DIVINE PERSONALITY AND HUMAN LIFE.* "IT is a good thing
to have read Hegel," said Jowett to a pupil ; "but now you must go away and forget all about him." The Master probably thought that the young man was, in the Psalmist's sense of the word, "high-minded," or overprone to speculation ; and, remembering that : "there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently,"
wished to recall him from clouclland to earth. There are, or (till the modern side was invented) were, few intelligent men who have not gone through the metaphysical stage ; and few who do not emerge from it—Comte's law of the three stages has this much justification ; though whether they pass into the positive is less certain. Most, in all probability, fall into the slipshod life of mere incuriousness, and "stick fast in the mire." This is to be regretted ; for the absence of thought in modern life is one of the sins which cry to heaven, and not in vain, for vengeance ; and, as the many cannot think, if the few, who can, refuse to do so, we are likely to be in a bad way. It is probable that, let us say, the present Prime Minister's acquaintance with the Republic, or the Politics, or the Critique of the Pure Reason is slight ; and it is unlikely that he will read Mr. Webb's Gifford Lectures. But, were it otherwise with our public men, our economic and political difficulties might be nearer a solution, and Reason be more in evidence in our affairs.
Mr. Webb philosophizes after the manner of Oxford. His book could not by any possibility have come from Cambridge, though to explain why this is so would take us too far afield. But there are few better manners of philosophizing ; and he has the gift, rare among philosophers, of doing so in the vulgar tongue. Stupid people complain of the "jargon " of philosophy, as if a science could dispense with a terminology. It cannot. But, in Mr. Webb, terminology is reduced to a minimum. His argument can be followed by any fairly well read man without difficulty, and this is no small praise.
In the first series of these lectures, "God and Personality," it was argued that by a "personal God" is meant a God with whom a personal relationship is possible for his worshippers ; that such a relationship is associated with the higher forms of religious experience ; that in Christianity certain difficulties which attach to the conception of the Personality of God are avoided by the assertion that God is not a single Person ; and it was claimed, not indeed that this position was free from difficulties, but that it was attended by fewer and less serious difficulties than its rivals. In the present course Personality in man is examined in the light of these conclusions ; the various activities in which this human Personality expresses itself— economic, scientific, aesthetic, moral, political, and religious-- being viewed in relation to the supreme spiritual Reality revealed to us in the experience given in religion. The three concluding lectures consider the rank to be assigned in the kingdom of Reality to the finite individual person ; and his destiny : "The man who takes Religion into account is better able than the materialist to be true to all sides of human experience. And out of the experience of Religion springs the hope of Immor- tality." The writer, however, adds that "there is a real danger lest in dwelling upon our personal hope our whole outlook should become trivial and, so to say, parochial. And that is why, as it seems to me, the only form of the hope which it is profitable to indulge is that which is directed, not upon our own eternal life, but upon God's ; and only upon our own as involved in his."
In the singularly suggestive chapter on "Divine Personality and the Aesthetic Life" Mr. Webb recalls William James's argument that something was to be said, on philosophical grounds, for the recognition of "gods many." There is. Polytheism, it is true, as such breaks down. In its noblest form, the Hellenic, it dealt only with a part of Nature ; and the residuum, the obscure core of reality and blind connexion which it overlooked, could not be got rid of. It reappeared—now as Fate, to which the Gods themselves were subject ; now as Matter, the Void, or the Limitless—a something unexplained
• Divine Personality and Human Life: Mlle the 64fford Lectures delivered in the University of Aberdeen in the Years 1918 and 1919. Second COWS'S. By Cleineat C. J. Webb. London : Allen and Unwin. [10e. 6d. net.]
and seemingly inexplicable. On the other hand, a mere Mono- theism, Hebrew or Mohammedan, gives us conceptions which, vigorous as they are, are drawn only in outline ; the content which they postulate, their shading, the links which connect them with one another and with the actual have yet to be supplied. Strength is the distinctive attribute of Deity : and, though the notion unfolds itself as time goes on, it retains throughout a certain rigidity. If not inhuman, it is at least tinhuman ; it stands in no vital contact with man. The notion of life, indeed, as we understand it, seems excluded by its change- less self-identity. God is a "Rock," a "Tower," a "Consuming Fire " ; but not akin to us, not human ; rather the antithesis of human kind.
Now, though its function of mediation is obscured in the Creeds, framed under the influence of an earlier philosophy, in which it commonly presents itself to us, the notion of the Trinity is essentially a mediating one. By associating the notion of plurality with the absolute unity of Monotheism, it breathes into it the breath of life, and brings God into contact with the world. It gives us the necessary theological content, of which Gentile religion is destitute, and which it was the mission of the Hebrews to retain ; but it gives us also that in which Hebrew religion was lacking—movement, life, actuality, kinship with mankind. If Christianity has in it a principle of growth, if it enters into, and develops with, the development of our race, if it has a breadth which can take in all human interests, a tenderness which can embrace all human suffering, a fullness which can suffuse all human experience with a superhuman glow, it is because it comes to us not, like Judaism or Islam, in the name of God One and Indivisible, but as the revelation of "a self- consciousness freed from the limitations which we find in our own."
The onesidedness of what has been called Hebraism, Mr. Webb points out, can nowhere be better studied than in the works of Blake, "enigmatical as they are, sometimes even to the very bounds of sanity, or beyond them" :— " If we identify Religion with Morality, or (which is the same thing) affirm that God is such a one as the Urizen of Blake's mythology, we shall never be able to overcome the artist's alienation from Religion. But Religion is not merely another name for Morality " :
and the recognition of the place of Aesthetic in philosophy is perhaps the most valuable and the most characteristic feature
of recent speculation. Here Lotze was a pioneer :— " That censoriousness of a one-sided moralism, which is constantly imposing limits upon artistic expression, limits which seem to the artist, with his passionate sense of Beauty, the fetters of an intolerable slavery, is corrected by the faith which, even in denying the legitimacy of certain modes of artistic expression, affirms that that which they would express is, so far as it is beautiful, also divine, and even although it remain here and thus unexpressed, eternally secure in God."
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