George Holmes Howison

“ And what actual features in modern science can give colour to the suspicion that pantheism is its proper result? Or if such a suspicion is well founded, what leads us to regard it with a certain aversion? If science establishes or clearly tends to establish the pantheistic view, why should this stir in us alarms? Is there some secret hostility to the interests of human nature in a pantheistic science? Can there be antagonism between the truth and the real interests of man? — is not truth our highest interest? Or, is truth of mere fact perchance not our highest interest? ”

“ To present universal Nature as the deep in which each soul with its moral hopes is to be engulfed, is to transform existence into a system of radical and irremediable evil, and thus to make genuine religion impossible; and not only religion, but also all cordial political union and order, for this gets and keeps a footing amid the shifting affairs of this sense-world, only because it is the outward image of the religious vision. Belief in the sovereign goodness of the universe and its grounding Light is the life alike of religious faith and of political fealty. ”

“ The recognition of “unconscious ideation” he traces clearly, too, to Leibnitz, to Kant, to Schelling, and to Schopenhauer. The Unconscious is actually here with us, Hartmann holds: there is a something beneath our consciousness, that performs for us, even when consciousness is suspended, all that is most characteristic of life, and that, too, with a swift and infallible surety and precision. What less can we do, then, than accept this Unconscious as the one absolute reality? We accept, and so come by the Philosophy of the Unconscious. ”

“ The real past is a flowing whole, and we are forever pouring the future into the flood, through the gate of the present. Our past is really always changing, and it is we who initiate the change; and so the past, though no part of it can be recalled, is perpetually being re-created and transformed, now for the worse, now for the better, as its whole goes on unfolding. But the whole, it is within the compass of our freedom to bring into fuller and fuller harmony with our active vision of our Ideal, in which at source the freedom consists. ”

“ We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, must teach that there is a being who is truly God: that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent creatures, and who superintends their lives with a providence which aims to secure their obedience to his will as the only sufficient condition of their blessedness. Yet all this is but an abstract and very vague formula, after all. Of how the contradiction whose extremes are represented by deism and pantheism is to be transcended and reconciled, it has nothing to say. ”

“ For the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognises others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest. The doctrine of a Cosmic Consciousness, on the contrary, reduces all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at best, to mere modes of the Sole Divine Life, and all their lives to mere effects of its solitary omnipresent causation ”

“ But many, probably more, still hang back, disturbed by anxious questionings — by an inward struggle between the sense of authority in what seems truth declared by science and the sense of majesty in what is felt to be an ineffable good which the apparent truth seems to put in peril. For my own part, I side with those who feel that the vaunted new world of evolutional philosophy is of a portent so threatening to the highest concerns of man that we ought at any rate to look before we leap, and to look more than once. ”

“ Though void of literal truth, its ethical truth is real; the conduct that it means is absolutely right. “A noble man,” to borrow Lange’s own words, “is not the least disturbed in his zeal for his ideals, though he be and must be told, and tells himself, that his ideal world, with all its settings of a God, immortal hopes, and eternal truths, is a mere imagination and no reality; these are all real for life, just because they are psychic ideals; they exist in the soul of man, and woe to him who casts doubt upon their power!” ”

“ I mean the theory, that, as Professor James himself expresses it, “the whole universe of material things — the furniture of earth and choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities; . . . the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality of those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.” ”

“ Our joy in the landscape comes from it; also our delight in art; our capacity for poetry; our bent to science and philosophy, by which we would figure to ourselves the form of this treasured All. It is, finally, the source and the reality of the set of feelings consecrated by the name of religion. To deny the worth of life is therefore to put ourselves in conflict with the elemental forces of our being, which will subdue us in spite of our struggles. ”

“ Within these limits there is complete compatibility of science with religion, and forever will be. Let science say its untrammelled say upon man the physical, the physiological, or the experimentally psychological; upon man the body and man the sensory consciousness, — these are all doubtless under the law of evolution issuing from man the Rational Soul. But let not science contrive its own destruction by venturing to lay profane hands, vain for explanation, on that sacred human nature which is its very spring and authorising source. ”

“ For the Will being in its essence but wild unrest, both metaphysics and experience teach that the only way of escape from the misery inherent in life is to bring the Will to quiescence; or rather, speaking plainly, to blot it out. And in consciousness, seat though this is of sorrow while it lasts, we have the light to the one sure way of deliverance; as consciousness is the preparation for the rescue of the Idea from the clutch of the Will. The way of salvation is the way of annihilation. ”

