BOOKS.
MR. BALFOUR'S INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.*
WE are not sure whether the ordinary reader will not follow the argument of Theism and Humanism with greater satisfac- tion if ho begins with the last of the ten lectures and then goes back to the first. Indeed, Mr. Balfour himself supplies a reason for taking them in this order
"Those," he says, "who have followed the course from the beginning may, on looking back, find themselves somewhat bewildered by the variety of subjects which I have asked them to consider. Art, History, Morals, the Theory of Probability, the .Logic of Perception, the presuppositions of Science, have all been touched on. • . Introduced one after the other with breathless rapidity, each for a moment has been shown under the limelight, and then hurried off the stage to make room for its successor."
In the closing lecture Mr. Balfour recognizes that this way of presenting his argument may have made it hard for some of his hearers to follow it, and, though he trusts that they will be in a minority, he has enough consideration for their frailty to restate the most important points of the case he has endeavoured to set forth. His lectures do not pretend to give "an historic survey, properly ` documented,' of the great Theistic controversy." The Gifford Lecturer is limited by the terms of the foundation to natural religion. He must not deal with the Christian religion or with any other that claims to be founded on a special revelation. For this reason, though the conclusion at which Mr. Balfour arrives " is religious, the discussions leading up to it are secular." Even such "great realities" as God, freedom, and immortality are scarcely referred to. He believes in them all, but he only discusses even the first " from a limited point of view." The very title of the book is meant to tell us what to expect from it. It is not intended as a proof that God exists, but only as a proof that " all we think best in human culture, whether associated with beauty, goodness, or knowledge, requires God for its support, that Humanism without Theism loses more than `half its value."
Mr. Balfour begins by crediting all men with having moments when nothing will stop them from asking how they are to regard " the universe of reality. How are they to think of it as a whole, hovrare they to think of their own relations to it ? " It is then that they seek help from those who have had leisure and inclination to consider these " ancient problems." Often it is to the metaphysician that they first turn. But they seldom find what they want in that quarter. "For one man who climbs to his chosen point of view by a meta- physical pathway, a thousand use some other road." The reason is that the thousand are examples of the plain man, the man who for the most part is content with what science has to tell him. " Within the clearing thus made for him in the tangled wilderness of the unknown, he feels at borne. Hero he can manage his own affairs; here he needs no philosophy to help him." Still, there are moments when questions occur to him on which science is silent, and then he will listen to philosophy if the problems it deals with are interesting, and the treatment of them such as he can follow.
"He would like, for example, to hear about God, if there be a God, and his soul, if he has a soul." But the metaphysicians do not give him what he wants. He " turns silently away from discussions on the One and the Many, on Subject and Object, on degrees of Reality, on the possibility of Error, on 'Space and Time, on Reason and Intuition, on the nature of Experience, on the logical characteristics of the Absolute." Mr. Balfour does not altogether admire the plain man. " He is provokingly unaware of the difficulties with which his common-sense doctrines are beset." All the same, he has Mr. Balfour's sympathy, and throughout these lectures the great subject of natural religion is approached from the plain man's point of view. The distinctive characteristic of his
Thestro and /Um:nista. rly the night Hon. Arthur hays Balfour, W.n.S., LL.D., D.C.L. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [10s. ed. mud
beliefs—of those at least which he holds most firmly—is that, whether true or false, whether proved or unproved, they are at least inevitable." They need not be either self-evident or self-consistent ; they are not necessarily true, they are some- times actually false, and they do not include a belief in a God. How then can they be made to serve the purpose of natural theology? For an answer to this question we must discover what the acceptance of them, taking them at their face value, really implies ; and the conclusion at which Mr. Balfour arrives is that the development of none of these beliefs " can be re- garded as a merely naturalistic process without doing fatal damage to their credit." The only alternative to Naturalism is Theism; consequently it becomes necessary for him at this stage to define what ho means by Theism. Is it the meta- physical or the religious conception of God that is con- templated in his argument P He refuses, indeed, to regard the two as incompatible; but if they were so, it is the religious, not the metaphysical, conception that he elects to make his own. " When I speak of God, I mean a God whom men can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose attributes, however con- ceived, leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between Himself and those He has created." Mr. Balfour's book must therefore be taken as a whole. The variety of the subjects discussed in it may be bewildering, but from his point of view it is inevitable. He will have nothing to do with setting up "a departmental Deity, even were his department the whole province of ethics." His idea of Theism requires that it shall " sustain in every essential part the full circle of human interests."
In the third lecture he considers the relation between
aesthetic and Theism. It is the most difficult part of his subject, because, as he admits, it does but appeal to a minority—a minority consisting only of those who are
"deeply conscious of the incongruity between our feelings of beauty and a materialistic account of their origin." In Mr.
