator. Darwin replied that Natural Selection would suffice, given only, to start with, a spot of protoplasm specially sensitive to light, and the occurrence of indefinite and minute variations over a sufficiently long period of time. All can be explained in terms of mechanism, automatic and unconscious.

Biology since Darwin has not stood still; but it would be outside my present purpose to discuss the question of the bearings of later discovery on his conception of the mechanism of evolution. I am only concerned to point out here how inevitable it was that the work of Darwin should seem to bring to its triumphant climax the long and fruitful effort of Astronomy, Physics and Chemistry to explain the Universe completely in mathematical and mechanical terms. All questions, it was proclaimed, were reducible in the last resort to problems of molecular Physics. Assume-it is a big assumption-certain properties as somehow self -existent in the atom, and some great initial 'push,' and everything else would automatically evolve, as a necessary consequence rigidly determined by the structure of matter and the original direction of primal energy.

There follows by inexorable logic the ineluctable conclusion that thought, feeling, will, can initiate nothing, change nothing, do nothing. Consciousness is only an 'epiphenomenon ', a functionless shadow cast by automatic changes in that material process which is the sole reality.

This last conclusion, however-and without doubt it is the only conclusion which the promises admit-lands us in a difficulty, and one that appears the greater the more closely it is examined. The 'shadow' has the curious property that it is conscious of itself. Moreover, though it is alleged to be impotent to do, it is certainly potent to think and to know-otherwise the whole structure of the sciences is illusion, and so the case for regarding consciousness as an epiphenomenon is illusion too.

Again, reasoning, the psychologists insist, is a function of ' conation ' or will; and in the course of biological evolution thought certainly appears as secondary to desire (cf.p. 77). Unless, then, it be a 'variation' useful to the individual in the struggle for existence, why has Natural Selection so enormously developed it? Yet again, if thought is a product of the Will to live, it is odd that it should discover that life itself is a process mechanically determined and therefore destitute of will. It is odd, too, that a Universe which is itself an automaton should give birth to little automata alive enough to know that their life is an illusion.

Yet again, if he starts with the assumption that matter alone is real, and that all that happens is the result of its mechanically determined movements, the Materialist must deny to consciousness any independent activity. How then can he allow any validity to Science itself? Science is a system of knowledge built up by the concentrated thought of generations of acute inquirers, and thought is an act of consciousness. If consciousness is a passive shadow, Science is just a fainter shadow cast upon the first by the Unknown.

THE POWER OF METAPHOR

The attractiveness of Materialism depends, to an extent which is not commonly recognised, on its appeal to the imagination. The human mind, even when highly trained, thinks to a great extent in pictures. Indeed, it is one purpose of this book to suggest that when the human mind tries to envisage the Universe as a whole, it can do no other, and that therefore true wisdom lies in frankly accepting this necessary limitation, and concentrating our efforts on finding the right picture. In studying ordinary objects we begin by noticing their resemblance to things already known, and so assigning them to this class or to that. But the Universe is like nothing but itself; classification, which is the very basis of all ordinary knowledge, is here meaningless, for the thing to be studied can be classed with nothing else. The best we can do is to find the illuminating metaphor, the picturesque analogy, the symbol or the myth, which will help us to apprehend some aspects of the truth. The Materialism of the last century I regard as a metaphor of this kind. It pictured the Universe as an Infinite Machine. A belief in God which ascribes to the Ultimate Reality qualities quintessentially human, like reason or love, is often decried as anthropomorphism, as an attempt to I fashion the Infinite after man's own image. But if Theism is anthropomorphism, Materialism is mechanomorphism, an attempt to fashion the Infinite in the image of a machine.

Mechanomorphism is essentially myth-and, up to a point, useful and illuminating myth. And it was a myth specially attractive in the later Victorian age, when the world was still dazzled by that unending procession of fresh mechanical inventions which our sated imaginations take as a matter of course. Fabrics with a delicacy of pattern rivalling the finest wrought by the alert brain and skilful fingers of living human agents, were being produced by dead machinery working in rigid unalterable planes and circles, impelled by impersonal forces like electricity or steam. And the pattern of the Universe that Science was revealing seemed to be the result of some all-pervading energy working in accord with rigid unalterable laws. How easy so to think of It! Go into a printing-house: see, at one end of the machine, a great blank roll of paper; at the other, neatly folded up and counted, copies of a journal pouring out, replete with information, argument and rhetoric. Why may we not picture the Universe as a similar machine-at one end the formless nebulae wafted through the inane; at the other the mind of man, capable of poetry, heroism and love?

Press the analogy and it reads a very different lesson.

The machine, I grant, by purely mechanical processes turns blank paper into speaking literature; but what guides it and what finds expression in the written words is living intelligence. I grant, too, that it has reached its present perfection as a result of a long, slow evolution through simpler stages; but to that evolution-to the designing, to the co-ordinating, to the intricate adaptation of those mechanic forces themselves-have gone centuries of conscious thought and invention, ever developing, improving, elaborating the rhythmic harmony of inter-related parts; and every modification at every stage was inspired by conscious purpose striving for the attainment of some clearly envisaged end. A machine as it stands is a dead and rigid thing, and the force which drives it is an unconscious force; but, for all that, the simplest machine is the epitome and distillation of long-concentrated conscious purpose linked with keen intelligence. It has taken centuries of conscious and intelligent effort to produce the machine which prints our morning paper, and has this Universe,-a machine the complexity and intricacy of which baffles the intellect and bewilders the imagination,-come into existence of itself, the result of blind unconscious force? Is the Universe one gigantic accident consequent upon an infinite succession of happy flukes? Of all the strange beliefs that man has cherished, none flaunts a paradox so staggering as this.

THE CONCEPTION OF MECHANISM

At this point I am compelled to touch on some questions of a more technical character. The reader who is conversant, even to a small extent, with scientific or with philosophic discussion will, I hope, find no difficulty in following my argument, whether he agrees with it or not. But any one who has no special interest either in Science or in Philosophy would do well, at any rate on a first reading of this book, to omit the remainder of the present chapter.

The conception of the Universe as an Infinite Machine is obviously metaphor; and though metaphors of this kind may be taken literally by the unreflective, thinkers recognise them as myth. It is otherwise with abstract terms. Of such terms Mechanism has proved one of the most delusive. Mechanism is the abstract conception which corresponds to the concrete thing machine; in origin it is a generalisation arrived at from the contemplation of actual machines. But every actual machine is a thing made by man for the attainment of some purely human end. Hence to use the term mechanism at all for the description of natural phenomena is to be guilty of anthropomorphism-if that be a matter of guilt-in a double degree. The anthropomorphism of religion interprets the Universe in terms of human personality-that is to say, in terms of the most remarkable natural product of that Universe. But mechanism is a conception doubly anthropomorphic, for it is derived from artificial constructions devised by human personalities for their own private uses.

The conception of Mechanism has been the master key of scientific discovery. Since, however, in origin it is a metaphor drawn from observation of machinery, it is of the first importance to beware lest illegitimate associations derived from its original nonscientific sense be allowed to creep unawares into its scientific usage. Otherwise an element of mythology will make its way into the citadel of Science. Now a machine is essentially an instrument; it is not in itself a creative power. It is a method by which creative thought seeks to attain ends clearly foreseen. It is something initiated by intelligence, controlled by a living agent and directed by purpose. Since, then, the abstract idea of mechanism is reached by way of generalisation from actual machines, it ought properly to include all this. As a matter of fact, it is employed by Science expressly in order to exclude everything of the sort. If this were merely a question of the use of words, it would not matter. The scientist-provided he is careful always to define his terms-has a right, like Alice's Humpty Dumpty, to make words mean what he chooses. But it is not legitimate to employ a word in an attenuated meaning and to expect at the same time to retain the good-will ', so to speak, of its old 'connection '. My point is this: an actual machine is a 'going concern '; but it is that only because it was designed and is controlled by intelligence and purpose; leave out these and it is nothing at all. If then you explain Nature which is also a 'going concern '-in terms of mechanism while expressly excluding from the connotation of that word all reference to intelligence and purpose, you are explaining it in terms of something that never has existed and never could. Mechanism so conceived is pure symbol; it is simply a name for an abstract relation which has not corresponding to it any concrete object of which we have actual experience.

Now mathematicians constantly reach valuable results by making use of symbols, such as [\/ - 1], to which nothing in human experience is known to correspond. Physical Science is entitled to do the same; and it has done so, with conspicuous success, in the case of this conception of mechanism. Indeed it has been this conception more than any other that has thrown wide open to the human race the door of knowledge. But it is quite another matter to interpret the Universe as a whole in terms of mechanism without asking for what the concept mechanism as used by Science really stands.

Science uses the concept of mechanism as a principle by means of which it is possible to co-ordinate innumerable observations dealing with moving bodies. In so far as any concept which reduces chaos to system may properly be called an explanation, it may be said to ' explain ' them. But it is not explanation in the same sense as when we find that some unknown thing is a member of a class of things already known, or when the unfamiliar is 'explained' by its likeness to the familiar (cf. p. 80). If mechanism in scientific usage were really the equivalent in abstract thought of the concrete thing machine, then to discover mechanism in Nature would be to 'explain' Nature in this sense. It would mean to discover that the obscure working of Nature has the closest resemblance to that familiar object of everyday life, a machine, that is to say, to something initiated by intelligence, controlled by a living agent and directed by purpose. Whereas, in fact, the mechanism of which the scientist speaks is an abstract idea which corresponds to the concrete object machine only if these essential characteristics of every actual machine are left out; that is to say, it resembles something that nowhere exists outside the mind of the scientist. Clearly this is not explaining the obscure working of Nature in terms of a familiar object of daily life, the unknown in terms of the known, but the contrary. It is explaining concrete observed fact by the aid of a conception which in the last resort is purely symbolic. In other words, mechanism, in its scientific use, is a mode of thinking; it is not a mode of being.

There is a further point. In the past the concept of mechanism has been specially fruitful for scientific discovery in relation to what Clerk-Maxwell called 'the model ', that is, the imaginative picture of 'how it works' which precedes, and may also control, the formulation of a new hypothesis. But in so far as 'the model' is a mental picture, it is extremely difficult to keep out of the picture the idea of Matter as solid substance, of Force as something which pushes or pulls, and of Causation as a kind of mechanical link between the motive force and the matter which it moves -much as the piston is the link between the steam that supplies the power and the wheel which the crank turns. Granted the adequacy of these conceptions of Matter, Force and Causation, the word 'mechanism', even with all its original associations with the word machine, is an illuminating metaphor. But to the modern scientist, as I shall show later, these conceptions are all impossibly naive.

A friend engaged in advanced research in Physics, to whom I showed the above paragraph in typescript, write to me as follows:

I don't know whether it matters for your purpose (since popular materialism is of course not based on the most modern science), but the 'model' is rather discredited nowadays. If it happens to be useful, any suggestions it can make are always welcome, but the ideal of 'explaining' everything so that the mechanism of the processes shall be evident is no longer common, and the desire to understand things, in this sense, is being found to be nearly as often harmful as helpful. The majority, I think, of the brilliant advances in physics which this century has seen have been made by methods which ignore, or in some cases even defy, the canons of successful explanation which were accepted in Maxwell's time. We are getting quite used to theories which are 'right' in the sense that they predict all sorts of unexpected things correctly, but which remain themselves unintelligible, or even self-contradictory, when one tries to 'understand' them.

With this I would ask the reader to compare this excerpt from the latest work of that distinguished scientific thinker, Professor Whitehead.- 4

It is orthodox to hold that there is nothing in biology but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex circumstances. One difficulty in this position is the present confusion as to the foundational concepts of physical science. . . . It cannot be too clearly understood [italics not in original] that the various physical laws which appear to apply to the behaviour of atoms are not mutually consistent as at present formulated. The appeal to mechanism on behalf of biology was in its origin an appeal to the well-attested self-consistent physical concepts as expressing the basis of all natural phenomena. But at present there is no such system of concepts. Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

MATTER

The atom-once supposed to be the ultimate unit of matter and to be a solid substance comparable to an infinitesimal pellet of shot has now been analysed by Physics into a kind of solar system, consisting of one or more 'electrons ' revolving round a centre known as a 'proton '. It is believed that, relatively to the size of these infinitesimal 'planets', their orbits are larger than those of the Solar System. Thus the amount of ' solid substance ' as compared with the extent of empty space within the atom is actually less than the amount of solid matter in the planets as compared with the empty space in the Solar System-in which the orbit of Neptune is 5000 million miles across. Further, it seems more probable than not that the electron should be regarded not as ' a solid substance ' at all but as a unit of electric force.

Philosophers say that this discovery makes no difference at all to any conclusion they had previously held. I think they are right. But it does make a difference to popular materialism. To the popular mind -and all of us at times fall back to the level of popular thinking-the attractiveness of the theory that Matter is the prime reality, depends on the fact that life and thought are invisible, impalpable and evanescent, while material objects are not. If I thump on the ground with my stick, there is a solid reality which will outlast me and all MY hopes or theories. But if matter is not solid at all-if in the last resort it can be resolved into infinitesimal points of electric force-it no longer strikes the imagination as being so much more real than in-visibilities like life or thought.

Again, it is no longer possible to laugh at the metaphysician who questions the ultimate validity of the hard-and-fast distinction which ordinary common-sense would make between mind and matter. Long before the physicist has reached the analysis of the atom into protons and electrons, he has gone beyond the limits of 'observation' in the simple and direct sense in which I feel something as 'hard ' or see it as 'red' -even with a microscope to extend my visual powers. The simple data of impressions received through the five senses-which after all are the basis of the whole of our knowledge of the external world-have been worked up into highly elaborate systems by means of hypotheses framed on mathematical and scientific principles, before the atom itself, much less the electron, comes upon the stage. The atom, the electron and the like, are not things directly observed, they are hypothetical constructions, elaborated by human minds to account for actual data of sense; and for the most part these data themselves consist of records on delicate measuring instruments, photographic plates, etc., which are 'representations' of phenomena which do not admit of being directly observed. Thus in advanced Physics it is more obvious (though not less true) than in everyday experience that sense data and interpretative inference are inextricably blended; and therefore the difficulty of saying whereabouts (if anywhere) in the act of knowing, the mental ends and the material begins a difficulty long ago discerned by philosophers-has become a live issue for scientists as well.

Mind and matter [writes Mr. Bertrand Russell] are for certain purposes convenient terms, but are not ultimate realities.Electrons and protons, like the soul, are logical fictions. 1

I should not myself have dared to speak so disrespectfully of an electron. But if I were to accept, 'without prejudice', as lawyers say, the conclusion that electrons, protons and the soul are all three 'logical fictions ', I should venture to suggest that the reality whatever it is-to which the fiction 'soul' corresponds, differs in one important respect from the reality to which the fictions 'electron ' and 'proton ' correspond. The soul' stands for an element in Reality which can frame theories about electrons and protons.

FORCE

The old-fashioned conception of Force, the second of the fundamental entities taken for granted in the popular idea of Mechanism, is being assailed today almost as vigorously as the old conception of Matter.

The very idea of Force is what would be termed an anthropomorphism, that is to say, it ascribes the behaviour of inanimate objects to causes derived from the behaviour of human beings. We have come to associate the motion of matter with somebody or something pulling or pushing it.2

What Prof. Soddy is here objecting to is, not the use of the term 'forces ' in Mechanics (where force may be defined as that which accelerates, retards or deflects massive bodies); but 'the attempt even to imagine forces to exist . . . as the causes of changes of energy......

It is better [he continues] to try to grasp the meaning of energy as a fundamental fact of experience than to begin, with totally inadequate knowledge, to derive from the actions of living beings a shallow analogy.

He bids us, therefore-when we are considering ultimates, not merely particular problems of mechanics-to discard altogether the idea of Force, and fall back on the conceptions of Potential and Kinetic Energy.

This conclusion, coming from so high an authority, I am bound to accept. I would, however, venture to point out that potential and kinetic energy are abstract intellectual concepts arrived at by generalisation from the study of the behaviour of physical bodies so abstract that it is hard for a layman like myself to feel certain he apprehends their true meaning. But though an abstract conception of this kind may be of far more value to the physicist than the conception of 'force ', I must confess that it seems to me to be equally anthropomorphic, only in a different way. 'Potentiality' is not a thing that can be observed; it is a conception framed by a human mind in order to state in the most highly generalised form an expectation that, if such and such observable change is made in the existing situation, certain other observable changes will take place. I cannot see that an interpretation in terms of ' expectation' is less anthropomorphic than one in terms of ' pushing'. To me it appears to be the replacing of an anthropomorphism which has been found to be misleading by one which for the purpose in view is of a more useful and illuminating character.

Be that as it may, the point I would press is that, if we are no longer allowed to think of Force as something which pushes or pulls, the old conception of mechanism 'has had another hard blow. 'Mechanism', unless treated as pure symbol, implies Matter as a solid substance, Force as that which pulls or pushes, and motion as that which is 'caused' by their conjunction.

Matter and Force have turned into something else. There remains to consider Causation.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

After two hundred years of discussion there is still hot debate as to the precise significance of the concept of Causation. A couple of pages is all that I can spare to the subject without disturbing the proportion of this book. I cannot, therefore, hope either to initiate into its mysteries a reader unfamiliar with the literature or to contribute anything of value to one who has digested it. I can merely state my own view as briefly and simply as possible, but without any attempt to justify it.

Hume long ago pointed out that causation is not a thing that can be observed, and Huxley revived and reiterated his arguments. All we can actually observe is that B habitually follows A. The assertion, then, that A is the 'cause ' of B must be based on inference of some sort; and this is equally true whether the inference is legitimate or not. Kant took up his parable from Hume, and went on to maintain that the human mind is so constituted that it cannot help making this kind of inference. On his view such phenomena can be grasped by the mind only if they are related to one another, or at least conceived as capable of being related, as cause and effect. I cannot experience a pinprick without taking it for granted that it has some cause, though I may quite well infer the wrong one. This taking for granted that for every event there must be some cause, Kant explains by saying that the peculiar quality of the relation we call causation is one which is read into experience by the experiencing mind. To this particular contention of Kant there has never, so far as I know, been given any satisfactory answer.

We seem; then, to be shut up to one of two conclusions.

(1) There is the conclusion which was drawn by the school of thinkers known as Philosophic Idealists. In Kant's own view the conception of causation is essentially anthropomorphic; it does not hold good in the sphere of Ultimate Reality. The Idealists, on the contrary, maintain that the relation of cause and effect, though contributed by our minds in the act of knowing, is a relation which must also hold good of Reality Itself. Largely on this ground, they argue that Reality must be conceived as rational-in the sense that Its structure must be thought of as similar to what we know as Reason. The Universe, then, must be viewed as the expression of Mind; and our minds partake of the nature of the Universal Mind, and see things-of course, 'through a glass darkly'as It or He sees them.

(2) But, on the other hand, suppose we think that Kant was right-apart, I mean, from details in the way in which he worked out his views-in holding the conception of causation to be a purely anthropomorphic principle of interpretation. Causation then becomes a symbolic representation of something behind phenomena, of the real nature of which we cannot be aware. In that case the last thread has snapped between the conception of Mechanism as Science uses it and what we call a machine. Even the notion of activity has disappeared from it. It is a way of saying that a ' working drawing ' of Reality may be made which, if Matter, Force and Causation were what apparently they are not, would represent the way it works. In other words, the conception of mechanism is definitely misleading unless it is treated as a pure diagram; but, recognised for what it is, it remains a necessary instrument of scientific thought.

To sum up. If we affirm the ultimate validity of the category of causation, we seem to land ourselves in some form of Philosophic Idealism. If we refuse to do so, we put the last nail in the coffin of mechanomorphic Materialism.

RELATIVITY

I am not sufficiently versed in the higher mathematics and in the theory of electro -magnetism to profess to understand the case for Einstein's theory. Much less am I entitled to pronounce what bearing, if any, it has upon the question of Materialism. But persons who are better qualified than myself to judge, and who cannot be suspected of any theological bias, think that it has a bearing.

Let Mr. Bertrand Russell speak: 3

The theory of relativity, by merging time into space-time, has damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosophers. Matter, for common-sense, is something which persists in time and moves in space. But for modern relativity -physics this view is no longer tenable. A piece of matter has become, not a persistent thing with varying states, but a system of inter-related events. The old solidity is gone, and with it the characteristics that, to the materialist, made matter seem more real than fleeting thoughts.

I What I believe, p. 17. (Kogan Paul, 1925.)

2 F. Soddy, Matter and Energy, p. 20. (Home University Library.)

3 Introduction to now edition of Lange's History of Materialism, p. xii. (Kegan Paul, 1925.)

4.-Science and the Modern World, p. 145.(Cambridge University Press, 1926.)

SYNOPSIS

SCIENCE

Pure Science conceives Reality in terms of Quantity. Quality (or Value) is the special province of Art and Religion.

The recent revolution, led by eminent scientists, in accepted views as to the nature of scientific knowledge. Quotations to illustrate this. Scientific knowledge, it would appear, is a Representation of Reality which may be compared to a diagram.

The main contention of this chapter is that Religion is similarly a Representation of Reality, only it is one comparable, not to a diagram, but to a picture. The religious apprehension of Reality may be likened to Turner's picture, 'Sunrise in Venice', the scientific to a ground plan of the canals and streets. For a comprehensive knowledge of Reality, Representations of both kinds are requisite.

Art

Whatever else Art may be-and no general theory of Aesthetics is here attempted-it is a method of externalising something of the inner quality of life.

Two essential differences between Science and Art.

(1) Science states; art suggests.

(2) Science explains observed data by bringing individual cases under a general law; Art reveals an inner spirit by embodying it in a concrete instance. By thus making visible the invisible, Art may convey information; for an inner spirit once objectified can be used as a datum for a scientific purpose, but such use is alien to the artist's own intention.

Life is something which can only be known from within. But the knowledge of its inward quality derived from one's own personal experience can be enriched by various means. Of these means Art is among the most important.

The apprehension of quality is an essential element in all conscious life. Two reflections suggest themselves.

(1) Quality is nothing artificial, but an element in the totality of things which any theory of the Universe must seek to explain.

(2) While Art objectifies life in its apprehension of aesthetic value, Religion is concerned with moral value also.

RELIGION

If Religion is to be accepted as a valid Representation of Reality in terms of quality, comparable to the Representation given by Science in terms of quantity, it Must be shewn that a twofold path to knowledge is necessitated by the constitution of the human mind. Proof of this postponed to Chapter IV.

Religion is the inner spirit of the religious man; and of this conduct is the primary objectification. But when we think of Religion as a Representation of Reality parallel to that given by Science, we must study its secondary objectifications, such as myth, creed and rite.

We then notice that, while Religion is akin to Art in that it is concerned with Quality, it resembles Science (1) in its claim to represent Truth, (2) in conceiving the Universe as a consistent Whole. Monotheism, the most mature type of Religion, makes the qualitative affirmation that the Whole is good.

TRUTH

Reality is too large and too rich for finite minds to grasp in its completeness. Truth, then, is the best attainable Representation of Reality in certain of its aspects.

Quality can only be known by being felt; but by means of Art we can feel quality beyond the limits of our own experience.

Religion, using methods of Art,-such as myth, drama, parable, hymn represents ' Reality by making men feel the quality which it ascribes to It.

Hence to test the 'truth' of any Religion we must cross-examine its myths, etc., and find their inner meaning before looking at the intellectual constructions of its theologians.

SCIENCE, ART AND RELIGION

SCIENCE

ALL things that can be measured, and all things, just so far as they can be measured, come within the purview of Science. The realm of Science is Quantity. Quality can be appraised, but it cannot be measured. This holds, even though for practical purposes we may try to correlate our estimate of quality with some scale of quantity. One picture is not two and three-quarter times as beautiful as another, nor is one crime three and a half times as heinous as another, even if the price paid for two pictures, or the terms of imprisonment awarded for two crimes, may be in those proportions. Again, you can measure the chemical constituents of two wines, but not the corresponding flavours; you cannot measure the differences of quality in the notes of a harmonic scale, although a mathematical formula will exactly describe the relative lengths of the vibrating strings.

The pure sciences, of which Physics and Chemistry are the type forms, conceive of Reality only in terms of quantity. But in Art and Religion we have activities of the human mind which appear to conceive no less exclusively in terms of quality. They weigh not, neither do they mete; they aim only at the recognition, the expression or the creation of Value. Further, the 26 methods by which quality is apprehended, estimated or expressed are different in kind from those which are applicable to quantity. If provisionally we assume that quantity and quality are two diverse aspects of Reality, they cannot be known in the same way.1

There are, however, certain sciences primarily concerned with the phenomena of human activity, such as Psychology or History, which would stultify themselves if they kept strictly to the quantitative methods and mechanical concepts of pure science of which Physics is the type. Psychology and History, as I shall argue later (p. 103 ff.), are compelled to supplement and interpret the results so reached by a sympathetic appreciation of the qualitative character of the inner life of the objects which they study. They are successful in exact proportion as they know how to employ at the right time and in the right way, in addition to methods employed by pure science, a kind of imaginative insight into the finer nuances of character akin to that of a great novelist. That Is to say, Psychology and History operate by a combination of the method of Science with the method of Art. These, then, should be styled ' mixed sciences '. They occupy a position intermediate between the 'pure' sciences of Physics and Chemistry 2 on the one side and Art and Religion on the other. I have mentioned these 'mixed sciences' because, as it will appear later, their existence has an important bearing on the provisional assumption which I am here making that quality as well as quantity is characteristic of Reality itself. But for the rest of this chapter they may be ignored.

An immense advance has been made during the last few years by a group of thinkers trained in pure science and mathematics towards a clearer understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. The change of outlook may without exaggeration be styled revolutionary. Since, however, it is one for the exposition of which my personal competency might reasonably be called in question, I prefer to let experts in these fields of knowledge speak for themselves.

The doors through which Nature imposes her presence on us are the senses. . . . Older physics was subdivided into mechanics, acoustics, optics and theory of heat. We see the connections with organs of sense the perceptions of motion, impressions of sound, light and heat. Here the qualities of the (perceiving) subject are still decisive for the formation of conceptions. The development of the exact sciences leads along a definite path from this stage to a goal which, even if far from being attained, yet lies clearly exposed before us: it is that of creating a picture of Nature which, confined within no limits of possible perception or intuition, represents a pure structure of conception, conceived for the purpose of depicting the sum of all experiences uniformly and without inconsistencies.

Nowadays mechanical force is an abstraction which has only its name in common with the subjective feeling of force. Mechanical mass is no longer an attribute of tangible bodies, but is also possessed by empty spaces filled only by ether radiation.

Inaudible tones, invisible light, imperceptible heat, these constitute the world of physics-cold and dead for him who wishes to experience living Nature, to grasp its relationships as a harmony, to marvel at her greatness in reverential awe.3

So the German mathematician and physicist Max Born. Similarly Mr. Eddington, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, in the essay already quoted (p. 27) in a footnote.

Leaving out all Aesthetic, ethical, or spiritual aspects of our environment, we are faced with qualities such as massiveness, substantiality, extension, duration, which are supposed to belong to the domain of physics. In a sense they do belong; but physics is not in a position to handle them directly. The essence of their nature is inscrutable; we may use mental pictures to aid calculations, but no image in the mind can be a replica of that which is not in the mind. And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer readings which we can observe. The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the worldqualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber.

Until recently physicists took it for granted that they had knowledge of the entities dealt with, which was of a more intimate character; and the difficulty which many find even now in accepting the theory of relativity arises from an unwillingness to give up these intuitions or traditions as to the intrinsic nature of space, time, matter and force, and substitute for them a knowledge expressible in terms of the readings of measuring instruments. In considering the relations of science and religion it is a very relevant fact that physics is now in course of abandoning all claim to a type of knowledge which it formerly asserted without hesitation. Moreover, these considerations indicate the limits to the sphere of exact science.

The conclusion of the matter is summed up in popular language by Mr. Bertrand Russell: 4

What we know about the physical world, I repeat, is much more abstract than was formerly supposed. Between bodies there are occurrences, such as light-waves; of the laws of these Occurrences we know something-just so much as can be expressed in mathematical formula-but of their nature we know nothing.

We naturally interpret the world pictorially; that is to say, we imagine that what goes on is more or less like what we see. But in fact this likeness can only extend to certain formal logical properties expressing structure, so that all we can know is certain general characteristics of its changes. Perhaps an illustration may make the matter clear. Between a piece of orchestral music as played, and the same piece of music as printed in the score, there is a certain resemblance, which may be described as a resemblance of structure. The resemblance is of such a sort that, when you know the rules, you can infer the music from the score or the score from the music. But suppose you had been stone-deaf from birth, but had lived among musical people. You could understand, if you had learned to speak and to do lip-reading, that the musical scores represented something quite different from themselves in intrinsic quality, though similar in structure. The value of music would be completely unimaginable to you, but you could infer all its mathematical characteristics, since they are the same as those of the score. Now our knowledge of nature is something like this. We can read the scores, and infer just so much as our stone-deaf person could have inferred about music. But we have not the advantages which he derived from association with musical people. We cannot know whether the music represented

SYNOPSIS

PRO NOBIS CRUCIFIXUS

In the Creed we find a story in which most of the events, though in form historical, are evidently symbolic. Plato would have seen in it one of those 'myths' to which he resorted when he felt that conceptual thinking had reached its farthest limit.

But to call this story a myth, in the ordinary use of the word, would be misleading, for three reasons:

(1) Christ is not a figure of mythology, but a character in history.

(2) The factual element in the Crucifixion is what gives the story its dynamic significance.

(3) In spiritual profundity the story is on quite a different level to the myths familiar to students of Comparative Religion. It is the supreme interpretation of the fact of Pain.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Wherever there is life, there is Pain; where man is, there is also Sin. Evil in this double aspect, constitutes a problem which is the touchstone of philosophy and religion alike. The two classical attempts to solve it are those worked out by the Indian and the Jew.

The Indian doctrine of Karma. Its attractiveness and its weakness. Its unfortunate influence on the genius of the Buddha.

The Hebrew quest, continued over many centuries, issued in a series of solutions, each intended to replace one which had satisfied a previous generation.

Historical circumstances compelled the Jew to 'specialise' in the problem of evil. A climax was reached when the disciples of Jesus were confronted with the spectacle of the Crucifixion-the ideally good man brought by His devotion to God's service to an ideally bad end. Reflection on the Cross led to a now and positive conception of the function of pain, involving the defeat of evil. 'Christianity thus gave to souls the faith and strength to grasp life's nettle.'

BEYOND PHILOSOPHY

Religion can only help those who believe it true. Truth means adequacy in representation. To test such adequacy we must ask:

(1) Is the Representation congruous with the facts of Science and History? This question is dealt with in Chapters IV.-VII.

(2) Has it that dynamic qualitative character which assists men to defeat evil? This is dealt with in Chapters VIII. and IX.

Criticism of Benedetto Croce's view that Religion is myth, and that myth is merely philosophy in an elementary stage.

(1) Just as poetry can express what prose cannot, so Religion has something to communicate which cannot be expressed in purely conceptual terms.

(2) The story does not merely present an idea about the nature of Reality; it elicits a reaction in feeling and will which-assuming the idea to be correct-is an appropriate reaction. It is not enough that an idea (about God) should be true; it must also inspire to action.

The question, What quality has Reality? is one to which everyday life compels us to make some answer-by deed if not by word. The search for the right answer is therefore worth the trouble.

But must not an answer given nearly two thousand years ago be outof-date? Great art never grows obsolete, and Religion may here, as in other ways, be closer akin to Art than to Science; and since the riddle of the Universe is not yet solved, this ancient answer must at least be studied.

AN ANCIENT STORY

PRO NOBIS CRUCIFIXUS

THERE is an ancient story-is it a parable, or something more ?which has a strangely moving power. First of all the scene is set in Heaven, before all worlds; it changes for a while to earth, under Pontius Pilate; then we are back in Heaven till the final End of things. Very God of very God, for us men and for our salvation, so the story runs, came down from Heaven, was incarnate of the Virgin and was made man; crucified also for us, He rose again, ascended into Heaven, sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and shall come again with glory to judge both quick and dead.

In such a story Plato would have seen one of those myths to which he himself would often have recourse when, at the end of a long and arduous quest for truth, he felt that the pure intellect had shot its bolt but something yet remained unsaid. And since Philosophy, even when it is protesting against the unreality of abstractions, is apt to be itself abstract, while Art is vivid and concrete, Plato, I hold, did not cease to be a thinker, rather he showed his greatness as a thinker, when, at the point where abstract ratiocination could go no further, he fell back on Myth.

Unfortunately for our present purpose the word ' myth ' has been fatally injured by the foolish people who talk of the ' Christ-myth ', with the implication that Jesus either never lived or that we know next to nothing of Him. These ought not to be taken seriously. Some of them, never having given real study to the subject (or lacking the equipment to do so if they would), speak from second-hand or superficial knowledge; others are of that class-unfortunately not a small one-who feed an unconscious egoism by championing some ingenious paradox. Competent scholars, here and in Germany, have been at the pains to publish refutations of their arguments; but, like those who maintain that Shakespeare was Bacon, or that the British are the Lost Tribes, they are impervious to refutation. The evidence is summarised below (p. 180 n.).

Were it not for these and other similar associations, the word 'myth ' might appropriately be used to describe a series of statements, in form historical, most of which are manifestly of a purely symbolic character. Heaven is not a place whence the Son of God could 'come down', or whither He could 'ascend'; God cannot be thought of as seated on one throne with another ' on his right-hand' side. Even more obviously symbolic is the title 'Son of God.' Indeed the Nicene Creed was expressly framed to repudiate the Arian contention that the 'begetting ' of the Son was a literal generation which took place in time. There are theologians who bid us analyse the story into elements that are symbolic and elements that are historical. By such analysis we miss its point. It is of the story as a whole, not. of little bits of it, that we ask, Is it true? But if we ask that question, the truth we are thinking of is a larger truth than that of history. 'Crucified under Pontius Pilate ' is indubitably historical, but taken by itself it is just a ghastly fact. Prefaced by the words, 'who for us men and for our salvation came down from 'Heaven ', it is transmuted; it becomes the supreme expression of the love of God for man. Ask whether this is true, and you have left history far behind-and you have outsoared philosophy as well.

But there is a further reason why, even though a better word is hard to find, I hesitate to give to such a story the title 'myth'. There is one respect, and that quite vital, in which among the world's many myths it stands apart. Its core is a historic fact-the gaunt reality of Jesus crucified. In other myths there may be a historic nucleus, but it is never the historical element in them that is significant. In this case it is the actual death of Jesus, coming as the climax of the actual life He lived, which gives its meaning to the story. Pose the question, How far is this story, if considered as a 'representation' of Ultimate Reality in Its qualitative aspect, an adequate expression of the quality actually inherent therein-and at once the factual character of its -historic core is seen to be essential. The quality of Reality may be expressed in a construction of the imagination; but in what has in fact happened we have confidence that the expression is authentic. For our present investigation, however, only the broad significance of the facts is important; it matters not at all whether Christ's public ministry lasted one year or three, whether the correct date of the Crucifixion is A.D. 30 or 33. It does matter that He was crucified.

But what matters most of all is whether the significance attached to this event in religious tradition is a valid interpretation of the quality of Reality. And the evidence by which this can be determined must be sought, not in ancient documents, but in a consideration, such as will be attempted in the following chapters, of the facts of Science and the experience of life.

Modern Psychology has done much to explore the suggestion that folk-tale and myth represent, as it were, race-dreams. They express in symbolic and dramatic form the hopes, fears and passions which lie deep down in the unconscious mind of the community. At times they rise to a level which makes them a kind of folk philosophy.

Of this character are many of the myths of Greek and Indian Religion, which obviously embody the intuitions of a race. For, though a myth or folk-tale may originally be the work of an individual, its survival and the actual form in which it has been preserved are due to the communal instinct which it expresses. But, though of immense interest from the historical and psychological point of view, the religious myths of India and Greece are of little value in the search for Ultimate Reality. This observation I may confirm by a quotation from that curious observer Count Hermann Keyserling.2

The mental outlook of the West was too scientific, even during the Middle Ages, to express irrational forces perfectly. But this is just what the Hindu succeeded in doing. The figures in the Indian Pantheon, in so far as they embody primary forces, are so convincing that I am inclined to believe the seer who told me once that. they were the true likenesses of divine reality. . . . The particular elementary instincts are . . . condensed into so much substance, and they grow into beings of such terrific power, that it is not surprising if many among us still believe to-day that they are essentially profound. It is in this sense that the Indian Pantheon, although a superficial product, yet possesses profundity. It is so tense and exhaustive an expression of the superficial in man and nature, as could never have been discovered by a profounder set of human beings.

The product of an early period in national development, the myths of India and Greece represent race experience and race reflection at a very primitive stage. And although with the advance towards higher civilisation their crudities have received some castigation, and their substance has been enriched or its expression refined, they are only capable of expressing a very elementary experience of life. That is why, both in India and Greece, the religious quest found its highest expression in philosophy rather than in myth.

Exactly the reverse holds good of the Christian story, even if you like to take it simply as a myth. This represents, not early beginnings, but the climax of highest development in Hebrew religion; it reflects, not the adolescence, but the maturity of a national soul and that the soul of a people which for a thousand years had been concentrated on the religious quest. Even if we regard it merely as a projection, an objectification in mythical symbol of the depths of a racial soul, it would yet stand to the myths of Greece or India as a drama to a dream. It is the one sublime interpretation of the fact of Pain.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Pain is the fundamental fact in life. In the evolution of living organisms the capacity for pain, we are told, develops earlier than that for pleasure.3 The pain of hunger precedes the satisfaction of repletion, and in the animal kingdom it is at least probable that, of the two, the pain is the more acute. Freud, regarding sex as the source of pleasure in its intensest form, feels justified in using the word ' sexual ' as the generalised description of pleasurable sensation of any kind. But here, too, at the animal level, one is inclined to suspect that the relief of pain, quite as much, if not more than, the achievement of pleasure, is the motivation of this instinct. Nor is it altogether otherwise even in the sublimated form of human courtship. It is significant that in Spanish the phrase for a proposal is decir su dolor, to tell one's woe. And at a far deeper level of experience than this, the ache, the disillusionment and the despair of love have ever been known as bedfellows of its joy.

If love should count you worthy, and should deign
One day to seek your door and be your guest,
Pause I ere you draw the bolt and bid him rest,
If in your old content you would remain;
For not alone he enters; in his train
Are angels of the mist, the lonely guest
Dreams of the unfulfilled and unpossessed,
And sorrow, and Life's immemorial pain.
He wakes desires you never may forget,
He shows you stars you never saw before,
He makes you share with him, for evermore,
The burden of the world's divine regret.
How wise you were to open riot! and yet,
How poor if you should turn him from the door! 4

Wherever life is, there is Pain. But once man with his gift of free choice has appeared, and whenever man is on the stage, then evil stalks in yet another guisedebasing lust, conscious injustice, deliberate cruelty, all the foulness, meanness, egoism, which of old was summed up in the one word-Sin.

For the polytheist the existence of evil is not a problem. He feels the smart of it; but where gods are many, with diverse interests and of characters none too high, he would be surprised if the world they ruled were not full of caprice. To the materialist, also, there is no problem; if the Universe is the product of blind chance it cannot be expected to function ethically. But to the monotheist, or to any philosopher to whom the rationality of the Universe means more than a mere mathematical self-consistency, evil presents a problem so urgent that according to the profundity of the solution which it offers, every religion and every philosophy must finally be judged.5

The fundamental question raised in this volume is whether or not Religion is or can be a valid Representation of Reality on the side of quality. Clearly, then, of all the religions of mankind-whatever other merits they may have-those only claim our notice here in which the problem of evil is recognised as central. This fact once observed, our investigation is enormously simplified; for the religions of which this holds good are few.

It was in India first that a solution of the problem of evil was thought out on the grand scale. Unfortunately the solution reached was reached too soon; it was too neat and too complete. A thousand years and more before Christ, India had worked out the doctrine of Karma. In this scheme all suffering, wheresoever seen and howsoever caused, is punishment for sins committed by the sufferer in a previous incarnation; and every sin committed now will similarly, in a subsequent reincarnation, meet its exact due. The equation between sin and suffering is perfect; guilt and punishment are exactly balanced.

At first blush this equation is the strong point of the theory. It enables man to assert that the structure of the Universe is just; 6 and this possibility is one that appeals to the mind of the West quite as much as to that of the East. But deeper reflection stirs a doubt, Is Justice the supreme good? The Law-court, like the steam-engine, is an invention of man, and to me, at any rate, the theologian who envisages the Power behind the Universe as an infinite Lord Chief Justice seems to be guilty of an anthropomorphism as naive as that of the materialist who thinks of It as an infinite Machine. Justice is a concept quite as necessary to Jurisprudence as that of mechanism is to Science; but the attempt to apply either of them to the Universe, in anything like their original sense, is seriously misleading-quite as much in the case of Justice (cf. p. 228 ff.) as we have already found it to be in the case of Mechanism.

In the way of life short cuts are perilous. The religious quest of India was side-tracked by the mechanical perfection with which the doctrine of Karma solved the problem of evil in terms of legal justice. A problem which seems completely solved causes no more perplexity; but when men cease to question they cease to find fresh light. It was peculiarly unfortunate that the Buddha, the greatest soul in Indian history-perhaps the second greatest in the history of Religion-accepted the doctrine of Karma with only minor modifications. For his acceptance of this doctrine meant that the problem of the nature and the end of Life was for him artificially simplified. By accepting the dogma that all pain in this life is punishment for sin in some previous existence-reckoned according to a kind of debtor and creditor account in which pain is always the negative equivalent in suffering of a positive act of wrong-he had ruled out in advance the possibility of a philosophy in which the fact of pain can have positive significance by becoming a constituent element in the quality of a life lived. If pain is never anything but a paying of past debts and never has a forward look, then it follows that life, as the Buddha held, is a thing from which release is to be sought. To kill desire becomes the message of deliverance.

The Hebrew, like the Indian, tried hard to conceive the Universe as just. And at that early stage of social development at which individuality is still overshadowed by tribal consciousness, it was not impossible to do so. The observation that the sins of parents are visited upon the children, or those of the monarch on his people, has a rough-and-ready correspondence with the facts of life.

Children certainly do suffer for what their parents, nations for what their rulers, do amiss. But is this just? That question is bound to be asked as soon as men reach the stage when the individual, rather than the group, is seen as the unit of moral responsibility; and by the time of the Babylonian exile the Jew had reached this stage.

In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.7

Then Ezekiel thunders out the famous chapter which proclaims that in the award of prosperity and adversity to the individual God is strictly just.

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.8

But the doctrine that in this world the individual gets exactly his deserts is not one which experience bears out. The book of Job was written to point this out. And so far as this life is concerned Job is right; the hypothesis of the rule of justice simply will not fit the facts. It was a greater than Job who said, 'Those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay'; and, again, 'He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust'. The purpose of the Universe, if such there be, is something which soars above mere justice. 9

No premature solution of the mystery of evil had barred the Jew from continuing to ponder on the problem. And neither the character nor the circumstances of the race had allowed it to remain unpondered.

(1) Some time before the Babylonian exile a line of prophets had proclaimed a sublimely ethical monotheism. And, as we have already seen, the problem of evil becomes acute in exact proportion as man rises to the belief that the All is ordered by a single Will and that that Will is good.

(2) This people, devoted as they were to a higher religion and a nobler ethic, nevertheless, century after century, were helplessly subjected to great empires whose ideals and whose gods were cruel and impure. So circumstanced they could never leave off asking, Why?

(3) With the complete destruction of the Hebrew state and of the old national life, there arose a confident expectation of a glorious national restoration, the so-called Messianic hope, ever renewed by Prophets and Apocalyptists. All the fervour, which in other peoples has expressed itself in patriotic pride and statecraft, was concentrated on the national religion. For them there was no art or architecture to provide outlet for the energies of the finest minds outside Jerusalem no shrine might be built, and the art which expresses itself in ' graven images and the likeness of anything on heaven and earth' was banned. Not yet had the opportunity presented itself for extensive commercial enterprise. Nothing large and worthy was left but to meditate on their religion. And this religion with a unique emphasis taught that the national God was all powerful and all good-a lesson daily contradicted by the facts of life.10

Of this race and into its traditions, after five hundred years of such experience, were born Jesus Christ and His great interpreters, St. Paul and him we name St. John: and between Him and them a Cross had intervened. The crucifixion came as a final refutation of the theory against which the book of Job had been the classic, but apparently unavailing, protest-that in this life there is some kind of equivalence between suffering and desert. The spectacle of the ideally good man brought to an ideally bad end, as a consequence of his self-devotion to moral and religious reform, raises the problem of evil in its acutest form. The career of Jesus is a test case. Indeed, for all who ask the meaning of the Universe it is the test case. The Cross of Christ must be, either the darkest spot of all in the mystery of existence, or a searchlight by the aid of which we may penetrate the surrounding gloom.

And from reflection on that cross there has dawned upon the mind of man a new vision of God-a vision of a God who Himself enters into the world's pain, and thereby breaks the power of the world's sin. And with this has gone a new perception of the possibilities of pain-an apprehension that there is a kind and quality of pain that is creative, curative, redemptive, and that this is a kind of pain which man is privileged to share with God. Evil is neither explained nor denied; it is defeated. ' Christianity thus gave to souls the faith and strength to grasp life's nettle.' 11.

BEYOND PHILOSOPHY

A religion will give strength to grasp life's nettle Only to those who believe it true. But we have seen (p. 44 f.) that what is meant by truth is adequacy in representation. Science and Religion are alike in that they can apprehend Reality only under forms which analysis shows to be symbolic. Hence to ascertain the extent to which a religious -representation in story form is true, we must put two questions.