“ It is doubtless with a view to such conceptions that ministers of religion nowadays so often say, “The evolution of man is well enough, if biologists will only leave us a Personal God at the beginning of the process.” But that if, when conjoined with that consequent, is an if of tragic meaning: the Power behind evolution, were the whole of man evolved, could never be a personal God — in short, would not be a God at all. For it is the essence of a person to stand in a relation with beings having an autonomy, in whom he recognises rights, toward whom he acknowledges duties. ”

“ Yes, we must go still farther, and say that even should the science of Nature prove pantheism true, this would only array the interests of science against the interests of man — the interests that man can never displace from their supreme seat in his world, except by abdicating his inmost nature and putting his conscience to an open shame. A pantheistic edict of science would only proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict between the law of Nature and the law written indelibly in the human spirit. ”

“ Why should the word “personal” come into the title of the theory at all? Is not idealism the doctrine that mind is the only primary or absolute reality? — and so is it not always the assertion that personality is the central source of things? Why, then, isn’t the prefix superfluous? The answer is, that the actual history of philosophic thought, even after philosophy attains to the view that rational consciousness is the First Principle, exhibits a singular arrest of the movement toward putting complete personality at the centre of things. Historic idealism is, in fact, far from being personal ”

“ In fact, not only is it impossible for souls to be souls, apart from freedom, immortality, and God, but it is just as impossible for God to be God, apart from souls and their immortality and freedom. In other words, the self-existent perfection of deity itself freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession of a world that is in God’s own image, and such a control of it as is alone consistent with its being so: a divine creation must completely reflect the divine nature, and must therefore be a world of moral freedom, autonomous, and, in the last resort, self-active or eternal. ”

“ This sense of our vocation to moral perfection, and of all it implies as to freedom and continuance, is what makes our main question of such thrilling concern. The question starts a ghastly fear, lest science may be the doom of our loftiest hopes. If so, it will quench the aspirations which have been the soul of man’s grandest as well as sublimest endeavours; for the beliefs it will destroy are the real foundation of all that has given majesty and glory to history. ”

“ The metaphysical passion, born of this illusion, is indeed worthless for knowledge, but it is precious for experience. In its immature stages, it burns to transcend the limits of experience, in the vain hope of bringing back knowledge of that mysterious Beyond; and so long as it has continued in this delusion, it has been the bane of the world. But when once freed from the error, it will become, with religion and poetry, the benign solvent of the ills of life. ”

“ Hence moral life is not only primordial in the nature of mind, but what we commonly call a moral consciousness, as if we would thereby divide it permanently from the rest of consciousness, and count this remainder mere knowledge or mere aesthetic discernment as the case may be, turns out to be in fact and in truth the primary logical spring of all other possible consciousness. So profoundly and so immovably is this deepest Fountain of value and worth inseated in our being. ”

“ Amid the manifold disappointments and discouragements of the long battle with defect and wrong, the merely subjective ideal would tend to fade out, to decline both in vividness and in character, and so cease to attract and adequately guide effort. The only adequate support — and it is adequate — is the reality of God, the heavenly Judge, the unfailing Beholder and Sympathiser. To him, the one Absolute Conscience, in every moral disaster our conscience turns for assured refuge and certain renewal of moral courage and strength. ”

“ Thus Teleology, or the Reign of Final Cause, the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the notion Evolution, but is the very vital cord in the notion. The conception of evolution is founded at last and essentially in the conception of Progress: but this conception has no meaning at all except in the light of a goal; there can be no goal unless there is a Beyond for everything actual; and there is no such Beyond except through a spontaneous ideal. The presupposition of Nature, as a system undergoing evolution, is therefore the causal activity of our Pure Ideals. ”

“ Human nature is not prepared to face despair, until it shall have been proved beyond all question, and after a search entirely exhaustive, that despair must indeed be faced.
Amid all the clamour of the times in extolling evolution, then, it is eminently seasonable to ask, Just how much can the principle of evolution really do? Is it of such reach and such profundity as actually to serve for the explanation of everything known? To state the question more exactly. How far over the fields of being does evolution really go, and with unbroken continuity? ”

“ Men no doubt usually live in one of Three Stages of Illusion in regard to this essential misery of life. They either think that even in this world the sum of joy so far exceeds the sum of sorrow as to make existence here substantially good; or, if sobered out of this by inexorable experience, they take refuge in the Hereafter, in the prospect of an endless opportunity beyond the grave, — a refuge of lies, for the one Unconscious is the sole basis of consciousness, there is no indestructible self, death is simply subsidence into the absolute vague, and immortality is therefore a delusion ”