Balfour's hands the subject gains greatly in interest from the breadth with which it is handled. He is thinking not merely of art properly so called—of painting, and poetry, and music. He recognizes also the aesthetic value of history, especially of history in the widest sense, as it deals with the fate of " mankind itself, its past and future, its collective destiny." The interest of history requires, no doubt, a supply of "brute fact," but it must be brute fact about " beings who are more than animals, who look before and after, who dream about the past and hope about the future, who plan and strive and suffer for ends of their own invention, for ideals which reach 'far beyond the appetites and fears which rule the lives of their brother beasts." What will be the interest left in history when it is regarded merely as a field in which "the law of energy-degradation, or (if you please) 'the second law of therino-dyn.amics,' " is left to work its will? Till a period within the memory of men now living "it was possible to credit terrestrial life with an infinite future." With the disappearance of this prospect, " the role of man, if limited to an earthly stage, becomes meaningless and futile. . . . Will any one assert that universal history can maintain its interest undiminished if steeped in the atmosphere of a creed like this?" The same thing can be said of ethics in relation to Theism, only with far greater truth and extent of application. There is no way of reconciling the conflict between altruietio and egoistic ends "If the most we can say for morality on the causal side is that it is the product of non-moral, and ultimately of material agents, guided up to a certain point by selection, and thereafter left the sport of chance, a sense of humour, if nothing else, should prevent us wasting fine language on the splendour of the moral law, and the reverential obedience owed it by. mankind. . More than this is needful if the noblest ideals are not to lose all power of appeal. Ethic must have its root in the divine; and in the divine it must find its consummation."
Perhaps the part of Theism and Humanism which is of most general interest is the fifth lecture, the first of the four which deal with "Intellectual Values." Mr. Balfour " has been charged (and not always by unfriendly com- mentators) with the desire to force doubt into the service of orthodoxy by recommending mankind what they wish, since all beliefs alike are destitute of proof." This, he maintains, is really a travesty of Ms opinions, and he can only regard it as an indirect consequence of the emphasis with which, as a young man, he expressed his " contempt for the complacent dogmatism of the empirical philosophy which in Great Britain reigned supreme through the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But was this contempt altogether unreasonable ?" In order to show that it was not, Mr. Balfour gives his readers a delightful " autobio- graphical parenthesis" of interest. He went to Cambridge, lie says, in the middle "sixties " " with a very keen desire to discover what I ought to think of the world and why." It was also a severely practical desire. For the history of speculation be " cared not a jot." Dead systems and dead fashions were to him equally uninteresting. What he wanted was to get at the groundwork of modern scientific knowledge. In the middle "sixties" such an inquirer was certain to be referred to Mill. In the System of Logic all the questions Mr. Balfour wished to ask were supposed to be answered. Mill's authority in this country was only "comparable to that wielded forty years earlier by Hegel in Germany, and in the Middle Ages by Aristotle." But the staff thus supplied broke in the disciple's hand. Mill "seemed to hold that the funda- mental difficulties of knowledge do not begin till the frontier is crossed which divides physics from metaphysics, the natural from the supernatural, the world of ' phenomena' from the world of nournena,' positive experiences from religious dreams." Mr. Balfour thought then, as many others have come to think since, that the fundamental difficulties of knowledge begin much further back. When Mill and his followers taught that experience "gave you indisputable knowledge of 'phenomena,' and that if you went beyond phenomena' you were dreaming, or you were inventing," they gave the field of experience a scope and a character to which it cannot make good its claim. It "is no well-defined and protected region under whose clear skies useful knowledge flourishes unchallenged." On the contrary, it is "the very battlefield of philosophy, the cockpit of metaphysics, strewn with abundant arguments, where every strategic position has been taken and retaken, to which every school lays formal claim, which every contending system pre- tends to hold in effective occupation." It is these facts that agnostic empiricism will never face. "When it is resolved not to part with a conclusion, anything will serve it for an argument; only when it is incredulous does it know bow to be critical." This was the discovery of which Mr. Balfour says that the "shock of disillusionment" remains with him to the present hour. His complaint against Mill was and is that he never "displayed any serious misgiving as to the scope and validity of his empirical methods." He never realized that the difficulties which beset the problem of knowledge " begin with the convictions of common sense." This is the position which is stated and defended in the sixth and three following lectures. They are not always easy reading, but those who are convinced by them will not regret the labour that has brought them to the conclusion that "reason and the works of reason have their source in God; that from Him they draw their inspiration; and that if they repudiate their origin, by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency."
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