(1) Is this Particular Representation congruous with what we know in other ways about the nature of the Universe? This is equivalent to asking whether the philosophy which it implies is one borne out by the facts of Natural Science and History.

(2) Has it the dynamic power essential to a representation of quality?-for quality, we have seen, is adequately represented only when we are made to experience it. More particularly, is it a practical solution of the problem of the evil will, and does it make possible the 'defeat of pain'? This is a question which must be explored mainly in the light of Psychology and everyday life.

These two questions cannot profitably be studied in complete isolation. But, roughly speaking, Chapters IV-VII. of this book form an attempt to answer the first -so far as possible without recourse to the technical apparatus of Philosophy. The second is dealt with mainly in Chapters VIII. and IX. It will, however,make the argument somewhat clearer if I say something in this place on the relation of the two questions to one another.

Tennyson wrote:

For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers, Where truth in closest words shall fail, When truth embodied in a tale Shall enter in at lowly doors.

Croce, the professional philosopher, is, it would seem, less apprehensive of the possibility that ' the closest words' may fail. To him Religion is essentially myth; and myth is simply philosophy at an elementary stage a method of envisaging the nature of Reality, very suitable for the ignorant multitude but unnecessary to the true philosopher, who sees clearly the truth which the myth is feebly struggling to express.

Emphatically that is not the view I hold. If the truth were expressed in a clear form elsewhere, it would be waste of time to explore exactly how much of it is sketched out more dimly in an ancient myth. Had I found intellectual satisfaction in any system of philosophy that I have come across, that philosophy would be the thing which I should now be trying to present in language intelligible to the plain man.

I am not denying that this 'ancient story ' does express in symbolic form certain things which can be quite well expressed in philosophic terms. To say, for example, that God was made man is to affirm a kinship between the spirit of man and the essential nature of the Power behind the veil; it is to assert the Divinity of Man-a Divinity -potential in all men, even if actualised only in one. Such an assertion implies philosophy, and that at more than an elementary stage of development.

And the philosophy implied is obviously one that has an affinity to certain of the classical systems while violently conflicting with certain others. Croce is -right in seeing philosophy implicit in the story; he errs, I suggest, in not seeing that there is also something more. Call it frankly 'myth '-yet the depth, the range, the ,intensity of experience which lie behind this Super myth transcend the grasp of any single individual; it is something which the thinker may by close study dimly apprehend, but it is not something which by thinking he ever would have reached. We may imagine a philosopher, who had drunk deep the cup of sorrow and of wrong, having the genius by the light so gained to interpret some fragment of that age-long race experience. Even so, could he express what he divined in the language of philosophy, abstract and intellectualised as that necessarily must be? Perhaps he, too, would frame a myth; at any rate he must become a poet-for poetry can say, or at least suggest, things which cannot be expressed in prose. We do not, however, offer poetry to the uncultured multitude, reserving prose for the elect but contrariwise. And if this myth be 'true', it is wanted today by the elite even more than by the herd. Vanitas vanitatum is the cry, not of the poor and simple, but of those who have thought and read and enjoyed much.

There is a further consideration. Looked at from the side of the spectator or the hearer, Art is something which compels a spiritual reply. Architecture, painting, poetry and music have the power to elicit from him who sees or hears a dynamic spiritual response. They are a stimulus potent to provoke a reaction of the personality, qualitative in kind. They can educe latent perceptions, kindle dormant feeling, incite to fresh activities. Their impact is creative. So it is with Religion. Poetry is not poetry unless it moves, a jest is not a jest unless it can amuse; just so, creed, rite or myth are not religion unless they can inspire. Religion is futile unless it is 'a word of power'. When presented to men-not of course in a bare outline like the Creed, but with the passion of conviction by one whose own inmost soul has realised something of its rich and varied meaning-the tale of Christ has ever awakened men to new life.12

Doubtless it can have that power only for those who see in it, not just a noble fancy, but a valid, if symbolic, expression of the Soul of Things. Nevertheless, explanation in the scientific, or even in the philosophic, sense is not the purpose of Religion, Religion, as we saw, differs from Art in that it purports to be concerned with truth; it claims to be a ' representation ' of Reality as valid in its own sphere as that of Science. But that representation is in terms of quality; and quality can be represented only if somehow it can be actually felt. It follows that in Religion no statement can be called ' true' unless it can evoke that emotional and volitional response which is the most appropriate to the quality actually inherent in Reality. Religion must not merely tell us what our environment is like; it must help us to adapt ourselves to it.

The Universe is something to be lived in, not merely to be studied; man's attitude towards it can never be that of a spectator only. I cannot avoid some emotional and practical, as well as an intellectual, reaction towards the Not-myself in its totality; what I can do is to seek the right reaction. I may picture the Power behind things as a lifeless Machine, as a purblind Life-force, or as a benevolent Intelligence and my practical and emotional reaction to It will vary accordingly. And it ought so to vary; for the reaction which is appropriate if the first or second of these conceptions be, correct, will be entirely inappropriate if the last is nearest to the truth.

At this point Philosophy comes in. Unless the intellect can affirm a factual correspondence between Reality and the Representation of It by Religion, the Christian Creed is left as the most pathetic, just because the most sublime, of all the empty dreams of man. But the philosophy implied in it is only part of what it means. It is psychologically dynamic; it not only presents an idea of Reality, but it stings man to respond to it in the way that is best, supposing the idea to be true. It is a poem-but a real person lived it. It is drama-but it was acted out upon a real cross. The universal is individualised, the abstract has become concrete. Therefore this Drama can bring to man not a theory of the Universe but the bread of life, not Theism but God.

The question 'What quality has Reality? ' is one that many deliberately decline to ask. Unfortunately for them it is one which they cannot decline to answer in fact, if not in theory. It is not possible to avoid reacting in some way, other than merely intellectual, to the Totality of Things. To. live at all is to live in a certain spirit and a certain way. There is no need to speak the words' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'. To live in one kind of way is to say this daily, in deed if not in word; it is to affirm indifference to the right as a quality in Reality. To live in a different way is, in deed if not in word, to affirm the contrary. But which is true? Which way of life, that is, is the reaction to Reality appropriate to its actual quality? For if an iceberg is a fitting symbol of Its quality, one kind of reaction is appropriate; if the Crucifix, quite another. Of these two pictures, which is the more congruous with the reality of things? That is a matter, not of fancy, but of fact. It may be fact that is hard to ascertain but it is worth the search.

There are some who will object:-The story has come down to us from ancient days; it took shape in an age in many ways remote from ours and before the dawn of modem science; can we loam anything from such an age? The objection would be weighty were it not for the fact, so often reiterated above, that (considered as a mode of 'representation') Religion is to be classed, not with Science, but with Poetry and Art. Poetry and Art, whenever truly great, are things age does not stale. In that they are unlike Science. In the sphere of scientific knowledge each generation starts where the last left off; ancient and obsolete are all but synonymous. It is otherwise with Art or Letters. Homer and Shakespeare are not out of date; the sculpture of Greece,13. the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, still exact our wonder. And, if Religion expresses its creative intuition in ways nearer akin to those of Art than to those of Science, the creations of its classic age should never lose their power.

This is not just theory. Look at the facts and say how and where the march of progress has left Christ behind. Have men since found an answer more true or more inspiring to the questions which every man or woman who thinks and feels is compelled to face? Not yet has Science or Philosophy solved the riddle of existence; not yet have sorrow and wrong, disease and disillusionment departed from the earth. Death has not lost his sting, the grave its victory. Till that time comes, or till some nobler, truer vision has been seen, it is time wasted to interrogate the nature of the Universe without first deeply pondering how far, or in what way, that ancient answer to the riddle may assist our quest.

ADDITIONAL NOTE

PHILOSOPHY As KNOWLEDGE

Neither my criticism of Croce above (p. 65 ff.) nor my contention in Chapter IV. that there are fundamentally two Ways of Knowledge--i.e. the quantitative, characteristic of Science, and the qualitative, more especially seen in (Art and) Religion is intended to deny to Philosophy the claim to be a Way of Knowledge. Obviously, if my view is correct, it follows that a philosopher who accepts it (and is, therefore, aware that Science and Religion apprehend Reality under two different aspects) knows something that is outside the spheres of knowing, within which Science and Religion operate; further, this knowledge of his gives both to his scientific and to his religious knowing a character which it would not otherwise have. Nevertheless Philosophy can no more be a substitute for Religion than it can be for Science; moreover, in this book, I am primarily concerned only with the Ways of Knowledge which are immediately relevant to the correlation of Science and Religion.

Footnotes:

I .The exploitation in psychological theory of the myths of Oedipus, Electra and Narcissus, familiar as it is in popular talk, has a technical significance the exact meaning of which cannot be easily appreciated without considerable study of the subject. But the meaning and the appeal of a story like that of Cinderella is plain to all-it is the typical day-dream of the neglected and oppressed. It is an objectification in symbolic form of the consolation framed by hope for an inferiority felt in the depths of the soul. But in the series, dream, day-dream, folk-myth and conscious work of art, no hard-and-fast line can be drawn. Each passes into the other by imperceptible gradations. All emerge from the depths of the subconscious, and, in all, feeling-tone and quality predominate. only in the above series the element of intellectualisation. and consciously achieved coherence, which in the work of art is essential, comes more and more into evidence. But even in dreams intellectualisation is present; and it is a great mistake to suppose that the only problems with which the dream-life deals are at the level of conflicts of sex or fear. The dream sometimes (of. Appendix I., Dream Psychology and the Mystic Vision), and still Oftener the myth, deals with problems of the same kind as those which exercise the Tragic Poet or the Philosopher.

2.The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, E.T., p. 96. (Jonathan Cape, 1925.)

3.Pain centres seem to lie lower (sc. in the brain structure) than pleasure centres. No region of the cortex cerebri has been assigned to pain. Such negative evidence gives perhaps extraneous interest to the ancient view . . . that pleasure is absence of pain " (C.S. Sherington ,The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, p. 255. (Yale University Press, 1920.)

4. S. R. Lysaght Poems of the Unknown Way; quoted with the kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan and Co.

5. In discussions of this subject, the conventional procedure is to begin by distinguishing the problem of pain from the problem of sin, with the implication that, of the two, sin is the more perplexing. I am not so sure. Pain is coterminous with life, conscious wrong-doing is confined to man; and were it not that the wrong that one man does is so frequently paid for by the agonies of others, the problem of evil would-to most of us, at any rate-assume a different aspect. Again, to the problem of sin a solution theoretically satisfactory lies close at hand. Neither virtue nor vice has any meaning unless the will is in some sense free, for an automaton can be neither good nor evil. Free will, then, is a necessary condition of goodness; but that same freedom of choice which makes goodness possible must leave open the possibility of the choice of evil. An abstract argument like this does not satisfy the heart, but at least it estops the plea as it is stated by the head. I know of no logic that can so nimbly dodge the fact of pain.

6.Yet the moralist may reasonably urge that punishment fails to attain its object unless the offender is conscious that, and exactly for what, he is being Punished at the time when the punishment is inflicted. Again, the philanthropist may urge that the theory that all suffering is richly deserved is likely to damp man's ardour in the effort to relieve it.

7. Jeremiah xxxi. 29 ff.

8. Ezekiel xviii. 20.

9. Cf. the very original and important essay, ' Beyond Justice 1, in Lily Dougall's God's Way with Man. (Student Christian Movement, 1923.)

10 Exuberance of vitality is a characteristic of the Jew - no race has ever lived through and lived down so much. Arid since life is essentially that which feels (that is, which is susceptible to quality), it is, perhaps, not surprising that the Jew has always shown a peculiarly keen apprehension of value-alike in things material and spiritual. As trafficker or artist, as world-financier or revolutionary, as musician or scientific discoverer, he is still remarkable. In a later chapter I shall show grounds for taking the concept of Life as a key to the interpretation of Reality. If that be so, we have an additional reason for giving special study to a literature embodying the concentrated experience of a race gifted with such intense vitality and a sense of value so enhanced. Not only in the book of Job, but also in Proverbs (' My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord . . ') and in Isaiah Iiii. (I Who hath believed our report. - .') new lines of thought in regard to the problem of evil are opened up in the Old Testament, to be constructively developed, and synthetized in the New.

11. F. von Hugel, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of

Religion, p.112. (Dent, 1921).

12.To the average Christian the Creed is a symbol standing for the gospel story as a whole, much as a flag stands for a country; my treatment of it in this chapter has been influenced by this fact. Of course, however, if the Gospel story were not so presupposed, most of what I have written about its dynamic power would be untrue. The fact that the Gospels themselves have the quality of great Art is not without importance in estimating the value of the religious 'representation' they embody.

13. On this point the judgement of a man like Rodin is of special interest. 'No artist will ever surpass Pheidias-- for progress exists in the World, but not in Art. The greatest of sculptors....will remain for ever without an equal.'-- A. Rodin, Art, p. 234, E.T. (Hodder, 1912.)

SYNOPSIS

FREEWILL

The arguments against the freedom Of the Will seem unanswerable; but they prove too much. They prove that no reasoning can prove anything---in which case, the argument against Freewill, not to say the whole structure of Science, falls to the ground.

The absurdity of this conclusion forces us to scrutinise the nature of human knowledge.

SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge in the scientific sense involves three processes:

(1) Classification, (2) Analysis, (3) Explanation, by which is meant seeing the individual thing as an instance of a general law.

If there exists anything which is recalcitrant to any of these processes, it must-just so far as it is that-slip through the meshes of the net of scientific knowledge. Such a thing is Life.

CLASSIFICATION AND INDIVIDUALITY

Classification concentrates on the resemblances between individuals and ignores their differences. It is a practical device-necessary because it is impossible to 'handle' things in large numbers unless they can be sorted out into groups which can be treated as if each member of them were identically alike.

When we deal with men or works of art individuality is all-important; and it exists, and may be important, elsewhere.

Classification, since it ignores individuality, is a method of abstraction. In dealing with the atom of hydrogen or the amoeba, individuality may be ignored, but in higher types of life it becomes more and more important.

Scientific knowledge, therefore, being based on classification, is compelled to ignore a phenomenon which becomes more striking with every rise in the scale of life.

THE NATURE OF LIFE

Life is not a substance which can be observed under the microscope, but something different in kind. It is a principle of Organisation.

The relation of life to matter is a problem at present unsolved. But the existence of life, and up to a point its nature, is known to us, not inferentially or as an object of scientific knowledge, but directly from the fact that we are alive.

Life is not to be pictured as an 'atmosphere', or as an 'ocean' of some invisible fluid. It is a principle of self-organising individuation.

In Art there is no conflict between mechanism and meaning: why suppose there is such in Nature? But if there is purpose in Nature, Science could not reveal it; for purpose being essentially qualitative is outside the sphere of Science.

The probability that in life even at the sub-human level there is an element of spontaneity.

THE FLUX OF THINGS

Another limitation of scientific knowledge arises from the fact that while Reality is dynamic, knowledge is of the static. To know (in the scientific sense) a living thing we must conceive of it as if dead.

THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

The controversy between the Mechanist and Neo-Vitalist schools raises questions the answer to which seems to depend, less on biological facts, than on the theory of knowledge we adopt.

Biology and Physiology are compelled by the nature of the human mind to use the concepts of mechanism and law; but it is more important in these sciences than in Physics and Chemistry to recognise the symbolic nature of those concepts. They are adequate as a 'description' of behaviour, but not as a complete account of it; for that the concept of Life must somehow be introduced.

The concept of Life is in the last resort anthropomorphic; it is an interpretation of the movements, etc., of other men and animals in terms of our own inner experience. This anthropomorphism is unavoidable; but provided we know what we are doing and use proper safeguards, there is no reason for avoiding it.

PSYCHOLOGY

Modern Psychology has been extremely successful in applying the conceptions of mechanism and law to the human mind. But it must use anthropomorphic conceptions like libido, and it supplements the methods of pure science by the anthropomorphic method of sympathetic understanding.

'Behaviourism' is a completely logical position-and also a reductio ad absurdum of the assumption that the only way of knowledge is by the methods of ' pure ' Science.

Psychology must, to a large extent, dispense with measurement-the 'very basis of the physical sciences. If that fact be held to disqualify Psychology for the title of Science, it is only the more evident that there is a valid way of knowledge outside the sphere of Science-and this way is one by which Quality can be apprehended.

HISTORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

As in Psychology, so in History and in the ordinary affairs of life, scientific methods are regularly supplemented by an intuitive knowledge of the inner quality of life akin to that employed by the Artist.

RELIGION AS KNOWLEDGE

Religion employs both methods, but in a reversed order of importance. Myth, rite and sacred book are externalisations of an inward spirit. Religion looks to these first; but it will degenerate into superstition unless it checks conceptions derived from these in the light of scientific knowledge.

CONCLUSION

If we make the assumption (for which reasons will be given in the next chapter) that the fundamental element in Reality is of the nature of Life, it follows that Reality can only partially be understood by the methods of pure Science. The experiment, therefore, must be tried of supplementing knowledge of the purely scientific kind by inferences drawn from the nature of Life, in other words, by a method of anthropomorphism scientifically controlled.

Chapter 4

TWO WAYS OF KNOWLEDGE

FREEWILL

The ancient problem of Freewill raises the question, 'What is knowledge ?' in a way which compels the attention even of the man in the street. The case against Freewill seems in logic to be irrefutable; but the conclusion that we have no power of choice and no spontaneous initiative in action is so absurd that we, cannot help suspecting that the fault is in the logic. There must be a 'catch' somewhere. The 'catch', I suggest, will be found in the fact that there are two different and disparate ways by which the human mind becomes aware of truth. There is the method of Science-classification, analysis and reduction to law which is applicable to all visible and material things; and there is the method of direct intuitive knowledge (and inference therefrom), which must be used to supplement and check the results of the other method, wheresoever there exists that mysterious, invisible something which we call' Life'.

Let us look into this question of Freewill. I aim what I am as the result of inherited physique and temperament, modified and developed by the environment in which I have lived--that is, by country, school, persons, books, accidents, etc. To these influences I owe the experiences, the opinions, and even the ideals which condition what I wish, think or do as new circumstances arise. Is it not obvious, then, that what I think and wish and do is as much determined by causes external to myself as is the course of a river by the mountains through which it winds? This conclusion psychologists of the school of Freud believe they can still further fortify by tracing a relation of mechanical causation between the conscious thought of the adult and unconscious psychic processes the course of which has been determined by inheritance or by some purely accidental occurrences in early life.

But when we look this conclusion in the face, it has awkward consequences. If the Determinist is right in denying the existence of spontaneous initiative, the application of his principle cannot be limited to action; his argument, if it proves anything, proves that wishes and thoughts, quite as much as deeds, are mechanically determined. The Freudians so far are right in emphasising this. But here comes the difficulty; if Determinism is a sound theory, then it is determined which arguments shall appeal to me as valid and which shall appear to be fallacies. It follows, then, that my thinking the case for Determinism conclusive constitutes no reason at all for believing it to be so; I think so merely because some purely accidental circumstances of heredity and environment have determined that I should be the kind of person to whom the arguments for Determinism appeal. And if my opponent is convinced by the arguments for Freewill, that is not because the arguments are superior, but merely because, by his heredity and environment, it is determined that he shall think them so. Accordingly, if the Determinist is right, reasoning can prove nothing; it is merely an ingenious method of providing us with apparently rational excuses for believing what in any case we cannot help believing. But if all reasoning is a 'pathetic fallacy', then the reasons for believing in Determinism itself are fallacious. Not only that; unless reason is that which can discriminate, there is no criterion of truth and falsehood; all knowledge, collapses; one hypothesis is as good as another, and Science itself is a fairy tale. This conclusion can be avoided only if we see that, as a necessary postulate of reasoning, there must be inherent in the nature of thought enough of spontaneity to enable it to discriminate between true and false; and that means, in its reaction to material submitted to it, to choose between two or more alternatives. Were thought no more than an automatic reflex action of the organism to circumstance, the nature of that reaction would be predetermined; the mind might react by judging statements to be either true or false, but such judgment would be determined, not by the actual merits of the case, but merely by the exact nature of the stimulus, emotional or otherwise, given by the way the statement was put. True, our judgments often do come very near to being of this nature; but the essential difference between prejudice and real knowledge consists in our having some capacity to rise above such automatic reactions.

Recent psychology has emphasised the dependence of thought on desire; indeed, there are those who would regard reason as a function of ' conation ', that is, of will and desire. Thought, desire and will are indissoluble elements in a single vital process; yet biologically conation seems prior in importance-and, to a large extent, in time. Even in human life, thought is exercised mainly in devising means to ends defined by the satisfaction of practical need. The scientist and philosopher (for whom thinking is in itself an end) are a late and rare product of the evolutionary process. But just in so far as thought is a function of conation (to discuss exactly how far it is this would be beside MY present purpose), it follows that the element of spontaneity which we cannot but recognise in thought must be read back into will also. Indeed there is much to be said for the view that spontaneity is of the essence of life itself, and, to quote a happy phrase of Prof. J. A. Thomson, that' the response of the organism to external stimulus is of the -nature not of a rebound, but of a reply '.

For the moment, however, I am concerned with the problem of Freedom not so much for its own sake as for its bearing on the problem, What is Knowledge? Determinism seems logically irrefutable, yet it not only denies a fact which seems to be a fundamental datum of consciousness, it also inevitably involves the conclusion that all reasoning-incidentally, therefore, all Science-is an illusion. If so, the reasoning which proves Determinism must, along with all other reasoning, be pronounced a fallacy. Such a result is a danger signal. The scientists and philosophers who have argued for Determinism are not fools; and if suspicion attaches to this conclusion it must extend far beyond. The case for Determinism is of such a kind that, if it shows signs of breaking down, the question is at once raised, What, then, is the nature and validity of scientific knowledge? For the very possibility of scientific knowledge as commonly conceived is bound up with the assumption that the phenomenal Universe is a mechanically determined system governed by uniform laws.

It is not, then, the, existence of a conflict, real or supposed, between Science and Religion that makes it necessary to scrutinise the nature of human knowledge. If nothing more was involved, many would decline the inquiry. It is the contradiction which arises for Science itself (as well as for everyday life), from the necessity of affirming both the spontaneity of thought and action and the reign of law. Every hour of the day we plan and project; and in doing so we take for granted that we are really free, that it will make a real difference whether we decide to do this or that. Yet Science (and its presupposition, the reign of law) affirms that we are automata, whose thoughts, feelings, actions, are all determined for us. Confronted by such a contradiction we are forced to raise the question whether the underlying assumptions, and the methods of reaching and presenting knowledge which Science has used with such extraordinary success, are valid only in certain spheres or for certain aspects of Reality. No question can be more alive-for the man in the street, quite as much as for the philosopher.

SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Scientific knowledge differs from the workaday knowledge of everyday life mainly in being more systematic and more thoroughgoing. It can be analysed into three processes.

(1) Knowledge is recognition-this is a walkingstick; that is a pig; the other thing looks like an insect, but of a kind I have not seen before. That is to say, knowing means noting in regard to any object that it is like or unlike, or partly like and partly unlike, something already known. Knowing, then, in the first place consists in discovering the right class in which a thing should be placed, Knowledge is classification.

(2) But that is not all. To understand a motor-car I fix my attention on the different parts of which it is made up. I also note carefully how they fit together into a single whole. The body, the wheels, the brakes, the engine and every one of those innumerable component parts, must be studied individually and also in their relation to one another and to the whole. - Scientific knowledge differs from popular in that this process is carried further. The chemist analyses a drop of water into molecules of oxygen and hydrogen; the physicist takes up the task and resolves the atoms of which these gases are composed into little solar systems of protons and electrons. Knowledge is analysis.

(3) There is a third stage. Knowledge attempts to give an answer to the question, Why? I am awakened by a noise. Is it something rattling in the wind, or perhaps a burglar? Listening intently, I gather new facts. It seems to come from near the floor in a corner of the room. It has the rhythm of gnawing. I frame a hypothesis. It must be a rat. Rats, I know, do gnaw wood at night, and I account for this particular noise on the theory that it is a particular instance of that generalised observation. Knowledge is explanation. Or to take an example from the high realms of Science. Newton showed how the observed facts as to the motion of the planets round the sun, of the moon round the earth, and the (corrected) observations as to the mass of earth and moon would be accounted for by the hypothesis that every material object in the Universe attracts every other with a force varying directly with the product of their masses and inversely with the square of their distance. Since innumerable facts subsequently observed were found to accord with this hypothesis and -until quite recently-none that conflicted with it, the hypothesis, that this particular uniformity of behaviour as between material objects was of universal validity, seemed to be established. It therefore ceased to be styled hypothesis and was referred to as a Law. When individual facts are seen as particular instances of a general rule, or when two or more such general rules are seen as instances of some still more general rule, then from the point of view of scientific knowledge they are said to be explained. The general rules, or uniformities of behaviour in things or classes of things, are commonly spoken of as Laws of Nature. The crown of scientific knowledge is the discovery of such laws. Scientific knowledge then is explanation by reference to general laws.

The method, then, of Science is to take the individual concrete thing, and (a) to assign it to a class, (b) to split it up into its component parts and (c) to see everything about it as a particular instance of some universal law. But the method of Science is only a systematic and clearheaded way of doing what half-consciously and in a rule of-thumb way we all do in everyday life, whenever we use our minds to 'know'.

But what if there be anywhere anything that either (a) has some element of uniqueness which eludes classification, or (b) has in it something which defies analysis, something which completely disappears when analysis begins, or (c) behaves in a way which cannot plausibly be described as merely one instance of a mode of action in accordance with some universal law?

Obviously, if anything exists which has any one of these characteristics, that thing will, just to the extent to which it possesses any one of them, slip through the meshes of the net of scientific knowledge. To know, in the sense in which Science uses that word, means to classify, to analyse and to explain as an instance of a general law. Whatever, therefore, cannot be classified, or analysed, or referred to a general law simply eludes Science. If it is to be known at all, it can only be by some method of apprehension other than those employed by Science.

But, we ask, do things possessing any of these characteristics as a matter of fact exist? Certainly. At least one of them is possessed by everything that is alive; and in man, of living things the most alive, all three exist. The possibility suggests itself that where Life is there is something with which knowledge (in the scientific sense) cannot entirely cope.

CLASSIFICATION AND INDIVIDUALITY

We have seen that the basis of all scientific knowledge is classification. To understand means to see a thing in its relation to the rest of things we know about, to see how far it resembles and how far it differs from other like things. Having classified an object we can then relate it to the system of observed uniformities of antecedent and consequent (or cause and effect, if we prefer that ambiguous terminology) which we call the Laws of Nature. Thus, in the scientific sense of the word, we can only understand where we have succeeded in classifying. The more refined and more illuminating our principle of classification the better we shall be able to understand. The advance of Science consists mainly in discovering more subtle and at the same time more simple principles of classification, which enable us to co-ordinate more and more facts in a logically articulated system -under certain primary generalisations or laws.

Now classification demands not only the detection of identity between all members of the same class, but also the ignoring of individual divergence from the class type. At the bottom of the scale of existence the identity between members of a class may approximate to, or even reach, completeness. Thus for practical purposes we assume--though the assumption may well be false that every atom of hydrogen is in all respects and for all purposes exactly like every other. At this end, then, of the scale of being, classification appears to be something of objective and universal validity, being based upon the discovery of identities of a purely objective and absolute nature.

But, as we ascend the scale of being, our confidence in the objective and absolute character of classification begins to be shaken. It begins to dawn upon us that classification is a convenient, indeed a necessary, method of handling things by the simple device of ignoring their individuality. For, whenever we are dealing with entities like human beings in which individuality is of importance, it becomes obvious that the identities on which classifications are based are nothing more than a selection made for some purely subjective purpose. A zoologist may assign man to the class of mammals called 'primates'; and for the purpose of studying his relation to other animals this classification is highly illuminating. But man can only be classed as a member of the class 'primates' either by ignoring all those qualities which are not shared by the rest of the class, or by defining man as a sub-class every member of which has certain identical qualities in addition to those common to the larger class. We must then go on classifying on zoological principles and distinguish further sub-classes within the class 'man', e.g. the classes of white, yellow, black men. But, having got as far as that, we soon find a need for classification based on other than purely zoological considerations. Suppose I am taken ill in Japan, the person I need is one who belongs to the class 'doctor', and the best doctor available may or may not be a member of the class 'white'; the zoological classification by race colour becomes irrelevant. The classification I now require is one based upon the quite different principle of medical degree or training. But I soon discover that this is only a partial guide. All doctors of like technical qualification are not equally good; and whether I recover from my illness or not may depend upon how far the individual called in possesses that personal flair which makes one doctor so much superior to another in diagnosis.

One awakes to the fact that classification has always a practical aim. In order to 'handle' things at all we must think of them as belonging to one class or another, that is to say, treat them as being for our purpose identical. A quartermaster who has to feed a battalion of 1000 men must think of them not as men but as' mouths'. For his purpose it is irrelevant that some are honest, others thieving, some illiterate, others highly educated, some stupid, others brilliant. But to a bank manager selecting a clerk, to a newspaper proprietor seeking an editor, or to an operatic producer on the look-out for a conductor, these differences between men are the only things that matter.

And classification is no less necessary if the things we wish to 'handle ' are, not men or solid substances, but ideas and their embodiment in Art. If I write a book of literary criticism I must classify poetry as epic, dramatic, lyric, etc. Only so can I deal with it in a way that is in any sense ' scientific '. But then I make the discovery that, however apt my classification is, and however illuminating it may be for the study of the relations of a particular poem with others in regard to aim, method and technique, it just leaves out the essential thing-the unique individuality of the poem. To understand Hamlet it is necessary to consider it as a member of this class and of that-as poetic drama, as tragedy, as Elizabethan, etc. But in the last resort what makes Hamlet worth the trouble of considering at all is just that unique combination of qualifies and effects which is not to be found identically elsewhere. That is to say, the thing about it which we most want to understand is precisely that which most completely eludes classification and is most individual.

And what is true of a work of art is still more true of man. If the man happens to be a man of genius his individuality is of a kind so marked as to be a matter of world-wide concern. But individuality exists in every man; nor is the degree in which it exists at all proportionate to the extent to which his name is known outside the family or the office. In a less conspicuous degree individuality can be detected in animals. Dogs have character, though only those who know them well may be able to detect it. How far down the scale of life individuality can be traced is for our immediate purpose irrelevant. It suffices for my argument that individuality does exist somewhere in the world.

But once it is realised that every human being and quite possibly every living thing-forms in a sense ' a class by himself ', we get fresh light as to the -nature, meaning and purpose of classification as it is used in actual practice. In actual practice when we classify, what we really do is to consider, not individuals as a whole, but merely certain bits of them. We artificially isolate certain aspects of individuals and then treat them as if these aspects were the whole of them. We may class men by their capacity to make runs, to learn music, or to march 25 miles a day, according as we want cricketers for a team, singers for a choir, or soldiers for a punitive expedition. But in each case we are only considering bits of them; other bits, which for other purposes may be more important, are simply left out. That is what is meant by the formula classification is abstraction; it is treating a group of individuals who have certain qualities in common as if they possessed these qualities and none other.

Now when we are dealing with a group of the amoeba family the qualities in which individuals differ are so, infinitesimal as to be practically negligible. Close observers believe they can detect individuality even in the amoeba; if they are right, then just to the extent to which individuality exists the classification of the amoeba is an abstraction; that is to say, it is a statement quite true so far as it goes, but incomplete; it leaves out something. But as one ascends in the scale of life individuality becomes a more and more important factor. A sheep has more individuality than a snail, a dog than a sheep, a man than a dog, a genius than a dullard.

Hence, as we ascend in the scale of life, any generalisations we can make, any laws we can observe, will necessarily be, not less true, but less complete and exhaustive statements of truth; and the higher we ascend the more does the relative importance of what they leave unstated to what they succeed in stating continually increase. In the realm of Physics and Chemistry the generalisations of science fit the facts as exactly as spare parts fit a standard bicycle. When we get to Psychology, though we can still make classifications and discover general laws, they fit the individual case only approximately-like a pair of boots ready made. Just as the boot manufacturer tries to secure better fits by continually producing fresh intermediate sizes, so Science is always refining on and perfecting its earlier classifications. But to this process there is a necessary limit; at the point where an individual becomes the sole member of his class, the purpose of classification has disappeared.

The value of the conception of Law, with its necessary basis in classification, is that it enables us to 'explain' the individual instance by seeing it as a particular case of a general rule. But, if no two men, and probably no two living beings, are so exactly identical that the differences between them are for all conceivable purposes irrelevant, then clearly the kind of ' explanation ' which it is the purpose of scientific method to offer becomes, in so far as these differences are concerned, inapplicable.

But this does not mean---it is important to note this--that Science and its methods are at fault. What we are 'up against' is a limitation inherent in the human intellect. The fact that individuality is something which eludes classification is not like a defect, which improved methods may some day enable us to make good; it belongs to the nature of classification as such. Classification, I repeat, is a method of handling things by the simple device of ignoring their individuality; and the nature of the human mind is such that by no other method can it handle a plurality of things. To ' understand'-in the purely scientific sense of that word-means to conceive as a member of a class of identicals, to ' explain ' means to see as a case of a general law. Hence exactly to the extent in which a thing (or person) is individual and unique, it has about it something that, from the nature of the human intellect, eludes such understanding. All that Science can do with individuality is to ignore it; that is to say, Science is compelled to ignore a phenomenon that becomes more and more striking with every rise in the scale of life. Obviously, then, Science is by its own methods excluded from knowing Reality in one of its most important aspects. The individual can be in the concrete case perceived, but never in the abstract scientific sense explained.

THE NATURE OF LIFE

All living things, from the mere fact that they have life, exhibit at least one (the second named) of the characteristics mentioned above (p. 81) as necessarily eluding the net of scientific knowledge. No living body admits of complete analysis into ultimate constituents. Living bodies can readily be analysed into their chemical and physical constituents-but life is not one of these. Nor is it likely that life is some substance, so far unidentified, which with finer instruments or improved technique the scientist might isolate. Life, it would seem, is something different in kind, something of which the one thing we can safely affirm is that it is, or acts as, a principle of organisation creative in character. This description would not cease to be appropriate even if a means of producing life in a laboratory were some day to be discovered. Such a discovery would prove that, given physical conditions sufficiently favourable, that synthetic activity which we call by the name 'life' will ' emerge '. But such ' emergence ' would in no way constitute a discovery that life is a residual constituent of certain bodies which hitherto had eluded analysis.

In the conception of Emergent Evolution propounded by Prof. Lloyd Morgan stress is laid on the analogy between the first appearance of life and the fact that in Physics and Chemistry the combination in a particular way of certain factors results in the 'emergence' of properties which are more and other than the mechanical sum of the properties of the several factors. In so far as the analogy holds it adds emphasis to the familiar observation that things are what they are by virtue of differences, not in the nature of the ' stuff ' of which they are composed, but in the way in which they are organised. The brain of Shakespeare and a clod of earth are alike made up of protons and electrons - but they are differently organised. Similarly, a sonnet of Shakespeare and a paragraph from the Police Court news are alike made up out of twenty-six letters of the alphabet and a few stops-but they are differently organised. In both cases the important question to ask is, What is the organising principle?

In the world of inorganic matter the principle of organisation is still to seek. It is otherwise when we study living organisms. Here we find an organising principle, directive, co-ordinative, curative, which we call Life, the existence of which we are compelled to postulate in order to explain the observed phenomena. Life is not a substance that can be seen under a microscope, nor is it an entity comparable to an electron. Indeed it cannot become an object of knowledge in the scientific sense of that word. Life is only found in connexion with the particular collocations of matter of which it is the organising principle; it may be that the distinction between life and matter is not ultimate. In that case it might be far more correct to describe matter as an elementary mode of life than to call life a mode of matter.Be that as it may-and in the present state of human knowledge no theory as to the ultimate relation of life to matter can be more than a tentative hypothesis the existence of life is not a hypothesis but a fact. For, paradoxically enough, though life is a thing which cannot be an object of scientific knowledge, it is a thing of which we have a direct apprehension, a thing of the existence of which we are more certain than of anything else. I think and I feel, which means I am alive, of that I can have no doubt; yet my being alive is not a thing I know in the way that I know external objects, nor can I know the life that is in me by the method of scientific knowledge. But if I did not already think and feel, I could have neither common-sense knowledge of everyday things nor the organised form of that knowledge which we call Science.

There would seem also to be a close relation between life and individuation. In the last section it was convenient to treat individuality as if it were merely a residual difference left after all the resemblances between one thing and others, or one person and others, have been subtracted. But unless we go further than this, its real significance will be missed. At least some minimum of individuality seems to be a necessary accompaniment of life. We are apt to think of life as if it were a kind of ' atmosphere '; or we picture 'the ocean of life ' as a uniform invisible fluid, a certain amount of which (varying according to their activity or size) flows out into all living creatures. It is nothing of the sort. Life, wherever it can be observed, is not only an organising principle, but a principle of unity and individuation. The lowest organism differs from a piece of inorganic substance of the same size just because the particles of matter in it are organised so as to subserve the conative and appetitive disposition of the organism as a whole. Life is essentially that which organises matter for a constructive end-that end, towards the bottom of the scale of life, being apparently no more, but also no less, than the continuance of itself, in the face of serious obstacles, through self and race preservation. Life, then, is organisation with a view to struggle; and even where the end striven for may seem, in the first place, to be race preservation, the focus of organisation and effort is always an individual organism. If from one point of view life is strife, from another it is self-organising individuation.

Physiology has attempted to explain all reactions of the living organism to its environment by the purely mechanical conception of 'reflex action'. The attempt has succeeded over so large a field that most physiologists not unreasonably hope that improved methods of observation may show that it holds good over the whole field. Zoologists, on the other hand, point to evidence I for the existence of a certain spontaneity and a certain purposefulness in the response to stimuli extending almost, if not quite, to the bottom of the scale of life.

But it is a mistake to suppose that there is any necessary conflict between mechanism and purpose. Take any one of the world's miracles of architecture the Taj Mahal, or Bourges Cathedral. There is not a stone, or a beam, or an ounce of cement whose presence and whose place cannot be mechanically explained. The muscular exertion of the oxen who drew the stones or of the workmen who chiselled them is a force measurable in'footpounds', and no whit less mechanical than that exercised by a steam-hammer or a crane. Nowhere has there been work done by any mysterious non-mechanical force. There is no unexplained residuum which requires the hypothesis of such a force. And yet, the buildings thus so completely explicable in mechanical terms, besides subserving very definite practical uses, realise an aesthetic quality-and that not accidental but intentional-which is the wonder of the world. There is mechanism throughout, but the organising principle is purposive mind. In Art there is no conflict between mechanism and meaning; why then assume that, in explaining Nature, we are compelled to choose between mechanism and purpose? No doubt in Nature the purpose (if there at all) works from within the mechanism; but that is the way that purpose works in directing the mechanism of the human body. But if there is purpose in Nature, we ought not to expect Science to reveal it. Purpose is activity the direction of which is determined by an end, that is, by an apprehension of quality. But quality cannot be measured, and therefore from its essential nature it-and, along with it, purpose-is outside the sphere of Science.

Again, when we study life as manifested in man, we discover phenomena which cannot be conceived of as being merely particular examples of a general law. Of such phenomena the most conspicuous is that activity of the human mind which is exhibited as often as it decides between true and false. Where error is possible, a right decision involves something which cannot be explained as an instance of a general law; for a decision which could be so explained would be automatic, and therefore the judgment pronounced would be determined, not by inherent truth or falsity, but merely by reflex action between the mind and its environment. The very existence of Science depends upon the postulate that the mind is capable of discriminating between true and false conclusions. But such discrimination cannot possibly be expressed in a formula or conceived as a particular instance of a general law. I may also recall my previous argument (p. 78) that the spontaneity of thought, implied in the possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood, involves also some measure of spontaneity in conation also. Free thought implies freewill, that is, the possibility of actions which cannot wholly be represented as particular cases of a general law.

But if the existence of free intelligence and spontaneous choice is once admitted in the case of man, then the behaviour of certain animals is most naturally explained on the hypothesis that they too possess these faculties, though in a lesser degree. Indeed, there are zoologists and psychologists who believe that at least the germ of these exists wherever there is life. But for our present inquiry, the facts in regard to lower forms of life are, strictly speaking, irrelevant. We are investigating the method of scientific knowledge with a view to estimating its competency to explain all the phenomena of the Universe. Of these phenomena the one that is most difficult to explain is admittedly life, and that difficulty is at its maximum when life occurs in the intense form in which it is exhibited in man. The test of a theory is its adequacy to explain the big difficulties. A theory of the nature of knowledge which covers the case of life as seen in man will cover all the other facts; but any theory which fails to explain this, the greatest difficulty of all, is bankrupt from the start.

THE FLUX OF THINGS

It will be convenient in this connexion to consider briefly another limitation of the human intellect-on which Bergson has laid great stress. Reality is dynamic, thought makes It static. I cannot classify things, I cannot observe the exact relations between them, I cannot reason about them, if they are changing shape, place or quality, while I think. If the individuals transform themselves while I am in the act of sorting them, my classification is obsolete before it is completed. If a length is altering all the while I am measuring it, my results will be inaccurate. If the premises change in the course of an argument the conclusion is necessarily unsound. Thought can only deal with what it can regard as static. If it treats of things that move and change, it must treat them as if they became, and for a moment remained, fixed at different points along the line. In the real world, however, there is nothing stationary; all things are in a state of flux: even the ' everlasting hills' are hourly being worn away, though it may take half a million years noticeably to change their shape. Yet to handle things at all we must treat them as if, for infinitesimal moments at least, they stood quite still. A bird on the wing and the shot from a gun are both in rapid and continuous motion. The sportsman must aim at the fixed point where he expects the bird to be when his shot has reached that same point.

Fortunately for us the flux of things is not disorderly. It has a regularity and a rhythm which makes it possible to calculate its movements. In practice we assume that the movement of any object, instead of being, as it really is, continuous and indivisible, can be divided into a number of separate and finite 'jerks', comparable to the points by which we plot out a curve we wish to draw. By that device we can treat the dynamic as if it were commensurable with the static. And we are justified in doing this because otherwise we could neither reason about nor manipulate the dynamic at all. In the realm of Physics and Inorganic Chemistry the regularities of Nature are so exact that the theoretic incommensurabilities involved in treating the dynamic as if it were divisible into an infinite number of static points may be ignored'; just as for all ordinary (and for most extraordinary) purposes, one may assume that a figure whose outer boundary is 3.14159 times its maximum cross measurement is a perfect circle, though in reality it would be a regular polygon with something over three hundred thousand sides.

But when we are dealing with living beings, we have got into a region in which modifications in the objects of our study are no longer, as in Physics or Inorganic Chemistry, comparatively regular, simple and measurable with great exactitude, but where they are spasmodic, subtle and various. Clearly in this sphere that elusive incommensurability which necessarily results from our being compelled to think of the dynamic as if it were static, of the living as if it were dead, is likely to be larger in extent and also more significant. And the higher we ascend in the scale of life the graver is likely to be the error, if this consideration is ignored.

THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

To the preceding arguments it may be objected that they seem to prove too much. If whatever is alive, or has individuality, or cannot be wholly analysed, or preserves the least germ of spontaneity, must of necessity slip between the meshes off the net of Science, will not the biologist and the physiologist have something to say? It looks as if one were maintaining that any scientific study of living creatures is like trying to hold port in a strainer; you retain the crust but the wine escapes.

Now, as a matter of fact, a number of biologists and physiologists have themselves been crying out of late against the idea that the phenomena of life and consciousness can be exhaustively explained in terms of the 'mechanical' categories employed by Physics and Chemistry. Some have produced theories of a vital 'entelechy' (an old word to express an active immaterial agency having an elementary psychic character), others have been content with a vague claim to an ' autonomy' of the vital sciences-by which is meant the right of these sciences to select and use categories of explanation other than and beyond those employed in Chemistry and Physics. Yet others resist all such claims; pointing to the immense advances made through the persistent use of the category of mechanism in the past, they urge patience and further effort along the old ways before seeking new.

For a person not a scientist to intervene in such a controversy would be presumptuous, if the question at stake in this controversy were purely biological. But, unless I am altogether mistaken, it is really the much larger question of the nature of human knowledge.

Certain of the Neo-Vitalist school seem to me to be in danger of forgetting an important element of truth of which mechanistic Materialism is the one-sided expression. The human mind, as we have seen, is so constituted that it can only 'understand ' by classifying and analysing individual objects and 'explaining' them as instances of a general 'law'. It must think of matter as ' substance ', and of causation under the mechanistic figure of one thing pushing or pulling another, much as the piston moves the crank. So far as he frames mental pictures of the working of the thing he studies, the physiologist, like the physicist, requires his 'model' mechanically conceived. The physicist, we have seen (p. 15), has lately discovered that he must go deeper, he must be prepared to make use of concepts that are unimaginable. This fact is a warning to the physiologist also not to suppose that the mechanistic conceptions he uses are ultimate; but it in no sense precludes his using them. Einstein has warned us against treating as ultimate our common-sense conceptions of space and time and the Euclidean geometry that is based upon them; but for all ordinary, and most scientific, purposes we can still afford to, do so. Mechanism is a mode of thought as natural (and as valid) as Euclidean geometry; and both these are modes of thought which, from the structure of our minds, we cannot help employing. It follows that sciences like Biology and Physiology, whose subject-matter is the living organism, are obliged, not by their special subject matter, but by the nature of the human intelligence, to use categories like mechanism and law precisely as are Physics and Chemistry. Every advance in Physiology and Psychology consists in making some further step forward in the process of discovering 'laws ' (that is, formulae under which the individual may be seen as a particular case of a uniform principle) or in detecting 'mechanisms' by means of which phenomena can be connected with one another in the relation of cause and effect. The difference between the sciences which deal with the organic and the inorganic does not lie there. It lies in the following consideration. In Physics and in Chemistry it rarely makes any practical difference if one forgets for the moment that law is a descriptive formula (p. 272) and mechanism a symbol for an abstract relation, and thinks of them as if they were efficient causes of a compulsive character. In Biology and Physiology it is important all the time to keep these limitations in mind, and to remember that life is neither a description nor a symbol but something actually existent, which, as we know it in ourselves, seems to be in some sense an originating and directing cause.

