ARCHBISHOP THOMSON ON THE GERMAN PANTHEISM.
IN the lecture which the Archbishop of York delivered two or three months ago, at Leeds, on the German School of Pessi- mists and "The Worth of Life," and which has just been pub- lished,* he touched incidentally a point of perhaps even greater importance than the main subject of his lecture itself. The youngest of the two German teachers of the doctrine that life is undesirable, but so sweetened by illusions as to make men think it desirable until it has been lived, Von Hartmann, seems to hold it at least probable that the supreme intelligence which beguiles us into the fret and fag of life by virtue of these illusions, is not, as we suppose all intelligence to be, deliberately conscious of its ends, but unconscious of those ends,—in other words, as we infer, that the Supreme intelligence—so far like a man of genius, —creates what is greater than anything which man includes in the word " design,"—creates, as we should say, unconsciously, just as the highest artist or the highest poet creates. The Arch- bishop does not go out of his way to attack this conception, but simply remarks, "Supposing that there is ground for saying that the divine intelligence is 'unconscious' in the sense of having a different kind of knowledge from that of created human beings, the question is, as M. Janet puts it, whether the Supreme intelli- gence is something higher or lower than our consciousness. If lower, then the world is a mere machine, and could not be other than it is. Complaints against it, whether a philosopher or a poet complain, are as foolish as the act of the infant who whips the floor that it falls upon for hurting it. If on the other hand, as
• The Worth of Life. An Address delivered at the Opening of the Pifty-Eighth Session of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society on Tuesday, 23rd October, 1877, by William, Lord Archbishop of York. London : John Murray.
Von Hartmann would probably admit, the Supreme knowledge is something far higher than our consciousness, then the protest of the pessimist is as impious as it is blind, for what is it but the outcry of the lesser intelligence against the greater, of the narrow and limited against that whose experience is boundless as the eternity behind it, and whose foresight is unlimited as the eternity before ?" The value of that criticism is in this, that it really touches the very centre of all the objections to what are called anthropo- morphic views of God. Nothing has been commoner, for instance, than to say that because God's ways are not as our ways, we cannot attribute to him human reason, or human justice, or human love, without ascribing to him all our petty limits. And this would be most true, if it were meant only to warn us against ascribing to the divine mind, under the name of the highest human gifts or virtues, the shortcomings essentially inherent in all human gifts and virtues. But it is most false, if it be intended rather to deny us the use of our very highest nature in interpreting the nature of a being in- finitely beyond us. The question is not whether we shall invest God with what is defective in human reason, justice, or love, but whether we shall invest him with what is noblest in it. If we refuse to do the latter, because limitations are inherent in our highest thought, the only result is that, giving up our highest symbols of him, we must have recourse to lower, and while appar- ently repudiating the impiety of ascribing to God our limitations, we fall into the worse impiety of ascribing to him that which is not limited, only because it is nothing at all, and is incapable of exciting either our admiration or our love. All the objections to the moral government of God which are founded upon his supposed infinitude and absoluteness, really mean that in the effort to avoid imputing to him human littleness, we deny to him what is leaq little in men, and therefore make him less than we should make him if we frankly used the highest light that we have. So, too, of those who tell us we must not lower God by imputing to him the petty human affections. Surely the question is precisely whether, if we exclude from our view what, even if it be the most exclusive, is yet also the noblest and most dis- interested part of our own nature, we shall lower or raise our image of him. As M. Janet and the Archbishop say, all these disputes admit of but two ways of solving them,—that which ascribes the creative origin of things to a source far below man, and that which ascribes it to a source far above him. The first is the true atheistic solution, and the second the true theistic solu- tion; and if we adopt the second, though we may be quite right, wherever we are conscious of own shortcomings, to avoid im- puting them to the Creator, we cannot reasonably abjure our own highest nature in interpreting his on the irrelevant ground that our's is limited. Limited also, and much more limited, is that part of us which is not spiritual and moral, and the attempt to worship a God who is free from our spiritual and moral limitations almost always ends in the worship of one who is not spiritual and moral at all, —i.e., who is not higher than we are, but lower.
