J. Macbride Sterrett

“ Creation in all its present forms and in its totality is imperfect. Respice finem is philosophy's antidote to doubt, awakened by imperfect and transitory forms of life and creed. Reason is immanent in and governs the world, but the world as it is, is not equal to, does not exhaust Reason—the Totality. "Anthropo-cosmic theism" is the valid interpretation of the creation, while creation is not exhaustive of the Divine. It contains all degrees of unreason as well as of reason. It is not, even as a totality, the perfect, but a process towards the perfect. ”

“ It is the First Principle of all things. It is, in the most concrete word possible, God. But it is God immanent, the living Ground of all forms and phases of existence. That which distinguishes philosophy from the mere rationalism of both superaturalism and naturalism is found in this conception of the immanence of the Ground in all phases of particularity. This rationalism never gets beyond a Deus ex machina. It bottoms all forms of faith and institution on that which is beyond. Its jure divino creeds, cults, decalogues, politics, are all based upon a transcendent mechanical First Principle. ”

“ It is a process from and to God, a process of the education of man into rationality, or the concrete freedom of the Sons of God in his kingdom. On God's side it manifests his Providence; on man's side it is humanity making itself, or coming to a practical consciousness of its rational freedom. Enough of this has been attained to give us an estimate of the past and a forecast of the future. Man is what he now is by virtue of those authoritative beliefs and institutions, religious and political, which have held society together and educated it. ”

“ History is thus interpreted as a series of intelligent events, a progressive eduction of the rationality of man in his institutions, in state, art, and religion. Wherever two or three are met together to consult about and devise a common good, and wherever this common good widens in extent and deepens in quality, there is seen the implicit spirit of rationality, outering itself. ”

“ As in nature nothing is without interest, significance, rationality to the student of science, so in human history, no creed, cult, or institution is without interest and significance. As the student of nature traces the increase of rationality from the lowest form of inorganic matter up to its most organic form in man, so does the student of philosophy trace the increase of this rationality from the lowest form of ethical and religious life, up to its most organic, fulfilled form in the Incarnation and its extension in the life of the world. ”

“ Our First Principle interprets it as the reason of humanity organizing and instituting its needs and ideals in its onward stumbling to and fro between its own true character and its passing caricature. ”

“ That is, relativity demands self-relation. An effect implies a self-separation in the cause a transference of energy to its own created object. Reciprocity is the bridge by which thought makes this transition. The cause is seen to be as dependent upon its effect as the reverse. It first becomes a cause in its effect. Without this it would be causeless. Thus cause and effect have essential kinship, mutually begetting each other. They form one total, dividing itself off from itself and yet finding itself in both. ”

“ Their phase of rationality is the measure of their worth, and the measure of temporal rationality is the idea of concrete corporate freedom of spirit in institutions. The very faculty of knowledge which accomplishes the results of scientific history implies, further, an eternal self-consciousness, eternally self-realized, and yet eternally realizing itself in temporal conditions. Nothing exists rationally except for self-consciousness, and all things only for an eternal Self-Consciousness. The theory of knowledge, then, is ultimate for man in his study and his estimation of all that is. ”

“ The experience of primeval man, of Oriental, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian man, is the woof through the struggle to interpret which this warp of thought comes into human consciousness. It is the universal constitutive of all particulars which thought has labored at interpreting. The various names which thought has at various epochs given to this universal ground are called categories. The ultimate one of God, as concrete or Triune Personality, is reached only by thought thinking Christian experience. Philosophy without experience is empty, without progressive experience it is dead. ”

“ For such a Ground, no sign or reason can be given, except that which is self-contained and self-authenticating. How then, let us ask, does God manifest Himself as the ground of all authority in the most comprehensive view of reality — philosophy?
Philosophy is interpretative of phenomenal reality. It is not a priori, but strictly inductive. Without the woof of experience it is as empty as experience without its warp is blind and chaotic. The laws which science discovers are inductive hypotheses. ”

“ Briefly stated it is this: the First Principle of the Universe is Personality, or thinking, loving will, going forth in a temporal process with the teleological aim of returning with a whole commonwealth of souls educated into his own image. The First Principle is Reason and the temporal process is toward Reason, each phase manifesting some phase of rationality. The world of human history manifests this rationality no less, nay more, than the world of natural history. History is neither an immediate work of God, nor is it an apostasy from God. ”

“ It is timeless and spaceless. Knowing eternally creates its object of knowledge; willing, its product; and loving, its lover. In this trinity of relationship we may see love as the central constitutive ground, the absolute form of self-activity. The world and man are its manifestation in time and space. The poet Dante saw how even hell was the creation of this "primal love" (Canto III, 6) .
Common sense inventories things; science inventories relations; and philosophy explains both these inventories by the creative energy of the totality, or perfect self-consciousness. ”

“ Let us begin with the simplest form of our consciousness and rise into that self-consciousness which is the magic and universally elastic and yet adamantine circle which embraces all reality. Even Professor Huxley makes the confession for science "that all the phenomena of nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness."
(a) The simplest phase of consciousness is that of indefinite otherness which becomes qualified into something distinct and separate from the self. Qualified sensations run into masses. We have a quantity of existence. ”