Clear thinking, however, on this point is liable to be side-tracked by discussion of the much-debated point whether the life in a given organism should be regarded as a kind of extra brought in from outside, or as something which necessarily supervenes upon the occurrence (accidental or otherwise) of a sufficiently favourable organisation of matter. Interesting as this question is, its solution is in no way vital to the theory of knowledge I am trying to expound. For my present purpose it makes no difference whether life is an entity disparate from 'matter' (whatever matter in the last resort may be) or whether its origin is better described by conceptions like ' epigenesis ' or ' emergent evolution '. Whatever theory be held, life is not a phenomenon of the same order as other phenomena-if for no other reason, because it is not a thing that can ever be directly observed. Its presence and its nature are always, and of necessity, a matter of inference. In the study of living organisms all that we can observe is behaviour, that is, a series of motions and reactions which take place after the impact or apposition of other bodies or forces to which we give the name 'stimuli'. So much we can observe; what, then, is it that we infer? We infer that these motions and reactions are accompanied by, and are the resultants of, the presence in the organism of the thing we call 'life'. Moreover, we say at once of certain types of motion and reaction that they are, and of certain others that they are not, a sign of the presence of life. The word life, then, differs from words like ' oscillation ' or ' rebound' in that it is not a name that we bestow on a particular type of motion or reaction; it is a cause which we assume to be capable of accounting for them. More than that, it is not a cause assumed to exist, though in itself unknown; it is not some hypothetical entity which might just as well be called x; it is something the nature of which is taken for granted to be a matter of familiar knowledge.

But how and why is it that I can take for granted as being something perfectly familiar a mysterious entity which no one has ever seen, heard, touched, measured or weighed?

The answer is plain. I do this because I have direct experience within myself of this mysterious something; I feel it rather than know it, and I take for granted that every one else has knowledge of it in exactly the same way. But this means that when I say a thing is alive, I am accounting for its motions and reactions on the hypothesis that they are caused by, and are the expression of, an indwelling, active, sensitive principle similar to the life principle as I know it in myself. Whenever, therefore, I speak of 'life', I am interpreting the observed facts of 'behaviour ' in the light of an inward experience of my own; I am reading something of myself into the phenomena I study. I am projecting myself into the facts I observe.

Is this legitimate? My reply is that the legitimacy of this method of interpretation is something which I put to the test of experiment all day and every day in my dealings with my fellow-men; and I find that as a rule the experiment works. Human intercourse depends entirely on the supposition that I can approximately interpret the words, looks, actions of other men as being the expression of feelings and intentions more or less similar to those which I should myself express by similar words, looks or actions. Interpreting the gestures of a man upon whose corn I have trodden in a 'bus in the light of a feeling of anger which similar experiences have called forth in myself, I say he is angry-and I adopt protective measures. And very disagreeable consequences may ensue unless I am ready on occasion to apply the same process of interpretation to the gestures of a dog,making due allowances for the difference, while noting the resemblance, between a dog and a man. And, with a larger allowance for the extent of the difference, the same principle applies to our interpretation of the activities of living creatures still lower in the scale.

Life in the last resort is a thing that I can only apprehend from within. My belief that other human beings, and the lower animals, have within them something of the same kind is an inference. Some of the followers of Descartes held that in the case of the lower animals the inference was illegitimate. Animals to them were mere machines, the cry of a trapped hare was merely the noise of breaking machinery. But of that absurdity Darwinism has made an end. Sensation, conation and cognition obviously exist in the lower animals, though at a very much lower degree of intensity than in man, even perhaps approximating to zero in the simplest forms of living organism. But no hard and-fast line can be drawn. It is this fact of continuity that obliges us to give the name 'life ' to the active creative organising principle throughout the realm of living organisms; otherwise we should do better to call it x. But we do not, and we ought not to, call it x; for this principle is not an unknown quantity; it is something which, though eluding knowledge in the sense in which Science uses that term, is yet more familiar to us than all our scientific knowledge.

The conception of life is one with which sciences like Biology and Physiology cannot possibly dispense; but the point I would emphasise is that it is a conception which is unavoidably anthropomorphic.,. If I say that a man is alive, I assert that he has in a full sense what in myself I call by the name 'life'; if I say an animal is alive, I assert that it has the same thing but in an attenuated form; if I say so of a tree, I affirm the possession of the same thing but in a still more attenuated form; and if I did not mean the word life to be understood in that anthropomorphic sense, I ought to call it simply x. But not only does the conception of life, when applied to the animal, mean life as I know it from within myself, though with a big but undefined minus quality understood; the same thing holds good of terms like hunger, fear, sex, struggle, and the like, which again are terms that Physiology and Biology cannot avoid using. Such terms have no meaning unless used with the implication that they describe emotional 'urges ' resembling more or less the corresponding elements in human experience.

The suggestion that up to a point the Biological Sciences must be anthropomorphic is one which some exponents of these studies may hotly repudiate. But why? Two centuries ago anthropomorphism of an uncritical character was a danger to scientific method. Today the danger seems rather to arise from undue anxiety to avoid it. Once the necessity of anthropomorphic conceptions is openly admitted it is possible to guard against their being wrongly applied. Deny their necessity and you find you are using them unawares, and, therefore, without the necessary precautions.

I would venture to suggest to those who are expert in the Vital Sciences that as a mere matter of fact they are actually in the habit of approaching the Subject-matter of these sciences from two opposite sides. On the one hand they make use of the methods of pure science, classification, analysis, reduction of facts to uniform law, and thereby they reveal the 'mechanism' of the organism and its evolution. On the other hand, whenever they speak of the 'struggle for existence', or of hunger, sex and the like, they are actually using a method of intuitive interpretation, which reads into and explains the observed phenomena in the light of the thing called life. They cannot avoid using both the conception of mechanism and that of life; but of these conceptions the one is reached by generalisation from external observation, the other is derived from human experience. Thus the Biologist and Physiologist, I maintain, are like the man who, in order to explain Venice to his friend, used both the scientific plan in Baedeker and the creative interpretation of a Turner picture. And I maintain that they are right in using both; for the object of the scientist is to advance knowledge, not merely to keep inside a set of rules to which the name 'pure science' may be applied.

PSYCHOLOGY

In Psychology, and still more in History, the fact of this double approach-which I may call scientific and intuitive-is still more in evidence. The aim of Psychology is to discover the mechanism of conation, emotion and reflection, and so far as possible to reduce to the uniformity of scientific law particular types of mental reaction. In this it has had considerable success. One result of this has been to discredit the use of pure introspection in Psychology, all the more since a scientific explanation is now forthcoming of that capacity for self-deception which the cynic in all ages has delighted to detect in human nature-in other people. It has been shown, for example, that a person may sincerely believe himself to be actuated by a motive directly contrary in character to the 'repressed' desire by which his conduct is really determined.

Some people, however, by a curious confusion of thought, have deduced from this discovery the conclusion that Psychology can cease to be anthropomorphic in the sense that it need no longer employ concepts derived from human feelings, desires, motives, as these are known from introspection. The fallacy is obvious. Suppose, for example, that the psychologist detects that a person who thinks himself exceptionally humble is actually, without knowing it, inordinately conceited; what he is doing is to ascribe that conduct to its real, instead of to its imaginary, motive. But neither the real nor the imaginary motive could be discussed apart from introspective interpretation of human feeling; and if nobody ever correctly interpreted his own feeling, there could be no difference between real and imaginary motives, so that the psychologist would have no basis from which to start. The psychologist, far more than the physiologist, is bound to work with conceptions the meaning of which is derived from inward experience.

In Psychology we can see more clearly than in any other of the Vital Sciences the necessity of combining mechanistic and anthropomorphic methods of interpretation. Vital experience is essentially fluid. But knowledge, whether popular or scientific since from its own nature it must analyse and classify-is compelled to treat everything it surveys as definite and static. A psychologist cannot get very far without using the conception of libido or 'desire'. But 'desire,' when it appears on the page of a scientific treatise, has become an abstract mental concept, it is no longer a throbbing experience. The word has the same sort of relation to the experience as a twenty-franc note has to a golden louis; it is a symbol which by a useful convention will be accepted as equivalent-so long as the exchange remains at par. But we are apt to forget that, as between words and things, the exchange is never exactly at par, and is least often so where the things are most alive. It follows that the technical terms used by the psychologist to describe the inner activities of the living spirit, in proportion as they profess to approximate to the exactitude of the terminology used in the pure sciences, misrepresent the activity of which they strive to be an objective expression. This brings us up against the centre of our problem. The reflective intellect cannot make scientific use of any material unless it can present it to itself for study as if it were a static and exactly definable object. Vital experience, then, can be utilised for scientific purposes only in so far as it can be conceptualised in this way in technical terms assumed to have a definite and static content. But the moment it is forgotten that every such conceptualisation is up to a point a misrepresentation, the study becomes pseudo-scientific. Everybody who has felt deeply knows that only in the shallows of experience can the inner quality of life be expressed in words. Intense life transcends exact expression. But though its quality cannot be expressed, it may be suggested-by a gesture, a look, a poem, a tune. But then only a person with the requisite power of sympathetic appreciation can understand. Conceptual knowledge is inadequate to compass life.

This is the explanation of the fact so often noted that bookknowledge of the laws of Psychology, or of the technique of method, is of very little use to the physician unless he has an inner sympathy with the subtleties of mood and feeling over a wide range of human experience. It frequently happens that a patient with whom one practitioner can do nothing, is easily cured by another who, generally speaking, is in no way his superior, simply because the one has, and the other has not, a temperament sympathetic to this particular patient. Sympathy is the capacity to understand the inner feelings of others by analogy (but it must be the right analogy) to feelings one has experienced oneself. It is the most anthropomorphic of all methods of interpretation. And to the practising psychotherapist both sympathy and scientific knowledge are equally essential. A psychologist to be successful must be a man who has something of that imaginative insight into the subtleties of human motive and character which are required to make a good novelist, along with the mastery of abstract law and principle which belong to the scientist's equipment. In other words, the psychologist is compelled at one and the same time to conceive of his subjectmatter anthropomorphically and mechanistically. And any theory of the nature of Psychology which does not recognise this fact of therapeutical experience is ipso facto condemned as an academic abstraction.

One school of psychologists, the Behaviourists, in order to avoid what they regard as the slur of anthropomorphism, try to rule out from the sphere of Psychology everything but behaviour, i.e what can be externally observed. To do this, of course, they are compelled to adopt the determinist assumption that behaviour is never in any way affected by the thought, desire or will of the actor a reductio ad absurdum of which enough has been already said. It is, however, commonly, overlooked by those who criticise and dissent from this school that the Behaviourist position is the only possible one, so long as it is assumed that no knowledge is valid unless it is reached by the methods of pure science. But in practice no psychotherapist-whatever his theory-is a Behaviourist. I mean that in actually treating a patient his procedure is one which quite clearly involves a happy combination of the methods of pure science with anthropomorphically interpretative intuition. And his practical success in the curing of disease is presumptive evidence that this procedure is legitimate.

But modern Psychology not only makes use of an anthropomorphic method of interpretation forbidden by pure science, it also-except in that special department technically known as Experimental Psychology to a large extent dispenses with something which for the physicist is absolutely fundamental, viz., measurement. I remember, at the International Congress of Psychology at Oxford in 1923, this point being raised in an impressive way by an eminent scientist present as a visitor, who expressed a grave misgiving whether, until and unless some standard of measurement could be found, Psychology could be regarded as a branch of Science at all. But, assuming the misgiving to be justified, what follows? If Psychology is not allowed to rank as a branch of Science, it can certainly claim to be a branch of knowledge-and that means that knowledge is a much wider thing than 'pure' science, and that important elements in Reality will be ignored unless we are prepared overtly and frankly to employ another method of interpretation.

And this other method is one which, unlike those used by pure science, can take cognisance of Quality.

HISTORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

The necessity of operating by a twofold method of knowledge is no less strikingly apparent in the study of History. History for the last century or so has prided itself on being a branch of Science. In so far as the historian collects facts, detects sequences of cause and effect, or discovers social laws or tendencies, he is using the methods of Science. But if he aspires to give his readers a living picture, say, of a great statesman or of the course of a revolution, he must also become an artist. For that statesman was a highly vitalised character, that revolution was a torrential expression of living hopes and passions. Unless the historian can somehow make this clear he has misrepresented the actualities of what he professes to record. If he would avoid giving a false impression of reality, he must interpret, by his imaginative insight into personality and its workings, the detailed facts he has collected, tested and arranged by the methods of Science. The task is difficult: it is very easy to misunderstand the feelings and to misinterpret the motives of a brother or a wife; how much more so those of men and multitudes

in a bygone age. But the historian who declines to risk that failure has already failed. The great historian, like the successful psychotherapist, is the man who is master of the methods of Science and also of the method of the imaginative interpretation of personality-and knows how to check the results of each method by those of the other.

Exactly the same holds good of everyday life. In dealing with things material we apply methods of observation, classification and analysis which are a rule-of-thumb equivalent of those of Science; but persons and animals, too, for that matter-can only be dealt with if we to some extent understand them from within; we must know or guess something of their character and motives. No man ever erected a big business, or organised and led to victory an army, unless he had, besides a gift for figures, facts and system, some knowledge of the hearts of men. To the scientist's power of grasping and manipulating things, he must add, to however small a degree, something of the artist's insight into character, that is, into the inner quality of life. But neither of these will suffice alone. And if any one is under the impression that it is only when dealing with human beings that this combination of methods is required, let him talk to a trainer of race-horses or to the huntsman of the nearest pack of hounds-and he will find out his mistake.

RELIGION AS KNOWLEDGE

Art, we have already seen (p. 34), is, or rather can be utilised as, a form of knowledge in so far as in it life has objectified its own inner quality. But Art is indifferent to the historical or scientific interpretation of Reality. There is, I understand, adequate evidence that there was in Denmark a prince whose name was Hamlet; but if the contrary were to be proved, that would not make the slightest difference to the value of the play. Again, Art is the expression of only one aspect of the inner quality of life, viz., that specific kind of interest which we call aesthetic and which may be defined as the appreciation of beauty, provided the term beauty be stretched to cover also the grotesque and the bizarre.

Religion, like Art, objectifies an inner quality of life but it differs from Art in that the life it would interpret is conceived to be an expression of, dependent upon, or in some special rapport with, a Life other and more than human. Its range of interest, therefore, is wider than that of Art; and it is profoundly concerned with the objective character of that larger Life which (and whose contact with ours) it endeavours to interpret. Religion, therefore, must postulate the existence of a ' not-ourselves' that is alive. In the next chapter I shall endeavour to show that the postulate is justified. But if it once be granted that such a larger Life exists, that Life must be supposed to have effects upon the phenomenal world which Science studies. Hence the myths and other forms in which Religion tries to body forth its intuitions must always submit to cross-examination in the light of scientific knowledge.

It would seem, then, that Religion, considered as a means of Knowledge, must, like Psychology and History, make use of both the alternative ways of knowledge-only in the reverse order. Psychology, starting with the conceptions of mechanism and law, which are the basis of Physics and Chemistry, finds itself compelled to supplement these with conceptions like will, desire, thought, which we have seen to be necessarily anthropomorphic. Religion, on the other hand, starts with the method of anthropomorphic intuition, but is compelled, on pain of degenerating into superstition, to check results so reached by reference to facts and laws of the purely scientific order.

CONCLUSION

To sum up. Our analysis of the nature of knowledge points to two conclusions.

(1) The methods of classification, analysis and reduction to law as used in pure Science can only take us part of the way wherever life occurs, and the higher the type of living organism the more this inadequacy becomes important. If, then, the Universe is the expression of anything resembling Life-whether conscious or purblind-it would seem that It can only be understood in a very one-sided and partial way, so long as we confine ourselves to the methods of pure Science.

(2) That being so, we are bound to ask whether, by a right use of the direct acquaintance which we have with life as experienced within ourselves, we can supplement the deficiencies of the methods of pure Science? We are compelled, at least by way of experiment, to test the possibility of making up for the inadequacy of the purely scientific method by a method of approach which is frankly anthropomorphic. But-and the reservation is of vital importance-not just any kind of anthropomorphism can serve our purpose. It must be anthropomorphism with its necessary limitations clearly faced, and its results checked and counterchecked on truly scientific principles, so that what is reached by anthropomorphic intuition is continually supplemented, and at every point controlled, by the methods of pure Science.

Mr. J. B. S. Haldane ventures on the prophecy,

A time will come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and practical life will, then, I think, be something like Bergsonian activism.

I do not like this way of putting it. The sciences will not invade and destroy one another. They will rather unite to invade the Unknown, attacking positions now from the side of the conceptions of physics, now from that of the nature of life. Mechanism and anthropomorphism will be check and countercheck to one another, as is already the case, if not yet in the Vital Sciences, most clearly in Psychology. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of Science and practical life will then be the recognition of the fact that Life, in the sense of conscious Life, is the fundamental element in Reality. But that means that quality, as well as quantity, is an aspect of Reality, for consciousness implies the apprehension of quality. 'If Life is real, value in some form or other must be real also; for implicit in the will to live is the unexpressed assumption that it is worth while-an assumption for ever challenged by the fact of pain.

SYNOPSIS

THE LIFE-FORCE

Bergson's conception of 'Creative Evolution' has popularised the idea that the Universe is the expression of an indwelling 'Life-Force'.

This is an advance on Materialism in three ways:

(1) It explains all that Materialism explains, and more also.

(2) It indicates a dynamic 'urge' capable of setting in motion, so to speak, the mechanism which Science reveals.

(3) It explains by means of a vera causa. Life is an organising principle; and it is the only known one. The Universe is a system, and therefore requires some organising principle to explain it.

But, if we are to think of Reality in terms of Life,, we must decide whether the conception of life we use is derived from the vegetable, the animal, or the human world.

Three reasons for declining to take as our norm life the 'simplest' form of life.

(1) Life in its lowest form is unknown, and perhaps undiscoverable.

(2) Life in itself (as distinguished from the material organism in which it is manifested) must be estimated qualitatively and in terms, not of complexity, but of intensity.

(3) To attempt to explain the higher forms of life in terms of the lower would be to repeat the error of Materialism-but with less plausibility. The nature of life cannot be understood until it is studied in its last and richest development, that is, in man.

The popular conception of the Life-Force-a kind of 'half-way house' between Materialism and Theism. This is untenable. The sole difficulty in accepting Theism is the existence of evil.

THE ABSOLUTE

The argument of the Idealist school of Philosophy from the fact that the Universe is an intelligible system to the existence of a Supreme Intelligence. But is there any reason to believe that intelligence can exist except concomitantly with feeling and will?

In Greek, Indian and European thought the conception of the Absolute has found classical expression in various ways. Some of these are open to grave objection.

Brief remarks upon the view that (1) God can only be described by negatives; (2) Divine Perfection involves motionless impassibility; (3) Eternity implies that all things are determined, and the only activity of the Divine is intellectual contemplation.

If the Idealist doctrine that the Universe is the expression of Mind could be fused with a more or less Bergsonian conception of a Life-Force, the result would be something very like the vision of the Hebrew prophets -a Living God.

GOD

The naive anthropomorphism of primitive religion (and science) has ceased to be a danger; reaction against it has gone too far. To reach a true conception of Reality we must make the fullest use of both the ways of knowledge discussed in the last chapter-the way of pure Science and the way of interpretation in terms of life.

Frankly, this means personification. But to ascribe personality to the Power behind phenomena is not so absurd as at first sight appears. The essential element in personality is quality; to its ' greatness' considerations of size or 'foot-pounds' are simply irrelevant. Thus, supposing there is adequate reason to believe that love exists at all in the Ultimate, there is nothing absurd in equating the quality of that love with that shown in the character of Christ.

We must even go so far as to ascribe to the Divine personality something of that concrete synthetic character to which we give the name Individuality.

The danger of making God in the image of man. This only avoided if we select for the purpose the Ideal Man.

Answer to the objection that while personality implies variability, the Universe is the expression of a reign of law.

Is 'supra-personal' a better word than personal to apply to God?

Pantheism is plausible only if Quality is an irrelevance.

The Anthropomorphism of Jesus.

So far our argument points to a living, not as yet to a loving, God. That is the further conclusion upon which the arguments-setting out from different startingpoints-of Chapters VI.-IX. will converge.

Chapter 5

THE LIFE-FORCE, THE ABSOLUTE, OR GOD

IN the beginning was IT-the infinite Unknown out of which have come, in which subsist, all things that are. In IT I live and move and have my being; and before ITS immensity and mystery I stand dumbfoundered-abashed, but questioning.

In the beginning was IT. Or, instead Of IT, should I have written HE? . . . That is the question.

THE LIFE-FORCE

Bergson has compelled attention to the grand hypothesis of Creative Evolution-the expression of the ceaseless 'urge' of an e'lan vital or Life-Force ever finding its outlet in fresh experiment. On this view the individual living creature is also, on a small scale and in a derivative way, a focal centre of creation, a tiny taper, as it were, burning by its own flame, but lit from the universal bonfire. Largely through the influence of Bergson, the conception of the 'Life-Force' seems to be stepping into the place once occupied by Scientific Materialism in the popular semi-scientific thinking of to-day.

Into the details of the system of Bergson or his followers I do not propose to enter. But any philosophy which explains the Universe in terms of Life has certain conspicuous advantages.

(1) A Life-Force hypothesis will explain everything that Materialism tried to explain and more also. Life, as we know it, works only in and through the mechanism of living organisms. A living organism is a machine, with a difference. For certain purposes it is not amiss to think of the organism as an engine, but it is a self-stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative, self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-reproducing engine.'

(1 J. A. Thomson, The System of Animate Nature vol. i. p. 157. (Williams and Norgate, 1920.)

Conceive Ultimate Reality, not as a Machine, but as an Organism, and you have explained everything in the Universe which resembles a machine-and some other things as well. Life will account for the thing we call mechanism, but mechanism will not easily account for the thing we call life.

(2) The e'lan vital expressed in evolution is dynamic; it is creative. Darwin, Mendel and others have discovered something of the mechanism by which Creative Evolution works, but without the Will to live, without, that is, an inward onward urge, the mechanism could never have come into action.

(3) A ' Life-force ' hypothesis satisfies Newton's demand for a vera causa; that is to say, it explains the fact that the Universe is a coherent system by referring it to a cause the existence of which is actually known. It is a first principle of science that, if a set of phenomena can be adequately accounted for by a known cause, it is idle to seek for an unknown. Now life is a known cause, and it is one which will adequately explain the coherence of the Universe-and no other known cause will do so.

This last point is one that I must develop further. In our more melancholy moments we are apt to compare life to the flame of a candle. No analogy could be more misleading. Flame is a visible accompaniment of the dissolution of the thing that burns, life is that which prevents the dissolution of the organism by constantly repairing loss: more than that, it is the thing which has actually built it up. The human body, the most complex of living organisms, starts from the conjunction of two microscopic cells. It becomes what it does solely by virtue of the fact that the principle of life within is at every stage selecting from the environment, transmuting, and so incorporating into its own substance, matter originally alien to itself. Life is a principle of organisation; and it is that, not only in the way in which the plan of a building or the design of an engine may be said to exhibit the principle on which the various parts are arranged so as to form a single whole; it is the active agent in bringing into being the whole so organised. Life is architect and workman both. And it not only brings into existence; it also keeps in repair. It is creative, preservative, curative. I have already had occasion (p. 90) to tilt against the notion of the Universal Life as a sort of fluid, the 'ocean of life', or as a kind of all-pervading 'atmosphere' which all sentient creatures breathe. Life is an active organising principle; it 'pervades' indeed the whole of an organism, but it does so, not as an atmosphere, but as a synthetic, directing and controlling power. Again, not only is Life a principle of synthesis and organisation, but Life -and Mind, which is a function of Life-is the only such principle of which we have any knowledge.

Now the Universe, whatever else it is, is an organised system; otherwise the elaborate structure of knowledge we call Science would be a cloud castle of the human mind having no correspondence with Reality. And Life is a thing that exists in the Universe, and as it is also the only principle of synthesis and organisation which we can anywhere detect, the hypothesis that Life is (or, at least, is a representative expression of) the synthetic organising, controlling principle, in the Universe is of all hypotheses so far propounded the most completely scientific. On this hypothesis the driving power behind the Universe is thought of, not as a dead, wholly unconscious, force comparable to an electric current, but as all-pervading Life. The totality of things is pictured no longer as a machine, but as an organism. The Universe becomes alive.

This sounds a much more promising solution of the riddle than the Materialism which it is at present in the process of superseding in the popular mind. But at once it raises one searching question. If the Ultimate Reality is to be thought of in terms of life, What kind of life? For life is known to us in various forms.

There is life at the simplest vegetable stage; there is that freer, more intense, and, it would seem, more characteristic form of it shown in the conscious but unreflective life of the animal; and there is life as it appears, in an infinitely richer form, in the mind of man.

If we have given up the attempt to conceive the Universe in terms of dead matter and dead energy, and are asking if it can be explained in terms of life, the first question we have to raise is, Which of these manifestations of life are we to select as our type the simplest, or the richest? The old Materialism selected the simplest kind of force we can imagine--force, that is, of the dead mechanical type, like gravitation or electricity as these are popularly conceived. If the attempt to explain the Universe in terms of that has broken down, ought we then to try the kind,of force which seems next simplest-i.e. unconscious life as it appears in the vegetable kingdom-and to say that the creative principle is a blindly groping Life-force?

I submit that this procedure, though at first sight the most obvious, is radically unsound for three main reasons.

(1) Life in its lowest form is an unknown quantity.

(a) We only really know life as it exists in ourselves. Life as it exists in the animal or vegetable world is an entity the existence of which we postulate in order to explain certain effects, and which we assume to be a faint shadow of that conscious life we know of in ourselves.

(b) The most primitive kind of living organism, the parent of all now-existing organisms, has either ceased to exist or has not yet been discovered.

(c) If ever the gulf between organic and inorganic should be bridged, as is quite possible, Life and Energy may be shown to be continuous.

(2) The adjectives 'simple ' and 'complex ' are appropriate to describe the difference between a unicellular vegetable and a human being, considered merely as two different organisations of matter; they are not appropriate to describe the difference between the life which appears in. the one and in the other. The human body can be analysed into an infinite number of constituent parts; not so the life that is in it. Numerically, so to speak, the life is one. If we are to express the difference between the life manifested in the more complex and in the simpler types of organism we can only do so by using adjectives implying quality. The difference between life in man and in a vegetable is not that between 'complicated' and 'simple'; it is the difference between 'intense' and 'faint', 'vivid' and 'pallid','vehement' and 'still', 'rich' and 'meagre'.

(3) The failure of Materialism was at least a magnificent failure; it sought to explain the Universe as the expression of force in the simplest form known.1

(1. Physicists (cf. p. 18) are now objecting to the use of the term 'force ' of things like gravitation or of the concept of 'energy'. But as the position I am criticising depends for its plausibility on the acceptance of the conceptions of 'force' and I energy' in what is practically the popular usage of those words, I feel justified -in conforming to that usage.)

To choose unconscious life, merely because it seems at the moment to be the next most simple, would be to repeat that error—but in a less plausible and attractive way. For in what did the error of Materialism consist? It consisted precisely in the fact that it took for granted that the simple is necessarily the explanation of the complex, and the earlier of the later. It saw that the body was a machine conforming to the laws of physics and mechanics; it assumed that it was only a machine. It saw that life was a force; it assumed that it was merely force. To assume that, because consciousness is life, it is merely life, is to repeat the fallacy. When or how life first appeared on this planet no man knows. Whether life is another manifestation of what physicists call energy, or whether it is a new thing superadded, is still uncertain. But the answer to these questions does not affect the present issue. If life is a manifestation of energy, then 'energy' must be something intrinsically richer than, and different in kind from, mechanical force as popularly conceived, or that abstract concept 'energy' with which physicist, theory operates. If, on the other hand, life is a new thing, superadded at a certain stage of the physical evolution of matter, then the Universe is shewn to have contained from the beginning something other than, and different in kind from, anything that had hitherto appeared on earth. In either case the nature of things, the real content of the Universe, is most likely to be deduced from a scrutiny of the nature of life.

But we cannot stop short here. What I have just said of the relation of life and energy, applies equally to the relation between 'life' and 'conscious life'. Those same considerations, which impel us to interpret the Power behind things in terms of life rather than of mechanical force, impel us to do this in terms of life in its most intense form, as exhibited in the developed consciousness of man, rather than in the attenuated form in which it appears in the vegetable. The question whether any hard-and-fast line can be drawn between the manifestations of life in the unconscious vegetable, in the conscious animal, and in the rational human, stage, is a much debated one. But, decide it how we will, we are left with a dilemma from which there is no escape. Either at each of these stages something new is superadded, in which case it follows that something in the Universe hitherto not seen on earth has just come into view; or we must say that what has become explicit in the later stage was already implicit though undeveloped in the earlier, in which case life is essentially something richer, freer and altogether different from what we should have supposed had we nothing but the vegetable world in which to study it. The eagle was once no more than an egg; but what should we know of the meaning, purpose and nature of that egg if we had never seen the grown bird in its soaring splendour? Man is the last product of the immanent creative Life, but till he is studied, and that in his most perfect form, the nature of life is only half revealed. The real nature of a process, to use a formula as old as Aristotle, can only be understood by examining its highest product; and we shall miss the meaning of Creative Evolution unless we study the beginnings from the standpoint of the end achieved.

I would urge, therefore, for the three reasons given above, that, once Materialism is given up, we are logically compelled to give the most serious consideration to the hypothesis that the Ultimate Reality is certainly no less (and, if that, probably far more) alive and fully conscious than the highest of its products of which we have any knowledge-the mind and heart of man.

In the popular mind the conception of a Life-Force virtually 'splits the difference' between Materialism and Theism. I am not sure how far in Bergson's own view the e'lan vital is a half -way house of this kind. At any rate to me the hypothesis of a Life-Force which is purposive but purblind (like the life observable in a tree or an amoeba) seems neither plausible in itself nor to be borne out by the evidence. An hypothesis is plausible which purports to explain either the oak by the acorn, or the acorn by the oak; not so one that would explain both by the six-inch sapling. If the hypothesis of a Universal Life is demanded to explain the fact of life, then the hypothesis that in that Universal Life there is intelligence is required to explain the fact of reason.

Materialism we found to be 'mechanomorphism,' and therefore, since machinery is a man-made thing, to be anthropomorphism at second hand. The conception of a purblind Life-Force-in that it likens the Power behind the Universe to life as it exists in the brute creation-might by analogy be styled 'theriomorphism'; and since we only know brute life by inference from our own, theriomorphism. also is anthropomorphism at second hand. Since, then, we must have anthropomorphism,let it be at first hand; and if we apply the category of life to explain the Universe, let us start from life as it exists in man. Life can only be anthropomorphically conceived; and if, lacking knowledge of any alternative explanation, we adopt the provisional hypothesis that Life is the principle of Organisation of the Universe,we are forced to choose between two forms of that hypothesis. We must face the decision, Is the Universe more or less alive than ourselves? Which of these two hypotheses will best explain all the facts remains to considered; but if life is the principle of Organisation the Universe, there is at least an a' priori presumption that this Universal Life is as much more intense than life as it appears in man, as life in man is than life in an amoeba. There are those who are prepared to maintain that man is greater than the Universe, since in him life is of a higher order than in It; but, I would urge, it is for them to prove their case.

And they have a case. It can be summed up in single word-Evil. As life becomes more intense, cognition becomes more acute; purpose, therefore, become more fully conscious. If, then, the Life of the Whole is more intense than that of man, It must know more clearly than does man at what It is aiming and what It is actually effecting. It cannot but be cognisant of the world's pain. Our problem, then, will not be solved till we have found either purpose in that pain, or remedy for it.

THE ABSOLUTE

It is impossible to avoid some reference to that classical tradition in Philosophy, having a pedigree going back to Plato, which reigned in Oxford in my student days and in which I first found an intellectual refuge from the Agnosticism which is a stage-both intellectually and morally, I think, a healthy stage--through which most men who think at all must pass.

Philosophical Idealism has rarely made much appeal to men of Science; nor have its exponents ever succeeded in stating it in a way that is readily comprehensible to the plain man.'

(1. Certain aspects of the argument are stated with admirable clarity by W. Temple, The Faith and Modern Thought, chap. i.)

It has assumed so many phases that to profess to expound, would be as presumptuous as to criticise, it in half a dozen pages. I prefer, therefore, to incur only the guilt of the lesser presumption of stating, without attempting to justify my contentions, (a) where it seems to me to be successful in establishing its main position, and (b) some objections to certain ideas which are, or have been, associated with the conception of the Absolute. But to any reader who has no previous acquaintance with philosophy, I would suggest that, at a first reading of the book, he skip this section, and begin again on p. 133 with the section headed 'GOD'.

Fundamentally, Philosophical Idealism is based on an analysis of the presuppositions of thought. The Universe is admittedly a system intelligible to thought-that follows, if from nothing else, from the fact that Science can foretell. It is argued that this would not be possible unless the system itself were the expression of Mind. The argument has been acutely debated over a long period of years; nevertheless, in my opinion, it is one that so far has held out against all attempts to refute it. The conclusion that the Universe is the expression of Mind is one of which the importance cannot possibly be exaggerated.

But the Idealist philosophers of the last century had formed their conception of the nature of thought and its place in the Universe mainly through reflection on the materials and methods of Sciences like Mathmatics, Physics and Astronomy. A very considerable change of emphasis is necessitated, if we turn towards the Biological Sciences and especially to recent Psychology. Thought is now seen as a function of Life. As give us in experience, it is never separable from desire and will; and to think of the Universe as the expression of Creative Thought, is, I would submit, less happy than to think Of IT as the expression of Creative Life, that is, of Creative Desire and Creative Will, guided and informed by supreme Intelligence. This change of emphasis is of special importance in our approach to the concepts of Goodness and Beauty. Goodness and Beauty, to the unsophisticated observer, appear to be more closely related to will and desire than they are to abstract thought. Idealist philosophers have made heroic endeavours to substantiate the ultimate reality of Goodness and Beauty by making them objects of the Divine Contemplation but the undue emphasis in their general system on the primacy of thought has made their arguments on this point, even if logically sound, psychologically a little unconvincing.

Philosophers in this tradition very frequently tend to conceive of the Power behind Things as ' The Absolute '. This conception, formulated as Brahma, has behind it the prestige, not only of much of modern European, but also of Greek and of Indian, Philosophy. In a mitigated form it has succeeded in asserting itself in the writings of many Christian and Mohammedan Theologians whose orthodoxy is reckoned to be beyond dispute. Great systems of thought cannot be dismissed in an epigram or a paragraph; but, even at the risk of appearing to suffer from that delusion, I will set down the heads of some objections to the concept of The Absolute in the form in which that concept has often been understood. I must, however, add that very few, if any, now living representatives of the Idealist school hold it in precisely that form.

(1) The doctrine that a true idea of God can only be arrived at by the way of negation appears to me to be a rather misleading way of stating something which, so far as it is true, is a truth of secondary importance. Of course no adjective or substantive can be predicated of the Divine in exactly its ordinary sense, for the simple reason that words were invented to fit, and derive their meaning from their appropriation to, the things of everyday life. But to admit this does not carry with it the admission that all we can say of God is that He is not this, and not that. I may speak of a prize-fighter as a powerful man; if I apply the same adjective to a Prime Minister I use it in a different sense; while if I speak of God as powerful, I use the word in yet another sense, but in one that is analogous. It is absurd to say that I must not ascribe power to God because His power is not of a kind and quality that operates by means of biceps or of rhetoric.

(2) Curiously enough, a tradition of thought which has vigorously protested against describing God by positive attributes has made an unfortunate exception in the case of the attribute 'perfection '. It is argued that, since God is perfect, He must be absolutely incapable of change. Change may be either for the better or the worse; but what is already perfect cannot change for the better, while anything that can change for the worse must already have in itself some element of decay and therefore of imperfection. This is very pretty word-play, but it overlooks the fact that perfection is, as its derivation (i.e. completely finished) implies, a wholly static conception. A billiard ball may be (for practical purposes) a perfect sphere, the Venus de Milo may be a perfect work of art-but they are both dead. God is alive, and the essence of life is movement. Surely it would be a better analogy to liken God, not to the perfect work of art, but to the perfect Artist. But if we do that, at once we think of Him as One who is always experiencing and always creating, 'My Father worketh even until now, and I work '. And I would urge that, although we may hold that in the eternal experience of God ' death is swallowed up in victory ', yet His experience of suffering must somehow be real. Were the attitude of God towards the world's sorrow and the world's sin merely that of an unfeeling onlooker, then the 'perfection' which our theory saved would not be a moral one.

(3) No competent thinker would ever have maintained the view just criticised apart from a doctrine, which does, at first blush, seem to qualify, if not to rebut, the objections I have mentioned. The doctrine that the Ultimate Being is not subject to the time process has commended itself to the vast majority of idealist Philosophers and is deeply imbedded in Christian theology. It is only recently that it has become philosophically respectable to question it. To the consciousness of God, it is held, all things, past, present and to come, are simultaneously present, all coexist in one Eternal Now. The Divine mind does not apprehend in terms of Time, but of Eternity-a word which does not mean a period of time infinitely extended in both directions, but absolute timelessness.

To this view it is no valid objection that the conception of Eternity is one that we cannot conceive; it would be strange if we could conceive the mode of being of the Infinite. But it is, I think., sometimes forgotten that from an inconceivable conception no logical consequence can properly be deduced. Thus from the verbal definition of Eternity it might seem logically to follow that all things are strictly determined. For if all things co-exist together in the mind of God, nothing that has been, is, or will be, could be otherwise than it is. To the audience at the cinema, pictures on the screen look like a series of successive happenings, but on the film they were all there fixed and final. Eternity must not be so conceived. Nor again may it be inferred that the only activity left for God, in His changeless impassibility, is a ceaseless intellectual contemplation of His own infinite perfection. Aristotle's contention that oewpia (Greek letters), intellectual contemplation, is the sole occupation worthy of the gods implied a fine protest against taking seriously the grossness and puerility in the legends of the Greek deities. But it was a conception which could be alluring only so long as Ultimate Reality was conceived of in terms of pure intellect. It ceases to attract if, as modern thought impels us, we substitute life for pure intellect, and recognise that, in all living minds, feeling and will are concomitant with contemplative thought.

The philosophical conception of Eternity does, I readily admit, elude a number of difficulties which at once arise if we consider the ultimate nature of Time. It is obvious that Time cannot mean to God what it does to man. Even to Einstein it does not mean the same thing as it does to the man in the street. A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday is probably good metaphysics as well as noble poetry; and the term Eternity is of great value as a symbol to remind us of the limitations of all our thought about Time. But if it is taken to be a clear-cut conception of the kind from which strict logic can draw conclusions, the use of the word becomes not a solution, but an evasion, of difficulties-and an apparent support for wrong notions about God.

So far I have been mainly concerned to criticise conclusions of the more extreme Absolutist wing of the Idealist school; but, before leaving the subject, I would reiterate my own belief in the soundness of the Idealist argument from the intelligibility of things to an Intelligence behind them. The somewhat abstract intellectualism of the classical Idealism makes its worldview seem a trifle jejune beside a vivid Life-Force conception like that of Bergson; but its demonstration that it is a necessity of thought to postulate an ultimate' Intelligence makes it a most valuable complement to, and corrective of, his philosophy. For this demonstration entirely disposes of the possibility, left open by Bergson, that the Life-Force may be only a purblind groping monster, a mere Will to live at best half-conscious of Its aims. If, then, we can correlate the principles for which Bergson and the Idealists respectively argue, in such a way that these will no longer conflict with but supplement one another, we reach a conception of the Universe as the expression of Desire and Willbut of rational Desire and intelligently directed Will. Idealist Philosophy has at times seemed to point us to a conception of the Reality behind Appearances as an Absolute of which nothing but negatives can be predicated-changeless, colourless, motionless, feelingless, and therefore, for all that is argued to the contrary, really dead. Creative Evolution, on the other hand, pictures a Universe really alive, but leaves us wondering how far the e'lan vital is, or is not, more than an aimless Will to live. Combine the two conceptions, and we are on the verge of that splendid concrete vision of the ancient Hebrew prophets-a Living God.

GOD

I anticipate that not a few of those who read this chapter will be conscious of a growing misgiving that they are being stealthily decoyed into an untenable Anthropomorphism, into a reversion to the standpoint of pre-scientific and pre-philosophic ages when man made God in his own image. By the simple savage or by half-civilised man this may be done with a good conscience, but we are the heirs of all the ages; noblesse oblige, intellectually at least we must be respectable!

This particular misgiving is one which, if I am at liberty to quote my own experience, I may say that I have lived through and lived down. My reasons for this change of view are set out in the previous chapter. For the last century and more, educated men-in acute reaction against the Anthropomorphic Deism of popular Christianity-in speaking of the Ultimate Being have instinctively preferred to use words of an impersonal connotation, such as the Supreme Being, the Absolute, the All Pervading, the Veiled Being, and the like. But in philosophy, as in politics, reaction against one extreme may easily result in another just as bad or, maybe, even worse. The category of personality is not only religiously the most inspiring that we can apply to the Power behind the Universe, it is also intellectually the least inadequate. In olden days a crude anthropomorphism was a danger to be feared; in our age what the philosopher wants is the courage to advance further, and to advance more confidently, towards what, abandoning all shamefacedness, I Will style the Higher Anthropomorphism.

So long as Materialism seemed to the majority of scientists to give an adequate account of the phenomena of life, consciousness could only be regarded as an ' epiphenomenon '-a curious and useless shadow cast by the solid substance of Reality. But, once we are driven by further observation of the facts of organic life including, of course, those studied by Psychology to postulate something like a Life-Force behind the Universe, the case is altered. Those 'bits' of individuals, those aspects of the living mind which the generalisations of physical science are bound to leave out of their purview, and also that inexplicable 'individuality' which even Psychology cannot include, must somehow or other be brought back upon the ledger before the final accounts are passed. The subtler qualities of life not only may, but must, be brought into consideration. Thought, feeling, the sense of value things which cannot be seen, counted, or weighed-and that psychic entity we call individuality, may well turn out to be just those elements which will supply a key to the understanding of the Whole. It is not merely legitimate to bring these things in, it is illegitimate to leave them out.

To reach a true conception of Reality we must, as we have seen, combine in a single comprehensive scheme all that can be discovered along each of two different ways of knowledge. First comes the investigation of the material Universe by the methods of pure Science. Secondly, there must be carefully controlled inference as to the nature and quality of that indwelling Creative Life which is partially expressed in all living organisms. In man that Life finds expression in an intenser, and therefore probably a more representative, form; and this is also a form of which we have direct knowledge in our own inner experience.

To use this knowledge to interpret Creative Life is, I frankly admit, in effect to personify the Power behind things. But personification, provided always it is checked and controlled by the results of scientific observation, is not only a legitimate, it is a necessary mode of conception. If I am to interpret any life other than human I must, to however limited an extent and with whatever degree of qualification and hesitation, use my own inner experience as a key; that is, I must 'personify' it. If I affirm of a dog that it is affectionate, frightened, ill-tempered or disappointed, I speak of the dog as if it were a person. But the personality which I thus ascribe to the dog must be understood to have, as it were, a large minus quantity appended. If I attribute such qualities to a rabbit, I am still implicitly ascribing to it personality, but with an increase in the appended minus quantity. But, instead of looking downwards, I may look up; I may venture to use my own experience of the inner quality of life to interpret the quality of the Universal Life. Then I am ascribing personality to it; but in that case it is with a large plus.

This brings us up against a difficulty. Granted that it is admissible to ascribe personality to the Power behind the Universe, provided that conception be used with a meaning indefinitely enlarged-must not that enlargement be so enormous as to dwarf to the point of insignificance the original meaning of the term ' person'? Granted that it may be more appropriate to speak of that Power as 'HE ' than as ' IT', yet if HE and IT are both conceived as infinite, is there, for our poor human intellects, any practical difference between them? Have not both pronouns lost all real meaning?

This objection is crushing-until we realise that the essence of personality and of its inward life does not consist in quantity but in quality. A man's passion for his lady love takes up no more room in space than his affection for his great-aunt; the difference is one of intensity and quality, not of size. The difference between the kind of disapprobation with which a fashionable undergraduate regards a man who wears the wrong tie and that with which Elijah viewed the prophets of Baal, is a difference which may be called ' world-wide '-but that does not imply that it is one to which the diameter of the earth is in the smallest degree relevant. Once grasp the point that personality and its characteristics are a matter of quality, not of quantity, and we can brave that 'astronomical intimidation' to which otherwise from the mere size of the material Universe we might succumb. If the essence of personality had anything at all to do either with size, or with capacity to exert foot-pounds of physical force, any analogies or inferences from human to divine personality would be ridiculous. But when St. John, for instance, maintains that the quality of love as manifested in the personality of Christ may be an adequate representation of a quality inherent in the Divine, his contention, whether we accept it or not, is at least not inherently absurd.