Now we can imagine its being said that, even accepting these assumptions, if we try to conceive God in the light of our own highest nature, the philosophy which ascribes to the divine mind unconscious wisdom must be truer than that which attributes clear and conscious design to every one of the divine acts, since it is admitted that the human intellect achieves its greatest results without anticipating them, and that indeed all the highest actions of men are greater than their deliberate thoughts. It is the work of a true poet to say what is beyond the immediate grasp even of his own intelligence,—and of a true artist to conceive a beauty or a sublimity many of the higher aspects of which are hidden even from himself, and only brought out painfully by subsequent analysis and contemplation. So in the highest moral action, the will goes before even the most enlightened conscience, instead of painfully fulfilling its behests. The highest minds first act, and then come to understand and even to wonder at the spirit of their own action, and only gradually come to know what they have done. lf, then, in this respect we impute to God the highest elements of our mental nature rather than the lowest, should we not suppose that the philosophy which as- cribes creation itself to an unconscious wisdom and un- conscious art far beyond the range of deliberate design, is the true one? We should reply in the negative, and for what seems to us the simplest of all reasons. The very fact that our highest practical and creative efforts are so far beyond the forecast of our own deliberate intentions, is rationally intelligible to us only on the supposition of what we call "inspiration." We use the word as much for intellectual as for moral genius, as much for the poet and artist as for the prophet. But the use of the word at all, of course implies that that knowledge of the scope of his action which is not in the person who does it, is in one who itispires him to do it, and who supplies the defect of the seeming agent's knowledge by his own higher knowledge. If this idea that when words or deeds are fuller of meaning and of aid for others than the seeming authors themselves know, they proceed from the inspiration of a higher knowledge, be a blunder, if this be a characteristic not merely of dependent natures, as such, but of all natures, that the highest actions are far in advance of intentions, and the highest sayings fuller of meaning than the mind which framed them,—then, of course, the philosophy of the unconscious is true. But true or false, it is at least to man simply inconceivable. We can understand how a dependent being may be guided far in advance of his clear convictions by a power within him which has deeper knowledge and wider thoughts than his. But we cannot understand how, if there be no such inward guide, the spirit of action could far outstrip intention, except by mere accident or chance,—in which case, of course, it would quite as often fall behind intention, or on one aide of it, or in any other irregular manner, being due not to any natural law of being or principle of existence, but to the absence of any such law or principle.
And again, so long as it is quite conformable to all our human ex- perience that the helpless and ignorant are guided to do what is far more for their own good than they can be aware of, by those who have visibly more power and more knowledge, it will always be at least natural for us to interpret the cases in which a vast advance beyond the intellectual or moral resources at their disposal is made by those who have no such visible guides to help them, as due to the intervention of an invisible guide. The presumption is and must be in favour of that interpretation, because it is one to which analogy would lead us, while it is all but unthinkable that action, unguided by any reason, visible or invisible, should turn out intrinsically more reasonable and more capable of satisfying the reason of others than action under the control of reason. An unreasonable world animated by chaotic forces is imaginable enough, though of course it would be impossible to picture it by the aid of reason, which would always be interpolating coherence of some kind in the midst of incoherencies. But a reasonable world, created without conscious anticipation, without knowledge of the end from the beginning,—that is, created tentatively and blindly, yet so that what was blindly and tentatively done, turned out greater than what was consciously and intellectually done, this is really unimaginable, because it attributes more to ignorance than to knowledge, more to chance than to foresight, more to the lower elements of physical nature, than to the highest exertions of mind. Indeed, it is obvious that even when we observe the unconscious- ness of the highest genius and virtue, we do not for a moment suppose that the genius or the virtue would be intrinsically less if it were fully conscious of its own nature, but only that with such consciousness, such genius or virtue could not exist in natures so limited and dependent as the men who display it, on other sides of them, always are. We do not suppose for a moment that Shakespeare's or Titian's genius, or the virtues of St. Paul, would lose their meaning by coexisting with a full knowledge of their drift and purport ; but only that had they been rooted in full knowledge, the men who displayed these qualities would have been of a stature far beyond what would be in keeping with their time and generation,—would have been, in fact, prodigies rather than men. The poet is a man whose vision extends, in one direction, far beyond his grasp in any other, and so it happens that he is unable to follow the full drift of his own meaning. The saint is a man whose actions go far beyond the vista of his conscience,—who is, in fact, better than he knows himself to be, or could have made himself to be. And either the one or the other, if be had had the knowledge to measure. beforehand the scope of his own impressions and feel- ings, would have been every way out of proportion to his gene- ration, just as on the particular side in which he is so great he actually seems out of proportion to it. But the reason he is not really out of proportion to it, is that even where he is so much beyond it, it is not as a creative, but as a receptive and depend- ent being that he is so,--that, like children following their parents' guidance, he is holding by an unseen hand in thus forestalling the thoughts or works of his generation,--in a word, that his greatness is explained, consistently with his limitation, as only willingness to profit by the stirrings of a fuller wisdom, or the impulse of a purer righteousness.
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