“ This implies that the thinking man has lived through and above all non-theistic, and all abstract theistic theories, the unsatisfactoriness of each successive one forcing thought to seek the truth just beyond, and yet implied in it, till concrete personality is reached and is seen to be the eternal presupposition lying back of and giving comparative worth to each imperfect one, and in which they are all abrogated and fulfilled. We may put the whole of philosophy in one sentence adapted from Augustine: Thou hast made our minds for Thee, O God, and they are restless till they rest in Thee. ”

“ To-day it must give a synopsis of the modern or Christian consciousness. The lowest category or conception of the universal ground was, perhaps, spatially the highest, — i.e. the Vedic Sky. This was an induction. So, too, was the Oriental conception of blank Being or Brahm, as well as the more modern ones of matter, substance, force. Thought tarries dogmatically upon one until new experience shows its inadequacy. Advance is made through new, or newly comprehended, revelation of the First Principle in the web of experience. ”

“ It is a process, a movement of real logic through historic process of corporate man. Again it seeks the ground, rather than for "grounds" as the old rationalism did. Grounds or reasons are external and artificial, and not inherent. But such bolstering up with external props inevitably leads to sophistry, or the inventing of reasons that may seem to be valid. This is the resort of one who knows that he is defeated, that he has no real ground. Again, mere reasons are individualistic "points of view," and one person's are as good as another's. ”

“ We believe that this is the great healthy moral and intellectual stream of tendency to-day, despite the many appearances to the contrary. The human spirit has been criticising authorities to find their real basis. The work has been the work of an age of faith,—of daring, soaring, and profound faith. ”

“ Hence changes in the totality of conditions are spontaneous or self-determined. Thus the categories of essence, which modern science uses, issue inductively in self-activity, self-relation, freedom, and personality — the ultimate and constitutive presupposition underlying all objects of sense and all forces, laws, and systems of science.
But as self-activity is not impersonal activity, neither can it be solitary activity. Self-consciousness is never an abstract, unitary activity. ”

“ That is, the task of finding the right of might, the ethical worth of code, creed, cult, and institution can only be performed by the aid of philosophy. The function of philosophy is simply the comprehending of the old and the new as elements of a rational process. It differs in toto from the not yet obsolete rationalism of the eighteenth century, in that it has no a priori ideal, no fixed quantity and measure of the rational. To it the real is the rational, however much it may contradict the subjective reason of the individual. ”

“ But this ascensio mentis ad Deum is, I have said, an inductive process, a critical regress to the logical condition of all existence. It is thought's description of heaven, earth, and hell, so far as these have come within the magic realm of self-conscious experience. It is the concrete system of the fossilized intelligence of man in all departments of his experience. It is an inductive discovery and unification of the categories through which men know sensations, things, force, laws, self-activity. ”

“ Now, the First Principle reached by philosophy and stated in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can be seen as self-sufficient, and sufficient for creation as a free process of self-activity—the creation going forth in imperfect form in order to return in perfect form ”

“ The world as such is not divine, but a procession which includes its return to the Divine. That is, the First Principle yields a rational and teleological basis and view of creation and its history. The final cause is the true first cause. ”

“ Causa sui begets eternally a second free self-activity as its own object. This again is creative in its self-recognition. Knowing is one with willing. In knowing himself, he creates a third equal one, in which the first also knows himself. The Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the ultimate speculative conception of the first principle, knowing, willing, loving. The perfect life of this true totality is a life of self-constituted relationships. ”

“ It sees only a series of increasingly adequate manifestations and vehicles of the true spirit of man. The highest form to-day is given for us in all distinctively Christian institutions. Other objective forms of rationality are not now the φύσις of man. Other spirit of rationality can never be for man, however much its outward forms may change, as man is educated "unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ"—the eternal Reason, the goal and the starting-point of man's true history. ”

“ The ultimate work is being done by philosophy — the synoptic and synthetic work of spirit, building upon and following out the necessary work of science. On its ethical side it has been a psychological and historical estimate of past and existing cults, codes, and institutions to find their radical source and basis. ”

“ It sees that the real is the relatively rational, not because any status quo is ultimate, but because it is a progressive manifestation of the reason that is at the heart of all that is. But when we thus dogmatically announce this Ultimate Ground, we find ourselves asking for reasons for it. ”

“ The knowledge of all temporal conditions can never itself be a part or product of these conditions, as they are only objects of this knowledge. It is to this spiritual principle, then, to which we must refer for parentage, all the institutions, usages, social codes, and aspirations, through which man has become so far rationalized. The real at any time and place is the relatively rational for that time and place, but the end is not yet. The Mosaic economy for the Jews was one phase of this rationality. ”

“ Nothing ultimate or infallible can be looked for in this temporal process, nor, on the other hand, can it be looked at apart from its ultimate and essential destiny. There may be three false verdicts as to creation: all things are divine; nothing is divine ”

“ If we stop at this stage we only have a chaos of atoms in an empty void. But the mind which has already thrown its unifying power over isolated transient sensations to give us these atoms and the void, will not stop here. ”