To personify the Power behind things is not, as so many fear, a ' pathetic illusion '; it is a necessity of thought. It is sometimes said that Philosophy demands an Impersonal Absolute, Religion a Personal God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless the argument outlined above is wholly fallacious, any Philosophy which does not conceive the Infinite as in some sense concretely personal is intellectually blind at one essential point. I have argued that individuality is the synthetic focus of the living organism, and that in the ascending scale of evolution individuality and freedom increase as life reveals itself in forms ever intenser and more highly organised. Analogy suggests that this principle applies also to the Life in the Universe. The Universe is a coherent system otherwise Science could not interpret It in terms of Law-and It is the expression of a Living Power; then is It not of living organisms the most highly organised of all?, Unless,then, we are to conceive that Life as less vital than our own, we must ascribe to it that element in personality which makes it a focus of synthetic activity, originative, directive, co-ordinative. We must not think of It as an ' ocean of life', or even as 'a stream of consciousness', but as a closely knit, highly centralised, self consistent, fully self-conscious, eternally creative Unity. That is, we must not regard the Ultimate Reality as merely in a vague way personal; we must ascribe to IT, what, for want of a richer word, we can only call Individuality.

Indeed, I would go so far as to maintain that to individualise the Deity by the use of a proper name like Allah or Jehovah is, up to a point, philosophically more sound than to think of Him exclusively in abstract impersonal terms like ro' oelov or the Absolute.

But though to personify the Power behind things is a necessity, it is a dangerous necessity. Man cannot be trusted to make God in his own image. Pass in review all the things that man has imagined his Deity to demand or to approve-human sacrifice, temple prostitution, grotesque asceticism, the rack and the stake, not to mention the endless routine of senseless ritual and trivial superstition. Tantum, religio potuit suadere malorum! A religion which personifies unworthily the Power behind things will do far more to retard than to advance the highest welfare of the race. That is why an epoch in human progress dates from the suggestion, perhaps first made by St. Paul, that instead of picturing God in their own image, or in the image traditional in a particular community, men should picture Him in the image of Jesus Christ. Historic Christianity has never quite risen to this conception. Hitherto it has always compromised; its teachers have lacked the insight or the courage to reject out and out certain elements in the conception of God derived from earlier beliefs. But just in so far as Christianity has risen to its heritage and has conceived of God in terms of Jesus Christ, it has put before the world a personification of the Divine which at least is not unworthy. How far it is also true, we shall examine later.

To all this there is an objection, raised less by the professional philosopher than by the average educated man. Personality in human experience is associated with limitation, idiosyncrasy and caprice. The Power behind Things, whatever else it may be, is not such: does It not, above all, manifest Itself in a reign of law? The reign of law seems incompatible with the idea that the Power of whose activity it is the expression is one to which the term 'personal ' can properly be applied; for in the popular notion the essence of personality seems to be freedom to change one's mind or vary one's conduct. But human beings chop and change about, not because they are persons, but because they are persons subject to infirmity of purpose, or liable to be confronted with unforeseen or unforeseeable emergencies and these are negative conditions of human life, not positive qualities of personality as such. If we speak of the Power behind Things as personal, we must attribute to It a steadiness of purpose and a range of knowledge infinitely transcending ours. Should we not then expect Its activities to function in ways calculable and consistent, which to us must appear as necessary and unalterable laws-' God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent'. We are apt to forget that no conception and therefore no word which we can apply to God can be really appropriate. Ideas, and the words in which we express them, derive what meaning they have from things and conditions of which we have experience. What idea or word appropriate to our limited experience could be adequate to describe the Infinite? But, unless the whole argument of this chapter is fallacious, personality is much the least inadequate. The idea of personality is, as it were, the window through which we look out upon the limitless Beyond; it is the smoked glass through which alone we can behold the Sun.

Some thinkers would prefer to use the word 'Suprapersonal' '; and, if this were to become current coin, it might do well enough. Still, in my judgment, 'personal ' is really the better, because the safer, word. It is at least full of concrete meaning-incidentally, it does justice to the testimony of religious experience and it can be used without danger of intellectual error because no educated person is likely to forget that in speaking of God as personal we are expanding the idea of personality to meet this special case. On the other hand, if we refuse to call God personal, and conscientiously use words like ' supra-personal ', we are pretty certain to end by thinking of Him as impersonal. Thought in the last resort is controlled by imagination, and it does matter whether the word we use seems to stand for He or It; and to the imagination ' supra-personal ' inclines to stand for It. It is better to do a slight violence to language than to impoverish thought; it is preferable to expand the idea of personality rather than to contract our idea of God. To think or speak of the Infinite in abstract and impersonal terms is unconsciously to liken Him to forces lower, poorer and less full of vitality than ourselves, such as the electric current or the life principle in a tree. To say that God is ' personal but something more' is to say that the Creative Principle must be higher than the highest, richer than the richest, more full of life than the alivest of all the things It has produced-and that surely is merely common sense.

To the 'pure reason' God must always be that which transcends comprehension; no concept derived from human experience can be applied to Him, except in an analogical sense. In so far, then, as its intellectual content is concerned, any language in which we speak of God must be in the last resort symbolic. But life is a thing which we know, not by the 'pure reason', but from direct inner experience; and this knowledge, though imperfect, is not symbolic; for that which knows is homogeneous with that which is known. And what we so know about life is its qualitative character. If, then, Life is a representative expression of Reality, the qualitative knowledge we have of life in its richest form (i.e. in personality) is up to a point knowledge of Reality. The most original contribution of Christianity towards philosophic thinking is the assertion that in the personality of the Ideal Man the qualification ' up to a point' is no longer needed. Such an assertion requires, and in the next two chapters will receive, examination. But if it can be sustained, it follows that, although for thought God transcends all comprehension, qualitatively He can be known; to the intellect He is the 'Veiled Being'; but to the heart the mystery has been revealed. I This then is the message . . . which we declare unto you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.'

If, then, we apply to God the concept 'personality' it must be with the stress laid, not on any intellectualised definition of that word, but on its qualitative content. The same thing holds of concepts like Life or Mind. If these are taken abstractly, that is, if they are thought rather than intuited, the logical result is Pantheism. If the Universe is the expression of Life (or even of Mind) conceived abstractly, whatever is, is equally divine. But Life and Mind are known to us at first hand only in personality; and there they are apprehended concretely and intuitively. In such apprehension quality is always the essential element. Pantheism, then, rests on the fallacy of abstraction. But if from the existence of Life or Mind it is legitimate to draw any inference at all as to the nature of the Universe, it can only be the Theistic inference-all things proceed from God and exist in Him, but they are not all equally expressive of His nature in which quality must be essential.

By purely intellectual considerations such as the foregoing I myself have been gradually led farther and farther away from the tempered Absolutism of the school of T. H. Green, in the direction of what I have called the Higher Anthropomorphism. But it was only after I had actually penned the first draft of this chapter that it flashed across my mind that of all the great religious teachers of the world Christ is the most unashamedly anthropomorphic. From primitive physical Anthropomorphism He was, it goes without saying, as far removed as were Confucius or the Buddha, Zeno or Zoroaster. His anthropomorphism was completely spiritual; but, just for that reason, it could be absolutely thoroughgoing. He told men to speak and think of God as Father. Many before Him had applied that name to God; Christ alone would have men to -use no other, to think out fully all its implications, and to apply them to every circumstance of life. 'If ye being evil know how to give good gifts -unto your children, how much more your Father in heaven.' The whole basis of Christ's practical religious teaching is just one great anthropomorphic thought. God is our Father, only He is as much better than the best, as He is wiser than the wisest and stronger than the strongest, of human parents-let man believe this, and act accordingly.

Christ's view of God was not the result of philosophic speculation; it was the intuition of supreme religious genius, interpreting, we may surmise, unique personal experience. And the line of argument we have followed out has not yet brought us anything like as far as that. It is pointing us in the direction of the conception of a Living God-not as yet towards that of a Loving God. That is the further conclusion upon which the arguments of the next four chapters-setting out from very different starting points-seem all to converge. But just so far as it is recognised to be a necessity for thought to conceive the Power behind phenomena as concretely personal, the anthropomorphism of Jesus becomes intellectually more acceptable than the rationalised abstractions of a Hegel, a Haeckel or a Herbert Spencer.

SYNOPSIS

THE WILL TO POWER

For Nietzsche, Christ is the preacher of a ‘slave-morality '. In fact it is Nietzsche's morality that should bear this name; for this represents the slave's dream of hour he would behave if only he were free; it is the expression, not of greatness, but of a neurotic desire for greatness.

The true expression of the free-man's temper is the princely motto Ich dien. I am in the midst of you as he that serves.' The worship of naked power is the ideal of an enslaved world which Historic Christianity has only partially succeeded in discrediting.

THE IDEA OF POWER

Power means ability to effect a purpose consciously entertained; it is meaningless if applied to a force which has no capacity of initiation or self direction.

Nietzsche's conception of the Universe as the expression of a purposeless Will to Power is a poetic fancy; and the notion that it is somehow fine for man to live in tune with such a Universe is an imaginative fallacy.

If the Universe is without purpose, Mr. Russell is right in saying that Man is greater than Nature; if not, a study of the inner quality of the Will to live may throw light on the purpose of the Whole. To such a study this chapter essays to be a contribution.

BIOLOGY AND ETHICS

The place of Natural Selection in biological evolution. Three limiting conditions of the operation of the ‘struggle for existence' in the animal kingdom

(1) The struggle is for the survival, not so much of the individual, as of the species.

(2) War, that is, fighting between groups of the same species, is practically unknown.

(3) The struggle is for food or the opportunity of procreating the species. The phrase, therefore, is inaptly transferred to the struggle for wealth, fame or power in human society-the attainment of which generally leads to sterility.

Life is strife; but clear thinking on the distinction between strife that is creative and strife that is destructive, is the vital need of our times.

IS NATURE NON-MORAL?

Nature is not a Garden of Eden; nevertheless the cruelty and the waste which exist-apart from man-can be, and have been, gravely over-estimated

In the animal kingdom there is present the germ of what in man becomes morality.

CIVILISATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Material progress is dependent on Science, Invention and Organisation. But these would be impossible without the disinterested love of knowledge, and the disinterested love of constructive work.

The conditions, however, in which these can function effectively on a large scale are brought into existence by man's unique gift for co-operation.

We ask, then, to what quality in human nature is due this creative power of cooperation? Intellect, energy and courage only lead to progress in a society dominated by the ideals of Honesty and Justice.

But these are principles of equilibrium only. For progress there is required generosity, idealism and the spirit of self-sacrificing service. Of this creative love the care of parent for child is the simplest and most typical expression. Progress, we conclude, results where Intelligence and Energy are guided by the spirit of disinterested devotion-in the love of truth, in the love of constructive work and, above all, in the love of fellow-men.

CREATIVE STRIFE

The continuity between Man and Nature, which Darwin demonstrated, justifies us in seeking, in the life of man, the inner quality of the Life which expresses itself in Creative Evolution. But we must study man's life at its best and highest, for only there is it consciously creative-elsewhere it is destructive. Strife is creative only when it is the expression of Love. The bearing of this on our conception of God.

Chapter 6

CREATIVE STRIFE

THE WILL TO POWER

To Nietzsche Christ is the supreme corrupter of man kind, the all too successful prophet of a ‘slave morality '.But in fact it is the morality of which Nietzsche is himself the prophet that should be called the slave's. It is Nietzsche himself who, with a perfervid passion moulding a superb literary style, has given the world the classical expression of the slave's ideal-the ideal, I mean, by which the crushed and cringing servitor would like to live if only he were strong and free. The power to do or get the particular things he wants to do or get is every man's desire; but sheer Power-hard, empty hectoring Power-is the day-dream of the down trodden. To such the meaning of real liberty is veiled; they neither understand nor want that equal fellowship of mutual consideration, courtesy and self-respect, which among themselves the free-born take for granted. What the slave longs for is to be, still more to feel himself to be, the kind of man he thinks his master is. But on that point his thought is not his master's. Those who are used to rule do not envisage their own character and ethic as these appear to those beneath them. Rarely do those born to power conceive them selves as self-assertive, hard, oppressive. A parvenu may pride himself on qualities like these: the others, whatever they may be in actual fact, generally like to think of themselves as reasonable, kindly and beneficent, and, if stern at times, then only under dire necessity.

Modern psychology has shown that the Will to Power, where it appears in an exaggerated form, has usually a pathological explanation. It originates not from the strength but from the weakness of the patient. Some personal defect, some exaggerated delinquency in early years, an oppressive parent or teacher, a series of social snubs or the reprimands of a superior, often produce a permanent sense of inferiority; this is resented, and therefore driven out of conscious memory, but still dominates the subconscious self. In compensation for this dimly felt inferiority that self puts forth an exaggerated conviction of pre-eminence and selfassertion which not infrequently may show itself in harsh ideal or in destructive action. That is why, even among those of free and noble birth, there are always individuals who accept that truly ' slave ' morality which idealises mere strength and violence. And in periods and places where parental or scholastic discipline is repressive and severe, where class or race bitterness is acute and the tradition of political liberty is young, the number of such persons will be larger than where the contrary conditions hold.

The Will to Power is only one of many instincts in the human animal; and any individual in whom, by reason of an abnormal development of the assertive instinct, the love instinct and the herd instinct have been atrophied, is, from a purely medical point of view, suffering from an arrest of growth which has resulted in what may be termed a kind of psychological malformation. Nietzsche, with the sensitiveness of genius and the pathological instability which ultimately brought him to the madhouse, has given us the supreme expression in literature of the slave's ideal-the neurotic slave dreaming himself a king.

Nietzsche's doctrine of the superman [says Count Hermann Keyserling] is not an expression of greatness, but an expression of the desire for greatness, perhaps the most pathetic expression of that desire which has ever been known.'

(i The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, E.T., vol. i. p. 42. (Jonathan Cape, 1925.) I had written the preceding paragraphs before coming across this sentence by a German thinker who in many ways (see op. cit. p. 164) is in sympathy with Nietzsche's ethic.)

The free-man's temper is of a different kind. Inheriting a status without stigma or reproach, he has no need by egoistic self assertion to force the world to acknowledge in him some claim to special eminence, in order to disguise, if possible even from himself, an inferiority secretly admitted. His self-respect does not depend on an artificial structure of reputation or conceit of power which he feels to be ever threatened by the opinion of his fellows. His own position being secure, he can afford to give free play to those instincts, innate in every healthy man, which rejoice in the good of others. His instinct of self-assertion, not being for ever harnessed to the supposed necessity of self-defence, insensibly becomes a directive principle to those other instincts in the form of the impulsion noblesse oblige. Therefore he needs must devote himself to worthy ends; and, as the occasion may require, he is equally ready to follow or to lead. In either case his princely motto is Ich lien-I serve.

But man, in the historic phrase, though born free is everywhere in chains. The majority of mankind have never yet achieved freedom. In addition a large proportion, as a result of this and of faulty ideals of education, are slightly pathological. Hence that ‘slave-morality ' which worships naked power as such is still widespread-though in a humaner phase of civilisation and in a democratic age it is less universal and less whole-hearted than in earlier epochs.

What man admires on earth, that he ascribes to heaven, and lie has always fashioned God in the image of his king. A race or a generation which reverences pomp and circumstance, and loves to abase itself before a splendid violence and a domineering will thinks of God as a celestial Sultan. Rut a race of free-men will demand a very different kind of God, or will worship not at all. On the altar of the free-man's God must be inscribed his own Ich dien..

Historic Christianity developed in an enslaved world which naturally thought of God as the imperial Caesar of the Universe, and neither the Church nor the world it tried to teach could easily think otherwise. But the ascription of divinity to Christ-whether metaphysically justifiable or not-meant that the word divinity must ultimately acquire a significance absolutely irreconcilable with the old Hebrew or pagan view of God. ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them . . . but I am in the midst of you as he that serves.' Slowly through the ages the word divinity has changed its meaning. Today men think of the King of Kings less and less in terms of Caesar, more and more in terms of Christ; they see in the moral grandeur of a heroic death, not the humiliation, but the majesty of God.

Hell fire and some other things in official and popular Christianity have in the past done much to keep alive the Sultanic view of God and encourage men to prostrate themselves before mere Power. In so far as the Church has done that, it has taught Nietzsche's own ideal—or rather, it has failed to unteach the ‘slave-morality ' of the ancient world. But in so far as Christianity has really seen ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ ', it has made possible for millions the free-man's worship of Creative Love.

THE IDEA OF POWER

The foregoing considerations have an importance other than purely ethical by reason of the rampant muddle-headedness prevalent, even among some who think themselves philosophers, in regard to the conceptions of Will and Power, whether as applied to Man or to the Universe.

Power is a conception which implies quality quite as much as quantity; for power means ability to effect a purpose consciously entertained. Except in relation to such purpose, the word power is simply a metaphor—and a misleading one at that. The torrent that passes over the Falls of Niagara has been converted by human ingenuity into a source of power to accomplish purposes desired by human beings. But in itself this overwhelming mass of water has less power than a mosquito; for it has no capacity of self-direction, it can originate nothing; it can only passively submit to flow along a given channel. If an earthquake were to block the exit of the river from the Great Lakes, the water would not strive or cry aloud, it would initiate no movement; it would just lie still. In time the level would rise and a new outlet would be found; but that would be because more water had come in from outside, not because of any effort made by that already there, and then it would escape, not in a manner chosen by itself, but simply along the line of least resistance.

Only then if the Universe is the expression of conscious Life, can Power be an attribute which can be ascribed to It. Everest is not more powerful than Mont Blanc, it is merely larger. And if the Universe is without purpose, then to speak of It as the expression of Power, is nonsense. Nietzsche rejected Materialism; all the more clearly for that his conception of the Universe as the expression of a purposeless Will to Power is seen to be poetic fancy. The notion, then, that to identify oneself with the Will to Power is, as it were, to put oneself in tune with the Infinite, so far from being the deduction of a cold, clearheaded realism, is an imaginative fallacy. Only if Ultimate Reality is conscious, is there any point in attuning human effort to Its purpose or in conforming our values to Itssupposing we can ascertain them. If Reality is without purpose and without values, the idea that human ethic is the better for being a reflection of these negations is merely the ghost of a dead theology haunting the worshippers of a dead god. If God exists, then it is by His values that our ethic is determined; if not, no clear-headed thinker would build an ethic on the nonexistent values of this nonexistent being.

Mr. Bertrand Russell, who is never muddle-headed, sees this clearly. After discarding (for reasons which seem to me inadequate) the view that life, and a fortiori conscious life, is a phenomenon of cosmic significance, he proceeds to draw that conclusion which alone is logical:

We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature. In the world of values, Nature in itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, deserving of neither admiration nor censure. It is we who create value, and our desires which confer value. In this realm we are kings,and we debase our kingship if we bow down to Nature. It is for us to determine the good life, not for Nature-not even for Nature personified as God.'

(i 33. Russell, What 1 believe, pp. 24-5.(Megan Paul, 1925.)

On his premises Mr. Russell is right. But we have seen reason to reject his view that Life is a phenomenon of no real significance for the understanding of Reality. That being so, we shall expect to get further light on the nature of Reality by a study of the values which seem to emerge from an examination of the inner quality of the Will to live. Such an examination I will forthwith essay.

BIOLOGY AND ETHICS

Life is strife; and in the animal kingdom most of its energy is used up in the mere effort to keep alive. This effort expresses itself in a struggle for two quite different, and occasionally incompatible, ends-self-preservation and the propagation of the species. From this struggle biological evolution has resulted. As a result of causes and by means of a mechanism at present imperfectly ascertained, all living organisms tend to produce offspring varying from the parent type; some of these variations (technically known as ‘mutations ') differ from the rest in the quality of being transmissible to descendants; and of these some are also useful in ‘the struggle for existence ', as tending either to the preservation of the individual organism or to the multiplication, nurture or protection of its offspring. Thus there are two positive factors, (a) that life is a dynamic striving and (b) that it constantly throws up mutations having a survival value. These have been subjected to the negative action of Natural Selection, which weeds out the individuals and species least well adapted to their environment.

This selective process is often described as ' the survival of the fittest'. That is misleading; Natural Selection is a principle, not of survival, but of elimination; and therefore, taken by itself, it is a principle, not of life, but of death. And it eliminates, not those who are unfit in the sense of being less worthy to exist, but those less capable of existing at all in a particular environment. Under certain circumstances Natural Selection kills off heroes but preserves the typhoid bacteria which attack them.

‘The struggle for existence ' may also be a misleading phrase. Striving and desire are inherent in the very nature of life, and in the animal kingdom this does express itself in a ‘struggle for existence ' in the literal sense of an effort to keep alive. But in the animal kingdom the struggle goes on under three limiting conditions of the utmost significance.

(1) In Nature the instincts which tend to the survival of the species are always in the long run more powerful than those which put the individual first. There are even cases in the insect world where the act of impregnating the female is fatal to the male; while the selfsacrifice of the mother bird has become a proverb. The point, however, requires no arguing; it is self-evident that, if in any species in any generation the number of individuals which reach maturity is not at least equal to the average of previous generations, the process of diminution must be reversed or the species will die out. In Nature, then, the struggle is less for individual than for race survival.

The basilisk in mediaeval lore was a creature so fierce that immediately after birth it devoured both its parents. Since the number of the species would thus in every generation be reduced by one-half, it is not surprising that no specimen survives. And, by simple arithmetic, nations or classes which continue to indulge in families of only one child will be in the same case.

(2) Throughout Nature we have the spectacle of one species preying upon another; common also, though less frequent, is the struggle of individuals within the same species-two thrushes for the same worm, two stags for the same doe. But fighting between different groups of individuals within the same species is very rare, in fact all but unknown. War is an institution which man has in common with the ant, but apparently with no other creature.'

(1 Certain species of ants conduct organised warfare with other ants. They also appear to have as slaves ants of a slightly different species. ‘Go to the ant 'will hardly be the exhortation of a modern moralist.

It would appear that the often-quoted case of the imported brown rat exterminating the native black rat in this country will not stand examination. The brown has largely superseded the black rat because he is cleverer at escaping man and other enemies, and at opening up new avenues of subsistence. There is no evidence of fighting on a large scale between the two species. Cf. J. Arthur Thomson, System of Animate Nature, p. 298 f.)

(3) In the animal world the struggle for existence involves conflict for the sake of food or the opportunity of parentage. When the phrase is applied, as it so often is, to human life, it means the struggle for wealth, comfort, fame or power. But there is one fact written large across the history of civilisation. Individuals of those classes which have been most successful in this struggle leave behind them fewer children than the average, and their families-with a few conspicuous exceptions die out. In the biological sense a struggle in which success leads to this result is a struggle, not for existence, but for extinction.

Life is strife-it was the Buddha, not Darwin, who first proclaimed that to the world. But, alike in its philosophy of the Universe and in the practical conduct of life, humanity will wander down blind alleys till it grasps the simple fact that strife is of two kinds-that which creates, and that which destroys.

The antithesis between creative and destructive strife is no mere debating point for philosophic schools. The doctrine that war ' by destroying creates ', and that internecine competition in the sphere of Economics or in Real Politik will produce the maximum of social good, has been preached to Europe as a gospel for half a century. Purporting to be the lesson of Biology, it has claimed the authority of Science. That claim is without justification. As a mere matter of fact Creative Evolution has not worked that way. But the illusion to the contrary has seemed to give the sanction of the Universe to the promptings of human egoism. The name and prestige of Natural Science have been invoked to give a basis in reason to the doctrine that Might is Right; that doctrine has been accepted as their tacit, if not overt, creed by no small proportion of those who in things practical control the world-and mankind at large has had to foot the bill.

Ambitious men made wars, avaricious cheated and oppressed, before Biology was ever dreamt of. For such the misinterpretation of Darwinism provides, not a reason, but an excuse. But the supposed lesson of Biology has weakened the hands of those who would hold these in check; and it has diminished the prestige of ordinary morality with the generality of men. Of course, if it is really true that the Power behind the Universe is characteristically expressed, to use a now hackneyed phrase, in ‘nature red in tooth and claw'humanity ought to face that situation. But if this is not true, our first duty to ourselves and to our time is to find out the error and publish its falsity abroad.

IS NATURE NON-MORAL?

Nature is not the Garden of Eden we should like to find it; still less, however, is it the Hell that in some moods we picture. It is an imaginative fallacy to see as one awful totality the pain of every living thing; pain is only felt by individuals, and in the animal world it would seem as if the individual's share is quite small. That capacity to feel on behalf of others, which adds so much to human sorrow, hardly there exists, so that the individual experiences little pain apart from the physical suffering which falls to its own lot. Again, we must not think of the animal world as if it consisted mainly of creatures like the horse and the dog, made exceptionally sensitive by centuries of selective breeding, soft nurture and the education of human intercourse; nor even of these as if their capacity for feeling was in any way comparable to that of human beings. In the vast majority of living creatures, sensation, so far as we can judge, rarely reaches that level of acuteness which we should call definitely pain. The ‘cloven worm' probably feels the cleaving process hardly more than I feel the paring of my nails; the squeal of a rabbit bitten by a stoat is not less loud, but probably indicates less actual pain, than that of a small boy smacked by a firm but kind mamma. Among animals disease is rare, and as a rule it either kills quickly or causes small discomfort. Death is swift, and, even if violent, is rarely very painful. The hawk's victim, until the moment of its death, has lived blithely unconscious and unapprehensive of its doom. Sudden fear either excites or calms; and there is some evidence that in the tiger's grip (even with a human being) fear inhibits feeling and produces anesthesia in the prey. And if low capacity for sensation, while reducing pain, makes pleasure also much less keen, the impression one derives from watching wild life is that its dominant mood is a kind of suffused happiness. And where happiness ceases, death is usually at hand. Lastly, the animals can know little of the suffering (as of the pleasure) which inevitably accompanies man's enhanced capacity for memory and prevision; in their world disappointment, despair, bereavement and remorse are, in anything like the sense in which we feel them, quite unknown. There is little sorrow, and there is no sin.

But if our idea of the cruelty of Nature is to a large extent a sympathetic fallacy, what of the waste? To take one out of a hundred possible examples: a herring spawns several hundred thousand eggs, of which on an average only about three will reach maturity. But they are not wasted; every one of them, whether as egg or tiny fish, becomes food for some other living creature. Is the hen's egg that I ate for breakfast wasted because it never reached the chicken stage? We may allow ourselves to wish that evolution had developed on entirely vegetarian lines; but so long as I enjoy my mutton chop without a qualm, I cannot accuse Nature because the lion feeds on an antelope, which in all probability lived more happily and died with perhaps less pain than the sheep from which I dine.

Once man appears on the scene, pain, waste and cruelty present a problem the magnitude of which eternally confounds the optimist. But outside the sphere of man-and the pain which he inflicts on animals-it is on a small scale. Later on we shall inquire whether a solution, or any approximation to a solution, can be reached of the problem of evil as it exists where man comes in. If anything like a solution can be attained to the problem when it is presented in its acutest form, the greater will include the less. But if we can get no light on the greater issue, the existence of the lesser will not increase our darkness much.

The consideration that, apart from man, the case for cruelty and waste in Nature is not a strong one, is merely negative. Closer observation, however, points to a positive conclusion that there is operative in Nature an active Will to Good. Kropotkin in his now classical treatise, Mutual Aid, shows that, at the level of consciousness attained in bird and animal life, friendly co-operation is the rule, hostility the exception-not only between members of the same species but even between different species. The one conspicuous exception of course is where carnivorous or insectivorous creatures prey upon smaller or weaker species. But, as already pointed out, the relation between the carnivorous species and their ordinary food is precisely the same as the relation that prevails between man and the chicken or the sheep. There is no more 'immorality', and as little cruelty, in the one case as in the other. But in the mutual relations between members of the same species there are striking phenomena of quite an opposite character. Go to the tiger and the wolf types so admired by certain would be supermen. Deprive the tigress of her whelps, watch the elaborate cooperation of the wolf pack on the hunt. Mother-love and esprit de corps are here apparent in more than rudimentary form. When we note qualities like these in the fiercest of her children, the theory of an essential immorality in the ways of Nature has lost its plausibility.

Nor is the significance of such qualities annulled by the objection that they are there simply as a result of Natural Selection, their presence being of value in the struggle for existence. Undoubtedly Natural Selection puts a premium on such qualities; but it does not produce them. Natural Selection no more brings into existence instincts or qualities which have a ‘survival value' than a Scholarship Examination brings into existence clever or well taught boys. It merely tests and selects the materials presented. But that means that the instincts and qualities in question-parent love and esprit de corps in a rudimentary form--are not in any sense a product of internecine struggle; on the contrary they are an emergence of an inner quality of Life which, once it has found expression, impels the individual, to however small an extent, to rise above that struggle. Moreover-the point is all important- it is in the higher animals, where life begins to be exhibited in an intenser form, that these qualities begin to show. The elan vital, as it expresses itself in the animal kingdom, is not yet moral; but it has started on the road that leads in that direction.

CIVILISATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Spiritual and material progress do not necessarily go together. But material progress is clearly the result of two things-first, a constant extension of scientific knowledge and invention, secondly, an ever-widening range of cooperation between man and man. Of these the second is, we shall see, really the more important, since on it in the last resort depends not only scientific discovery, industrial production and commerce, but, in highly civilised communities, the availability for daily use of the very simplest necessities of life. Civilisation and its products we are apt just to take for granted, or we ponder mainly on its glaring defects and its hideous failures. We often forget how much it has achieved; still more often we overlook the inner principles which have made that achievement possible. It is worth while to stop and ask, What are these inner principles?

Civilisation is the creation of three activities, intelligence, energy and goodwill. By goodwill I do not mean anything negative or passive, like harmlessness or mere good nature; I mean a spirit whose characteristic quality is that it is both disinterested and constructive. And, I am bold to maintain, it is this active Will to Good that is in the last resort the regulative and directive principle behind all achievement which is really creative; while intelligence and energy have been creative or destructive in exact proportion as they have or have not been directed towards disinterested ends.

No one will dispute that it is to Science first and foremost that man owes his present mastery of things material, and at first blush Science appears to be the expression of the intellect alone. But how did Science come into existence? Through the passion of a succession of individuals for knowledge for its own sake. Science is the by-product of the disinterested love of truth. It is by its noble army of martyrs that the victories of Science, as of Religion, have been won. Man's present triumph over Nature is due solely to that long line of men who have braved death, legal persecution, social ostracism, poverty and neglect because they valued truth above all else; who have valued it so highly that, in days when it seemed that Religion and Science were incompatible, they have cheerfully for truth's sake renounced, not merely the good things of this life, but the hope of a life to come. Science is the clearest proof of all that the spirit of disinterested constructiveness is the mainspring of progress.

Take next Invention and Organisation. These conjointly have made useful for everyday life the gains of Science in the field of theoretic knowledge. At first sight it may appear that in this case the element of idealism is much to seek. Invention and Organisation, no doubt, have had their martyrs, but these have been far less numerous and less conspicuous than those of Science. Advance in Invention and Organisation, far more frequently than in abstract Science, has been due to the desire for personal profit or advantage, a desire frequently exhibited in quite legitimate, but in no sense ideal, ways. And unfortunately Invention and Organisation have been too often used by men to compass the detriment or destruction of fellow-men. But here again, if we look below the surface, the same principle is found to hold. The desire to use powers or opportunities, either for legitimate personal profit or for ends detrimental to others, is a thing which belongs to common human nature; it is not a peculiarity of the inventor or the organiser. What is specially characteristic of these, and what gives them their power (for good or for evil) is not the fact that they share in the common selfishness of the race, but that they have in addition an interest in ideal values of a certain character. The great inventor and the great organiser are men of vision and imagination, concentration and determination-men who can see a problem or a need to which others are blind, and who can discover the way to solve the problem they have seen. To do this they must have something of the artist's enthusiasm; they must be men who have a disinterested passion for solving a problem, for creating something which is to them ‘a work of art' valued for its own sake. No man ever made a really great invention who had no interest in good work neatly done. No man ever organised a great business who was not interested in building up a structure which he valued for its own sake. Man has a disinterested passion for creative work to match his disinterested love of truth. It is man the discoverer, backed up by man the artist-craftsman and the artist-organiser, who has conquered Nature. Sometimes an originator has used his discoveries and inventions for selfish instead of for noble ends-though more often it is some one else who has seen this use for them. But roughly speaking it is true that Invention and Organisation, like pure Science, have been the work of men who loved them for their own sake.

But the foundation-stone of civilisation lies deeper still. Discovery, Invention and Organisation are possible only because of man's unique gift for co-operation. Commonplace and obvious as this statement is, the habit of taking the familiar for granted without probing its significance is so deeply engrained in all of us that an illustration to bring home this point will hardly be irrelevant.

What are the conditions which make possible a new discovery shall we say in Chemistry? Chemical discoveries are not made by Hottentots living in their native kraals; they are only made by men who live in conditions which presuppose the whole apparatus of a complicated civilisation. The individual discoverer must first know his subject thoroughly, that is, he must be one who inherits accumulated knowledge and methods of research which it has taken centuries of the co-ordinated effort of workers in many nations to evolve. He must have at command a scientific library, elaborate and delicate instruments, carefully prepared materials, an expensive laboratory-which represent the thought and the labour of thousands focussed during centuries on this special science. Moreover, he himself must have been reared and fed, medically attended and educated, by the care and at the expense of others for many years. Nor would he have made his great discovery had there not been there at his command that day coffee for his breakfast raised by the coolies of South America, bread grown on the prairies of Canada, coal from the mines of Wales to cook the meal, clothes to wear made of wool shorn from the flocks of Australia or of cotton gathered in the fields of Egypt; and behind all these the developed systems of railroad, steamship, factory, shop and domestic service which put them at his service. Behind every new discovery in any science lies the whole organised system of international industry and commerce, the elaborate social fabric of law and order, the educational machinery of many nations and the accumulated knowledge of all the centuries. Modern intellect has been able to make its unprecedented scientific advances solely because it has had at its disposal the resources, moral, intellectual and material, of a civilisation immeasurably more complex, more highly organised, and more world embracing than any which preceded it.

And what holds good of Discovery holds good still more of Invention, advance in which would be impossible without a great commercial and industrial system. Were there not so vast a market waiting, few new inventions could be produced at a price which would not be prohibitive. And it is because the fresh machinery and designs which are produced in one place become in a few years familiar to the whole world, that the opportunity of further improvement and new invention is ever being presented to many minds in many countries. The names of great discoverers, inventors, captains of industry, stand out as the conspicuous instruments of advance; but they are capable of being this only because each one of them, besides inheriting the achievements of the past, is also in a position to utilise and to focus on the line of advance the activities of his contemporaries. The peaks of the mountains are the first to catch the light of the rising sun, but it is the mass below which sustains them at their giddy height.

But Co-operation on the grand scale is a new thing-the slow result of centuries of effort and of organisation continually improving-organisation of knowledge and education, of industry and commerce, of social and political life, of city, state and interstate co-operation. Not so very long ago man was organised in small tribal groups having little contact other than hostile with outside tribes; security of person and property and ready communication existed only within areas comparatively small; industry was carried on by single individuals or by tiny guilds owning a few simple tools and possessing a traditional skill in some particular handicraft; transport was slow and difficult so that only with great difficulty and at prohibitive expense could the products of many distant lands be brought together for manufacture and then again redistributed to the ends of the earth; discoverers and inventors in one place worked in complete ignorance of those in another. And just so long as these conditions lasted man was a weakling and the slave of Nature. Before man could hold his own with Nature the Great State, the Great Industry, World Trade, International Science had to arise. Thus of all the conditions of human progress, Co-operation is the most fundamental.

There remains, then, to inquire, Upon the existence of what principle in the nature of man does the possibility of this grand scale Co-operation depend?

Here, again, it is easy at first glance to miss the essential point. The creation of great states and great industries, the commercial exploitation of the whole world, have been effected under the leadership of men whose outstanding characteristics have been intellect, energy and courage. Nietzsche is right in hailing these as creative qualities; where he errs is in not perceiving that they are qualities which promote progress only in so far as they are in the last resort directed by, and subordinated to the Will to Good. Intellect, energy and courage can be directed either to purely selfish or to purely ideal ends. In the actual experience of life we find that the ends to which they are directed are generally mixed. Few men are so selfish as not to have at heart, at any rate to some extent, the interests of their family, their class, or their country. Few are so disinterested as never to be moved one hairbreadth by considerations of personal vanity or private interest. The point, however, that I urge is that intellect, energy and courage are creative forces, in exact proportion to the extent to which they are directed towards unselfish ends; they are destructive, in exact proportion as they are directed towards ends that are purely self-regarding.

Napoleon stands as the type of the superman ideal in history; and his life affords the classical illustration of the truth of this contention. The French Revolution, to the extent that it was really guided by the ideal of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity', and not merely by personal and class hatred, was a creative moment in European progress; and the embodiment of those ideals in terms of just and efficient government was mainly the work of Napoleon. But just in so far as his career was the expression of the Will to Power-personal and national-his influence was wholly destructive; he bathed Europe in blood and impoverished, morally as much as materially, the country which he had himself consolidated as well as those which his ambition had all but enslaved.

Look again at the world of commerce. The slogan ‘Business is business ' comes very near to meaning ‘Business is war'. But production and distribution are a necessary public service. And even if conditions in some ways analogous to warfare exist between the individuals or groups who conduct this service, it can be and often is an honourable warfare-a sporting competition in which men ‘play the game'. Granted, this does not always happen. Things are very far from being ideal; goods are not always ‘up to sample'-; verbal engagements may not always be honourably adhered to; agents and buyers may take commissions to betray their masters' interests; employees are often sweated; dirty tricks are played. But all this is one side only of the matter. Such things are still the exception rather than the rule. More often than not goods are up to sample, engagements are kept, agents can be trusted, employees are reasonably content-but for that, trade would be impossible. Nor is it enough to explain such honesty as there is by saying that it exists merely because experience shows that in the long run it is the best policy. It exists because-at any rate in those countries where commerce really flourishes there is a high pride in the credit of the firm, a genuine interest in good work well done, and the majority of men love fair dealing for its own sake-even though, given sufficient temptation and a good chance of not being detected, many may succumb. It is beyond dispute that ire trade honesty is creative, dishonesty destructive. Commercial prosperity depends on confidence. In countries where verbal agreements are repudiated, where no agents can be trusted, trade languishes; where the opposite holds, and in exact proportion as it holds, trade flourishes.

But something more then a minimum of business honesty is needed. Commerce and industry thrive only where there exist security of person and property. But these depend entirely on the intelligent and impartial administration of Justice by the state. Where officials can be regularly bribed or intimidated, where judges normally decide in accordance with family interests or personal favouritism, where false witnesses can be purchased for a few rupees a head, progress languishes. Indeed, I hazard the opinion that their poor success in solving the problem of civil justice has been the main cause of the relative stagnation of civilisation among such highly gifted peoples as those of India and China.

Honesty and justice are the fundamental conditions of Cooperation. But alone they are not enough. Experience shows that in the long run those businesses are most successful in which the relation of co-operation between employer and employed, and also between the firm and its 'connexion', has in it an element which goes beyond honesty; where the spirit all round is one which prefers, if it must err at all, to err on the side of generosity. Indeed, real honesty is only possible in a society where the majority have generous instincts where buyers are willing to give a fair price and producers desire to do the best that can be done at that price. A survey of the great and old-established businesses of the commercial world will show that firms which over a long period have acquired a reputation for honesty of this generous quality acquire a connexion which treats them in the same spirit. And if ever, as does occasionally happen, such a firm declines, the cause will be, not its adherence to the higher business morality, but the fact that its management has fallen into the hands of men less enterprising, less intelligent, or less industrious-sometimes, even, the abandonment by a new generation of the old tradition of fair dealing which was the source of the firm's good name.

Justice, similarly, in the strictly legal sense of the word, is not a principle of progress but merely of equilibrium: it administers the law that is, it does nothing to amend it. But, if mankind is to advance, it is not enough to secure the impartial administration of the social system and the law that exists; there must also be its gradual supersession by a system progressively more just, more intelligent and more humane. History shows that laws, institutions, and social customs need constant amelioration; and without this there can be no advance. Laws, institutions, and customs are intimately related to national character. They express the character of a people-or, at least, of its dominant elements-in the past, and they mould its character for the future. It follows that progress is impossible without continual political, social and ethical reform.

And to what is reform of law or custom due? At once we come upon the creative function of the prophet, the martyr, the reformer. Progress always involves criticism of accepted ideas, usually also of the usages and the institutions in which they are embodied. Such criticism inevitably provokes opposition; especially where the change necessitated threatens the material interests, as well as the traditional prejudices, of powerful sections of the community. Hence the reformer, whether of ideas or of practice, has always to take the risk of being a martyr. His motives, like those of other men, are generally mixed; the desire for personal distinction, or for the furtherance of the sectional interests of the groups with which he is most closely identified, usually enters into, and thereby impairs, his disinterested perception of the right and his disinterested devotion to its attainment. But here again the greatness and permanence of the advance which he achieves depend mainly on the extent to which ideal and disinterested motives predominate in the minds of himself and those whom he leads. Just in so far as he is swayed by purely personal ambition, or the interests of a particular sect, class or nation, he retards, instead of promoting,the advance of humanity.

Progress depends partly upon a growing keenness of perception for ethical ideals, partly upon an advance in the art of reducing them to practice. Primitive man recognises the rights of others only within the borders of a small group of blood relations. A large part of moral progress consists in the gradual extension of the range of persons towards whom obligation is recognised as existing-from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to civilised humanity, and from that to all mankind. Partly it consists in enriching and enlarging the conception of the nature of the obligation due. First comes the primitive justice which demands no more, and exacts no less, than eye for eye and tooth for tooth. Later on comes the discovery that justice alone will not suffice. The strictest payment to each man of his bare rights is not enough. That growing capacity of Co-operation, which has alone made possible the advance of man, has in the last resort been due to generosity, the readiness to do more than one need, to give more and exact less than is strictly in the bond, to sympathise and to forgive. It has been due, that is, to the spirit which inspires the brother and the friend, the hero and the martyr, the prophet and the reformer, both those who are known to fame and the vastly larger number of the unhonoured and unknown.

And, when we come to think of it, it is this selfsame spirit, only in another aspect, which expresses itself in the self-sacrificing care and labour of the parent for the child, but for which the race of man could never have existed. And to this expression-the simplest and oldest, but in some ways the most typical of all-we see that the name most obviously appropriate is Creative Love.

There is in human nature an instinct for self-immolation which can easily be mistaken for self-devotion. But neither asceticism nor Quixotic sacrifice is constructive. Creative Love, as it must be backed by energy, so it must be controlled by reason-but not too much controlled. An act or temper which is to be spiritually creative must have an aspect of abandon; a flame from which men seek to light their torches must be a flare. The prodigality of Nature is a true reflection of a necessary element in the highest spiritual life; ‘good measure pressed down and running over'. Generosity is the note of the heroic, Animaeque magnae prodigus Regulus. ‘High heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated less or more.' The balanced perfection of Greek art just falls short of the exuberant plenitude which speaks through all the restraint, the proportion and the intellectual coherence of the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals, which, far better than any theology, translated into stone the constructive aspiration of the Religion they expressed.

Disinterested love, recognition of ideal values, and the capacity for devotion to them when recognised, seem to play such a small part in the struggle for a livelihood or for pleasure which pre-occupies most men's minds, that there is a certain plausibility in regarding them as secondary and accidental products of the evolutionary process. Our analysis of the facts has shown that the contrary holds good. The rudder seems but a small thing, but its direction determines that of the ship; and progress has depended on the direction of energy and intelligence by the still small voice which bids man stake all on his intuition of the highest-on the love of truth, the love of constructive work, the love of fellow-man, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

CREATIVE LOVE

The essential continuity between Man and Nature is the grand deduction to be made from Darwin's great discovery. Once stated, the conclusion is all but self-evident. Its consequences are less so. The Creative Life that reveals itself in Nature at its sub-human level is, broadly speaking, nonmoral and non-reflective; while the conspicuous differentia of Man is that he is conscious of ideal values and interested in the meaning of things. But, we have seen, in the tenderness of the tigress for her cubs or in the loyalty of the wolf to the pack there is the germ of what in man we call a moral sense. In the nightingale's delight in the song of her mate, in the peahen's admiration of the cock, there are the beginnings of an aesthetic sense. In some of the higher animals the power of profiting by experience and of adaptation to unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances is evidence of a degree of intelligence all but reflective. Just in so far as these things appear in Nature, Nature is beginning to show itself to be the expression of a principle which cannot be described as wholly without a sense of values or without a capacity for conscious purpose and reflection.

Man, especially philosophising man, proud of being so much more than an animal, has tried to forget that he is animal at all. Aware that morality often means refusing to follow the dictates of instinct, he has overlooked the fact that the highest morality is not the negation, but the sublimation, of natural instinct, ‘First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual'. There is an immense difference, but there is no absolute breach of continuity, between the care of the cat for its kittens and the tenderness of the mother for her babe, or between the attachment of the antelope to the herd and the loyalty of the citizen to his country. When instinct becomes consciously moral, it becomes something infinitely richer; it becomes aware of its own nature, and of its own value; and with every such advance that value becomes greater-but there is nowhere a complete breach of continuity. But, just for that reason, if we ask the meaning of that element in the Life-Force which expresses itself in such instincts, we shall expect to find it in what the highest has attained rather than in that towards which the lowest seems dimly to be groping. That inward urge which prompts the mother bird to feed her nestlings before herself, does not reveal its real quality until we contemplate the Buddha renouncing the bliss which he had found in order to teach the Way to miserable men. The instinct which makes the sentinel of a flock of mountain goats watch while its fellows feed, yields up its meaning when we look at Socrates choosing death rather than escape from prison, in loyalty to his country's laws.

