F. H. Bradley

“ It is religion only when the divine will, of which for faith the world is the realization, reflects itself in us; and, with the personal energy of our own and its self-consciousness, carries out both its and our will into the world, which is its own and ours, and gives us, in the feeling which results from function, that inner assurance of identity which precedes and accompanies the action of our will. And thus for religion and morality the content of the will is the same, though the knowledge and the spirit are widely different. ”

“ Morality is an endless process, and therefore a self-contradiction; and, being such, it does not remain standing in itself, but feels the impulse to transcend its existing reality.
It is a self-contradiction in this way: it is a demand for what can not be. Nothing is good but the good will; nothing is to be real but the good; and yet the reality is not wholly good. ”

“ Here, as in the world of my station, we have the objective side, the many affirmations of the one will, the one body, the real ideal humanity, which in all its members is the same, although in every one it is different; and which is completely realized not in any one this or that, nor in any mere ‘collective unity’ of such particulars, but only in the whole as a whole. And we have the subjective personal side, where the one will of the whole is, in its unity with the conscious members, self-conscious, and wills itself as the personal identity of the universal and particular will. ”

“ In order to be, religion must do. Its practice is the realization of the ideal in me and in the world. Separate religion from the real world, and you will find it has nothing left it to do; it becomes a form, and so ceases. The practical content which religion carries out comes from the state, society, art, and science. But the whole of this sphere is the world of morality, and all our duties there are moral duties. ”

“ Unless man was and divined himself to be a whole, he could not feel the contradiction, still less feel pain in it, and reject it as foreign to his real nature.
So we see that the moral point of view, which leaves man in a sphere with which he is not satisfied, can not be final. This or that human being, this or that passing stage of culture, may remain in this region of weariness, of false self-approval and no less false self-contempt; but for the race, as a whole, this is impossible. It has not done it; and, while man is man, it certainly never will do it. ”

“ They may all be good, and yet not good men; but no one who knew what true religion was would call a man, who on the whole was immoral, a religious man. For religion is not the mere knowing or contemplating of any object, however high. It is not mere philosophy nor art, because it is not mere seeing, no mere theoretic activity, considered as such or merely from its theoretical side. The religious consciousness tells us that a man is not religious, or more religious because the matter of his theoretic activity is religious ”

“ Religion is more than morality. In the religious consciousness we find the belief, however vague and indistinct, in an object, a not-myself; an object, further, which is real. An ideal which is not real, which is only in our heads, can not be the object of religion: and in particular the ideal self, as the ‘is to be’ which is real only so far as we put it forth by our wills, and which, as an ideal, we can not put forth, is not a real object, and so not the object for religion. Hence, because it is unreal, the ideal of personal morality is not enough for religion. ”

“ Reflection on morality leads us beyond it. It leads us, in short, to see the necessity of a religious point of view. It certainly does not tell us that morality comes first in the world and then religion: what it tells us is that morality is imperfect, and imperfect in such a way as implies a higher, which is religion.
Morality issues in religion: and at this word ‘religion’ the ordinary reader is upon us with cries and questions, and with all the problems of the day—God, and personal God, immortality of the soul, the conflict of revelation and science, and who knows what beside? ”

“ You must believe that you too really are one with the divine, and must act as if you believed it. In short, you must be justified not by works but solely by faith. This doctrine, which Protestantism, to its eternal glory, has made its own and sealed with its blood, is the very centre of Christianity; and, where you have not this in one form or another, there Christianity is nothing but a name. ”

“ The individual life for religion is one with the divine; it possesses infinite worth, a value no terms can express. And the bad gains a corresponding intensity of badness. It is infinitely evil, so that, for the religious consciousness, different amounts of badness are not measurable. All men are equally, because utterly, sinful. But this extreme of evil is therefore the more easy to subdue. It is not a reality against a mere ideal, but a mere fact which is contrary to the whole reality, an unutterable contradiction. ”

“ In our journey we have not seen much, and much that we have seen was perhaps little worth the effort, or might have been had without it. Be that as it may, the hunt after pleasure in any shape has proved itself a delusion, and the form of duty a snare, and the finite realization of ‘my station’ was truth indeed, and a happiness that called to us to stay, but was too narrow to satisfy wholly the spirit’s hunger; and ideal morality brought the sickening sense of inevitable failure. ”

“ How can the human-divine ideal ever be my will?
The answer is, Your will it never can be as the will of your private self, so that your private self should become wholly good. To that self you must die, and by faith be made one with the ideal. You must resolve to give up your will, as the mere will of this or that man, and you must put your whole self, your entire will, into the will of the divine. That must be your one self, as it is your true self; that you must hold to both with thought and will, and all other you must renounce ”

“ We are given as this will, which, because this will, is to realize the real ideal: the real ideal is given as the will which is wholly real, and therefore to be realized in us.
Now nothing is easier than for a one-sided reflection to rush in with a cry for clearness and consistency, and to apply its favourite ‘either—or.’ ‘If real, how realize? If realize, then not real.’ We, however, must not allow ourselves to give way to the desire for drawing conclusions, but have to observe the facts; and we see that the religious consciousness refuses the dilemma. ”