But, the reader may object, are not the force and fraud, which Machiavelli and Nietzsche so extol, also foreshadowed in the animal, and must not they equally reveal something of the inward quality in the Infinite Creative Life? Not so. In the animal there is the vehement application of physical energy, and the use of elementary intelligence, for the attainment of ends desired; but the ends are always, cat the animal level, legitimate ends, and their attainment by the individual is, broadly speaking, beneficial to the species as a whole. That ceases to hold when a creature has emerged who can discriminate clearly between selfish and unselfish ends, who has a standard of values and a power of considered choice. Man differs from the animal in that he can, up to a point, take charge of the direction of his own life. He can, indeed he must, choose whether to make his life consciously creative or consciously destructive. It is the fundamental contention of this book that life as we know it is a mirror of the Infinite Life. The Infinite Life is nothing if not creative; hence only when our life is functioning in a way that is actively creative can it in any sense mirror the Infinite. But in man, we have seen, energy and intelligence, when they take the form of force and fraud, become essentially destructive, that is, they are finding a perverted and non-creative expression. It is only when, and in proportion as, they are directed and controlled by the Will to Good that they become creative. The supremely characteristic manifestation, then, of the inward quality of the Infinite Creative Life is that which finds expression in the Will to Good. In other words, Strife can create only a f it be the expression of Love.

Greece saw the vision of Cosmos, the order, beauty, law, behind phenomena; the Universe is the expression of Mind.

India conceived the Dance of Shiva-Shiva, with the Sun and Moon as eyes and the Ganges spurting from his helm, dancing exultant in the flames; the Universe is the expression of Zest.

India was right; Greece, too, was right. But it was a deeper insight, not merely a sublimer dream, that dared to say: the Universe is the expression of Love; that could see the inmost mystery of Creative Power unveiled in the figure of a man hanging on a cross for the sake of an ideal.

SYNOPSIS

CREATIVE PERSONALITY

The doctrine of the Divinity of Man is a source of inspiration or degradation according to the type of humanity regarded as ideal.

The influence of personality is such that the appearance in history of an individual worthy to be regarded as the Ideal Man would have been uniquely creative. Is Christ such an individual? (Note.-The historical evidence.)

THE CALL

The voice from heaven at the Baptism is, in the life of Christ, comparable to the ‘Call' of an Old Testament Prophet; it is a moment of realisation of vocation.

Both this voice and the symbolism in the story of the Temptation must be interpreted in the light thrown by modern Psychology on visions and auditions.

The Temptation expresses the conflict between the contemporary Messianic ideal and the moral ideals expressed in the life and teaching of Jesus.

SON OF GOD

Inferences as to the mind of Christ which may be drawn from the words, (a) ‘Thou art my beloved Son ', (b) ' I thank Thee Father . . . ', and other sayings.

All men are potentially ‘sons of God '-not slaves, but free-men.

SERVICE

AS the free-man must fight the battles of the state, so the citizens of the Kingdom of God must serve and, if need be, die-Christ, the Son par excellence, leading the way. The conception, Kingdom of God, stands for an ideal which, by its very definition, is unsurpassable.

To Christ the Crucifixion meant, not only personal disgrace and agony, but the rejection by His people of its national destiny. The moral grandeur of His act is obscured, if it be supposed that He had supernatural knowledge (as distinct from faith) that His cause would triumph. As an expression in action of the ideal of service, ' the utmost for the highest', His self-devotion has an absolute quality, it is a ne plus ultra.

A POSITIVE IDEAL

The conventional emphasis on ‘'sinlessness' ' in Christ unfortunate

(1) It is impossible to prove a negative.

(2) It suggests that the moral ideal is mainly ‘to do no harm'. The New Testament suggests that there was both a real development of character and a real struggle with temptation.

Granting that Christ did achieve moral perfection, this is to be seen, not in a negative avoidance of sin, but in His positive and creative passion for righteousness.

A MISGIVING

Is not the Christ ideal a little tame, and also impracticable?

The criticism would be valid were not the conventional picture of Christ a misrepresentation of the actual historic person. This shown under five headings

(1) ‘The man of sorrows '; (2) ‘The sheep before the shearers '; (3) Christ a ‘constructive revolutionary '; (4) The ‘Way of the Cross ' means not asceticism, but battle; (5) The higher common-sense.

THE IDEAL OF MAN

The intellectual and aesthetic tradition of Europe looks back to Athens, not to Galilee. Must the Ideal Man be an ‘Admirable Crichton'?

Christ was a specialist in ethics and religion; nevertheless everything He said and did appears to be intellectually and aesthetically, as well as morally, the ideal reaction to the actual circumstances. This illustrated by a detailed consideration of-(1) His intellectual powers. (2) His esthetic insight. (3) The element of finality in His moral teaching.

THE MIRROR OF THE INFINITE

The personality of Jesus is intensely individual, but at the same time it perfectly embodies a universal principle, viz. Creative Love. The appearance in history of such a person constitutes prima facie evidence that Creative Love is an element in Reality.

Man asks no special assurance that among the attributes of the Power behind things are (1) Infinite might; (2) Beauty; (3) Bare rationality. Of Its purpose (i.e. of Its moral quality) he would know more.

If in any agency there is purpose, that constitutes its essence. Unless God is as good as Christ, man can be nobler than his Creator. If love exists at all in God, it must be dominant, and therefore what He is.

DOGMA AS SYMBOL

Dogma can be treated, not as an intellectual fetter, but as a devotional symbol. The concept of the Trinity, taken in this way, expresses the inscrutable mystery and supra-personal character of Reality. The concept of Christ as the ‘portrait' of the Father gives to that mystery a luminous centre.

But Christ is not an arbitrarily chosen symbol of the Divine; He can be that only because of what He really is, and of what God is.

Chapter 7

THE CHRIST

CREATIVE PERSONALITY

THE doctrine of the Divinity of Man is one full of inspiration, but also full of peril. It may find expression in the worship of the Christ; but also in the worship of Napoleon or Don Juan. The Will to Power and the Will to Pleasure are instincts so powerful that they have sometimes wrested even from Reason and Religion sanction for their claim to rule witness the philosophy of Nietzsche in the West or the erotic cults of Krishna 1 ( It is the peculiar tragedy of Indian religion that Krishna, who in the Oita voices the loftiest conceptions of Hinduism, is also hero of a legend which makes him the Don Juan of the gods; and in certain districts the centre of a cult in which immoral practices have a place.) in the East. The Will to Righteousness is no less truly human than the Will to Pleasure or to Power; but -it develops later, and, like the heir to a contested throne, though born to reign may never wear the crown. Man's divinity is a thing that he must win.

Predominantly in childhood, only a little less in later years, character develops along the lines of the attraction exercised by striking personalities who seem to impersonate ideals. A man's philosophy of the Universe and the code of ethics which he accepts his Creed and his Commandments, so to speak-count for much, but the personalities that appeal to him count for more.

Every one knows the difference that it makes to the ‘tone ' of a regiment, a college or an office, whether the dominant personalities therein more nearly embody the Napoleonic, the Don Juan, or the Christ ideal.

Thus it comes about that at the stage in Creative Evolution reached by man-the stage at which, in virtue of the possession of self-consciousness, a species becomes capable of taking, to however limited extent, an active share in the direction of its own destiny-dynamic personality becomes the centre of the creative process. Whenever a truly creative personality appears in history, the Power behind the Universe not only finds a new expression for some element in Its-or His-own nature, but also makes a fresh contribution to the actual task of creation. Not only is a remarkable specimen of the race produced, but also, through him, there is effected a new constructive work.

The inspiration of humanity is the roll-call of its famous men. But does any one of these represent an absolute ideal, an ideal, that is, which is wholly and without qualification worthy of imitation? And if we have no criterion, no objective standard of the ideal, how are we to say exactly where or to what extent any one model is defective? The very richness of our heritage of great men makes for confusion. Also an ideal tends to be dynamic in proportion to the clearness of its outline. There is, then, nothing intrinsically unreasonable in the idea that at some time in the course of history Creative Evolution should have produced a super-hero who could stand to humanity as the embodiment of a kind of super-ideal, capable of providing the rallying standard which men require. Such a person, appearing at a certain stage of man's development, would have been, of all possible variations in the species, the one most effectively creative.

To our fathers Christ was such a super-hero. Is He such to us? or must we look elsewhere for our Superman? Or are we to say that the Power-or Person-manifested in Creative Evolution has not as yet proved capable of this supreme creative act, and that we must do the best we can without it? 1

1 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE.-Of the life of Jesus we know less than we could wish, but we know a good deal. Our documentary authorities are incomparably superior, for example, to those on which rest our knowledge of the Buddha. The allusions in the letters of Paul, though scanty in amount, are the evidence of an actual contemporary. Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, seems to have been written something under forty years after the happenings it records, and there is contemporary evidence (cf. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, p. 17 f. Macmillan, 1924) that its author was a resident in Jerusalem and a follower of the Apostle Peter. His story shows traces of that kind of enhancement of detail which, where events recorded are remarkable, is a common phenomenon in reports by simple-minded persons who derive their information from others by word of mouth; but there is very little that can be dismissed at once as legend. In the stories of the Infancy, and a few other passages of Matthew and Luke, poetic legend has clearly been at work. But the bulls of the material in these two Gospels appears to be derived either from Mark or from written collections of parables and sayings of still earlier date, and Luke seems to have used an account of the Passion independent of Mark. For the life of Christ, then, we turn first to Mark, supplementing him to some extent from Luke; for the teaching we rely mainly on Luke and Matthew. The Gospel of John is a work of an entirely different character, not a biography but a meditation. It is a mystic's interpretation of the essence of Christianity cast into dramatic form. It probably incorporates authentic traditions other than those preserved in the Synoptics; nevertheless it should be read, as we read a dialogue of Plato or the book of Job; that is, for the sake, not of the incident's and situations, but of the thought they are selected to convey.

The remainder of this chapter is largely an attempt to give an answer to this question. It has cost me much thought and much labour; but, as I read it through once more in proof, there came over me a feeling of acute dissatisfaction. In discussing problems about Christ, I seemed to have left unportrayed the Christ Himself. But, perhaps, that does not really matter. The Gospels are there; from their pages who will may find the plaster's personality in all its grace and majesty. And if what I have written leads any one to re-read a familiar story with a freshened eye my purpose has been effected.

THE CALL

A scholar who studies the mind of an Isaiah or an Ezekiel, will take as starting-point the vision and the voice through which, to them, as to so many of the Hebrew prophets, there calve the conviction of vocation. In the form assumed by the ‘Call' of a prophet, both his own individuality and the essence of his special message are concentrated in symbolic form. It was through a Voice and a Vision of this same symbolic character that conviction reached the mind of Jesus, as He rose from the water after baptism by John, that He was indeed Messiah.2 a In Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, the words are, ‘coming up out of the water, he saw'; and there is no suggestion that any one but Jesus saw the vision or heard the voice. So also Matthew; in Luke, and still nacre in John, the original tradition has been modified.

Curiously enough, many eminent critics, instead of seeking in this incident the key to the understanding of His mind and message, have on purely a priori grounds denied its historicity.

At the end of this volume I have set out in an Appendix some facts which illustrate the psychological mechanism of experiences of this type; and have tried to show the vital necessity of distinguishing in such cases between the content and the form. The principle I have inferred from the evidence there adduced, i.e. that their significance lies, not in a particular psychological mechanism, but in their spiritual quality, requires special emphasis when we come to study some of those experiences which have changed the history of the world-the summons which brought Amos from following the flock, the vision that made Paul a Christian, or the voice that convinced Jesus that He was indeed the Christ.

By the recipient of such a 'call' its compulsive authority could not be questioned, ‘The lion hath roared who will not fear? The Lord God hath spoken, who will not prophesy? ' 1

1 Amos iii. 8. Both the ethical monotheism of the Jew, and the practice of putting a prophetic message in writing-to ‘which ultimately we owe the fact that there is a Bible-go back to the new line struck out by Amos. z I have worked this out in more detail, and have also discussed at length the extent to which Jesus accepted the Apocalyptic views of the age, in my essay, ° The Historic Christ', in Foundations. (Macmillan, 1912.)To Jesus from the moment of His baptism, whatever may have been the case before, it could not for a single moment be doubtful that He was the Christ. And to the contemporary Jewish mind- which was inclined to interpret the utterances of earlier prophets in the light of later Apocalyptic--Messiahship implied an office of far more than human magnificence and power. Only, therefore, in the light of the conviction that Messiahship had been authenticated by the voice of God Himself, can we consider how far the life of Jesus is an expression of the religious and moral ideal He taught.

Matthew and Luke-drawing apparently on a lost document (Q so-called) which represents the earliest stratum of the Gospel tradition-go on to tell of a series of Temptations. One after another there are presented to His mind, in symbolic picture, aspects of the contemporary ideal of what the Christ should be or do; one after another, luxury, empire, the appeal to marvel, are rejected as entailing faithlessness to the highest. The incompatibility between His estimate of moral and religious values and that picture of regal magnificence and easy triumph which religious tradition had associated with the Messianic office was fundamental .2 The mental conflict entailed by such a crisis may well have found expression in visionary experiences of the kind recorded in the Gospel story (p. 320 ff.); but a generation which worshipped Jesus as superhuman would never have guessed even the fact, much less the character, of such a conflict. Some account of it must have reached them, derived ultimately from Christ Himself. And He would have had reason to give the disciples some account of it. At Caesarea Philippi, Peter saluted Him as Messiah; at once, we are told, He began to point out that He was not Messiah in anything like the sense supposed; and in particular He repudiated, as temptation from Satan, Peter's suggestion that the Christ ought not to suffer. This incident, or the period of esoteric teaching which seems to have followed it, was, I suggest, an occasion when He could hardly have avoided communicating to His disciples the nature of, and the conclusions reached by Him in, the spiritual conflict in regard to this very point which had accompanied His call. Jesus always taught (probably He also thought) to a large extent in parable and metaphor; and allowance must also be made for the possibility of a difference in matters of detail between the account as originally related by Him and as recorded in our documents. It is, therefore, safer to leave open the question whether the story of the Temptation should be read as conscious parable, or whether the scenes and voices described were originally seen or heard in visions. But that the voice at the Baptism, ‘Thou art my beloved Son', was what psychologists style an ‘audition', I do not personally regard as an open question.

SON of GOD

Visions and auditions seem normally to be dramatised projections of conclusions to which the self has arrived in its subconscious ranges; but when they occur to great souls who have used themselves to deep communion with the Infinite, it may well be that they express something larger than the individual mind, and are indeed a veritable expression of the Divine. Nevertheless, in these cases also it would appear that their actual form is mainly determined by the character and mental history of the individual and his race. It is not surprising, then, that, so far as form is concerned, the audition which assured Jesus that He was the Christ reflected a passage of the Old Testament commonly interpreted as Messianic.'

1 Ps. ii. 7. The Western text in Luke iii. 22 reads: " Thou art my son, this day have I begotten Thee." If, as I believe (cf. The Four Gospels, p. 188), this is what Luke wrote, and represents the wording found in the oldest source Q, the reference to the Messianic text is even clearer than in the Marcan version of the Voice.

But we are entitled to draw large inferences as to the inner depths of the mind of Him who heard the Voice from the fact that the words echoed are not such as point to royal dignity or supernatural power, ‘Son of David', ‘Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God', but ‘beloved Son', which suggest a personal relation between a human soul and the Divine. This note of personal intimacy, if one may so call it, between Himself and God can be felt in many of His recorded sayings. The prophets of the Old Testament believed that there was given to them, but only at certain intervals, ‘a word of the Lord', from which they derived an absolutely authentic, but still only a partial, knowledge of God's nature and His will for man. Christ always speaks as if He felt that He knew this fully and knew it all the while. Quite naturally, as it were, He substitutes for the prophet's ‘thus saith the Lord ' the simple ‘I say unto you '. To use technical language, in Him the ‘prophetic consciousness ', raised as it were to the nth power, is sublimated into the Messianic. But if He speaks with authority, it is less the authority of status and of office than of direct intuitive knowledge.

‘I thank thee, O Father, . . . that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding and didst reveal them unto babes.' To say this was, in a sense, to put Himself alongside the babes. Not the pedant nor the sophist, but he alone who, with the man's courage and the man's intellect, retains the child's heart and the child's direct simplicity, has the necessary equipment, so to speak, for understanding God's parental love towards man. Would Christ have told others that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven they must become as little children, unless He had verified the fact by personal experience? Just because He was the first and only grown man of high courage and powerful intellect to try that and no other method of approach to God, He could say, ‘No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him'. Thereby He won (or perhaps He did not have to win it) an insight into the nature of God that told Him that God not only is, but asks to be treated as, ‘our Father'. Those best worship God who think of Him first and foremost, not as Creator, not as Sovereign, not as Judge, but just as Parent to be loved and trusted. And if we may judge from words and actions which are clearly the spontaneous expression of the inner mind of Jesus, we must conclude that alike in sorrow and in joy this attitude was by Him completely realised. Legend had spoken of Abraham as ‘the friend ' of God; Jesus thought, spoke and acted as ‘the son'.

But this conviction of sonship to God, though in one sense unique, is not proclaimed by Him as an exclusive personal privilege; He is the pioneer, the one to whom and through whom the full secret of God's goodness has been first disclosed-but now it is an open secret. The main burden of His message is that this parenthood of God, this overflowing tenderness and individual care, so far from being confined to the one unique Messiah Son, is for all-for the publican, the sinner and the little child. All are God's children, and all who recognise the fact and respond in love and trust may aspire in the fullest sense to become the sons of God. They can become, and are exhorted to become, like God.

Love your enemies . . . that ye may be the sons of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good . . . ye therefore shall be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Before Christ, the typical conception of God had been that of monarch; with the corollary that the good man was His faithful slave. Once to Ezekiel, prostrate before ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord', there had come a voice, ‘Son of man stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee '. Christ said that to all men. Stand upon your feet, realise your sonship to God, and He will speak to you; and, in that inspiration, all things good will then be possible to you.

SERVICE

From slave to son. The word rappnsia--that citizen right of 'free speech' which the old Greek republican loved to contrast with the servility of the subject of an oriental despot---is chosen by St. Paul (Eph. iii. 12) to summarise the difference between the new religion and the old. But in the Greek world, along with the free-man's privilege of speech, went the free-man's responsibility to take counsel for, and fight the battles of, the state. So it is in Christ's teaching. If God's sons are free, they must enter into His purposes and fight His battles. ‘Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.' The citizens of the Kingdom of God are a fighting aristocracy; but their objective is to give and not to get, and, therefore, their methods of warfare differ from the common as widely as their aim. It follows that the Messiah, who is the first to realise man's sonship to God, must be the leader in that fight. Citizenship in the Kingdom of God brings inspiration and consolation, but also conflict, desolation and rebuff. In both directions Christ says ‘Follow me'. To an enthusiast aspiring to discipleship He gives the damping warning, ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head'. His special privilege as Messiah is just the unique service which He renders, the unique burden He takes up. The Kings of the Gentiles may delight in adulation and lord it over servile courts, but He whom God has chosen to fulfil the destiny of Israel, to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.' 1 Cf. Mark g. 35-45.

‘As a ransom' it is written. A price, it seems, had to be paid. For the deliverance of suffering, erring humanity, to further the coming of the Kingdom of God-to realise, that is, an unsurpassable ideal-He must give His life. The Kingdom of God was a name for something conceived of by Him as being alike the climax of the working of Divine Providence and the goal of human effort. It is not surprising that a large literature has come into existence in the attempt to elucidate His meaning.l

1 I have attempted to sum up the controversy in Foundations, p. 111 ff. An outline of that meaning is given in a clause of the Lord's Prayer, ‘Thy Kingdom come,' that is, ‘Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' It is sufficient for my present purpose to point out that the ideal as here expressed has an ‘absolute quality. A state of things in which the will of God is completely realised in concrete fact is, by definition, that that which no higher can be conceived. Human progress may go on to the end of time, yet from the nature of the case it can consist only in ever learning better how to fill out the detail of this grandly simple scheme.

Jesus had pointed out to men the way to reach the Kingdom, but Jerusalem, even more emphatically than Galilee, had rejected this; there was left only the last desperate throw-to die for it. But the death which Jesus faced was not the death of a soldier or a martyr applauded by sympathetic friends-all had left Him disillusioned, and He had anticipated that they would do so.2 2 Mark xiv. 27-31.

It was the death of a discredited pretender. More than that, it meant the failure of Ibis own highest and dearest hopes-the hope that even at the last His beloved Jerusalem 3 ( 3 Cf. Luke xiii. 34; xix. 41-44. ) might not prove blind to the hour of her visitation, that the people, who were His own people and God's own people, in the hour of destiny might not play false.

Popular theology assumes that Christ possessed a supernatural knowledge of the details of the future, and that a Resurrection and Ascension were by Him all through clearly and explicitly foreseen.4

It is probable that some of the explicit detail in the prophecies Mark viii. 31; ix. 31; x. 33 f. (and parallels), is due to a modification of the original sayings in oral tradition, influenced by subsequent events.

Such an assumption belittles the moral grandeur of His act. Doubtless He believed that His cause was God's cause, and that therefore it could not finally be worsted; that God was the God of the living, and that therefore this life was not for Him the end. But to Him, as to other men, this was a matter, not of knowledge but of faith. To Him, as to any other of His time, crucifixion stood for torture, disgrace and death.

But the rejection which preceded it made it mean to Him something which it did not mean to others the failure of His life's mission, the renunciation by His people of their national destiny. That was the cup which in Gethsemane He feared to drink.

Called to an office of a majesty the highest conceivable, Christ lived a life of complete self-devotion to the service of His fellow-men in a cause which He believed, and with good reason, to be God's cause; He braved a death of utter failure, torture and disgrace in the hope (not with the explicit knowledge) at that price to realise on earth an unsurpassable ideal. Such an expression in action of such an ideal has in it the quality of an ‘absolute '; there is in its perfection a certain finality. Such a life is a ne plus ultra; it is not merely something which before or since has been unequalled; it is something which one cannot even imagine as transcended.

A POSITIVE IDEAL

Apologetic theologians are wont to build large constructions upon the ‘'sinlessness' ' of Christ. For two reasons this is unfortunate.

(1) It is proverbially impossible to prove a negative. If it be urged that no sinful action is recorded of Him, it can be replied that the faults of an idealised leader are not the things which his biographers love to dwell upon. If, again, it be urged that anything. of the kind would be inconsistent with the whole character portrayed in the Gospels, that is a stronger argument; yet in human nature unexpected inconsistencies are found. In this particular case it may plausibly be urged that any exhibition of the will to evil would be an inconsistency so startling as to be psychologically incredible; but can a whole theology be built on the assumption of its impossibility?

(2) The word ‘'sinlessness' ' suggests the idea, which has been the bane of popular ethics, that the highest moral achievement is ° to do no harm'; whereas the most conspicuous feature in the teaching of Christ is His insistence that righteousness is positive and consists, not in avoidance of error, but in being inspired by an overwhelming passion for good, and by an unquenchable love of God and man.

A sentence in the Fourth Gospel, ‘which of you convinceth me of sin? ' is commonly quoted to prove that Christ thought of Himself as morally perfect. But this, like so much in the Fourth Gospel, may well represent the reflection of the disciple on the character of Christ rather than anything He Himself actually said. More illuminating to my mind is the passage in Mark where, in reply to the somewhat ‘gushing' greeting ‘Good Master', he replies, ‘Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, God.' From the days of the author of the First Gospel, who in the parallel passage modifies Mark's phrase, theologians have striven to explain away the obvious meaning of the words. But why try to do so? Have we not an instinctive feeling that one who could explicitly think and definitely affirm that he had reached the goal of moral perfection would be, not the ideal man, but the ideal Pharisee?

Indeed I would be bold to ask, ‘If Christ had affirmed that He had attained perfection, would He not by so doing have shown a certain lack of moral insight? ' Luke quite frankly says ‘Jesus grew in wisdom', and in biblical usage the word 'wisdom' implies moral quite as much as intellectual insight. Character is something which is ever being enriched by experience, and the sublime assertion that He was ‘made perfect through suffering'1 (1 Cf. Heb. ii. 10 with v. 8.) has meaning only if we suppose that the character of our Lord never ceased to be so enriched, and only attained its full maturity in the World Invisible after the supreme experience of the Crucifixion.

But to say that a character has not attained perfection, in the sense of not having yet reached its full maturity, does not necessarily imply that it is defective through that actual exercise of evil choice which we call sin. And we may readily believe that this was the case with Christ. But if He avoided actual sin, it was not without real effort. Most men at some point in their career must face a struggle, a choice of Hercules, on the issue of which will depend the tenor and the quality of their whole life. The Gospel tradition, in the Temptation story, emphasises the occurrence of such a moral crisis in the life of Christ.

Man is an animal, and he has godlike dreams; temptation may arise from either fact. Natural selection suffers no race to survive in which the primary instincts, for food and for the reproduction of the species, are too weak to spur into activity. In themselves both these fundamental instincts are good, but both may be indulged under circumstances in which the indulgence is evil. Where in a food shortage all are rationed, it is base for an individual to indulge an innocent and natural hunger; in a far greater variety of circumstances it is base to indulge the other primary (and in itself equally innocent) instinct; so much so that many have come to look upon the mere possession of that instinct as wrong. On the higher side of man's nature, temptation comes from the purely spiritual desire for power and admiration; and this temptation comes in its most subtle form when these allure by the thought of the influence for good which they might give. It is worth while to note that, in the testing crisis which determined the character of His career, Christ was assailed first by hunger, the simplest and strongest of the animal desires, and then by the most insinuating of spiritual temptations the power and position which offer influence for good.

There is no reason to suppose that the Temptation in the wilderness was the only occasion in which it cost Christ effort to choose the better way. The strength that overcomes in great temptations has commonly been won through victory in small ones. Christ would not have become a creative moral force in history if at the age of thirty He had never yet-in things physical as well as spiritual-heard the tempter's voice. Nor even after this ‘Choice of Hercules ' was He-if we must accept the Gospel record-wholly free. ‘The devil departed from him for a season', says Luke; and again ‘Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations '. And why, otherwise, in Gethsemane, face to face with the final conflict, did he crave the prayers of friends?

Christ, we read, was 'in all points tempted like as we are '; and the fight was not ended in a single round. If we conclude that, unlike us, He was enabled on each several occasion to overcome, we draw an inference in accordance with the general impression produced by the records of His life. But an avoidance of moral error, even if it could be demonstrated to be complete, would be a merely negative achievement which would throw little light on the main problem of this chapter. The question whether Christ is the Ideal Man is one the answer to which practically decides the further question whether or no the Divine Creative Principle reveals Itself in the life of Christ in some unique sense. Now, whatever else It is, the Creative Principle must be something positive and active; Its trend and character cannot therefore be displayed by any mere negation. But it is just the positive, active, creative righteousness in the life and teaching of Christ which strikes us first and last. No doubt, could we detect any obvious and conspicuous fault in His character or actions, this impression would be to that extent weakened and impaired. But the defects which have been alleged to exist are so trifling and superficial that, even if they could be substantiated as such (personally I believe they cannot be 1 ) 1 See the admirable discussion by the late Dean Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 1.69 ff. (Duckworth, 1916.) they would relatively to the positive good be like the spots on the sun's disk, practically negligible. Goodness is positive and creative; Divinity also must be something essentially positive and always creative. ‘My father worketh hitherto and I work.' It is not on account of a negative sinlessness which, even if actual, is unprovable, but because of the positive quality in His life and words, and because in history Christ has been uniquely creative, that no discussion of the nature either of goodness or of God can afford to leave Him out.

A MISGIVING

And yet, with all its commanding appeal, may it not be said that the moral ideal set forth in tile life and teaching of Christ is in one sense negative? Is it not at least a little unpractical? Does it not under-estimate the value of self-assertion under proper circumstances? ‘A beautiful character, but just a little soft,' is a comment one sometimes hears. Hectically as he overstates it, has not Nietzsche something of a case?

It should be admitted-rather it ought to be shouted from the housetops-that, as most often interpreted in Christian art or Christian teaching, Christ's ideal is not the highest. The portrait of the Christ which has been impressed on the general mind of Europe is defective in certain positive moral qualities. It is worth while, then, to point out that precisely in regard to those qualities it differs from the portrait of the historic Jesus which we find in the first three Gospels.

(1) ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.' In their original context I (1 Lamentations, i. 12.) these wonderful words are the wail of Jerusalem desolated by the Babylonian conqueror; written beneath a crucifix, as if spoken by Christ Himself, they are misleading. The best men do not make pitiful appeals of this kind for themselves; they incline to be silent about, or to understate, their personal sufferings. And that was the attitude of the historic Jesus, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me '. Christ drank to the dregs the cup of disappointment and despair; Isaiah's words 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief' appropriately describe Him but He did not pathetically call attention to the fact. He wore, but did not advertise, a crown of thorns.

(2) The argument from prophecy played a large part in early Christian apologetic. Diligently were the Scriptures searched for passages which by any possibility might be read as a forecast of some incident in the Messiah's life. Christ had kept silence before Caiaphas and Pilate; in Isaiah were found the words, ‘He humbled himself and opened not his mouth; as a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as. .a sheep that before her shearers is dumb.' The too literal application of this text has permanently discoloured the accepted portrait of the Christ. What was the real reason why Christ was silent before the High Priest? To plead one's cause before a tribunal is to acknowledge it as one which at any rate desires to do justice; it is morally to bind oneself to respect the verdict. Christ knew that the tribunal before which He stood was not a court of justice, but a conspiracy. Had there been among His judges any desire at all to do justice, it might have been worth while to state a case; to beg for mercy merely He could not stoop. Before Pilate He kept silence for another reason. Pilate had a real, if Iukewarm, wish to see justice done; but for the Messiah, condemned by His own people, to make any effort to escape with bare life, through the intervention of the magistrate of an alien and oppressive power, was morally impossible. Socrates, unjustly sentenced by what was, similarly, the supreme court of his people, felt that he could not worthily allow his friends to bribe the jailor to let him escape: and could Jesus, publicly condemned by God's High Priest, speak a single word which might induce the pagan Roman to grant Him life? The silence of Christ before His judges was not that of the sheep before the shearers; it was the silence, not of meek submission, but of self-respect.

(3) The submissiveness, which is an outstanding feature in the conventional picture of the Christ, is sheer parody of the historic Jesus. True, He taught and lived in practice a life of complete surrender to the will of God. But by Him the will of God was thought of, not as an arbitrary decree, but as the expression of the absolutely good. Surrender to the will of God meant to Him unwavering devotion to the Absolute Ideal, coupled with the recognition that both the path towards it and the price of its attainment is known to God but often veiled from man. Christ did not teach surrender to the will of man: least of all a docile submission to those men who claimed to be the guardians of a special revelation of the will of God for man. In His attitude to the religious authorities of the day Christ was a revolutionary. The notion that it is the duty of a religious man to accept uncriticised anything. that the past has held venerable and sacred, finds no support in Him. Christ was conspicuously a critic of tradition. He was constantly condemning accepted conceptions of God, accepted canons of morality, and above all that ecclesiastical tradition by which the word of God, then as so often since, was made of none effect.

Christ assuredly was not the mere iconoclast who loves destruction for its own sake; if He was a revolutionary He was a ‘Constructive Revolutionary'.1 (1 In my essay under that title in The Spirit (Macmillan 1919) I have tried to explain on historical grounds the paradoxical fact that in Europe generally the Church, which professes to incarnate the spirit of Christ, has come to be associated with resistance to all change.) He realised fully the value of the religious heritage of a mighty past. He came not to destroy but to fulfil. He brought out of His treasury things old as well as new. Yet in the main His eye was less on the past than on the present and the future; and He saw that for the sake of righteousness law must be sometimes broken, and for the sake of Religion the Temple might have to be destroyed. He had a passionate affection for the Church of His fathers, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I . . .'; but He saw that when the fig tree had ceased to bear fruit it ought not, and would not much longer be permitted, to cumber the ground. His 'churchmanship' ' consisted in an effort at all costs to reform and vitalise existing thought and usage, not in the endeavour to perpetuate and defend the status quo. Where no principle was involved He counselled the keeping of the Law. ‘Go show thyself to the priest and offer for thy cleansing . . . .' ‘Leave there thy gift before the altar.' But if Law or commentary stood in the way of humanity or freedom, He brushed them aside with the revolutionary dictum-‘the Sabbath was made for man'. In the Jewish theory Church and State were one; and in this State, organised as a Church, He was no anarchist. He did recognise, and ordinarily He obeyed, the legitimate authority of scribe and priest. But it is not for this obedience that He is known to history, but because He also recognised that occasion may arise when the duty of rebellion has the higher claim. In the face of glaring abuses, He was not content merely to criticise in words. In driving out of the Temple the vendors of sacrificial animals, He committed an outrage on a trade sanctioned by public opinion and by the authorities of both Church and State-that was why they crucified Him. He stirred up a hornets' nest, and the hornets stung.

(4) Christ was crucified. He had divined that fate; and to all who would follow Him He promised--‘threatened' would be the better word-a cross. He knew that humanity has always persecuted its prophets and stoned those who have been sent unto it. But He had none of the ascetic's passion for suffering for its own sake. John the Baptist was an ascetic; and Christ respected John. But He did not imitate John's way; He claimed to better it. He came eating and drinking-He enjoyed life to an extent that scandalised His critics. He was inclined to laugh at the grave and solemn Pharisees; and they did not like it.' (a On the humour of Christ, cf. T. R. Clover, The Jesus of History, p. 49 f.)

Not only the progress, the very existence, of our race has daily to be bought with blood and tears; and suffering necessary for the work's sake, if bravely faced and cheerfully endured, ennobles and uplifts. But history shows that austerities, studiously devised as a means of spiritual self-culture, tend to produce a capacity for self-sacrifice only at the price of a fanatic limitation of the moral vision. The power of the ascetic ideal to make noble minds indifferent or even hostile to the highest moral and intellectual movements of their day has been the tragedy of religion in East and West alike. But it falsely claims the prestige of Christ's example. Not for its own sake did He take up the cross, but only because there was no other way to the triumph of His cause. Even to the last He prayed ‘if it be possible, let this cup pass '-though with absolute readiness to drink it if the cause required.

(5) But, perhaps, at the back of our mind there still remains the haunting query, Is not Christ, all said and done, a dreamer of dreams, the very type of the unpractical idealist? We want our morality for every day use. A moral ideal to be of real service must be compatible with common sense; it must be one which, if put in practice, will work.

The Greek used the same word (To kalov) for the beautiful and for the good; and perhaps the deepest of all instincts in the human heart is the conviction that goodness, like beauty, has an intrinsic value. A heroic deed, a noble character, exacts our admiration. A fine action, like a fine picture, needs not to justify itself before the tribunal of common sense. But there is a lower and there is a higher common sense; and this latter is not a matter unworthy of the moralist's consideration. It is necessary, then, to consider the morality of Christ from the standpoint of the higher common sense, that is, of practical effectiveness in the interests of human progress.

The essence of common sense is to know exactly, what you want to achieve, to make sure that your object is to you worth the price which must be paid for it, to estimate accurately the assets you possess and how best to utilise them. It is not common sense at all to strive after things which other people value, but which you yourself do not, or to strive after things which you do desire, but without counting the probable cost, and being willing, if necessary, to pay it.

Christ knew what He wanted to achieve, He knew the price, and He was prepared to pay it. The resources available for the accomplishment of His aims, in the way of wealth, learning, position, or the support of those who had these things, were simply nil. He had His own clear insight, sincerity of purpose and unflinching courage; He had an absolute trust in God, and He had the devotion of a group of uneducated and not conspicuously intelligent working men. Those were all His assets. Yet as the result of what He said and did during

a space of time-possibly four, more probably a little more than two, years in length 1--(1 I have discussed this point in The Four Gospels, p. 421.)

He has left a deeper mark on the history of the world than any other one individual that ever lived. If to produce a maximum of results with a minimum of resources and opportunities is a test of practical sagacity, Christ affords a supreme example of that gift, that is, of that kind of common sense which realises that for the sake of great ends great sacrifices must be made and great risks taken.

There were times when the odds against Him seemed too great. There were moments when the stupidities and iniquities of His contemporaries seemed too gross for remedy and He almost despaired of men'Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth? ' (Lk. xviii. 8). There was a moment (I like to think) when He despaired of God, when to Him-as to so many since-it seemed that the Power which determines all things is in the last resort indifferent to the triumph of right or wrong-'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me '? From one who trusted God as Christ had done, who had staked all for a cause so obviously God's cause, this cry attests the lowest depths of failure and despair. It is just because the Christ did so despair, did so, to use a slang phrase, ‘touch absolute bottom', that we feel His fellowship with us ordinary men.

But had He failed? Grant, if you will, His belief in God, in immortality, in His own unique mission, to be an empty dream; grant, if you must, that everything He lived and died for was delusion. Yet to have succeeded during twenty centuries in imposing that delusion upon half the world is at least a practical success-and is, perhaps, presumptive evidence that it was not delusion after all.

Jesus, whose lot with us was cast,
Who saw it out, from first to last
Patient and fearless, tender, true,
Carpenter, vagabond, felon, Jew
Whose humorous eye took in each phase
Of full rich life this world displays,
Yet evermore kept fast in view
The far-off goal it leads us to
Who, as your hour neared, did not fail--
The world's fate trembling in the scale-
With your half-hearted band to dine,
And chat across the bread and wine
Then went out firm to face the end,
Alone, without a single friend
Who felt, as your last words confessed,
Wrung from a proud unflinching breast
By hours of dull ignoble pain,
Your whole life's fight was fought in vain
Would I could win and keep and feel
That heart of love, that spirit of steel.l

1- Lines published anonymously in, and reprinted by permission from, the Speetator. I have since been told that they have been traced to a London doctor, Wilfred Brinton, who gave his life to slum work.

THE IDEAL OF MAN

The intellectual and aesthetic tradition of Europe looks back to Athens, not to Galilee; and no amount of special pleading will make it plausible to maintain that Science, Philosophy or Art owe as much to Jesus as to Hippocrates, Plato or Praxiteles. Nor on the other hand can it be maintained, as some Christians have done, that because the stimulus to such activities is not derived from Jesus, they are of little worth.

Again, reflection soon compels us to face the question whether, in view of the necessary limitations of individual personality, the conception of an Ideal Man has really any meaning. The inspiration to progress has usually come from individuals who, without being narrow specialists, have yet been eminent in some particular department. Like Plato and like Praxiteles, Christ was a supreme discoverer and creator-but only in one field. But can a specialist in some one department be regarded as the ideal for all humanity? Or must any one who wants to realise the highest possibilities of human nature be one who, in a famous phrase, ‘left no subject untouched, and touched nothing which he did not adorn '? Must the Ideal Man be a kind of ‘Admirable Crichton'?

The point here raised is one which has far-reaching consequences for any theory of conduct. Quite obviously any practicable ideal for man must involve a certain element of specialisation. The things that are do-able are infinite, and no one can do them all; indeed no one can do more than a very few of them really well. The quality of a man's life or character must be judged, not by the number of different things he does, but by the nature of the particular things he elects to do, and by the way in which he does these. It follows that the ideal must be, not to do every conceivable thing, but for each one to do the things which he personally can and ought to doin the best way possible. But-and this I would urge is essential-the best way possible is a way which is intellectually and aesthetically, as well as morally, adequate to the circumstances of the case.

Christ was not an Admirable Crichton; He was a specialist in Ethics and Religion. It is worth while, then, to inquire how far everything which He said or did appears, if we scrutinise it carefully, to be intellectually and aesthetically, as well as morally, the ideally suitable reaction to the actual circumstances.

(1) Intelligence is often confused with extent and range of knowledge; or it is supposed to be identical with interest in science, philosophy, letters, or other so-called intellectual pursuits. That is a misconception. Intelligence shows itself in apprehending the exact nature of the particular problems with which the individual is himself called upon to deal; in seeing through the fog of contemporary sophism and misunderstanding; in detecting underlying principles which to most men are lost in a mass of detail or are obscured by accepted catchwords; in noticing the connexion of things usually unrelated or the distinction between things usually confused; in apprehending the importance of what others overlook or the relative unimportance of what they regard as central. It may best perhaps be described as a kind of ‘flair', in virtue of which the discoverer, the artist, the true reformer-not to mention the man who really possesses that not too common quality known as ‘common sense '-seize at once on what is relevant, and discard or subordinate what is not.

II. Intellectual quality of a high order is conspicuous in the incidental sayings of Christ, so notable for pith and point. What observation, what penetration, what concentration, do His parables reveal-never a trace in them of the prolix, the 'sloppy' or the confused. How apt the irony which counters the Pharisees' complaint of the company He kept, ‘Healthy people (sc. like you) do not need a doctor'. How skilfully (as in the answer ‘Render unto Caesar') He will enunciate a profound principle, while at the same time eluding an opponent's trap. The circumstances of His life presented neither the opportunity nor the need for Him to interest Himself in metaphysical speculation or scientific research; they did present both opportunity and need for a knowledge of the Old Testament and of current religious thought. Extensive book-learning was not a thing He was called upon to acquire; but the books He had read were the best available, and He got from them the best they had to give. In regard to these He displays that insight which selects the really valuable and discards the rubbish, which in a confused process of development detects the fundamental ideas and the right and real direction, which in the name of the spirit dares to sit in judgement on the letter. Consider, too, the sublime unity of conception-of God, man and duty-that underlies His philosophy of life. The more one ponders it, the more one realises it as the constructive synthesis, the creative simplification, of a master mind. If the test of intelligence is capacity ‘to see the point', among those born of woman Christ is not surpassed.

(2) Of the aesthetic quality of the mind of Christ it might appear that we lack material to frame a judgement. Not so. Of course we shall not ask, What masterpieces of painting or sculpture did He produce? The particular work which He felt called upon to do neither required nor allowed of the concentration of effort on such activities. Nor could He have done so without renouncing both His nationality and His mission; for the Jew was forbidden by his religion to make any graven image or the likeness of anything in heaven or in earth. But the aesthetic capacity of the Hebrew race, disallowed the use of brush or chisel, had been concentrated entirely on the art of expression in words. Viewed simply as literature-judged, that is, by a purely aesthetic standard the Old Testament contains poetry, impassioned rhetoric, descriptive narrative, which may be rivalled elsewhere but which has nowhere been surpassed. Our question, then, as to the aesthetic quality in Christ is answered when we note that in the one art in which His nation had excelled, Christ showed Himself a master. Christ as artist must be judged by His achievement in an art which He practised, not by the absence of achievement in arts which He did not even attempt. True, the test is one which cannot be applied to Him without injustice. His parables and sayings were not written down at the time. They have come down to us doubly diluted, first by the fallible memories of His followers, and again by translation into a foreign tongue; the original context of most of them is lost, translation has obscured their subtler nuance and poetic rhythm. Yet for all that, judged simply from the aesthetic standpoint, the words of Jesus are in the forefront of the world's literature.

Esthetic capacity is at bottom an apprehension of value-which expresses itself, now in creation, now in appreciation. The two can never be completely separated, but its creative side appears most clearly in the artist, the appreciative in the critic using the word critic to mean, not one who carps, but one who is supremely sensitive to finer shades of value. In parables like the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son we can see the creative artist; it is more difficult to test what I have called the ‘critic'. The sayings of Christ have been, as it were, put through a sieve: those only have been handed down which seemed interesting, or useful for purposes of exhortation, to the rather commonplace and prosaic minds of those who first listened to Him. One saying only, ‘not one sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father', shows His love for animals; one only shows His love of flowers. And neither of these, be it noted, is reported for its intrinsic interest, but only because it serves to illustrate a practical injunction; yet neither can be read in its context without our seeing that it is not a chance reflexion, but implies a deeply pondered conviction. We are justified, then, in pressing the full meaning of one famous saying.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Here is an aesthetic judgement, simple, penetrating, sublime; and it is expressed in an aesthetically perfect phrase. The idea has by now become a commonplace, the standard of taste implied is one which most moderns would accept as obvious; but at the time it was new and even revolutionary. It is the one aesthetic judgement of His which has been preserved; but it implies the possession of perfect taste.

(3) The way is now clear to consider the specific contribution of Christ to moral theory. In a sense this has been done already; just as aesthetic theory has little meaning unless it be illustrated in a concrete work of art, so a moral ideal will be effective in proportion as it has found concrete expression in an ideal life. The greatest contribution of Christ to moral theory was the life He led, and about this I have said enough. Nevertheless a moral ideal requires to be rightly defined in word as well as to be expressed in act. That is a point often overlooked. It is of small value to humanity that a prophet should die for his ideal, if the ideal itself be confused or false. If we are to affirm that Christ stands out above all other heroes and martyrs of our race, it must be for some unique sublimity in the ideal He taught, quite as much as for the completeness of the sacrifice which He made for its attainment.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

By the selection from the whole range of Jewish literature of these two sentences, as embodying between them the essence of Religion and Ethics, Christ effected one of those master simplifications which not infrequently inaugurate new eras in human progress. Considered as a summary expression of the moral and religious ideal, it has a quality to which the term ‘finality ' may properly be applied, in that it states a foundation principle which, so far as we can conceive, cannot in the nature of things ever be transcended. Once grant the existence of a Personal God-the source of all goodness, beauty, truth-love is the only adequate expression of the ideal attitude of man towards Him. Again, the maxim ‘love thy neighbour as thyself' has a quality which we may style 'absolute'. As definition it cannot be improved -upon; and the ideal which is defined is one towards which the higher minds in all countries and in all ages have been slowly and painfully feeling their way. And if it is a true ideal at all, it is completely true; for the simple reason that, if the right track lies in that direction, you have here reached its end. Nietzsche, we know, maintains that a direction exactly the opposite is right, and that therefore this is an utterly false and corrupting ideal; but in so saying he traverses, not the teaching of Christ alone, but the moral sense of all humanity, and, as I have already pointed out, the lessons of biology, psychology and history as well. If the conscience of mankind has in all times and all places been wholly perverted, if Socrates, Confucius and the Buddha are to be counted the great deceivers of mankind, then, I grant, the maxim ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' is in perversity and deceit the most dangerous of all. If not, Christ has here stated-and that in a way that could not conceivably be improved upon-the principle and the criterion of that final ethic towards which all the rest were reaching out. And it is of all ethical principles both the simplest to apply and the most obviously fruitful in its results; for, as was shown in the last chapter, a society approaches to, or recedes from, an ideal state in exact proportion as the ethics of its individual members are inspired by this principle or the reverse.

The formula, Love God and love thy neighbour, provides us also with an unsurpassable expression of the right relation between Ethics and Religion; the love of God is the precondition and the inspiration of the love of man, the love of man is the practical expression of the love of God. It is also an ideal which is impatient of any static conception of Ethics or Religion. So far from conflicting with the idea of evolution, it necessarily demands for its realisation an unending development. Only as man advances in personal morality can he really learn to love God; only as there is social progress can he effectively put in practice the love of man. As society develops and civilisations change, opinions will and ought to change as to the best way to make real and effective, in the individual heart and in the body corporate, the love of God. Methods of religious discipline, organisation, ceremonial and the like, which are well suited to one age, one nation, one temperament, may be found ill-suited to another. There will be constant change in the ways of education, the codes, the institutions, which attempt to give practical realisation to the principle of the love of man. Development in these ways may be never-ending. But the ideal as apprehended and as defined by Jesus does not admit of improvement or advance. It is either false or it is final.

THE MIRROR - OF THE INFINITE

‘Christ is the greatest character in history, just as Hamlet is the greatest character in art', wrote Clutton-Brock. A great work of art, while intensely individual, is always felt to be the expression of something universal. Thus Hamlet is not a type, but an individual; and yet up to a point every man is Hamlet. Just so Christ is individually Himself and no one else; yet, in a sense, He is humanity. There is hardly a saying or an action recorded in the first three Gospels which is not in some subtle way 'characteristic'; of which, if we found it in some other book, we should not at once say, ‘That might have come from the Gospels.' Yet about the deeds and words of Christ there is always a haunting quality of seeming to be the expression of something universal. Can we account for this impression?

The life and character of Christ are an embodiment (whether perfect or approximate hardly affects my argument) in concrete experience of an ideal principle-the principle of Creative Love. It follows that the thinker who wishes to frame a conception of the Universe must regard the occurrence in history of such a life as a phenomenon of unique importance. The life of Christ is a fact; no theory, therefore, of the Universe can be intellectually watertight which is inadequate to explain this fact. And when a principle has been realised in concrete experience, we must ask how far it is representative of an element in Ultimate Reality. The fact of Christ, the actual emergence upon the stage of history of this transcendent personality, is an empirical phenomenon which challenges explanation. For every effect we assume a cause adequate to produce it. If the personality of Christ is the effect, is it not reasonable to infer, in that Infinite Creative Life which we must assume as cause, a character in which Love is an essential element?

Few philosophers have fully realised the tremendous import of a personality whose mere occurrence in history compels us to face the possibility that Love may be even one attribute among many in the Power behind the Universe.

(1) We are never in doubt about Its irresistible might, Its all-pervasiveness, Its infinity. That is obvious. No Christ was required to show us that man in the presence of everlasting Nature is but a speck of animated dust, ‘an infant crying in the night'. What we want to know is the purpose (if there is one), the goal (if such there be), of this stupendous Process, the scheme of values (if any) towards the realisation of which It moves, Its attitude (whether kindly or indifferent) towards you and me.

(2) Nor again is Its beauty the thing about which we ask for further light. ‘The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.' The aesthetic quality of the Ultimate Creative Power is never far to seek. Nature, where it is unspoiled by man, blazons this abroad-in the starry heavens, the mountains, the sunsets, the lilies of the held. The occurrence of a unique personality in history is not needed to tell us that the Totality of things is beautiful.

(3) Nor is it the bare rationality of the Power behind things for which we ask the evidence. Mankind has always found it hard to believe that this ordered Universe, so immensely varied yet so completely linked in one intricately coordinated system, could have come into existence without the direction of conscious Mind.

Those who, like Epicurus of old or the Scientific Materialists of our time, maintain the contrary, maintain what to the plain man seems a paradox-to be accepted, of course, if irrefutably proved, but in itself antecedently improbable.

Neither the physical nor the metaphysical, neither the rational nor the aesthetic quality of the Infinite is what we are most concerned to know. But what, for lack of a richer word, I can only call its 'moral' quality is a piece of knowledge which affects our every act and every hope, which gives character to our every aspiration or achievement. More than that-the moral quality and purpose in the Infinite are not only that element in It which it is most important for us to know; they are also (if they exist at all) intrinsically the most important thing about It, they must constitute what Greek thinkers called its ovsia, or Its 'essence', i.e. that which makes It to be what It is. This follows from our previous conclusion (cf. p. 150) that power is a shadow unless it be linked to conscious purpose. For this, if true at all, must hold of the Universe as well as man.

This last point, self-evident as it is, is so often ignored that I will, at the risk of tedium, elaborate it. What is it that differentiates the force which shows itself in an electric current from that which shows itself in a growing tree? Is it its extent, or its quality? Is it the amount of ‘work ' that it can do, or the fact that it is alive? Ask again, what is the real difference between the lifeforce in a tree and in a man? The man knows what he wants; in him life is conscious, that is, capable of direction by a sense of quality. So too the essential difference between the life of one man and another, between the hero and the coward, between the cruel and the kind, is one of quality, it lies in the nature of his aims and his ideals. But once it is realised that the distinctive character of any power which can initiate or direct action is constituted by its intention or purpose, that is, its own inner quality, it logically follows that awareness of the highest values and complete devotion to them (if these exist at all in God) must be His ‘essence '. Once think of the Power behind things as fully conscious, and it follows that the ovsia of God must be conceived in terms, not of blank existence, but of quality.

I may also recall the argument (p. 140) that, whereas from the standpoint of ‘pure reason' God must always remain a mystery, yet His nature, so far as its quality is concerned, can be known if, and in so far as, in human personality life is manifested of such a character as to be qualitatively homogeneous with the Infinite Life. The ' absolute ' character in the ethical quality of the life of Christ is such as to suggest that in this case the required condition is approximately, if not completely, fulfilled.

May we, then, infer that the Infinite Mind is one which really loves the individual, that not one sparrow falls on the ground without Its caring? That is an inference which follows in strict logic from the argument, set out in the last two chapters, for regarding human personality at its highest as a representative expression of the Life of the Infinite. But it is an inference which would lose half its cogency were it not that in Christ we see a personality whom we cannot but regard as adequate to be a Mirror of that Infinite; and that, for the very simple reason that the life of Christ forces us to face this issue: unless God is at least as good as Christ, then man is nobler than his Creator.

But, some one may object, to argue thus from man to God is pushing the principle of anthropomorphic interpretation too far. I concede the objection; we have reached the bounds beyond which human reason may not feel confident of its conclusions. But reason, at the point where it begins to fail us, is pointing clearly in one direction; it is possible, but it is not likely, that just beyond our sight the long straight road we gaze down turns backward on itself. Not proof, but all the weight of probability, points to the conclusion that in that principle of Creative Love, which in the life and character of the Christ found for once undimmed expression, we glimpse the quality inherent in Reality. ‘The quality', I say, not ‘a quality'. For love, where it exists at all, exists as a directing activity in the Being who loves, and, unless (as commonly in human lives) there is an acute internal conflict in the soul, it is the directing power. There can be no inner conflict in the soul of God. In that Life love, if there at all, must be the ruling principle, the most essential element of all-in fact, we must conclude, to use an ancient phrase, that God is Love.

DOGMA AS SYMBOL

I have publicly associated myself with the effort to vindicate, within the Church of England, that freedom of thought and experiment which is for ever threatened in the name of dogma and tradition. But it is possible to treat dogmas, not as intellectual fetters, but as representations in symbolic form of that which cannot be adequately expressed in philosophic or scientific terms; and such a treatment has the historical justification that, at any rate during the first five centuries, dogmatic decisions were avowedly a refusal to accept definitions of belief in terms of the philosophy of that age. God in His totality must be That which transcends human comprehension or description. Within His unique Being there must for ever be something which is the counterpart of that living interaction of subject and object, that communing of soul and soul in love, which to us is possible only in a society of persons and a universe of things. Only in symbol can we name this suprapersonal Personality. And no symbol is fitting which does not suggest a mystery inscrutable-beyond logic, beyond conception, beyond imagination. Such a symbol, saturated through age-long use with worshipping associations, is the Three in One and One in Three, a symbol arithmetically absurd, representatively apt.

Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide Thee,........... God in three persons, Blessed Trinity!

But, if the doctrine of the Trinity seems to make vivid to us the dark mystery of the transcendent ‘otherness ' of God, that of the Incarnation gives us back the vision within that darkness of a luminous centre. Christ is ‘the image of the invisible God'. In Him ‘the Word is made flesh'-the meaning of the Infinite is spoken out. In that life and death is reflected, as in a mirror, the face of God.

Recalling what was said in an earlier chapter (p. 45) about Truth and Representation, it is clear that, if God is a spirit whose essential quality is that which we call love, then Christ can, or rather must, be a representative symbol of the Divine. And He is that, not because we choose to make Him such, but by reason of being what He is, and having lived the life He did. He is that, but He is more than that. By ‘symbol ' we commonly mean something intrinsically diverse from the thing it represents-as a flag is diverse from the country for which it stands, or as a written word is from the objects it describes. But if life instinct with love is the dynamic essence of Reality, then to describe the relation of Christ to God we require some stronger word than ‘symbol ', or even than St. Paul's word eikwv ‘portrait ', for a portrait in marble or on canvas is essentially heterogeneous to living, breathing flesh and blood. Here both the portrait and its original are ex eadem materia, the Representation and the Reality are of the same stuff. It is in no impoverished sense that we recite the ancient phrase, Christ is ' of one substance with the Father'; and to describe Him we shall find no words more true than ‘Son of God.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation;
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

SYNOPSIS

LOVE VERSUS LAW

The fact of evil the great obstacle to reconciling the Kingdom of Law revealed by Science with Christ's vision of God as Love.

Yet evil is less fundamental than good; it is parasitic. Atheism has a solution of the problem of evil, but not of the problem of good.

THE SCHOOL OF MANHOOD

Instead of asking how the facts of life can be reconciled with the justice of God, let us ask whether any other purpose can be detected in them.

Life resembles a game of football. A dangerous game, which can be nobly or ignobly played, is a school of character.

This no solution of the problem of evil; but it suggests the search for a dynamic solution-one, that is, in terms of the possibility of overcoming.

JUSTICE AND THE REIGN OF LAW

The so-called inexorability of the Laws of Nature a fallacy of the imagination; the Uniformity of Nature is a sine qua non of any consistent action. The discovery of new laws does not further limit man's freedom it increases his power.

The reign of law must also hold in the moral sphere. How then is the retrieval of moral failure, or the ‘forgiveness of sin', possible?

The ‘orthodox' doctrine of the Atonement an attempt to solve this problem. But it states the problem in terms of human jurisprudence.

Justice, in its legal associations; cannot safely be ascribed to God; for (1) Historically justice was a limitation of the individual's right to vengeance. (2) In practice it is invoked to prevent evil rather than to create good.

The Will of God must be conceived of as creative purpose-the Will to Good. Hence there can be no conflict in the mind of God-as there may be with a human magistrate-between Justice and Mercy.

In Nature, life has a curative as well as a creative aspect; in the moral sphere we should expect the Divine Life to manifest this double quality but under the limiting condition of the law of the inevitability of moral consequence. In this world the operation of thus law results, not in external penalties, but in the internal degeneration of the offender.

Can God cancel this result? He can do so if He Himself (a) shoulders the burden of suffering caused by sin, (b) redeems the sinner-not by unmaking the act, but by remaking the man, (c) in so doing, vindicates the principle of righteousness.

The question, How can God do this ‘.> concerns the qualitative aspect of reality. But, we have seen, truth of quality can only be conveyed by a ‘representation' different in kind from those employed by Science and Philosophy. The story of which the Cross of Christ is the centre is such a representation. The mental attitude required if the individual is to respond rightly; the truth of the ‘representation' can thus be tested by reference to the facts of life.

FAILURE AND RETRIEVAL

The degree to which the moral consciousness is awake varies strangely from man to man. But while the guilt of an act depends on the extent to which the doer is aware that it is wrong, its evil effect on his character is inversely proportionate to the extent to which he regrets it.

Repentance is evidence of moral advance already achieved. But continued advance depends largely on the individual recognising that, in spite of past failure, God loves him and still has a work for him to do.

It is un-Christian continually to brood upon one's sins and artificially work oneself up into agonies of contrition. Admit frankly that you are a worm; but realise also that to the worm that knows it is a worm God gives wings. Psychological confirmation of this.

The forgiveness of sin does not mean that the external consequences of past acts are cancelled. Nor, in one sense, are the maternal.

THE MENTAL ASPECT OF PAIN

Pain is part of man's environment; our problem is, How best can he adapt himself to it? A solution the more possible owing to the effect of mental conditions on the actual experience of pain. Even the pain of the past can, in its present effects, be modified by the right mental attitude.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The New Testament does not regard this as ‘the best of all possible worlds', but as one that has gone awry; but God, by entering into its suffering, is effecting its regeneration.

Not all suffering has regenerative power, only that kind of which Christ's is the type. The ‘natural' result of suffering is degradation; but these ‘natural' consequences are reversed in the case of suffering endured for the sake of an ideal.

CALAMITY

The suffering due to accident or the sin of others harder to bear than that of active martyrdom. Criticism of the traditional view that calamity is the will of God. Belief in Divine Providence does not necessarily involve this view.

Calamity to be met in a spirit, not so much of negative ‘submission', as of active ‘acceptance.'. Pain conquered is power.

Possibility of redeeming the past in cases where suffering, through failure to meet it in the right spirit, has been allowed to discourage and embitter.

THE PAIN OF OTHERS

Our despair in the face of the pain of others. Some possibilities of hope and help.

A LESSON FROM PSYCHOLOGY

The natural instinct is to hide, even from oneself, experiences which have deeply wounded; but, so hidden, they may, as it were, fester in the subconscious mind. But if brought up into clear consciousness and discussed, it is possible to ‘'reassociate' ' them, that is, attach to them an altogether different emotional tone-with beneficial consequences to mental and moral health.

Importance of choosing the right confidant, and (if possible) one with some psychological knowledge. The functions of a spiritual adviser. ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord.'

Psychologically considered, the distinctive feature of Christianity is its specific ‘reassociation ' of the idea of suffering.

THE WAY AND THE POWER

Religion as Power. Suggestions, practical and psychological, for realising this. Make the love of God in Christ the focal thought in prayer and meditation.

Chapter 8

THE DEFEAT OF EVIL

Love versus LAW

‘ALL'S love and all's law,' wrote Browning. But was it the study of realities, or a temperamental optimism, that prompted this conclusion? The fact of evil stands like a grim fortress blocking the way which our investigations seem to be opening up between that Kingdom of Law which the Universe is revealed to be by Science, and that Vision of God as Creative Love which Jesus caused humanity to see.

One thing is certain. Life on this earth is not ordered by a Love that succeeds in bringing happiness; nor in accordance with a Law that expresses itself in justice. ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing'; and it is not true that prosperity or adversity are meted out to men in accordance with desert. That theory of the equivalence of suffering and merit, against which Job had long before cried out, received its final refutation on the cross of Jesus. The moral purpose of the Infinite, if such there be, is either something less or something more than justice.

Yet that the Infinite has a purpose, that the quality of Reality in the last resort is good, my mind against all perplexity and bafflement continues to assert. All around us are death and disease, cruelty and injustice,

ugliness and stupidity. But death could not exist unless there were life, nor disease if there were no such thing as health. Evil is either conscious opposition to the good, or the result of wrong conceptions of the good or of the way to attain to it. Evil would not be what it is save in contrast to, or distinction from, the good. The world is full of evil, but it is also full of good, and the nature of things is such that the good is the more fundamental of the two. Good might exist without evil, evil could not exist without good; for evil is either a parody of, or an obstacle to, good. Evil is parasitic. On that fact I take my stand. On this, in the last resort, I base my belief in God.

We speak of ‘the problem of evil', but never of ‘the problem of good'. We take the good for granted, and only ask the reason for the evil. Yet surely, what we ought to ask for is an explanation of the world as a whole. And if we really want to know what is the nature and the character of the Power which produced and sustains the Universe, ‘the problem of good' is by far the greater problem of the two. If good is more positive and more fundamental than evil, the existence of the good is the thing which most needs to be accounted for. Here, as it seems to me, is the point where any form of atheism breaks down. The atheist has an explanation of the evil in the world, but he has no sufficient explanation of the good.

THE SCHOOL OF MANHOOD

Let us then cease for a while to ask why it is that the facts of life so constantly refute the theory that God is just; let us look those facts in the face anew, ancl ask rather whether we can detect some other purpose and meaning in it all.

If we do this, we see at once that, though life is not at all the picnic-party we perhaps should like, there is much in it which suggests a game of Rugby football. There is need for both team work and individual effort; there is conflict, pain and risk; there is the possibility of playing foul as well as fair; and there is the consciousness that, much as success is worth, what matters most is to have ‘played the game'.

‘The chase I follow far; 'Tis mimicry of noble war.' 1
(1 The Highland Chieftain, in Scott's Lady of the Lake.)

A game of football is a mimicry of life as unlike the real thing as hunting is to war. Life is like life, and it is like nothing less; but if an analogy is wanted, that of a dangerous game, which can be nobly or ignobly played, is perhaps the least inadequate. For life is neither a banquet nor a dreary pilgrimage; it is neither a trading concern where all dividends that are fairly earned are punctually paid, nor a lotus-eater's paradise; it is a school of manhood.

Such a conception of the meaning and purpose of life would be congruous with our previous conclusion that the life and character of Christ mirror the quality of the Unseen Power. ‘He captains Lis, but does not cosset us,' as Mr. Wells says. Life is an arena in which the purposes of a God with such an aim might be attained.

Look at the Universe from this point of view, and at once some not all-aspects of the problem of evil take on a different shape. A world, in which there was no conflict and no risk, would be a world in which the heroic quality in man could never be called forth. A world, from which suffering or failure were completely absent, would be one in which compassion and mutual aid were absent also. A world in which the innocent never suffered from the follies or the crimes of others, where every one got exactly what he himself deserved, would be a world in which it mattered to no one but a man's own self what he himself or any other did; it would be a world where responsibility, esprit de corps, brotherhood were unknown.

The problem of evil is not hereby solved. A world in which pain was impossible would be a world morally impoverished. But to admit this is far from admitting either that the amount of suffering in this world is no more than the minimum required, or that its actual distribution among individuals is the best. The recognition that a world, in which we suffer from one another's faults and follies and are succoured by one another's virtues, is better than one in which each individual was wholly self-sufficient, is not equivalent to an assertion that ‘the inhumanity of man to man ' is worth all the moral degradation and the pain it costs.

But what these considerations do suggest is this. We can approach the discussion of the fact of evil in its relation to the meaning and purpose of Creative Evolution if, and only if, we see the problem as one to be solved in dynamic, not in static, terms. We shall seek a solution in terms of process and possibility, not of a good already complete. We shall not attempt to explain away the existence of either pain or moral evil; and shall not hope to justify them, except and in so far as they are capable of being overcome.

JUSTICE AND THE REIGN OF LAW

We cry out against the ‘inexorability ' of the Laws of Nature and man's hard fate in that regard. In this there is a latent fallacy. The Uniformity of Nature is not the inexorability of a tyrant callous to his victim's groans; it is more like the immovability of the touchline, without which there could be no game, though it would at times be vastly convenient to an individual player if by a miracle the line would approach or retire a yard or two. The Uniformity of Nature is not an iron cage against which we dash ourselves in longing to escape; it is a necessary condition of such freedom as we have. Theoretically, the problem how I am to reconcile the reign of law with freedom may be insoluble. Practically, unless I knew that I could reckon on things happening in accordance with some fixed and ascertainable principle, I might wish, but I could never act or plan. If fire sometimes heated, sometimes froze, the kettle, who could invite a friend to tea? If the laws of specific gravity changed from day to day, who would venture in balloon or ship? Science is always discovering some new law; but this, so far from being the discovery of a fresh limit. to man's liberty, puts new power into his hands.

It is not otherwise in the moral sphere. Conduct could have no moral quality, good or evil, but for the law of the inevitability of consequence. If lying, stealing, fornication, did not necessarily and always produce evil results, both externally to others and internally to the character of the doer; if, as often as not, they benefited their victims and had an elevating influence on their perpetrators, they would not be evil. If truthfulness and honesty were qualities quite as likely as not to disintegrate society and demoralise their possessors, they would not be good. If any effect could come from any cause; or if in waking life, as happens sometimes in dreams, whenever a situation got too unpleasant, one could extricate oneself by simply waking up, nothing would in the long run seriously matter. In such a world morality would have no meaning.

The ancients condemned as inartistic a plot in which the playwright brings in a ‘god in a machine' to rescue the characters from some inextricable mess into which the natural development of events has led them. A God who regularly did this sort of thing in real life would make morality impossible. If any action, however evilly motived, might without any loss or cost to anybody turn out in every way all right, the ultimate distinction between good and evil would have disappeared. In the last resort we are only justified in affirming that distinction, if we believe that good inevitably leads to good, and that evil inevitably produces some kind of evil.

The fact that the Universe is a coherent system, which we commonly speak of as ‘the reign of law', is recognised by Science as the necessary background and condition of the whole process of Creative Evolution. All growth and progress is within and by means of the reign of law. But in the sphere of conduct thinkers have always found it difficult to reconcile the law of the inevitably evil consequence of wrong with the possibility of the retrieval of moral failure, or (to use the language of religion) the forgiveness of sin.

Quite the most interesting attempt to solve this problem is the so called ‘orthodox' theory of the Atonement. Strictly speaking there is no ‘orthodox ' doctrine of the Atonement; that is, in regard to this doctrine there is no formula, like those defining the Trinity and the Incarnation, which has ever been officially accepted by the whole Church. But in popular usage the adjective ‘orthodox' is often applied to a group of somewhat divergent theories which ultimately derive from Anselm, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury under William Rufus. His theory was a great advance on previous speculation, and to an age that thought of the government of the Universe in terms of Law in the juristic sense, it was illuminating. To the present age, which thinks in terms of ‘Natural Law', it tends to confuse rather than to elucidate the real issue. All the numerous later variations of Anselm's theory agree in stating the problem of the relation of the Power behind the Universe to the fact of moral evil as if it involved a conflict between the Justice and the Love, of God-a conflict which is resolved by one person within the Godhead paying to another the penalty properly due from sinful man. Such a procedure is analogous to that of a magistrate, who is compelled by the evidence to find an offender guilty and to impose a fine, but who is moved by compassion or some other reason to pay the fine himself. On the level of the; administration of human justice such a solution is often the best possible; but any language or analogies which suggest that the methods or values of the Law Court are applicable to God are dangerously misleading.

Judaism thought of Religion as the Law, and there fore necessarily conceived of God primarily as Judge and, though the teaching of Christ was largely a protest against this view, traces of it-more often in language than in actual thought still survive even in the New Testament. Again, the Middle Ages inherited the Roman Jurisprudence, and this was the one secular science which then existed in a reasonably developed form; and since every age is bound to apply to philosophical or theological speculation categories derive from the dominant science of the time, the legal view of God and His relation to man was still further accentuated. Hence, while Christ thought of God as Parent, Christianity has laid the emphasis on the thought of Him as Judge; and since in a judge justice is the supreme virtue, it follows that justice, and that conceived of mainly as in ancient law, has been made the most fundamental attribute of God.

But justice, legally conceived, has inherent in it two implications which make it a quality which cannot with any degree of appropriateness be ascribed either to the purpose revealed in Creative Evolution or to the God in whom Christ believed.

(1) Historically, justice arose as a limitation placed by the community on the individual's demand for vengeance or restitution. Smarting with injury, the individual demands an unlimited revenge; but society steps in and says, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth no more; the measure of the punishment shall not be in excess of the gravity of the crime '. Justice is thus appropriately pictured holding scales, for justice was originally the acceptance by society of the individual's claim for vengeance, only limited by the principle of the equal balance. That is why in Cicero's speeches severitas is the regular word for honesty in a judge, the implication being that his business is to punish, and that he will do so unless influenced by bribe or favour. Philosophers still dispute as to whether the purpose of punishment is, or should be, mainly vindictive, reformatory or deterrent; but legislative changes and penal practice during the last century have been steadily moving in the direction of making less and less of the vindictive aspect. Originally it was not so. Justice was vengeance-controlled by principle, made righteous by impartiality.

(2) The idea of justice has a second limitation. In real life the machinery of the Law Court is only invoked when some offence has been, or is alleged to have been, committed. And though in theory it is admitted that the ideal of justice is to reward good as well as to punish evil, in practice the administration of justice means of necessity discouraging evil rather than promoting good, and this fact has given the word a largely negative connotation. Justice we instinctively contrast with generosity, as being that which aims at putting down evil rather than at creating good.

The Will of God, if God there be, is the creative purpose. With man the Will to Good consists in co-operation with that creative process. Evil is that which, whether through ignorance, carelessness or malevolence, antagonises or impedes that process. But to conceive the Creative Will of which that process is the expression as adopting towards an offender an attitude resultant from a conflict between His Justice and His Love is a misleading anthropomorphism. A human magistrate, compelled, as the administrator of the letter of a Law imposed upon him by an authority superior to himself, to pronounce an offender guilty, but moved in another direction by what he recognises to be the worthy instinct of compassion, may find it hard to reconcile the two principles of 'justice' and of 'mercy'. But the Will of God must be thought of as the embodiment of a single principle-the Will to Good. And since that principle must be conceived of as creative rather than destructive, we should expect it to express itself in action which is curative rather than punitive, generous rather than just. As Anselm himself, rising above the logic of his theory, finely says, justum est to bonum esse, ‘It is just that thou shouldest be kind '.

In Nature life has a curative as well as a creative aspect; it expresses itself in the healing of injuries, as well as in normal growth--but always in accordance with the reign of law. That life at the Divine level should manifest itself in the moral sphere in healing as well as in creating, is only what we should expect. But, as we have seen, the reign of law also must hold in the moral sphere. The progressive, curative, restorative action of Creative Love could not operate without moral disaster except under the limiting condition of the law that no evil deed can be without its evil consequence and that in a moral Universe there is a sense in which ‘all bills must be paid'.

At this point clear thinking is particularly necessary. The idea that first comes to us is that the payment of these bills is, or at least ought to be, secured by a moral order which inflicts external pains and penalties on the offender. That is to say, we take for granted that the reign of law in the moral sphere is analogous to the punitive retaliation of criminal justice. As a matter of fact, so far as this world is concerned, the reign of law in the moral sphere appears to operate in a way far more analogous to that of ‘natural law ', i.e. to be an invariable nexus of cause and consequence. (What may happen in the next world is another matter; but to discuss this now would seriously confuse the issue.) 1

(1 In regard to the ultimate fate of the incurably wicked, I may refer to the essay, ‘The Bible and Hell', by C. W. Emmet, in the book Immortality, ed. B. H. Streeter. (Macmillan, 1917.)

No doubt in this world wrong-doing does sometimes result in unpleasant consequences to the offender, but only sometimes; it always results in internal degeneration. In that sense-I shall expand the point later—no evil ever goes unpunished; and the 'punishment' is always exactly proportioned to the offence. We must ask, then, under what conditions can the Creative Will to Good undo this necessary consequence of evil doing?

(1) Merely to unmake the past-by a royal fiat or by some intervention in the manner of the deus ex machina--would be to violate that nexus of cause and consequence upon which depends (p. 225) the very possibility for man of moral action.

(2) If there is in the Universe any spiritual intention, law in the moral sphere must have a qualitative character -a sanctity, if you prefer that word-which does not seem necessarily to attach to it in the physical sphere. If the normal operation of moral law is to be revoked, it must be done in a way which vindicates that sanctity. In criminal jurisprudence this vindication of the moral law-as recognised by the community-is secured by the public passing of a sentence, entailing the infliction of a penalty which in a symbolic sense is a kind of equivalent of the crime, that is, can be regarded as being in a sense a ‘payment of the bill'.1

This idea I owe to conversations with Mr. W. H. Moberly, Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University, though I do not wish to make him responsible for my particular application of it.

But God may have other ways of vindicating righteousness.

But though God is not limited to the methods of the Law Court, Anselm was right in that he saw the problem for philosophic thought to be, not that of punishment, but of forgiveness; he was right also in thinking that it is only soluble if we hold that in some way or other God ‘pays the bill' Himself. And that is done if God (a) shoulders the burden of the suffering that is caused by sin; (b) redeems the sinner without violation of the law of inevitability of moral consequence-not by unmaking the act, but by re-making the man; (c) effects this in a way which, so far from impairing, actually vindicates the sanctity of the broken law.

We ask, How can God do this? To ask that question is to repeat in other words the question, What is the nature of Reality in ITS qualitative aspect? and of all ways of putting that question it is the one which probes that quality most searchingly. Here then, if anywhere, we must beware of the pitfall of thinking that any ‘representation ' of Reality in terms of the logic which science (or even philosophy) uses, can adequately render the truth. Here, if anywhere, the only possible ‘representation' of the truth will be one of that character akin to Art but totally different to Science which alone, we have seen (p. 45 ff.), can adequately convey quality. Something of the nature of parable or drama is required.

‘Who for us men and for our Salvation came down from Heaven . . . and was crucified also for us.' It happened ‘under Pontius Pilate'; but ‘before the foundation of the world' the Lamb was slain. In the Cross of Christ we catch, focussed in one vivid moment, the eternal quality of Creative Life. But, precisely because it is quality that is here expressed, to restate that expression in terms amenable to formal logic is inevitably to miss something of its meaning. This is one of those cases (p. 65 ff.) where ‘truth embodied in a tale ' can outsoar Philosophy.

The simple Christian who is content to look on the Sacrifice of Christ as just a 'mystery' is here wiser than the theologian who insists on analysing its intellectual content. Such a conception, if true at all, is so because of the truth of quality it represents; and the more it is envisaged, not as logic but as picture, the richer the truth it will convey.

But when a 'representation' is in story form, we require some test that what it represents is really true, that it is not a fairy tale. We must be able to show by reference to the facts of life that as a matter of actual experience the law of the inevitability of moral consequence is compatible with the retrieval of moral failure, or rather that it can be made so in the individual's case-provided he adopts a certain mental attitude. That mental attitude was long ago defined in that language of devotion which, outside a place of worship, rings a little strange to modern ears-as ‘faith in His blood'. What did this mean? It meant, I suggest, an attitude of self forgetful response-a matter more of heart and will than of intellectual cogitation-to the idea, as bodied forth in that story, of the love of God to man. At any rate, it is worth while for us to inquire how far such a response does in point of fact bring the retrieval of moral failure within the range of actual possibilities.

FAILURE AND RETRIEVAL

1 The remainder of this chapter is a reprint (by kind permission) with considerable modifications of my essay, ‘The Defeat of Pain', in God and the Struggle for Existence (Student Christian Movement, 1918).

The modern man, it has been most truly said, is not interested in the problem of his sins. Unfortunately, hard facts, and their dismal consequences, go on existing independently of the amount of interest that we take in them. Many of the more religiously minded have turned their attention from individual to social sin. In an age when to many thinkers civilisation seems doomed through the moral bankruptcy which expresses itself in War and the Class War, they do well. But social sin is largely the pooled result of the egoism, folly and indifference of individuals; and the regeneration of the world will not be wrought if we rest content with the confession of other people's sins. The kind of conviction of sin, however, which this age requires will not come as a result of pulpit denunciation; it will come, if at all, from the effective bringing before men's imagination of a positive ideal-in that sense preaching Christ crucified-and from a patient training in the difficult art of selfknowledge. Once, however, the individual's eyes are opened to the futility, if not also to the depravity, of his own life, the problem of amendment becomes a live one. The old question is asked whether, and under what conditions, forgiveness of sin is a rational idea and a practicable possibility. On this point I would put forward a few considerations -superficially unlike, though perhaps fundamentally congruous with, the traditional teaching of the Church.

Nothing is more remarkable in human nature than the varying degree to which in different individuals the moral consciousness is awake. You will find men and women who are perfectly unconscious that their lives are one long expression of ‘envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness ', who yet feel paroxysms of contrition because they are haunted by impure dreams. You will find others quite easy in their minds about a long course of sexual depravity but burdened with remorse for an unkind word. We do not ‘see ourselves as others see us', much less as God sees us. Few of us know where our moral weakness really lies. Sin and the consciousness of sin are quite a different matter.

There is a second no less remarkable fact-one, indeed, which largely explains the former. The guilt of an action is directly proportionate to the extent to which the doer knows that it is wrong; its injurious effect, however, upon his moral character is inversely proportionate to the extent to which he regrets it. This point is so important that it requires expansion. Every act is the expression of a previous tendency or disposition in the character; the doing of the act stimulates that tendency; repeated acts of the same kind rapidly create a habit, which becomes a chain by which we are tied and bound. Not only that; conscience defied becomes less sensitive. An act which on the first occasion was done with shrinking, after constant repetition is performed with equanimity. The 'natural' consequence of the commission of wrong is not the awakening, but the dulling, of the sense of sin.

From this a conclusion of immense importance follows. To feel a real and increasing pain at the contemplation of one's own past guilt is already to have begun to reverse its natural consequences within the self. The consciousness of moral failure-I mean, of course, only when it rises to the height of acute discomfort-is a sign that the old self, of whose character the act deplored was a natural expression, is already dead or dying, and that a new self is coming to the birth. Repentance, therefore, is in itself an evidence of a moral advance already actually achieved. Its smart is the smart of ‘growing pains '.

But in order to bring the new self to the birth the individual must, first, gain a clear perception of the nature and meaning of that pain, and secondly, must bring it into relation with the thought of his own value -actual and potential. His actual value obviously must be what God, in spite of all his failure, thinks of him; his potential value lies in what God, in spite of all his weakness, can yet make of him. At bottom this is what the traditional Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins was really driving at, though obscured by language derived from the Jewish sacrificial system and by an obsolete psychology. Christianity has proved to be a ‘Gospel ' just in proportion as it has stressed the idea (perhaps the most characteristic contribution made by Jesus to man's conception of the Divine) that God stands there ‘declining to be estranged ', continuing to regard the offender as a being of priceless worth, for whom, in spite of all, He feels affection undiminished and hope unlimited.

The dawning consciousness of moral failure and of its true nature is itself the beginning of a new birth, and contains and implies the possibility of further growth. But whether that possibility will be realised or not depends largely on the extent to which the individual recognises this attitude of the Divine, and thereby gives God the opportunity, so to speak, of fanning into flame the spark of higher aspiration. This is the profound truth underlying the old evangelical exhortation to ' lay hold of the salvation freely offered ', or to ‘rest in the finished work'-phrases which unfortunately disguise from our generation the truth which to our fathers they made luminous. Let the repentant soul realise that, in spite of all, he still has an infinite value for God, that there is still a work he can do for God and man, and that by the mere fact of sincere repentance he has already begun to establish a personal contact with a Higher Power-then at once the consciousness, and therefore the intensity and effectiveness, of that contact is indefinitely enhanced. A stimulation of vitality and moral invigoration begins which will lift him right out of that past which already, by the mere fact that he condemns and deplores it, he has partially outgrown.

In current religious teaching there is an idea directly contrary, as it seems to me, to the teaching of Christ about God, and no less contrary to the lessons of modern psychology. I mean the idea that we should continually contemplate and brood upon our sins and work ourselves up into agonies of contrition about them.

It is a curious notion that we do honour to God by behaving towards Him as if He had less of common sense, not to mention common justice, than a reasonable human being. God must estimate a man's responsibility for his actions, not by the standard of an absolute ideal, but by the standard which he individually had reached at the time when he committed them. If he has come to realise that an offence is much worse than he supposed, that is a sign of growth in him; it is therefore a reason for thankfulness.'

1 Particularly in regard to the burden of remembered offences committed in early youth, often the best way one can give help is to minimise their seriousness-to make the person see the offence as something which, though in a grown man an enormity, in a boy deserved ‘a flogging and have done with it'.

Contrition which comes to a man as the natural consequence of fairly facing up to his responsibility, the recognition of the fact that he not only ought to have known better but that he did know better, is healthy. It is quite otherwise if he tries to exaggerate his responsibility, and therefore his contrition, beyond what the facts warrant. The tendency to do this is sometimes the result of conceiving God as an offended Potentate who is the more likely to be propitiated by an apology the more the magnitude of the offence is stressed-the precise conception of God which Christ did His best to unteach. It is often the unconscious reflection of wounded self-respect. The humiliation which a man feels on discovering that he was and is a greater ‘rotter ' than he had dreamed, is the measure of the Pharisee in him. In so far as he is in this case, the effect of artificially stimulating contrition is really to stimulate spiritual pride. Once a man knows he is a ‘worm ' and cheerfully accepts the fact, he can begin to rise above the worm. But so long as he grovels and broods on his ‘wormanity ', he retards the process-for the secret of moral advance is to transform interest in oneself into interest in the Kingdom of God. Christ taught that God freely forgives, but that it is the publican who most easily avails himself of that fact. To the worm that knows it is a worm, God gives wings.

But whatever view we take on the religious issue, from the psychological point of view this emphasis on the duty of brooding over the enormity of the past is bound to be disastrous. Indeed, it is largely responsible for the most depressing of all facts in the experience of religious people--the incapacity to overcome habitually recurrent sins. So many spend their time bitterly repenting of, and after a brief interval exactly repeating, the same act. Their failure has a simple psychological explanation. To concentrate attention on the enormity of an offence, and upon the blackness of heart and the weakness of will which can constantly repeat it, is really to submit oneself to a form of auto-suggestion which can only make the repetition of the act inevitable. Here the advice given by ministers of religion is often the worst possible. So far from being told to deplore the past and dread its repetition in the future, the penitent should be advised to turn away his attention from the thought of his own weakness and sin, to concentrate on the power and the desire of God to help him, to think no more of past failure but of the possibility of doing useful constructive work in the world. It may take some time to undo the work of long-continued auto suggestion, and to free the mind completely from the influence of bad advice and wrong conceptions-meanwhile let him cease to bother about this particular weakness.'

1 Bad habits, physical and mental, whether the result of youthful misconduct, accident, or the lack of good advice, often get beyond the control of the conscious will. If and when this stage is reached, or all but reached, they should be treated not as sin, but as disease. But in that case the patient is still morally to blame if he declines forthwith to take the necessary steps, and if need be to seek the best medical advice, to cure the disease. The mere suggestion that a bad habit or an obsession should be transferred from the category of sin to that of disease, to be treated quasi-medically (as one would a nasty ulcer), sometimes at once, more often after concentrated reflection on the idea, effects a cure. If not, a doctor or a nerve specialist should be consulted. Psychology confirms the teaching of St. Paul: leave behind the Law, with its associations of failure and of fear, throw yourself on the power and love of God as seen in Christ, and sin shall have no more dominion over you.

The forgiveness of sins does not mean that either a past act itself, or its inevitable consequences to other people, can be undone. A repentant murderer cannot call his victim to life again; he may be fortunate enough to have an opportunity to make some amends, as, for instance, by providing for the orphaned children; but that does not undo the past. Yet, following upon genuine repentance, a moral re-creation is possible which can reverse the otherwise inevitable consequences upon a man's own life and character, and so make his sum total contribution to mankind beneficent even if he cannot overtake and make substantial amends to the actual victims he has wronged or rescind the consequences of his folly on his fortunes or his health. More than that, a character so re-created can effect certain things which seem to be outside the range of those who have never fallen and risen again. St. Paul's conversion will serve to illustrate both these points. It could not bring Stephen to life again, but it turned the harsh fanatic energy which had found expression in that act of persecution into the passion which made him ‘labour more abundantly than they all'. In addition it gave him an insight into the human heart, into the nature of the moral struggle and into the meaning of Christ's life and teaching, which made him, next to his Master, the one who has made the deepest mark on the heart and mind of Europe. And, on a lesser scale, we all know men whose power for good seems to be directly conditioned by the fact that they have known evil and overcome it. Plato says that a physician should not be one who has always enjoyed the best health; and one who has himself failed and been restored may sometimes be the better physician to the souls of others.

0 felix culpa quae tantam meruit redemptionem

Then, is it better to have sinned and been forgiven than never to have sinned at all? In St. Paul's time there were men ready to draw some such conclusion ‘Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? ' We may leave the answer where St. Paul left it. Logically it may be 'Yes'; practically that answer could be given only by one who has never felt the experience from the inside. Such know that in all moral failure there is real loss. Some good thing which they might have done will, by reason of their failure, necessarily and eternally remain undone. And yet they know that, through the power and insight which they derived from the fact that they had failed and been restored, some other good thing has been accomplished which possibly-not certainly-but for that would have remained undone. In the task of bringing about the Kingdom of God there is scope for the co-operation of very different types. There is one work for Mary Magdalene, another for Mary the mother of Christ. We cannot hesitate as to which of the two will stand higher in that Kingdom; but the other may still stand high.

THE MENTAL ASPECT OF PAIN

I turn now to the problem of pain, and I do so with an interest not so much theoretical as practical. Pain is part of the environment in which we have to live. I ask how we can adapt ourselves to that environment, or rather how we can adapt the environment to ourselves -for the power to do that is the unique biological distinction of man. Can we, instead of being crushed by the difficulties we have to face, use them rather as a stimulus along the route to individual as well as social progress? I ask whether, in regard to the suffering as well as the moral failure past, present and to come which falls within the experience of any individual, we can say, ‘There is a way out'. I suggest that, along lines indicated in the New Testament and confirmed by the teaching of psychology, each one of us may find a way in which to cope successfully with that particular share of the world's evil with which he or she personally is brought into contact. I shall speak of the ‘defeat of pain' as such, without any attempt to discriminate between pain which, like remorse, is connected with the consciousness of moral failure and pain which is not so caused.

We are apt to underestimate the extent to which pain is of mental origin. Anxiety and disappointment,fear and regret, humiliation and remorse, the sense of desolation and despair, constitute the main burden of civilised man; and all these are of the mind. In normal times the amount of suffering due to causes entirely physical-wounds, accident or disease-would, for the majority of men, be a relatively small proportion of the whole; for the present generation the War has vastly altered the proportion. But even the pain caused by physical injury is determined by mental conditions more than is commonly supposed. There are stories from the front of men in the excitement of battle or retreat being for a long while actually unconscious of wounds received. Experiments in hypnosis, by which sensibility to pain can be either enhanced, so that the touch of a finger feels like a hot iron, or reduced, so that the patient feels nothing under the surgeon's knife, point in the same direction. Quite apart from these exceptional conditions, every doctor or nurse knows that the extent and acuteness with which pain is felt varies enormously with the mental attitude of the sufferer. That patient feels pain most who most dreads it and who concentrates attention on it most. Moreover, the actual quality of pain and its mental and physical effects differ according as it is borne with cheerfulness or despair, with acceptance or resentment.

If so much suffering is predominantly mental in origin, and if the mental element so conditions both the amount and the quality of the suffering which is physical in origin, it is not enough to attack the problem of the world's suffering from the physical side alone. It must be attacked from that side, but it is far more essential to approach it from the side of mind. And precisely for this reason the individual may have hope. He may find himself he often does find himself-up against hard facts which he cannot alter, or burdened with a physical disability which cannot be cured. But, where circumstances cannot be altered, it may still be possible to alter one's mental reaction towards them.

Especially is this true in regard to the past: this cannot be undone, but our reaction to it can be fundamentally changed. I cannot unmake the sins, sorrows and disappointments of the past; but it is possible to change my attitude towards them so completely as to transform their consequences in the living present, and thereby, so to speak, to remake the past. Christ taught not only that sins can be forgiven, but that the brokenhearted can be healed, and I shall try to show that both the experience of everyday life and the conclusions of modern psychology prove that Christ was right.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

In the New Testament no attempt is made to advance a theory of why pain or moral evil are permitted to exist. Certainly there is no suggestion that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds '. On the contrary, so far from being the best of all possible worlds, it is a world that God meant to be a great deal better than it is. It is a world that has gone awry, and that mainly through the ignorance, the folly, the malice, the greed and the passions of men. But though the world is not now what it should be, God is not ‘just leaving things alone ', but is engaged in fighting the evil. God does not stand outside the world serenely contemplating the misery and the strife. He is, no doubt, in a sense outside and beyond the world, but He is also inside it, immanent in it, as the philosophers say; and by the fact of His immanence He takes His share in the suffering; and God's share is, if I may use the phrase, the lion's share.

But this suffering is not just mere suffering with no end or result beyond itself. It is a means to an end, the means by which the ignorance, folly, malice, greed and evil passions may be overcome, the evil wills remade, and the results of evil action transmuted and undone. Yet it is not all suffering which has this virtue. The suffering which has power is suffering like Christ's

suffering, that is, faced for the sake of causes and ideals like those for which He worked and died, or borne in the spirit in which He bore His. Christ, however, is not merely our leader and our pattern. He is also ‘the portrait of the invisible God '. His attitude both to suffering and to evil is therefore representative of God's. God shares in the suffering and captains in the fight. And God summons us to assist Him in the task, to enter into partnership with Him-and that not only in the suffering but also in the victory which it brings.

This view of the power and possibilities of suffering requires analysis. Much cant is talked about the ennobling and purifying effect of suffering. To an animal, pain may be useful as a warning of danger or a spur to activity, but beyond the limited amount required for these purposes it debilitates and depresses. So too with man, the most natural effect of suffering is not to ennoble but to embitter, not to purify but to weaken. Joy is a necessity of life, of the highest life as well as of the lowest. The natural and normal reactions of the organism to suffering are vindictiveness, degradation, peevishness and despair. Where the contrary result is found it is because there is something in man, or at least in some men, which can counteract these 'natural' reactions. And this something does exist.