“ To repeat, public and private exercises are religious and good as the simple voice of, or as means to the strengthening of, the religious will. That will consists in the faith that overcomes the world, by turning it into the Christian world which for faith it is. The inner sphere of religion, which brings home to itself its assurance and its bliss, is only the inner sphere, and by itself is not religion. ”

“ If humanity is adorable, it is so only because it is not merely the last product of terrestrial developement, but because the idea of the identity of God and man is the absolute truth, because finite rational mind (wherever it exist) is not merely such, but, in another sense than physical or animal nature, is the self-realization of the Spirit in which all moves and lives, and so is an organic whole in that unity. ”

“ They are the isolating a sphere of religion which, so isolated, loses the character of religion, and is often even positively sinful, a hollow mockery of the divine, which takes the enjoyment without giving the activity, and degenerates into what may be well enough as aesthetic or contemplative, but, for all that, is both irreligious and immoral. By themselves, when religiously considered, these things are not ends at all; they are so only when they are means to faith, and so to will, and so to practice in the world. ”

“ Let that be as it may, how are we to go from the organism of the state to the organism of humanity? Admit the metaphysical assertion, that civilization is ‘the activity of a being just as real as you or I, and far more permanent’ (879) —but does history, after all, verify the belief that all or most of the perished millions who have covered this globe have entered into the main stream of civilization? Does observation of facts now show that all or most of the dwellers on this globe are organically connected? ”

“ If a man were to please himself with thoughts of virtue, and then go out, neglect the virtue, and fall into the vice, would that be morality? But if a man does the same by religion, there are people who call it ‘religious.’
The true doctrine is, that devotional exercises, and sacraments, and church-goings, not only should not and ought not to go by themselves, but that by themselves they simply are not religious at all. ”

“ You can have true religion without sacraments or public worship, and again both without clergymen; just as you can have clergymen and sacraments without true religion. And if a part of the clergy think that they stand in a more intimate relation with the divine Spirit than the rest of the community do, then they both go against the first principles of Christianity, and moreover any one, who does not shut his eyes, can see that the facts of life confute them. ”

“ We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether that mind recognizes it or whether it does not. And lastly, space compels us to do no more than dogmatically assert what seems to us to be true in respect of it.
That there is some connection between true religion and morality every one we need consider sees. A man who is ‘religious’ and does not act morally, is an impostor, or his religion is a false one. ”

“ That, however, is again an improper question, since, if it is right to be thus ‘religious,’ we have no business previously to narrow morality, i.e. to exclude religiousness from the ideal which morality is to realize. It seems quite plain that the sphere of morality is the sphere of practice, and the sphere of practice is the sphere of morality. There is no escaping this conclusion; and then, so far as religion is practical, the worlds of morality and religion must coincide. ”

“ To know a not-self is to transcend and leave one’s mind. If we know the whole, it can only be because the whole knows itself in us, because the whole is self or mind, which is and knows, knows and is, the identity and correlation of subject and object’. ”

“ And so the self goes on to realize what it obscurely foreknows as real; it realizes it, although, and because, it is aware of it as real. And in this, so far, art, philosophy, and religion are the same.
But, as we saw, they are also different. In art and science the will of the man who realizes is not of the essence. The essence of the matter is that a certain result should be produced, that, of the unseen object which is divined to be real, a part at least should become visible, that in short, however it comes about, some element of the real should be seen to be realized. ”

“ In morality what we know we feel or see, and can not doubt. There is nothing to believe against appearances. We have a claim and the consciousness that this is satisfied or unsatisfied, but nothing beyond ourselves to hold for true; except so far as in the social object it is before our eyes. But in religion, despite of appearances, we have to believe that something is real. We must have an inward assurance that the reality is above the facts; and we must carry that out against facts in which we can not see the inward reality, and seem to see what is contrary thereto. ”

“ We find the same difficulty, that the real is to be realized, both in art and science. The self dimly feels, or fore-feels, itself as full of truth and beauty, and unconsciously sets that fulness before it as an object, a not-itself which is against itself as this or that man. ”

“ But for religious faith the end of the evolution is presented as that which, despite the fact of the evolution, is already evolved; or rather which stands above the element of event, contradiction, and finitude. Despite what seems, we feel that we are more than a progress or evolution, in fact not that at all, but now fully real: and this full reality of ourselves we present to ourselves as an object, and by recognizing, both by judgment and will, in that object our real self, we anticipate, or rather rise above the sphere of, progress. ”

“ The reason of the contradiction is the fact that man is a contradiction. But man is more; he feels or knows himself as such, and this makes a vital difference; for to feel a contradiction is ipso facto to be above it. Otherwise, how would it be possible to feel it? A felt contradiction which does not imply, beside its two poles, an unity which includes and is above them, will, the more it is reflected on, the more be seen to be altogether unmeaning. ”

“ In the moral consciousness we found two poles, myself and the ideal self. The latter claimed to be real, and to have all as its reality; but, for the moral consciousness, it was not thus real either in the world or in us, and the evil in us and the world was as real. In religion we find once more two poles, myself and the ideal self. ”