That secret, dimly grasped by heroic men and women throughout all the ages, was by Christianity first publicly proclaimed: the natural consequences of suffering can, by the spirit and manner in which it is borne, not only be avoided, but actually reversed. Look upon suffering as a necessary condition of labour for any cause worth working for-whether it be the learning of a lesson, the production of a work of art, the bringing up of a family or the steering of a ship to port-and its character is changed. Realise that the stupidity, the indifference, the malice and the selfishness of man have always been such an obstacle to progress that every forward step has been paid for in blood and tears; that, because casualties are the price of victory, sacrifice, pushed at times to the point of martyrdom, though not in itself a thing to be desired, is necessary and worth while-and things are seen in a new light. If it is in this way and in this spirit that the Divinity immanent in the world is suffering, striving, overcoming, then to take one's share in the work is to be allowed, as St. Paul puts it (Col. i. 24), to pay part of ' the unpaid balance (so it reads in Greek) of the sufferings of Christ'. Then, indeed, not perhaps every day and always, but at least in our moments of deeper vision, such pain becomes no longer a burden but a privilege.

CALAMITY

No great cause has ever lacked its martyrs, and it is not hard to see how suffering of this kind-suffering voluntarily risked, or even actually challenged, by the sufferer for the sake of a great work or a great ideal—may ennoble and inspire. But a kind of suffering harder to be borne is that which, whether it comes from accident, disease, or from the negligence or malevolence of man, is in no sense connected with, or the direct result of, our efforts for a good work or a great cause. Such suffering, so far from being a price which we pay, and pay willingly, for the sake of the work, is often the greatest of all impediments to it; indeed sometimes it is a ‘knock-out blow' which, humanly speaking, makes nugatory all our hopes and all our plans.

The old theology said, ‘Calamity is the will of God submit'. But is calamity the will of God? The subject is one upon which there is much confusion of thought. No doubt a God who creates and sustains the Universe is ultimately responsible for everything in it; whatever happens is in one sense the result of something He has willed. But in that sense sin, quite as much as suffering, is the will of God-yet the very meaning of sin is that it is something contrary to His will. God is responsible for making a world which is a connected system-a system in which causes always produce their appropriate effects, where good produces good, and evil, evil, and where suffering is one of the effects produced by ignorance and sin. Without some element of risk and strain the highest type of character could not have been produced; again, unless the consequences of folly, ignorance or evil choice were really bad, life would be only a game in which, in the last resort, nothing really mattered. It follows that a world in which suffering and sin are possibilities is a world better worth creating than one in which everything was automatic, smooth and easy. Without freewill goodness, without risk courage, could not exist; freewill involves the possibility of sin, risk that of disaster. But we ought not to regard a particular disaster, any more than a particular sin, as a special ‘act of God'.

To refuse to accept everything that happens as an exact expression of the will of God does not mean the denial either of God's prescience or of His providence. An Intelligence which itself upholds the great interconnected system of cause and effect that we call Nature, and to which the secrets of all hearts are open, cannot but know the trend and tendencies of things. God cannot but possess an actual foresight of the future which, even if falling short of that absolute foreknowledge which is compatible only with predestination, may yet, in comparison with our human foresight, be styled omniscience. Again, the experience of all religious men points to the conclusion that ‘there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will'. Both as regards individuals and groups, there is evidence that those who ‘wait upon the Lord' (that is, who habitually concentrate their minds upon the Highest in quiet meditation, and act in response to inspiration so received) often have unusual power to conquer obstacles, escape danger and, in spite of loss and failure, achieve high ends. Such facts point to a Providence watching over us, guiding us to wise and salutary choice, leading us to the help of others and others to our help. Doubtless other facts suggest that by reason of deafness and unresponsiveness on our part, or on theirs, God's plan may temporarily miscarry. Yet the testimony of religious people is that they do often, to an extent quite unexpected, actually avoid disaster, they can ‘tread upon the lion and adder'; and that, where disaster does come, a way of recovery equally unexpected is in the long run provided. Where God does not prevent, He cures.

The conclusion that we ought not to regard accidents and calamities as ‘visitations' directly sent upon us by God is one of the first importance for practical religion. It is almost, if not quite, impossible to look upon the loss or the disease which crushes or debilitates as a direct expression of the will of God and still wholeheartedly regard Him as our heavenly Father. In the past, and even in the present, there seem to be some who have succeeded in this apparently impossible endeavour; but certainly from ordinary human nature it is too much to ask for a real and true love of God, if men are taught to regard all the evils that fall upon them as ‘visitations' deliberately sent by Him as chastisement or discipline.

Of course, if such a doctrine is true we must teach it and take the consequences; but if, as we have seen reason to believe, it is not true, then to decline to repudiate it frankly and emphatically is to take away the key to the kingdom of heaven and hinder those from entering in who otherwise might do so.

As an explanatory theory, the view of the old theology that sickness or calamity is a characteristic expression of the will of God we must discard; but the practical moral which the old religion drew from it was, up to a point-though only up to a point-quite sound.

To repine or to give way to resentment in the face of undeserved calamity is fatal. Unfortunately either repining or resentment are the natural instinctive attitudes to take up; and in so far as ‘submit to the will of God' meant ‘put such feelings quite away ', it was good advice. But the right attitude to adopt is, to my mind, far better described if instead of ' submission' we say ‘acceptance '. Mere submission to the will of an external power is negative, it is a dull, drab thing; but acceptance of a share, still more the willing acceptance of more than our full share, in the tragedy of life-a tragedy in which God as well as man is an actor-is positive, it has about it something vitalising.

Pain, like other elemental forces in Nature, can be turned to use, but only if the laws of its operation are first understood and then conformed to. Natura non nisi parendo vincitur, but the ' obedience ' by which Nature can be mastered is no merely passive submission; it is an activity which may be called 'obedience' only because it functions always in conformity to laws and principles clearly understood. So it is with pain. Those who meet it clear-eyed and with a positive and active acceptance, who ‘face the music', as the slang phrase has it; those who are ready, not only to ‘do their bit' in the world's war, but to ‘bear their bit' in the world's sorrow, make a strange discovery. They find, not only that they are enabled to bear their sorrow in a way which hurts less-for what hurts most in the bearing is that which is most resented, what is most freely accepted hurts least-but that they achieve an enrichment and a growth of personality which makes them centres of influence and light in manifold and unsuspected ways.

Few things avail to inspire and re - create the human heart as does the spectacle of crushing misfortune cheerfully and heroically borne; the unconscious influence which those who act thus exert is far greater than they or others comprehend. Here is the element of truth in the common talk about the ennobling and purifying power of suffering; though it is not the suffering, but the way it is borne, that ennobles. Pain, not just submitted to but willingly accepted, makes the sufferer socially creative. A man counts in this world to the extent that he has thought and to the extent that he has felt, provided always that he has thought and felt in the right way. Suffering rightly borne is constructive work. He who has ‘borne his bit' has also ‘done his bit'; pain conquered is power.

A few are able to bear their sufferings in this way. Most of us have failed to do so, or have succeeded very partially. We have allowed resentment and depression -which, I must repeat, are after all the natural reactions, physical and psychological, towards pain-to enter into our outlook even if not to dominate it. The suffering which, if we had accepted it as a privilege or utilised it as an opportunity-which is Christ's way-would have enriched, ennobled and fortified our personalities, we have faced in a way which has had the contrary effect. We have let it depress our enthusiasms, dim our ideals, sap our vitality. Is there a remedy for this?

There is: but it is one which has rather fallen out of sight in Christian teaching. We are familiar with the idea that sin can be forgiven. We have all been taught that it need not remain as a standing source of debility in the soul, and that the repentance following after wrongdoing may actually bring about an enrichment and deepening of the personality-‘to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little '. But in ordinary Christian teaching this idea has only been applied to breaches of certain fundamental moral laws. It is not ordinarily applied to the failure to meet suffering in the right way, though this failure is a moral one as much as any other, and differs from other moral failures only in being less commonly recognised as such. But if it be true that sins of one kind can be, as we say, ‘forgiven '-that is, if their naturally evil consequences upon our personalities can be transmuted by a subsequent change in our attitude towards them and God-the same must surely be true of this kind of moral failure also.

And experience shows that we can transform the past in this regard. We can bring up clearly into memory the times when we have suffered and have let that suffering fill us with resentment and despair. We can realise our error and deplore it, we can say to ourselves: 'No; all said and done, I am glad that in the great tragedy of humanity I have played my part; I am glad that I have tasted of the cup which is the heritage of man.' And in proportion as we can say this, and mean it, our whole outlook on life, our attitude to God and man, is changed. We are filled with a new joy-richer by reason of what we have endured; we are inspired with a sense of vitality and inner strength more deeply rooted because of the experience we have passed through. The draught which when first drunk was poison is transformed into wine. The past is not undone; yet the bitterness and weakness which are its living consequences in the present are not only cancelled but reversed.

Pain is a great teacher-it is not man's only teacher, as some have seemed to urge; there are, I am sure, things which can only be learnt through joy-but it is a teacher whose lessons are difficult to learn. If at first we decline to learn them, we suffer more; for then we must endure, not only the original pain, but the growing resentment or the life-draining melancholy which it entails. From this further suffering, consequent on our refusal to learn the lesson first offered to us, another and a different lesson can be learnt. But the actual learning of it awaits a fundamental change of attitude and outlook on our part, a netavoia which, like any other form of ‘conversion', comes to one man by stages slow and imperceptible, to another with a sudden flash, and to others not at all.

THE PAIN OF OTHERS

There remains the most difficult problem of all. How are we to take the suffering of others, especially of those we love, which we are compelled to witness but are unable to alleviate, and which in many cases we can see is not being borne-and under the circumstances can hardly be expected to be borne-in a way which can be otherwise than degrading and depressing? What of this? There are times when, though we cannot alleviate their suffering, we can help them to bear it in the right way; could we completely succeed in this we might

perhaps, though with an effort, be content. But there are also times when, called upon to be spectators of physical agony, crushing calamity, or desolating bereavement, all our theories about suffering and its uses simply shrivel up, and, if we try to put them into words, we seem to ourselves to be as those that mock.

Conquer by accepting. The principle that pain is to be met in this spirit, and not with resentment or despair, needs special reassertion when we thus contemplate the pain of others. For it may be given to us by an act of penetrating sympathy to enter into their suffering and, so to speak, accept it for them, and thereby, either at the time or later on, help them to a right acceptance. Still more necessary is it to remind ourselves that God feels this pain as much as we do, indeed much more, by reason of His more perfect sympathy. This fact points to the solution: ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord, he shall sustain thee '. God, too, is bearing the suffering, but He is bearing it in the right way; and in so far as we can open up our souls to Him, and through communion and meditation enter into His mind, we also begin to bear it in the right way. God's way of bearing suffering, like everything else He does, is creative and constructive; in so far as we bear it in His way, the negative attitude of repining and resentment will drop away, and we too shall become constructive and creative. The right act or the right forbearance, the right word or the right silence, will be given us; and when these are impossible or inappropriate, the right thought, the right feeling and the right prayer. And often these may be the most effective things of all. Men are all bound together by unseen telepathic ties of mutual influence. Each of us, by merely being what he is, contributes, for better or for worse, more than he knows to the mental and moral outlook of those he lives with, and probably of others to him unknown. He who is trying to bear the suffering of those he loves, with God, for God and in God's way, cannot fail to help them, and to help others also; though he may sometimes have to wait a long while for visible results.

And in one respect we can afford to wait, for what we have found to be true in our own case must hold good in theirs also. Pain, we have seen, even though wrongly borne at the time, may yet be transformed in retrospect, and defeat turned into victory in later days. If, then, we believe that the growth of souls will continue after this life, we can see a way in which even that suffering, which, because it was not rightly borne, has been wholly unprofitable and demoralising in this life, may one day be changed in quality and made the condition of a richer, deeper, nobler life in the Beyond.

Upon many souls the dead-weight burden of the world's sufferings acts as a paralysis to thought and effort. Considerations like those just urged may help such to turn from passive desolation to active energy. In the lives of most highly sensitive natures there are moments when the individual feels as if he were an Atlas bearing up alone the burden of the world's ill. It is not so. In the last resort it is borne up by God, and there are always ‘seven thousand in Israel', unsuspected and unknown, who are helping us and Him to do it.

A LESSON FROM PSYCHOLOGY

Man has a natural instinct to hide away, from himself and from others, experiences which have deeply wounded -in particular acute humiliation, undetected moral lapses, occasions of acute terror or long-drawn-out apprehension. Supposing we succeed in half smothering or even completely obliterating the memory of these, so much the worse for us. To suppress all recollection or expression of such incidents is like trying to plaster down a boil. The emotion associated with the original occasion remains as a suppressed poison in the mind. It is always seeking to find expression by investing the circumstances of a man's subsequent life with an atmosphere of unnecessary apprehension, difficulty, or pain, thus burdening the personality in the present with the shame, the fear and the agony of the past. The result is often depression, neurasthenia and, in extreme cases, physical paralysis, moral breakdown, or loss of reason.

If, however, the patient can be induced to remember clearly and to speak about the buried memory-the ‘repressed complex ' as it is technically called-relief at once begins. It is as if the boil were opened and the poisonous matter let out. It becomes possible for the patient, either for himself or with the help of the psychotherapist, to begin a process of readjustment or ‘reassociation', i.e. of associating the event in his mind with an emotion of an opposite kind. He can, for instance, see for himself (or be taught by another to see) what was once a legitimate cause of acute terror or anxiety, as either a trifle which he can now look back on with a smile, or, though a real disaster, yet as one which he can contemplate with a feeling of thankfulness in that he has somehow won through; or, again, for the depression of a vaguely realised disgrace he can substitute the satisfaction of failure retrieved or of guilt atoned for. Once this is done, especially if the patient can be made to see a clear relation between the emotion associated with the past shock or act and that which he experiences in connection with some present anxiety, mental health begins rapidly to accrue.'

1 In acute cases of nervous breakdown it is sometimes found that hypnotic suggestion is required to complete the necessary ‘reassociation '. But in many cases even of acute neurasthenia, the mere fact that the ' repressed complex ' has been brought into consciousness, and that the patient can speak about it clearly and fully, enables him to put behind him both the memory and the emotions associated with it, and, as it were, permanently to detach himself from this incident in his past; which, until he clearly remembered and frankly spoke about it to some one else, had in a kind of way lived on, and formed part of his present mental outlook.

This lesson of Psychology has a very important bearing on everyday life. In every man's experience there are some things of which he never speaks even to his most intimate friends-things which, when they start up in recollection, he strives, sometimes successfully, more often not, to exorcise from consciousness. Which of us has not memories from the past which stab and burn, memories of things seen, things suffered, things done, things left undone; memories of loss, disappointment, humiliation, which we try, but try in vain, to bury?

The habitual reserve that is characteristic of the English and the Scotch, in so far as it means that one does not carry one's ‘heart upon one's sleeve for daws to peck at' or is unwilling to be for ever wearying one's friends with the recital of minor troubles or petty peccadilloes, is to be commended; in so far as it is the expression of a high courage which disdains to exaggerate or seem to shirk its full share of the burden and the suffering of the race, it is to be admired. But Psychology bears out the ancient proverb, ‘A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved '. And though to be always seeking confidants for one's troubles or one's sins inevitably leads either to morbid introspection or to shallowness of character, an occasional unburdening of the soul is good for most. But it must be an ' unloading ' of fears,worries, humiliations and disappointments, and not only a confession of what are ordinarily styled sins.

Anyone who is haunted by the memory of some fright, some fault, some snub in early life, which he has never confided to a single person, would be well advised to tell it-not to all the world, but to some judicious friend who will listen sympathetically to the recital. Once these memories are expressed in words, one can for ever detach oneself from that self of long ago which did, thought and felt these painful things. One can view that old self with the eyes of an outsider and join one's confidant in a smile of sympathy for the misfortunes, or of pardon for the sins, of the' poor little devil' upon the steppingstone of whose dead self the present roan has risen to higher things. Bud--and this is the essential lesson of Psychology-until the failures of the dead past have been so expressed its putrefying corpse may, though we know it not, be still poisoning the present.

It is harder to find the right person to whom to confide painful incidents of maturer years-the moral failures, the slights of which the most humiliating thing is that we feel them as humiliations at all, the moments of panic, the unworthy forebodings and apprehensions, the disappointments in love or in ambition, the haunting fear of loss, failure, or detection which hangs above the head like a sword of Damocles; the follies, lapses, agonies of those we love. It is not only more difficult to find the right person to whom to speak of things like these; when found it is more difficult to bring oneself to use him or her at the critical moment. We are so often withheld from speech by the reflection that even when the cupboard door is opened the skeleton will still remain a skeleton. But this reflection is the excuse, partly of our ignorance, partly of our desire to escape the humiliation of confession. The skeleton, it is true, will still remain a skeleton; but once the fresh air is let in it will -if our confidant be one who can give wise advice become like a specimen in a museum, instead of the mouldering remains of a dead self.

Many would do well to avail themselves ‘of some discreet and learned minister of God's Word', and were clergy and ministers trained to be ‘soul doctors ' one might universalise this advice. Unfortunately they are rarely so trained, and what training they do receive is based on an obsolete psychology. Spiritual advice will do more harm than good unless it is based on a clear recognition of the distinction between sin and disease, that is, between what is entirely, and what is not entirely, under the control of the conscious will. But to ascertain, in any given case, the exact degree to which the individual is responsible is a far more difficult and delicate process than most people seem to think. At least an elementary knowledge .of pathological psychology is required, and more than an elementary knowledge of human nature. Precisely because his advice is likely to be taken more seriously, an unwise priest, like an ignorant doctor, can do more harm than other men; and whatever else may result from the laying on of hands, it does not in itself convey a knowledge of the human heart. Still, given sympathy, experience and common sense, the pastor, next to the doctor, has unique opportunities of qualifying in that subject. Again, the ordinary man always approaches a minister of religion with the subconscious expectation that he is a man easily to be ‘shocked', especially if the burdened soul be unorthodox in its beliefs. And since it is hard not to live up to what everybody expects of one, it may often cost the minister an effort to free himself from this conventional role. But let him make that effort; the minister of Christ is called upon to be, not the judge, but the physician of the soul.

Happy, however, are those who from childhood have been habituated to cast their burden upon the Lord, to give free, frank and natural expression in confident and spontaneous prayer to contrition, sorrow, fear, on each occasion, great or small, as it arises, realising God as the unseen Friend-ready to forgive sins, able and anxious to bind up wounds, a tower of defence in danger. Such find their prayer is answered by a courage enhanced and an insight sharpened, which enable them to look trouble and failure in the face, and before the bitterness has time to sink into the soul, to effect for themselves whatever ‘reassociation ' is required.

It is an interesting reflection that the teaching of Christ and His apostles in some respects anticipated, in others went beyond, not, of course, the actual discoveries of recent psychology, but their practical lesson for everyday life. Psychology teaches that the first condition of healing is to bring up into the daylight of clear recognition the exact nature and quality of the wound to be healed; the New Testament bids us look suffering fairly in the face, and to recognise clearly and frankly admit our sins. The next step, says the psychologist, is to ‘reassociate' the remembered episode, to re-educate ' the mind and heart, to change our attitude towards the past. Christ says the same: ‘Thy sins are forgiven '; ‘Sorrow shall be turned into joy '. Both say, ' First face up to the past; then turn your back upon it'; ‘Believe that power is yours and according to your faith it will be done unto you '. So far they seem to say the same thing. But there is this great difference-Christ has behind Him a religion, a reasonably grounded philosophy of life.1

1 In practice successful psychotherapists largely accomplish their cures by suggesting ideas of hope, confidence and consolation, which is, in effect, providing the patient with at least the practical deduction from a Christian philosophy of life. Owing, however, to the tragic feud between Science and Religion-a feud which, it may be hoped, our generation will see healed-few eminent scientific men are in a position conscientiously to make full use of this source of power. Hence the reassociation made by Him is more revolutionary and more profound; for He says of the wounds of the past, not only that they can be healed, but that out of them and by reason of them can be won an actual enrichment of the present; and He gives as the ground of this confidence the love and the power of God. Indeed, the feature in Christianity, which is perhaps most distinctive of it, is its specific ‘reassociation ' of the idea of suffering. Here is the great difference between the Old Testament and the New. In the Old, the problem of suffering is a constantly recurring theme; in the New, suffering is no longer a problem but an instrument of triumph, no longer a thing to be avoided, but a privilege to be claimed; and that because, illuminated by the Cross of Christ, it is seen as something shared by God Himself, and as the means of His accomplishing the sublimest of all ends.

THE WAY AND THE POWER

I have tried to show that, whatever our view of the origin and purpose of the suffering and evil in the world, there is a way out a way which, for the individual, is at once the most perfect adaptation to environment and the line of moral progress. ‘Granted,' some will say, ‘but "strait is the gate and narrow is the way". When the bitterness, the agony and the desolation are on us, or when it comes back to us in vivid memories of the past, it is not enough to be told there is a way out, we lack the power to tread it.'

Precisely at this point Religion is seen to be vital to everyday life. For, in exact proportion to its truth and our sincerity, Religion is power. Conceive of God as Christ conceived Him, make a genuine effort to trust Him and to follow Christ, and experience shows that prayer, communion, meditation, will prove to be the road to power. ‘Salvation '-that is, inspiration and deliverance in one-is within our grasp. ' Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find.'

But if this be said, in the same breath a warning must be added against an unquestioning submission to the guidance, not only of popular manuals of devotion, but even of the great classics. Even in the best of them, language is occasionally used which cannot but suggest the idea that God is a jealous Potentate needing and liking to be placated by ostentatious grovelling. But to the precise extent in which any surviving elements of this pre-Christian conception affect our attitude towards Him, our prayer is likely to be a source of weakness, not of power. A parent or .a teacher can do very little for a child who is simply abject, and it is hard for God to speak with us unless we first obey the order, ‘Son of man, stand upon thy feet'.

The idea, so often recurring in the New Testament, that moral progress is secured, less by the effort of our conscious wills, than by a surrender of our whole man to Christ in joyful faith, is curiously confirmed by modern Psychology. Psychologists hold (cf. p. 284 ff.) that what I can or cannot do depends not only on the desires and the effort of my conscious self, but on the hopes, fears and convictions which have sunk deep into my subconscious mind. If my conscious mind believes in God but I am for ever anxious for the morrow, it is because my subconscious mind does not believe. The subconscious mind is always learning from the conscious, but it both learns and forgets more slowly. And the lessons it takes to heart most deeply are not the purely intellectual notions of the conscious mind, but the values and emotions associated with them. A man, for instance, may believe with his conscious mind that God is good and men are brothers, but only if he plans and acts towards the Universe and man as if these things were true, will his subconscious mind believe them also. If his conscious mind affirms the principle of love but he schemes injury to the brother whom he hath seen, it is the attitude of hate that the subconscious mind will learn.

It is, therefore, not enough to assent with the mind to a philosophy that proves that the Power behind the Universe is one that works for righteousness; it is not enough to recognise with the intellect that for the individual sufferer there is a way out; we must so realise the meaning and the implications of these beliefs for feeling, thought and conduct, that they become part of our inmost being. But for this to happen, the values and emotions dominant in our conscious mind must dominate the subconscious also. Conscious and subconscious act and react on one another; but the conscious, if it knows and wills, can in the long run direct the whole by selecting the ideas and values upon which to ponder deepest in moments of quiet meditation.

You may call this 'auto-suggestion' if you like; whether, and how far, auto-suggestion is a bad thing I discuss later. But, good or bad, a certain amount of it is unavoidable. Do what we will, we cannot keep our mind a vacancy. The conscious mind is ever brooding, ever dwelling on thoughts, hopes and fears which inevitably act as ‘suggestions ' to the subconscious. We cannot avoid some form of auto-suggestion; we can choose the form. Let us, then, select what our intellect at its keenest sees to be most true, what our insight at its acutest sees to be most beautiful or best, and meditate on this. ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.' More especially, as we compose ourselves to rest at night, let us remember to govern mind and thought. We cannot but ‘suggest' to ourselves some thoughts, the effect of which will follow us next day. We have got to make a choice between thoughts of confidence or despair, of power or weakness, of love or hate. One way or the other, we cannot but decide whether our attitude to life and to the Universe and that means to God-is one of doubt or trust; and in regard to pain, one of acceptance or resentment. Then let the choice made reflect, not the mood of the moment, but the conviction of a life.

Amid the perplexities, the anxieties, the smarting pains of life, such self-control, such government and direction of our thoughts is hard. We need some focal point round which to centre our philosophy of power and help; we seek some beacon light upon the cliff visible however dark the night. And this we have.

Direction, inspiration, strength can all be had from one source. Only let the needle of life's compass be magnetised and free to move, so that it points always towards the Pole. Steer boldly straight ahead, ‘looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross '. Courage distils from that victorious love. Let prayer and meditation centre always round the thought of the Love and Power of that infinite and all-pervading Spirit of whom Christ is the portrait, and it will be possible to rise above the natural consequences of evil happenings, to make of suffering an opportunity, of loss a steppingstone to gain, and to find in failure retrieved and pain conquered the secret of power.

SYNOPSIS

THE REIGN OF LAW

Our discussion will be futile unless there has first been faced the question, Does God exist? Assuming the existence of God, the problem of the bearing on Religion of the New Psychology is the old problem of the relation of Divine activity to the reign of law raised by the discoveries of Newton, and still more so by those of Darwin.

Psychology attempts to apply the conception of law in the scientific sense to the operations of the human mind. The laws of Psychology, like those of Astronomy and Biology, are descriptions of the mechanism by which the Infinite works. Psychology is a branch of Science, not of Metaphysics or Moral Philosophy; but the facts which it deals with are of special importance in the philosophical discussion of Religion and ethics.

Primitive Religion looks for the Divine in the irrational. Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion were, in different ways, a protest against this. Science fortifies this protest: it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

In Psychology, more often than in the other sciences, the limitations inherent in the scientific conception of law are of practical concern.

(1) Laws are not eternal necessities of Nature, but generalisations arrived at by human observation, and are often provisional in character.

(2) Law, being based on classification, necessarily ignores individuality; freewill is by definition a function of individuality.

PROJECTION AND THE IDEA OF GOD

In the lives of the Saints and with other religious persons phenomena occur which are recognised as symptomatic of psycho-neurosis. But it is notably the morbid, not the healthy, elements in Religion that are so explicable.

Pathological symptoms often accompany genius. These perhaps due to (1) enhanced sensibility, (2) neurotic ‘over-compensation' increasing ‘capacity to take pains'. Anyhow, the significance of these symptoms is no greater when they accompany eminence in Religion than when they accompany eminence in other pursuits. The idea of Hell Fire and the conditions of life in the cloister might cause or enhance a neurosis; yet how are we to explain the exceptional vitality exhibited by many of the Saints?

Evidence that, psychologically considered, Religion is a phenomenon characteristic, not of disease, but of health.

(1) Conversion, viewed psychologically, is a movement away from ‘disassociation' towards 'integration' of the personality.

(2) Conclusions drawn from Abnormal Psychology do not always hold of Normal. The writers of Spiritual Autobiographies are not typical representatives of Religion. With the mass of men Religion is a force that makes for sanity and happiness. A psychological opinion in support of this. Religion is ‘natural' to man, and corresponds to an inner ‘urge to completeness'.

(3) Neurosis may account for fanaticism, but not for insight, in Religion.

The element of truth in the statement that the idea of God is a projection. Man's reaction to the Universe must be emotionally as well as intellectually the right one; but an emotional, like an intellectual, reaction will be largely determined by previous experience. If God is ‘our Heavenly Father', then the right reaction towards Him must be analogous to that of a child towards its father; with the all-important proviso that we mean the reaction of a psychologically healthy child towards a good and sensible father, and not the pathological reaction known as a ‘father-complex'.

AUTO-SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

Auto-suggestion briefly described. Its effect depends upon suggestibility, that is, on capacity for accepting an idea in the subconscious, which once so accepted will work. A modern experiment showing that the stigmatisation of St. Francis was probably an extreme case of this phenomenon.

Three striking analogies between the mechanism of auto-suggestion and the methods of prayer practised by the saints and mystics.

Recalling our previous conclusion as to the relation of Divine activity to the reign of law, we note that auto-suggestion is merely a name for the psychological mechanism by which an idea is appropriated by the subconscious-quite apart from its truth or falsehood. If God exists, it does not matter by what name we call the psychological mechanism by which we appropriate a true idea of Him. Also, if God is ‘the Beyond that is also Within', it is only from within that we can know Him; we should therefore expect communion with Him to take place in accordance with the normal laws governing the internal operation of the mind.

Two essential differences between the method of M. Coup; and those of the mystics.

(1) In the system of M. Coue the idea is spontaneously chosen, and that without any regard to its truth. In Prayer the idea of God is given; and it is accepted because it is conceived to be the Truth.

(2) Prayer is an ascent of the mind to that which is more real than

itself; auto-suggestion is a submission of the mind to an idea which is its own creation. The one is the inspiration of contact with a personality greater than the self; the other is of the nature of ‘dope'.

Prayer and the development of individuality.

A misgiving. May not some traditional methods of devotion tend in practice to confuse these distinctions-with the result that prayer may degenerate into something little better than pious auto-suggestion? The test of true prayer.

TELEPATHY AND INTERCESSION

Man is a social animal; if, therefore, petitionary prayer of any kind is justified, it must be concerned with the needs of others as well as with one's own.

But does it do them any good? There is evidence that it does. This granted, light may possibly be thrown on the way in which it works by the obscure phenomenon known as ‘telepathy'.

Psychic influence appears to be exercised by one mind on another (1) where persons are actually present, (2) more rarely, at a distance.

But prayer for others is in no sense an attempt to practise telepathy, much less hypnosis at long range; it is addressed to God. Yet it may well be that, when a mind is raised above its normal level through the act of communion with the Divine, God uses any latent psychic powers of that mind to fulfil His own purposes. If He does this, we should expect these powers to operate in accordance with the laws (at present very little known) of telepathy.

Caution against the tendency to think of God as a benevolent third-party, wholly external both to him who prays and to him for whom prayer is made. A ‘myth' about what happens wheat we pray for others.

In Him all live and move and have their being; in prayer this fact is consciously realised.

VISION AND POWER

From the psychological fact that an idea, once accepted into the depths of the subconscious, produces remarkable results, we deduce the vital importance of a right conception of God.

The harm done by Idolatry, that is to say, by the setting up before the mind's eye of a conception of God which is not the highest. Christians have often, in effect, been guilty of this by not being sufficiently thoroughgoing in thinking of God in terms of Christ.

But if God is conceived of in terms of Christ, Psychology suggests a mechanism by which the Vision of such a God, appropriated in prayer, may be transformed into Power-perhaps with world-shaking results.

If Vision is to inspire to high achievement, there is need, on psychological grounds, of a dynamic symbol which can serve as a rallying standard. Such a standard we have in the Cross of Christ.

Chapter 9

RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

THE REIGN OF LAW

MUCH illumination, and also much confusion, in regard to Religion and Ethics has resulted from recent developments in Psychology. The confusion has resulted, always and necessarily, whenever it is not clearly realised that it is futile to discuss the subject of the relation of Psychology and Religion until and unless one has-provisionally at any rate-made up one's mind whether or no the Power behind the Universe is conscious or unconscious, alive or dead. In other words, it is pure waste of time to ask the meaning of the psychological data in religious experience or belief unless one has first answered the question whether, apart from these data, the existence of God is a probable or an improbable hypothesis.

If, on other grounds, we have decided that there is no God, then obviously the Psychology of Religion becomes nothing more or less than the study of the origin, the quaint variations, the mechanism and the effects, of the human delusion that a God or gods exist. If on the other hand we have, at any rate provisionally, decided that the Ultimate Reality is alive and conscious, then we may expect that a scientific study of the psychological aspect of the reactions of man to the Infinite will be extremely fruitful of results. In particular, it should do much to provide criteria which will help us to distinguish the element of truth from that admixture of delusion which is only what we should expect to find in the religious, as in the scientific or the political, conceptions of the human mind in their early stages.

For reasons such as those briefly summarised in the earlier chapters of this volume, I hold that the balance of probability to put it at its lowest-is on the side of the hypothesis that Ultimate Reality is of the nature of Conscious Life. In that case the problem of the bearing on Religion of the New Psychology raises again the old question of the relation of the Divine activity to the reign of law, first clearly posed when Newton displayed the mechanism of the heavenly spheres, and raised in a still more acute form when Darwin formulated the Law of Evolution.

The laws of Psychology, so far as they are ascertained or ascertainable, are laws of Nature; and, if we regard the laws of Astronomy and Biology as formulae descriptive of the mechanism by and through which the Divine activity finds self expression, it cannot be otherwise with the laws of Psychology. Also, if there are laws which govern the working of the human mind, then we should expect that, if there be any apprehension of the Divine by the human mind, it will be in accordance with those laws.

When Darwin published his Origin of Species there were many who saw in it the death-blow both to Religion and Morality. It seemed to put a blind mechanical abstraction called Evolution on the throne of God, and to substitute the Struggle for Existence for the Law of Love. In an earlier chapter I have shewn the fallacy of this deduction. What Darwin had discovered was neither the nature of life nor the goal of its endeavour, but the road by which it had travelled. And his discovery illuminates, not so much the character or the purpose of the Power behind the Universe, as the mechanism by and through which He (or It) works. It is so with the New Psychology. This is a branch of Science; it is not a metaphysic. For the student of Religion it will soon, I believe, be recognised as the most important of the sciences-for if salvation is of souls, a science that throws light on the mechanism of human thought and human conduct cannot but be of vital interest to practical religion. Again, those who wish to study the various conceptions which humanity has entertained as to the nature of God, or to estimate the practical value of different codes of morals, may find the facts which Psychology brings to light, and the laws which it can formulate, to be relatively more important than those given by any other science; but that is all. No more than Astronomy or Biology does Psychology in itself provide either a philosophy of the Universe or a criterion of moral values (p. 342 ff.).

Primitive religion looks for evidence of Divine action mainly in the abnormal and the inexplicable, in the comet or the thunderbolt rather than in the sunrise or the growing blade-with the result that the narrow margin left for the recognition of any specifically Divine activity at all shrinks day by day with every advance of human knowledge. No small part of human progress has consisted in getting away from the conception of the Divine as essentially the irrational. The Greek philosophers achieved this along the line of the pure intellect; they saw the Universe as the expression of Reason. The Hebrew prophets did the same thing, but along another line; for them the idea of the ‘holy' originally the awe-inspiring quality in irrational taboo was transmuted till it became the characteristic symbol of the ethically sublime. In our own time it is Science that is ever forcing men to complete the work which the Greek and the Hebrew began. Science is the great cleanser of human thinking; it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

When, however, one speaks of recent psychology as an extension to the sphere of the human mind of the scientific conception of the reign of law, there are two limiting considerations which must be borne in mind.

(1) Much attention has been given of late to an analysis of the conception of law as used by Science. It is no longer supposed that the great generalisations of Physics, Astronomy and Chemistry have the same kind of necessity as the deductions of pure Mathematics. The ‘Laws of Nature ' are no longer regarded as eternal principles necessarily inherent in the nature of Reality; they are rather man-made descriptions. A Law may perhaps be defined as ‘a formula of limited degree of complexity',[1- See the interesting discussion by Air. Bertrand Russell in a recent reprint of Lange's History of Materialism, p. xiii ff. (Kegan Paul, 1925.)] which describes in a conveniently summary way uniformities of sequence and coexistence that observation has detected, and at the same time forms a coherent system with all other similar' formulae '. Since these laws enable us to predict occurrences, we have a security that they have a real correspondence with the structure of Reality. But the recent supersession of the Newtonian Law of Gravitation-‘the most spectacular' demonstration of the reign of law-has advertised to the world at large, what was already known to thinkers, viz. that the universal validity of all the laws known to Science is limited by the fact that the observations on which they are based are, in the last resort, approximations. The margin of error is perpetually being reduced by improved observation, with the result that it is found sometimes that the law as previously stated holds good only up to a certain point, sometimes that a new law is required to describe the facts. Now Psychology is the youngest of the sciences; it follows that the laws which it has so far formulated are likely to be provisional to an extent that does not hold of the older sciences.

(2) The - second consideration, though theoretically of universal application, is one which in practice affects Psychology more than any other branch of Science. Only so far as facts are identical in character can they be regarded as instances of a general law. Law is based upon classification; but classification, as we have already seen (p. 83 ff.), is a method of handling a plurality of things by the simple device of ignoring their individuality. Where, as in Psychology, individuality is an important feature of the subject matter studied, this limitation of the scientific method of knowledge is at its maximum. It follows, therefore, that anything like a complete explanation of the working of the human mind in terms of law is from the nature of the case impossible. If this limitation is not constantly borne in mind, the application by Psychology of the scientific concept of law to the understanding of the human mind may lead rather to misunderstanding. One such misunderstanding is the widespread idea that the possibility of a successful application of the concept of law to the workings of the human mind entails the denial of Freewill. What, however, is meant by Freewill except the assertion that spontaneous individuality exists? Individuality, we have seen (p. 88), can be perceived in the concrete instance: but, since it eludes classification, it must also elude explanation in terms of law. There is, therefore, always something in any human personality that cannot in this sense be ‘explained'.

Since neither Psychology nor Religion can admit that any conscious human activity is outside its sphere, the points of contact between them are far too numerous to be dealt with in a single chapter. But the purpose of this book is not so much to solve particular problems, as to determine the general principles involved in a proper correlation of Religion with Science. It will, therefore, suffice if I illustrate these principles by an examination of three propositions which belong to the commonplace of discussion on this subject: viz. that the idea of God is a ‘projection ', that prayer is a form of auto-suggestion, and that prayer for others works by telepathy. It will appear, if I mistake not, that in each of these propositions there is an element of truth and an element of error. The way will then be clear to outline briefly some considerations of a more positive character.

PROJECTION AND THE IDEA OF GOD 1

1 A few paragraphs and some of the arguments in this subsection are adapted from a paper, treating the same subject at greater length, but with a slightly different orientation, read by me to the Seventh International Congress of Psychology (192:3), and printed in their proceedings. (Cambridge University Press, 1924.) In some points I have modified views there expressed.

It is often said that belief in God is to be explained as a ‘projection ' upon the Universe of the child's craving for a parent's protection, or of its passionate yearning for affection, surviving in the adult in a ‘repressed' form; and that therefore Religion is a symptom that the person who exhibits it is suffering more or less acutely from a psycho-neurosis.

In support of this hypothesis evidence can be adduced from the lives of the Saints and the materials collected in books like William James' famous Varieties of Religious Experience. Phenomena here abound which are among the recognised symptoms of psycho-neurosis, such as a ‘masochistic' delight in suffering, a preoccupation with inward states of feeling indicative of extreme 'introversion', a type of straining egoism which suggests a ‘psychic over-compensation ' for an ‘inferiority complex '.

Candidly, I cannot help feeling that many of these people would have been much the better for a course of treatment on psychotherapeutic lines. But the result of such treatment, I feel sure, would have been, not to cure them of Religion, but to give their religion a much saner and more healthy turn. At this point, however, it is again of the first importance for the reader clearly to recognise the assumptions, whether conscious or subconscious, which he is making in regard to the Universe. If he starts with the assumption that there is no God, then the widespread delusion to the contrary will be one of the things which he may hope to explain by the study of these phenomena. But if on other grounds he is inclined to believe that God exists, he will be the more confirmed in that belief by the discovery that it is just those perverse, morbid and unworthy elements in human Religion--that have made Religion seem the source of so much evil--which are most easily explicable as pathological in origin.

At any rate, we must beware of ruling out of court every activity in which any person of the neurotic temper has excelled. If we begin doing that, we cannot stop short at Religion. There is a proverbial saying, Genius is akin to madness; and very many men of genius have shown signs of being to some extent neurotic. If to admit that is to throw discredit on all their work, a clean sweep will be made, not only of most of the Poetry, Art and Architecture of the world, but also of much scientific discovery and mechanical invention. This association of genius with psycho-neurosis is, I believe, explicable.

(1) Genius is essentially the capacity to perceive things which escape the notice of the average man; that means that it involves a more than ordinary sensitiveness to impressions. A razor is more easily notched than an axe, and enhanced sensitiveness cannot but be accompanied by increased liability to injury. The potential genius, then, even if exposed to no more than the ordinary risks in early life, may easily sustain psychological injury from 'traumata' which hardly affect a more ordinary child, and may thus become to some extent psycho-neurotic. When, then, genius and psycho-neurosis coexist, the genius is not the effect of the neurosis; they are parallel effects of a more than ordinary sensibility to impressions.

(2) A psycho-neurosis is always an element of at least potential weakness; but, as Adler has shown,[1 .The Neurotic Constitution, passim, E.T. (Moffat Yard and Kegan Paul, 1917.) ] the effort of the psyche to over-compensate for a subconscious feeling of inferiority often leads the individual to concentrate exceptional energy upon some pursuit for which he has a natural aptitude. Given the requisite ability, this effort may lead to outstanding achievement in that particular field. This is the psychological basis for the element of truth in the definition of genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains '. Plato long ago pointed out that perfect health is in practice often a bar to intellectual achievement. A vigorous healthy young man is usually distracted by too many other interests; some physical disability, ‘the bridle of Theages ', is generally needed, he thought, to turn men to philosophy. Perhaps the same thing applies to perfect psychic health.

The fact, then, that in the history of Religion, genius and neurosis are sometimes found together, is neither more nor less significant than is the same thing when it occurs in persons of artistic or scientific gifts. But in the case of Religion there have been, I suggest, other influences at work. First, the picture of Hell-fire vividly presented to an imaginative and hypersensitive child would in itself suffice to produce a psychological trauma. And so long as European thought was dominated by this conception, the religion of maturity would intensify the injury. Secondly, much of the evidence comes from the cloister; but the life of tile cloister, especially in the Middle Ages,[1.- But the sadistic cruelty, senseless treacheries, and sexual extravagances of so many persons of high position, and the wide prevalence of phenomena of dissociation like witchcraft and demon-possession suggest the conclusion that neurosis was far more prevalent among sinners than saints. Indeed, in view of the violence and brutality of the times, the wonder is that any one could have escaped some serious psychological trauma in early life. ] was in some of its features admirably adapted to enhance neurotic tendencies already existing in the individual, and therefore to elicit in an exaggerated form the symptoms which are their normal expression. But this consideration is double-edged. The austerities endured, and the lives lived year after year by some of the saints, were enough to kill any ordinary person in six months. Somehow and somewhence these people must have secured some special enhancement of vitality; and this at least suggests the possibility that in Religion itself there is a health-creating power which may go some way to counteract a psycho-neurosis which has originated from some other cause.

Pursuing this suggestion, we soon come across evidence which points towards the conclusion that Religion, so far from being a pathological symptom, is psychologically considered a phenomenon characteristic; not of disease, but of health.

(1) Perhaps the most interesting religious phenomenon investigated by James and Starbuck is that of conversion. Now conversion, whatever we may think of its religious significance, is from the psychological standpoint the successful resolution of a state of inner conflict. It is a movement within the personality from a condition of ‘dissociation ' in the direction of ‘integration '. That is to say, conversion, from the psychological aspect, is not a disease symptom but a movement towards restored health. To this view it will, perhaps, be objected that an inner conflict within the personality is sometimes brought to an end, not by cure, but by a complete identification of the self with some fantasy, and that the convert's idea that he is a child of God may be a fantasy of this character. To this objection my reply would be that in ordinary medical practice such. complete surrender of the self to a fantasy is usually what is called a ‘defensive neurosis ', that is, a device of the subconscious mind of the patient to enable him to escape finally from the difficulties and toils of real life. I frankly concede that this explanation may well apply to certain individuals who fly to the cloister to escape the temptations and struggles of life in the world. But a theory which proposes to explain a phenomenon must be capable of explaining it where it appears in its most pronounced form; and this theory fails to explain the phenomenon of Religion in some of its most striking cases, e.g. the Apostle Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, John Wesley, or General Booth. These men, as a result of conversion, entered upon a life of action which they saw from the first must increase beyond measure any hardships and difficulties they would otherwise have had to meet. I am personally acquainted with religious leaders at the present day who display a power of initiative, organisation, concentrated purpose, and prolonged mental and physical effort, equal if not superior to that of the great statesmen or commercial magnates of our time. The idea that such a man, for example, as Dr. J. R. Mott, the founder of the World Student Christian Movement, is one who has fled to fantasy as a refuge from reality, will be greeted with derision by those who know him.

(2) The functioning of an organism in a healthy state and its functioning when diseased are not the same thing.[1- I owe this point to a lecture by my friend, Br. William Brown. ]

Where the body is concerned, this distinction is recognised as so vital that Physiology and Pathology are classed as separate sciences. And, if we regard Psychology (as the new school does) as an extension of Biology, we are bound to recognise an analogous distinction between Normal and Pathological Psychology. Physiology and Pathology are always throwing light on one another, and it must be the same with Normal and Abnormal Psychology; but their interaction will cease to be beneficial the moment it is forgotten that the functioning of an organism when diseased is not the same as its functioning when healthy, and that therefore conclusions which may be suggested by the psychology of abnormal cases do not necessarily and without qualification hold good of normal persons.

The importance of this consideration in regard to Religion is this. The great mass of healthy-minded persons do not often talk about, still less put in writing, their religious experiences. The people who write spiritual autobiographies - even when, like Newman, they are driven to it by external circumstances-are usually introspective above the average; often they are of the type who are unhealthily interested in their inner state. But this means that the evidence which the psychologist has available for his studies has been, as it were, put through a sieve; the great mass of the material available for study comes either from the self-revelations of the more introverted, and even neurotic, of religious people, or else from the reports of the medical practitioner who is dealing with patients ex hypothesi abnormal. To concentrate attention on the neurotic element which may be detected in these cases is to mistake the circumference for the centre. Normally, Religion is a force which makes for sanity and happiness, as well as for morality, in the life both of the individual and of the community.

In this connexion I may quote a remark made to me by a continental psychologist of world-fame to the effect that ‘as a result of his therapeutical practice he had come to the conclusion that for complete psychological health mankind requires, either a religion, or some substitute for Religion which has not yet been discovered'. And he obviously regretted that he himself did not intellectually see his way clear to either alternative. I may also refer to an illuminating suggestion worked out by my friend Dr. J. A. Hadfield.[1 - Psychology and Morals, chs. viii.-xiii. (Methuen, 1923.) Also, in the ‘Conference' number of the Modern Churchman, September 1914. (Blackwell.) ]

That ‘urge to completeness ', he argues, which on the physical side of the organism expresses itself in growth, in the healing of wounds and even (in the lower types of organism) in the renewal of lost limbs, has a psychological counterpart. The ' completeness ' towards which the psychological urge is reaching includes absence of conflict within the self and a felt harmony of the individual both with his social environment and with the Universe at large. This harmony, as a matter of fact, can only be attained by the building up of an ethical personality in which the instincts are duly sublimated and subordinated to a dominant ideal. But in so far as the ‘urge to completeness ' demands harmony with the whole environment, i.e. with the Universe, it forms the psychological basis of Religion. It is the subjective need for which a true religion provides the objective satisfaction. On this theory Religion is seen to be eminently ‘natural ' to man; and the need for it-though in pathological subjects it may take a pathological form-is in itself an evidence of vital energy in the individual. The theory also points to there being a psychological verification of St. Augustine's famous saying, ‘Thou didst make us for Thyself; and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee '.

(3) If Religion originates in psycho-neurosis, we ought to be able to discover some kind of relation between the quality of a man's religious conviction and the extent of his neurosis. The intensity of a religious, as of any other, conviction might, in itself, be explained in psycho-neurotic terms; but its quality is a different matter. Putting it in another way, fanaticism may well be a pathological symptom; insight is not. In almost every asylum there is some one who is quite convinced that he is the Messiah; so was Jesus Christ-but that is the end of the resemblance between them.

This somewhat tedious controversy about religion and psychoneurosis has led many to overlook the important element of truth in the statement that the idea of God is a ‘projection'. The Universe is a thing to be lived in, as well as an object of scientific study. Hence, as I have already (p. 67) had occasion to insist, we cannot avoid an emotional reaction towards Reality as well as an intellectual. The important thing is to make sure that in both cases our reaction is the right one, that is, the one most appropriate to the actual character of Reality. To ascertain the intellectual reaction most appropriate is the business of Science and Philosophy; the securing of the appropriate emotional reaction is more particularly the concern of Religion.

Between the intellectual and emotional reactions there is an analogy-which I think has been commonly overlooked. Understanding, in the scientific sense, depends on seeing a relation between a phenomenon newly observed and others previously observed. That is to say, intellectual understanding necessitates the constant reference of new facts to what I may call ‘intellectual complexes ' which are the result of previous experience. Now emotional understanding works in a not dissimilar way. In everyday life we all of us 'sense' hostility, friendliness and the like, in other persons by an instinctive reference to the emotional reactions which their presence excites; these reactions depend on ‘feeling-complexes ' born of past experience. In much the same way, I suggest, our emotional reaction to Reality must be to a large extent determined by already existent ‘feeling complexes'. Our psychic constitution is such that we normally react along the line of some channel worn, so to speak, by previous emotional experience. Now, if the Power behind things can, as I have argued, be properly conceived of as a Living God-of whom Christ is the portrait-then the only channel at all adequate for the right direction of the emotional reaction of man to God is that worn by the child's experience of its parents. And clearly, the better the parents the less inadequate the channel.

Now where a child has sensible and good parents, its emotional reaction towards them is healthy; its psychological attitude towards them is then what is sometimes technically expressed by the word ‘sentiment' rather than ‘complex'.[1- On the distinction between a healthy 'sentiment' and a neurotic ‘complex ', see J. A. Hadfield, Psychology and Morals, p. 20 ff. (Methuen, 1923.)

But grave faults in character in one or both of the parents, or grave errors in their treatment of the child, frequently impart to the relation between parent and child a pathological character; the child, in the technical phrase, grows up with a ‘father-complex ' or (and) a ‘mother-complex '. Where this is the case, a neurotic element in his or her religion would seem to be almost inevitable. Where, however, the relation between the child and its parents has been thoroughly healthy, an emotional channel has been worn, a ‘sentiment' has grown up, on the lines of which a sound and healthy emotional reaction towards God may be developed. When Christ told man to think of, and feel towards, God as ‘your heavenly Father', He was in effect inviting them to ‘project' this ‘father-sentiment ' upon the Universe; but it was the healthy ‘sentiment' and not the pathological ‘complex ' that He meant.

‘Our Father' ;--among fighting races social ideals tend to an overemphasis on strength and justice as the characteristic virtues of the male, on tenderness as the special virtue of the female. The ideal character must obviously be a harmony of all these virtues; and it is noteworthy that they are all found completely harmonised in the Christ. He, then, can suffice to be our portrait of the Divine Father. But in epochs when the Gospels could be read by few, but when the Last Judgment, with Christ on the Judgment Throne terrifically pictured on stone or glass, was always before men's eyes, it was perhaps impossible to preserve the element of tenderness in the Divine without adoring Mary also as the Queen of Heaven.

AUTO-SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

Through the fame of M. Coue', auto-suggestion has become a household word. But his theoretical account of the process, most fully expounded by his disciple Baudouin,1-(1 Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion, E.T. (Allen and Unwin, 1920.)differs more in balance of emphasis than in fundamental conception from the theory of hypnotic suggestion previously maintained by Prof. McDougall 2-(2 Cf. Art. " Hypnotism " in Encyclopedia Britannica.) and other authorities. These hold that in hypnotic suggestion there is no magic influence, there is no subtle fluid passing from the physician to the patient, there is no imposition of superior will-power. What happens is this. The physician presents an idea to the patient's mind at a time and under conditions when the patient will accept it without question and without reserve. The critical faculty, the resistive impulse, is temporally inhibited, with the result that the idea penetrates right down into the subconscious,3-( I use the word ‘sub-conscious ' rather than ‘unconscious ' or ‘foreconscious', as being less definitely associated with any particular theory of its nature. Some word is required to describe that part of the mind which happens for the time being to be outside the field of full consciousness. But no hard-and-fast line can be drawn. Most of what is in the subconscious can on occasion come into the field of consciousness, while anything in the conscious mind may be withdrawn from consciousness.) and then begins to work. But the extent to which the idea 'works' depends, not on any magic gift in the physician, but on the receptivity of the patient, that is, on the degree to which the suggestion has been accepted.

The Baudouin-Coue' theory says that this means, in effect, that all suggestion is in the last resort autosuggestion; for to say that a suggestion proceeding from the physician operates only as and when accepted by the patient is virtually to say that it operates as and when it becomes an auto-suggestion. Accordingly, in this view, all that is required is to teach the patient how to practise auto-suggestion, that is, how to present the right idea to his own mind under the conditions favourable to maximum receptivity. And it is claimed that, as a matter of experience, in cases where the patient has learnt the lesson, cures are effected more rapidly and more thoroughly by auto-suggestion than where the physician continues himself to employ hetero-suggestion.

The value of auto-suggestion as a therapeutic method, or the possible dangers attending its indiscriminate use, are matters on which I am not competent to pronounce. I have mentioned M. Coue' solely because through him public interest has been excited in phenomena the existence of which was previously known only to specialists, and of which the real nature is still very imperfectly understood. But however obscure the nature of the phenomena, and however difficult the question of the right limits of the use of suggestion in medicine, it appears to be an established fact that human beings, though to a very variable degree, are ‘suggestible '. They are capable of accepting an idea in the depths of the subconscious, and an idea once so accepted by the subconscious works-setting up, as it were, a kind of fermentation which may result, not merely in mental and nervous, but even in physical, changes.

A striking experiment is recorded in The Lancet., 1-(1 ° The Influence of Hypnotic Suggestion on Inflammatory Conditions', J. A. Hadfield, The Lancet, November 3, 1917.)In the presence of two other medical men, the experimenter told a hypnotised subject that he was about to be touched by a red-hot iron; one of the other doctors, as previously arranged, then put his finger gently on the subject's arm. He cried out as if touched by a hot iron; the arm was bandaged and the bandage sealed. Next day the bandage was removed, and on the spot touched was found a small blister of the same size and nature as one subsequently produced on the same subject by an actual touch of hot iron. It would seem that during the night the subconscious mind of the patient, convinced that an actual burn had been inflicted, had set in motion the complicated train of operations in blood-vessels and tissues which would have been the natural reaction of the organism to an actual physical burn. Persons as susceptible to suggestion as this one are extremely rare; but I have quoted the case in order to put side by side with it the still more remarkable, but well attested, story of St. Francis of Assisi, who, after a long period of meditation on the Passion of Our Lord culminating in a vision of a crucified cherub, was found to have imprinted on his hands and feet dark blister-like protrusions corresponding to the wounds of Christ. This experience of St. Francis and other incidents of a similar character seem to bear out the contention that auto-suggestion may be as powerful as, if not even more powerful than, heterosuggestion; it also fits in with the theory that the principal agent in suggestion is the patient's own acceptance of the idea suggested, not some mysterious influence proceeding from the physician. Indeed it would seem as if the main law governing the operation of auto-suggestion might be expressed in the formula ‘according to thy faith be it done unto thee '. This is a discovery which raises questions of a far-reaching character both for Philosophy and Religion: for if under certain circumstances an idea-an entity purely mental can directly initiate changes in the material sphere, we seem to catch a fleeting glimpse of mind in the act of creating.

We may now proceed to ask, What is the exact relation between the method of auto-suggestion as recommended by M. Coue' and the Christian practice of prayer? M. Baudouin lays stress on three empirical generalisations.

(1) The power of an idea to work is largely dependent on its emotional associations. A mere intellectual concept, unless there is connected with it some feeling like hope, fear, attraction or repulsion, will produce little or no elect. So the saints have always held that mere intellectual belief about God is of small value; the faith which makes prayer effective must be grounded in love.

(2) Coue' holds that a general suggestion, such as ‘Day by day, in all respects, I am getting better and better', is more potent than particular suggestions which concentrate attention on the details of the patient's ailment. Care is taken, however, to give him a preliminary suggestion, mentioning in detail the main forms and conditions of physical and mental health, so that the ‘general suggestion ' which follows is actually to the patient's mind a kind of summarising formula full of concrete content, not a mere abstract phrase. Similarly in prayer the saints have deprecated too great concentration on points of detail, and recommended concentration on comprehensive ideas such as the love of God or His saving power; but this will generally follow confession of particular sins and will include mention of particular needs.

(3) A preliminary quiescence of the whole mind is required, leading up to a concentration of attention on a single idea. But this concentration is effective in proportion as the patient becomes able to maintain it with a minimum of voluntary effort. Baudouin points out the resemblance between this state of mind and that arrived at by some of the Indian methods of Yoga. He does not point out its resemblance to a state of mind such as that recommended as a preliminary to devotion by some of the Christian mystics; but consider this by St. Peter of Alcantara.

In meditation let the person rouse himself from things temporal, and let him collect himself within himself-that is to say, within the very centre of his soul, where lies impressed the very image of God. Here let him hearken to the voice of God as though speaking to him from on high, yet present in his soul, as though there were no other in the world save God and himself.'

1. Quoted in !1 Little Book of Life and Death, p. 128 (E. Waterhouse, (Methuen.)

We notice that the points of contact between prayer and autosuggestion are at their maximum in meditation and the ‘prayer of quiet', that is, when prayer takes on its highest and most characteristically Christian form and has moved furthest from the primitive pagan conception of inducing the gods to do man's will.2-(On the fundamental antithesis between the Christian and Pagan conceptions of Prayer, cf. A. L. Lilley, Prayer in Christian Theology, pp. 1-10. (Student Christian Movement, 1925.)

Our theory of the relation of the Divine activity to the reign of law in Nature could hardly be submitted to a more crucial test. Clearly there is some relation between the laws of human Psychology such as those above described and that communion with God of which the saints speak-with its resultant enhancement of mental and spiritual energy, and often of physical endurance as well. Are we, then, to say that prayer is auto-suggestion-and nothing more?

Once again I must point out that the answer we give to this question will depend entirely upon the answer we give to the prior question, Does God exist? If there is no God, then, of course, prayer is based upon illusion. But if God does exist, does it matter what name we give to the psychological mechanism by means of which the belief that He exists-and all that it involves-comes to be accepted below the merely surface consciousness in the inmost depths of my being? Suppose the belief to be true; then, once accepted into the subconscious, it will 'work' and will produce results in thought and action; and the results will surely be good. When to the psychological mechanism of such acceptance the name ‘auto-suggestion ' is given, the question of the truth or falsehood of the idea accepted is simply left unraised. But he who prays has raised that question, and has answered that the idea is true. Prayer is-or at least includes-the absolute surrender of the self, subconscious as well as conscious, to an idea-the idea of God as a present, personal, spiritual Being. But it is the truth of the idea, not the mechanism of its acceptance, that makes it to be prayer.

There is a further consideration. Suppose God to be an infinite, omnipresent, conscious Being likely to wish for some kind of personal converse with His little children according to the capacity of their powers of recognition. If God is ‘the Beyond that is also Within ', it is only from within that we can know Him. How otherwise, then, should we expect Him to communicate with finite minds if not in accordance with the laws which govern the internal operations of those minds? A human friend I can know by sight and touch, but from the nature of the case I can never see or touch the Infinite, the All Pervading. What must here correspond to the external vision of my friend is my idea of God, the thought of Him that I entertain. And if God should be properly conceived as Creative Love, then it is the qualitative aspect of my conception of Him that is most important; and that means that He can only communicate Himself to me if my 'idea' of Him is such as to educe an appropriate emotional response. Again, only if I surrender myself completely to this idea, so that it possesses my subconscious as well as my conscious mind, can I really appropriate it. For only so does it cease to be mere idea and become part of my actual life. Life, we have seen, cannot be intellectually understood; but it can be appreciated by life of a similar quality (p. 105). The Infinite Life, then, can reveal Himself to those within whom life similar in quality to His own has begun to be generated. This involves a submission of the mind to an idea of God; but it is an aspiring submission to a living idea.

The methods of auto-suggestion, considered from a purely psychological point of view, are very like those advocated by the Mystics as preliminary to the ‘prayer of quiet'. But these are only methods. Between M. Coue' and the Mystics there are two essential differences.

(1) In the system of M. Coue' the idea selected for concentration is spontaneously chosen, whether by the patient himself or his physician; and it is selected without any special regard to its truth or falsehood. In prayer the idea of God is not chosen but given, and it is accepted because it is felt to stand for ultimate truth.

(2) Prayer is ascensio mentis ad deem, a flight upwards, an offering of the mind to that which is more—real than the self; auto-suggestion is a swoop downwards, a submission of the mind to an idea which is a creature of its own.1 1 It may be that he who prays has achieved an idea of God as a result of long thought and inquiry, which is slightly different from the idea entertained by those around him, and is, in that sense, his own idea. But even so, he holds it, not because it is his idea, but because he is convinced that it is the true idea.)

Prayer brings the inspiration which comes from contact with a personality greater than one's own; auto-suggestion in the last resort is of the nature of ‘dope '.

If Life is a principle of individuation (p. 90), the higher the life the richer will be its individuality. The ideal life, therefore, must not be thought of as an exact reproduction of a standard pattern; even the imitation of Christ will be bad, if conceived mechanically. Standardisation is for machinery, not for souls; and what would be perfection in a billiard ball (p. 130) is futility in a saint. This fact has a bearing, which I think has not been pointed out before, on the ideal and the methods of prayer. Desires vary with the individual; reason, so far as it functions correctly, is the same for all men. Character is individualised life, considered from the standpoint of its quality; but both the test and expression of the quality of a personality are to be seen in its dominant desires. Now no desire is ever quite the same after it has been offered up before God in prayer; a desire which has found expression in prayer is inevitably purified and elevated. Prayer, therefore, is the training ground for character; we make it difficult for God to purify our desires unless we submit them to Him. But to climb a ladder we must begin at the bottom rung; and we must pray for the things of which we really feel our need, as well as for the things which we think, or know, we ought to want saying not only ‘Thy will be done', but also, ‘give us this day our daily bread '. Morality, say the psychologists (cf. Appendix II.), is best achieved, not by crushing, but by 'sublimating' natural instincts. Just so, if God's aim is to develop individuality, rather than to lop it down to a standard pattern, our actual desires are the material He needs to work upon.

This last consideration is obviously one of the first importance in regard to the much-discussed question of the petitionary element in prayer. But to work that point out here would entail too long a digression. I feel, however, impelled to utter a misgiving. There is,I suspect, something seriously at fault in much of the traditional teaching and practice in regard to methods of devotion. Only under exceptional circumstances can the human mind remain for any long time on the mountain-tops of aspiration, vision or endeavour. A danger lies here. Prayer too long continued, especially if mechanical repetitions and the drill of a devotional system be invoked to sustain it, may easily and insensibly slip down to the level of mere auto suggestion. It may even become a ' pious habit ' of mental vacuity which may blunt the edge of understanding, quench initiative, dull the moral sense.

That hypothesis, at least, would explain why it has so often happened that those who have been the first to stone the prophets have been among the most devout. It would explain, too, the intellectual and moral sterility of so many of the best-intentioned supporters of organised religion. True prayer must be that which succeeds in being (what all prayer aspires to be) a realised contact with Creative Spirit-the Spirit that makes all things new. If so, the test in one's own life whether prayer is really prayer, or merely pious auto suggestion, will be the extent to which it inspires to bold and constructive action and to moral and intellectual initiative.

TELEPATHY AND INTERCESSION 1

1 This subsection is a rewriting of part of the paper, ' Creative Prayer', published in the Conference number of The Modern Churchman, 1924.

Man is an animal-capable, so Christ taught, of becoming a son of God. Man is a herd animal; and as this animal-growing in that love of God and that love of man which naturally expresses itself in prayer and active service-comes nearer to being a son of God, the herd is not left behind; it is slowly transformed into a consciously God-indwelt society, it becomes the Kingdom of God on earth. Prayer, in its mechanism, may be likened to autosuggestion, but in its essence it is a right orientation of the soul towards God. Conceive God as our Heavenly Father, and it is unnatural not to lay before Him our own hopes and needs, our interests or our fears. Petitionary prayer, then, is the expression of a sound instinct so long as we regard it, not as a means of extorting something from a grudging Deity, but as the spontaneous expression to our Father of wants which we deeply feel, and which it would be hypocrisy to pretend that we did not. These we submit to God, not because we distrust His goodness or desire to bend His will to ours, but because He is our friend. Similarly it would be unnatural not to submit to God the needs of others, and our hopes and fears on their behalf. If our own soul's life is developing in the right direction, we know that we shall find ourselves growing in the capacity of loving our neighbour as ourselves. If, then, we do not find ourselves desiring to pray for others-in the same sense and in the same way as we pray for ourselves-that surely is a symptom that we are not travelling in the right direction.

But, we go on to ask, Does intercessory prayer really benefit the persons prayed for? Is anything actually effected by it?

That prayer for others has, as a matter of fact, been followed in point of time by benefit to the persons prayed for, is a conclusion for which can be adduced a large amount of weighty testimony. But that the prayer is the cause of the benefit, that in these cases post hoc is equivalent to propter hoc, is a matter not easy to establish on evidence which is, scientifically speaking, adequate; especially as it is not difficult to produce negative instances of individuals who have been prayed for fervently by their well-wishers without any obvious benefit resulting. Nevertheless, the testimony of the saints-using the term ‘saint' to include that great multitude of the uncanonised whose real goodness based on common sense gives their opinion no less weight than that of some among those officially canonised cannot be ignored; and I will venture to assume that there is evidence that intercessory prayer has-at any rate in some cases and under some conditions-brought benefit to persons on whose behalf it was offered. On that assumption, I ask the question, If so, how and why?

To this question I do not profess to have any answer which I should care to put forward as a considered philosophy of the subject. But I will outline, for what it may be worth, the hypothesis-or perhaps instead of ‘hypothesis ' I should rather say the ‘imaginative picture '-which at the moment presents itself as plausible to my own mind.

(1) I cannot help thinking that each one of us is a centre of a kind of psychic radio-activity, which may be either baneful or beneficial to others. That such influence operates upon persons actually present for the time being is a matter of everyday experience. There are people whose mere presence in a room promotes cheerfulness; there are others who are a dead weight of depression; while others have the baleful gift of producing an atmosphere of nervous excitability and tension. Again, the difference between the effect upon an audience of one actor or another playing the same part, or of two different singers giving the same song, is not to be accounted for merely by superiority in technique or physical gifts.-1. The most remarkable example of this power of creating ‘atmosphere ' (in this case, one of peace) among persons I have met is Sadhu Sundar Singh and I connect this with the fact that he spends so much of his life in prayer.

(2) There is a good deal of evidence that communication between one mind and another is possible without visible or audible means, and even over a considerable distance of space. To this phenomenon—call it ‘influence ', if ' communication ' seems too definite a word-the name 'telepathy' has been given. Some of my scientific friends, I candidly admit, tell me that they are not quite convinced that telepathy has yet been proved. Nevertheless, with all due respect to their judgement, I do regard it as proved, for this reason. Much of the evidence submitted to establish the possibility of communication with departed spirits is of such nature that, as it seems to me, one is forced to choose between one of two hypotheses-either communication is possible with the spirits of the departed, or there is such a thing as telepathic communication between living minds. Since, then, there is very respectable evidence for telepathic communication between the living, quite apart from that which would also fit in with the spiritualist hypothesis, the existence of evidence explicable on either view seems to me to weight the balance in favour of the hypothesis of

telepathy. Having, however, said this, I would hasten to add that the word ‘telepathy' explains nothing; it is merely a convenient name for a phenomenon which has so far eluded scientific analysis. But the name is as convenient as any other, so long as we do not allow ourselves to be deluded into supposing that the naming of a phenomenon is equivalent to its explanation.

Are we then to conclude that prayer for others is a form of telepathy? If by that is meant an attempt to exercise upon absent persons a kind of hypnotism intended to do them spiritual or other good, the answer I am inclined to give is, No. I cannot accept a view which would make prayer a form of long-range persuasion practised by invisible means. There is such a method of attempting influence, which is often called ‘absent treatment '; and there is a certain amount of evidence that some people can and do produce effects upon others in this way. Whether the evidence will bear scientific examination or not, I do not know; but, even if that were granted, a process of this kind, however beneficial, could not properly be called prayer-any more than giving a hungry person a meal could be called ‘praying for them', though, under certain circumstances, it might be the more Christian thing to do. The essence of prayer is that it is addressed to God; and intercession is prayer which expresses a desire that He may do something for the other person, or inspire them to do something for themselves. When I pray to God for some one, I am not regarding God as a kind of telephonic exchange for effecting Communication between my mind and that of my friend.

If prayer were thought of merely as a telepathic process it would cease to be prayer (though it might still be quite a good thing). Nevertheless our principle that God works in and through the laws of Psychology suggests the hypothesis that the kind of psychic rapport between individuals of which telepathic phenomena are an evidence, may be a means by which God, through us, may effect His own good purposes. If God uses the medical skill of a doctor to preserve a life which otherwise would be lost, if he uses the charitable disposition of a millionaire to save refugees from starvation, if He uses the persuasiveness of a preacher to turn sinners to repentance, there is no reason why He should not use the ‘psychic radioactivity' (supposing such a thing exists) of any individual to produce a change of heart in an erring friend, or the hope which will stimulate vitality in a sick one.

The difficulty of clear thinking on this question is that the nature of the human mind is such that we inevitably tend to think of God as a kind of superintelligent benevolent ‘third party ', wholly external both to me and to him for whom I pray. But God is not a ‘third party'; He is not wholly outside any existent thing; in Him all of us ‘live and move and have our being'. The exact extent to which the individual soul is a part of, or is separate from, the Infinite Spirit, is a matter on which philosophers have said much, and will say more.. My own belief is that this is a region where, from the nature of the human intellect, conceptual thinking can no longer trust its methods, and that it is better, frankly resorting to thinking in pictures, to frame a myth. And my myth is this. Suppose I pray for my friend John, lying on a sick-bed, say, in Birmingham, what happens? First of all, if I am praying as a Christian should, I start with the realisation that John is far dearer to

God than he is to me, and that God knows the exact needs of John in a way I could not do, even if I was actually standing at his bedside. Suppose I was standing at the bedside, I might by some small service, by suggesting a cheerful thought, or by the sympathy and encouragement of silent presence, very materially modify the mental attitude, the hope and courage, of my friend. By so doing I might turn the scale in the battle which is going on between the forces of disease on the one side and the vital principle, backed by the doctor's and nurses' skill, on the other. Is it not possible that an influence coming from me at a distance might have similar results? That, you will say, is mere telepathy. So it is: but, given that the me from whom that telepathic influence is flashed is, not just my ordinary self, but myself in spiritual communion with the Divine, then the situation is changed. The kind of influence flashed will be of an entirely different kind and quality to that which would be exercised if I was merely, ‘off my own bat' so to speak, trying a little bit of long-distance hypnotism-and that on a person of whose state of mind at that actual moment I am necessarily unaware, and whose real needs, whether medical or moral, I might gravely misapprehend even were I on the spot. Prayer for others should, I think, be largely, to use an old phrase, the effort to ‘hold them before God'; leaving it to Him to give them the thing they really need, but in spiritual concentration putting our personality, with all its faculties, known or unknown, explained or unexplained, at His service if haply, on this particular occasion and in this particular case, there may be anything in us which He will use.

That is my myth. But whatever may be thought of it, we are at least on safe ground if we say that prayer for others is a natural and inevitable expression of the fact that man is a social animal, who as he becomes more religious becomes not less but more social. As man advances in religious appreciation he advances in the love of man as well as in the love of God; and, as he grows in the realisation of sonship towards God, he grows in the realisation of his brotherhood to man. And it may be that the quality of prayer which is the expression of this growth makes us one with the Eternal Spirit in a way which enables our spirits also to transcend for the time being the barriers which mere space can normally erect between us and those we love. We and they alike ‘live and move and have our being ' in Him; the prayer which is an intensely conscious realisation of this may well have creative or curative power.

VISION AND POWER

That which is unseen can only be apprehended as idea-whether that be an abstract concept or a symbolic picture. If the Great Unseen is such that it is best spoken of, not as HE, but IT, then the truest idea we can have of IT will be some purely intellectual concept with little emotional content. In that case, by the laws of suggestion, it will not be the kind of idea which is likely, penetrating into the depths of the subconscious, to bring forth much fruit. But if, as the result of previous investigation, we have decided that the IT is more appropriately spoken of as HE, the case is altered. My idea of a living God cannot be a merely intellectual concept. According as I envisage His nature and His purpose, there will predominantly be connected with my idea of Him feelings either of terror, shrinking and abasement, or of joyful adoration, love and trust. But once accept into my inmost self an idea fraught

with emotion of either of these types, then by the fundamental laws of the nature of mind that idea must begin to work. And it will work like a ‘general suggestion ', a formula summarising many particulars. It cannot but produce marked results-upon my whole outlook upon men and things, my temperament, my character, my nervous system, and, lastly, upon my physical wellbeing. And those results will be directly proportionate to the extent to which it has penetrated my whole self. According to my faith it will be done unto me.

But what will be done unto me? Will those results be on the whole beneficent, or the contrary? Necessarily, by the laws of mind, it follows that those results will be evil or good according as the emotions which I associate with the idea of God incline to be those of terror and shrinking, or those of love and trust. Merely from the standpoint of its psychological mechanism, prayer is akin to ' auto-suggestion '-that word being used as the technical psychological description of a self-disposal of the mind which results in a man's completely ' taking in' an idea (presented under certain conditions) in such a way that the idea penetrates the subconscious as well as the conscious mind. If the idea is true, wholesome and sufficiently important, such self-disposal will be wholly beneficial; but if otherwise, it will be disastrous. Everything, therefore, depends on how we envisage the God to whom we pray.

This is a conclusion of tremendous import. The old Hebrew prophets were right in their denunciations of idolatry. For the essence of idolatry lies, not in the setting up of some graven image in a temple, but in the setting up before the mind's eye of any idea of God which is lower than the highest that our capacities or those of our age can grasp; and idolatry is wrong, not because it is an affront to God, but because it is an injury to man. We are always hearing of the failure of official Christianity. That failure, I would urge, is in the main due to the fact that the Churches have never dared openly to break the idols of the past, and publicly discard certain ideas of God, and of His ways with man, which are no longer the highest that men can conceive, which indeed sometimes make God out to be in goodness and in good-sense inferior to man.1.- I recall a mot by Clutton-Brock. A Jesuit theologian ho was told, had explained that it was possible that infants dying unbaptized would enjoy after this life a felicity exceeding anything we can even imagine in this world; yet since they must suffer eternal deprivation of the Beatific Vision they will be technically in Hell. ‘That ', said Clutton-Brock, 'is an attempt to save the morality of God at the expense of His common sense.'

I cannot but think that some even of the greatest of the mystics have been mistaken in supposing the highest stage of the religious life to be that in which the soul ‘sinks into the vast darkness of the Godhead '. I would urge rather that the highest type of prayer is man's response to the 'message' (1 John i. 5) that ‘God is light.; and in him is no darkness at all'. Prayer rises to its highest, not by emptying the idea of God of all content, but by filling it so far as possible with the right content. And we do this best if, without forgetting the God revealed in Nature in its sublimity and beauty, we chiefly think of Him in terms of Christ. ‘Seeing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.'

Let us suppose a man to think of God in terms of Christ, to be convinced, that is, that God is sublimely sensible, absolutely reliable, wholly loving; suppose further that, through something like the ‘prayer of quiet'-concentrated but not, I think, too long continued-he were to allow that vision, that idea, to ‘work' in his subconscious mind. Should we not expect such a one to achieve enhancement of vitality, conquest of temptation, superiority to pain, triumph over circumstance? For him vision would be translated into power. And suppose, not one man, but a great company were to see that vision and appropriate it, then, in their united power, would not the Kingdom of God be at hand?

‘If ye have faith . . . ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed . . . .' No word of the Master has seemed so wildly visionary as this, none has so often been toned down and explained away. But, by ‘faith ' Christ meant an absolute inward appropriation of the Vision of God-of God conceived and felt as He knew Him. And He was not addressing a single individual, but a brotherhood which he meant to be the core of the faithful ‘remnant ' of a nation conscious of a world mission. It was not a poet's dream, it was scientific fact, that His Vision of God, if accepted and retained for a generation unadulterated and unimpaired by a worldwide brotherhood of men, would have generated a power before which all obstacles would have gone down. What Christ said was sober fact then, and it is sober fact to-day.

The Vision of God which He saw is, I have argued, true. God is there, wishing to speak to us, urgent to recreate us. What Psychology has done is to unveil some little part of the mechanism through which God speaks and acts, provided that we do our part. Prophets and saints all testify that God does work, that Vision appropriated in prayer does issue forth in Power. These great souls, inheriting the rule-of-thumb experience of generations-interpreted by their own individual genius and resolution-did actually, though without clear understanding of its nature, make use of the appropriate psychological mechanism. But surely the dawning light of scientific understanding should make it possible in the future for men of quite ordinary capacity to accomplish practical results on a larger scale than was possible to them. So far from discrediting prayer, Psychology has shown its rationality; and future discovery will doubtless help us better to distinguish between the methods which, so far as the human instrument is concerned, are likely to be the more or the less effective. Tremendous are the problems which confront our age; civilisation, think some, is tottering. But with new knowledge comes new hope; and it may be given to our age to see fulfilment in a new way of the ancient promise that he that believeth shall do ‘greater works than these '.

' I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.' (I Theologia Germanica, p. 32. (Macmillan, 1901..) But no man can be a partner in the creative work of God who forgets that life is a battle in which victory is always at the cost of effort, and generally of wounds as well.

There is a notable piece of psychological analysis in Mr. Graham Wallas' famous Human Nature in Politics, in which he shows the necessity of some picture, name or other symbol on which thought and emotion can be so focussed that it stands as a dynamic representation of the meaning and the value of a complex reality like a country or a cause.

When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one's country, but an automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection . . . . What comes to him in the final charge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birthplace. More likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or imagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out from the unrealised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be the name, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the ‘Marseillaise '. Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes. 1-Human Nature in Politics, p. 72 f. (Constable, 1908.)

Religion, too, must concentrate its meaning in some dynamic symbol capable, in times of weariness and crisis, of lifting man above his normal self, and sustaining him through doubt and through despair with a clear sense of aim and courage superhuman. If the Kingdom of God is to be realised on earth, its soldiers need a rallying standard-and one with inspiration not limited by time or place. For this nation or for that, in one age or in another, an eagle, a flag or a battle-song has had the magic to make men more than men; ask we a standard potent for every race and in every age? That standard is the Cross of Jesus; its legend, Follow me.

SYNOPSIS

Face to face with death, all our argument ‘about it and about' seems curiously beside the point.

The mode of any future life we can only think of in metaphor-and no metaphor is likely to suggest a picture of that life even approximately correct. Yet the alternative--extinction or continued life-is a real one; and, however difficult it may be to make a decision in regard to it, such decision concerns a matter of fact.

The fact is important, not merely on account of human shrinking from an unknown future or the bitterness of bereavement, but mainly for its bearing on the eternal reality of ideal values.

The traditional mythology of the future life is obsolete; but unless the whole argument of this book is fallacious, life is of the enduring substance of Reality.

The life of the future to be conceived in terms of quality, not locality, as a continuation in enhanced form of the highest life known on earth.

The fact that life is essentially a principle of individuation favours the hypothesis that life endures, not merely in its universal, but also in its individual, manifestation.

Criticism of the idea that there is no loss of value if the individual perishes, so long as the Infinite Life goes on. It is not a question of man's desire for immortality; God-if He be really our Father, indeed unless He is actually morally inferior to man-cannot permit His children to perish.

A decision as to the moral quality of ultimate Reality is involved. Therefore the question must be considered from the standpoint of God's greatness, not from that of human littleness or doubt.

IMMORTALITY 1

1 Reprinted by permission (with some amplification) from the Nineteenth Century and After.

To stand looking at a human frame from which life has just departed is to feel the futility. of those elaborate arguments about the Immortality of the Soul-for and against it-in which most of us some time or other have taken part. Face to face with the fact of death, they seem quite curiously beside the point. We are up against an Unknown which baffles our accustomed method of analysis and exploration. We have thought, we have listened, and we have talked about this thing—but when the thing itself is before our eyes, if anything at all of this comes back to us, it will be one or other of the old familiar metaphors.

According to our mood, or even, it may be, according to the expression on the features of the dead, these rise before our fancy. That loving, living, enchanting something that has gone, what is its connexion with this other cold, still, decaying mass that is left behind? Is it the melody of the lute, gone for ever when the strings are broken? Or are we gazing on the empty cover of a chrysalis, whose tenant, transformed into some new and glorious mode, is enjoying even now, unseen by us, ‘a larger nether, a sublimer air'? Was that lively something, which seems to have departed, nothing but the visible manifestation of some material process which has now ceased-the flame of a candle that has been blown out? Or has our brother ‘fallen asleep 'a sleep the more refreshing because so deep-to wake again to welcoming faces of the dear ones who have gone before, in that far country where the great and good of all the ages dwell in eternal bliss?

Metaphors these-guesses, if you like-but the alternatives which they present to the mind are real. No mental picture we can frame of any life beyond the present is likely to be even approximately a correct image of the reality. But, under whatever metaphor or symbol we may envisage it, the alternative between extinction and continued existence is one which belongs to the realm of fact. The fact, like many other matters of fact, may be difficult to determine, but fact there must be. Suppose a man brought up for trial for murder. The evidence of the witnesses may be conflicting; the arguments of the opposing counsel may seem of nearly equal weight; but the man either did or did not commit the crime. Fact is none the less fact because it happens to be hard to ascertain. And, difficult as it may be to strike the balance of argument on either side, the continuance or the reverse of life beyond the grave is in the last resort not a matter of opinion, but of fact.

And it is a fact the knowledge of which is of more practical importance to man than any other one thing.

And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit,
Or homeless night without;

And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see
New prospects, or fall sheer-a blinded thing
There is, 0 grave, thy hourly victory,
And there, 0 death, thy sting.

But it is not merely the apprehension of an unknown future voiced in these well-known lines; it is not even though that counts for much more-the bitterness of bereavement and the passionate desire for reunion with our beloved that makes the question of a future life the one all-important fact. It is the feeling that if this life is really all, then the best and noblest things in life are not really what they seem-they, too, become matters of opinion. Most of us instinctively approve a decent, honourable way of life. Most of us also prefer clean linen to dirty. But, when clean linen cannot conveniently be got, some will put themselves about a good deal, others not so much, to overcome the difficulty. This, we allow, is a matter of individual taste. But is our preference for high and honourable living no more than that? Is the rightness of the right, the nobility of heroic effort, just a thing like clean linen, about which some people are perhaps a shade too faddy, others a good deal too slack? Is that perfect harmony of mutual love, sympathy and help, which is sometimes realised between human souls, to be valued merely as a source of pleasure more invigorating than champagne, and as a means of comfort and convenience more comprehensive and more soothing than a good arm-chair? Or are we to say that duty, heroism, love, are windows through which from time to time we glimpse something of eternal value something which is not a matter of opinion, but is deeply rooted in the ultimate Reality, something which makes worth while the sacrifice, the toil and moil, the constant stumbling and the never-ending struggle to arise?

This question is quite fundamental; but it is not one of those which can be settled by argument. If any one chooses to say that the answer we give to it is a ‘matter of taste ', all that can be done in reply is to insist that the taste involved is different in kind from that which decides on the question of clean linen or between the comparative merits of two French dishes. In the language of everyday life the distinction is expressed by saying that it is a matter, not of taste, but of character. In argument it is difficult to put it that way without either seeming pharisaical or being guilty of discourtesy. Hence it is a point on which argument is best avoided; but every student of human nature knows that the fundamental difference of quality between people consists, not so much in what they do that is largely a matter of environment and circumstance-but in whether, at the bottom of their hearts, they consider things like honour, love and duty to be a ‘matter of taste' or something more. But-and here is the vital consideration-is it easy, either to account for this difference of outlook or to justify the nobler choice, if this life is all?

No doubt at the present day many of those whose whole heart, mind and life goes out to an emphatic affirmation of the worthwhileness and the supremacy of these higher things, question or deny a future life. But it will, I think, be found with most of these that their very denial is a result of the passionate character of their idealism-a false deduction, I would submit, from premises that are high and true.

To some the affirmation of a future life means an association with the nobler choice of the idea of reward and punishment; and this seems to detract from its moral value. Antigone defying the tyrant with no hope of immortality, is surely, they say, a nobler figure than St. Perpetua doing the same thing, convinced that she is meriting thereby eternal bliss. This may be conceded; but the question, as it seems to me, is not how best to form a kind of ' class list' of heroic spirits, but how we are to ‘make sense ' of a Universe capable of producing such, and then letting them perish out of existence for evermore.

There are others who, having been brought up in a more or less literal acceptance of the traditional ideas of heaven and hell, scornfully reject them, as not only trivial but immoral.

The mind of man [wrote Clutton-Brock] is at the present day suffering from a nervous shock caused by his past failures to conceive of a future state. A burnt child dreads the fire; and the mind of man has been burnt by the fires of his own imagined Hell. So he flinches from the peril of any more conceiving.

That is the real difficulty. The old mythology of a future state is grotesquely unconvincing; and men hesitate to frame a new one. Yet unless the whole argument of this book is off the track, life is of the enduring substance of Reality. Matter is, as it were, a precipitate of life. Life is the artist; matter is the clay. But life is essentially that which eludes the method of scientific knowledge; its nature can only be expressed by the methods of art-by metaphor or myth. It is, then, a myth that we lack, a way of conceiving of life in the Beyond; for believing that life endures, we have good grounds.

I have attempted elsewhere 1( In two essays in Immortality. (Macmillan, 1917.) to frame a new' myth', or, perhaps I should say, to present a mental picture congruous with modern thought of the mode and character of life in the Beyond. I do not propose to reproduce this here; I would, however, recall that close connexion between the idea of quality and that of life which has so often recurred in the foregoing chapters. It may well be that place, as well as time, has a meaning in the life of the Beyond; nevertheless the essential feature in any ‘myth ' which aspires to be a valid representation of a future life, must be the conceiving of that life in terms of quality rather than of locality. This idea is already found, implicitly, in the Fourth Gospel. At any rate its author is at pains to criticise the picture thinking of contemporary religion in regard to its conception of the Judgement as a Great Assize; again he always speaks of Eternal Life as something which at least in part can be enjoyed here and now. Clearly he thinks of the Beyond in terms, not of place (or not mainly of place), but of quality of life. I have argued above that life of the quality manifested in the soul of Christ, that is, the highest life we know, is for us in this world a mirror of the creative life of God; if so, all human life as it approximates to that same quality must be a mirror of the life of Heaven. What we know here as love, joy, peace, constructive work, the vision of beauty-humour, too, I would add-are the pattern by which to frame our conception of that other richer life. But if the highest life we know on earth is no mere shadow, but is of the very substance of that which is to come, yet it is still only an earnest and a foretaste. There must remain heights and possibilities yet unexplored. ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.'

But, some one will say, it is the Infinite Life that endures; you and I are but the waves which, after a moment of seemingly individual existence, sink back into the boundless sea-the wave is but a ripple, it is the ocean that endures. Of course the individual life is bound up with, and is part of, the larger Life; but that Life is not to be envisaged as an ocean, as a sort of pool of vital fluid-that fallacy I have already dealt with (p. 90). Life is alive; and whenever it manifests itself it is as an individualising principle. If we must think in metaphors-or rather because we inevitably so think-let us be careful to choose the least misleading. Let us not liken life to something lifeless a pool or a fluid-but to something creative and alive. We may, perhaps, picture the individual life as a youthful musician, the body as his first violin-good enough to learn to play on, but to be discarded for something better later on.

There (1-1 The next two paragraphs are transcribed from one of my essays in Immortality.) are who urge that what we love is only that element in our friends which is Divine and eternal, and that, therefore, it will suffice if we think of this element only in them as destined to survive-and that only as part of the infinite Divine life to be manifested again in higher achievements of personal existence.

Whether [writes Mr. H. G. Wells in God the Invisible King] we live for ever or die to-morrow does not affect righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have no such appetite for a separate immortality; what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not, is of no more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.

There is a note of idealism here; but is it really true to say that ‘it does not affect righteousness' whether we live for ever or die tomorrow? For, if the Divine righteousness may lightly ‘scrap ' the individual, human righteousness may do the same. The most conspicuous mark of the moral level of any community is the value it sets on human personality. Readiness to sacrifice his own life for others may be a measure of the moral achievement of the individual, but the moral height of a society is shown by its reluctance to sacrifice even its least worthy members. The disinterestedness which is content with a Universe in which his own ego will soon cease to be, is much to the credit of Mr. Wells; it would not be to God's credit were He equally content.

That seems to me to be the point. In the last resort, it is not a question of what we personally would be content with for ourselves, or what opinions we entertain as to our own individual value. It is what the Universe is worth. What can we say of It, or the Power behind It, if It treats the individuality of heroic souls like oystershells at a banquet, whisked from the table to make room for the next course? It is all very well to talk of love and right and eternal values as things worth while for their own sake. These things are not self-subsistent; they are only names we give to qualities and experiences apprehended by conscious minds—our minds at any rate, and, if there be a God, by His. But if there be no God, and if we who see and feel these values are only creatures of a day, somehow they shrink into pathetic aspirations. Values shrivel unless they are recognised as such by some Immortal Being.

Christ taught man to think of God as the All-Father. But He has done something else. By His life and character Christ has compelled us to make the choice between a practical atheism and a thought of God as being at least as good as Christ Himself. If the Universe is the product of blind mechanical energy, or even of some half-conscious Life-force, then the heart and mind of Jesus is just a happy accident; it is merely the most remarkable of all the unexpected by-products cast up by the evolutionary process in its age-long aimless track. But if there is a purpose behind it all, then that life and character are not to be explained as accidents. They are an evidence of what the Creative Mind that wills it all is on occasion capable of producing. But no creative mind can produce something higher and nobler than itself. Therefore the emergence on the plane of history of the man Jesus forces thought to a decision. Either no purpose controls the universe at all and there is no God, or else that purpose is as noble, that mind has thoughts as high, as the purpose and the mind of Christ.

I must make my choice. There are things which make it hard to believe in a living, loving God. But reflection shows that it is harder still to accept the paradox that all is accident. I make my choice. What follows? ‘If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more your heavenly Father.' If a human parent would not allow the extinction of a cherished child, is God likely to consent to such a thing? If a reasonably good employer hates to regard his workmen simply as ‘hands ', as mere instruments for working out his purpose, are God's thoughts less than his? If a general loves the men whom at times he is compelled to treat as ' cannon-fodder' incidental to the attainment of a larger end, will God care less? Will He be content to treat a living personality like a rocket which, once its cascade of stars has been displayed, has fulfilled its function and falls back unregarded into the surrounding gloom?

In the belief in immortality the rationality of the Universe is at stake. By our decision as to this the quality of Reality is finally appraised. If there is a God at all, we are His children, and He must care for us. If we believe in God at all, it is not sentiment, nor self-deluded hope, it is the coldest logic, that compels us to approach the question of a future life from the standpoint of His greatness, not from that of our littleness and weariness, our doubts and our despair. ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God ',-and we may be content to leave them there.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void
Thou-Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.