Robert Mackintosh

“ To empiricism, all is a posteriori. To intuitionalism, half is a posteriori and half a priori. To idealism, all is a priori. Not that a posteriori is denied, or that idealism even in Hegel tries to evolve reality out of the philosopher's inner consciousness. Mere given fact may be the starting-point; but it is sublimated. We see by degrees—in general outline or upon general principles [29] —that what is is no other than what must be.
There is another conception of necessity which has established itself in the history of science and philosophy. We may call it mechanical necessity. ”

“ It seems as if one foot rested on dogmatism and one on scepticism. The fact—assumed without any attempt at justification by argument–that, in spite of the multitude of logical reasons for scepticism, we do know truth and beauty, makes Balfour a theist. And the God he postulates is brought in ex machina like the God of the old Design argument in its roughest popular form. There must be a God, who could compel irrational matter to serve rational ends–so ran the old argument. There must be a God who can miraculously endow the irrational mind of man with truth—so runs the new. ”

“ Theism is an afterthought the reply to doubt-the attempted reflective justification of what announced itself at first as a prophetic certainty. But no more is theism the first runnings of the stream of philosophy. It is philosophy harnessed to a practical and religious interest. It is philosophy called into court to answer selected questions. Theism then has its most habitual affinities with intuitionalism, but may fall under any one of our philosophical or quasi philosophical types. We have distinguished three types or tendencies: empiricism, intuitionalism, idealism. ”

“ The God whom all our thinking feels after is the all-inclusive system of reality. On the other hand, Kant’s religion is of a type which requires a sort of deistic God, standing outside the world and constraining it into moral paths, or standing outside our moral struggles and rewarding our goodness. Butler fears profoundly that there must be a just God who will punish us. Kant hopes, with tolerable strength of conviction, that there may be a just God who will reward us.
The main line in pure philosophy runs on from Kant’s wavering and sceptical idealism to the all-including gnosis of Hegel. ”

“ Looking into the immensity of space, man also looks into the depths of godhead. Whatever one may think of the cogency of such arguments, it seems safe to conclude that thinkers, who dislike constructive idealism, but accept time and space as boundless given quanta, reach in that way the thought of infinity, and if they are theists, necessarily connect their theism with reflexions on the nature of Time and Space. ”

“ Theism can take but little interest in this peculiar type of free will doctrine, or again in Epicurus’s professed admission of the existence of gods—made of atoms: inhabiting the spaces between the worlds; careless of men. Stoicism is a much more important system, but harder to classify. Perhaps in the department of thought where it is most in earnest—in ethics—it is an idealism. It tells men to “obey reason” and crush passion, or to live “according to nature.” In physics—but in that region of speculation its positions are more perfunctory-it teaches pantheism on a quasi-materialistic basis. ”

“ True, at a later stage, the opposition of sense and thought reasserts itself strongly with Kant even in ethics. We are allowed moral certainty, but are forbidden the hope of genuine moral victory. Just as our knowledge never can finish its task of reducing world-experience to an intelligible system, so our will is never once able perfectly to obey the law of reason. There is always a taint of feeling in man’s goodness. This portion of the ethical theory does curious service in Kant’s doctrine of religion. ”

“ If there is a God at all, he must be thought of as the guarantee of freedom in man and as the pledge of his immortality.
The mention of Christian theology may remind us that, for the majority of theists in medieval and modern times, theism proper has ranked only as a secondary wisdom. It is possible for Christians to work out natural theology in separate detail; but we cannot wonder if they rarely attempt the task, believing as they do that they have a fuller revelation of religious truth elsewhere. ”

“ Emphasis on moral motives is plain in Kant’s theism as in Butler’s. If this tendency is to take effect, a certain part of Kant’s rational scepticism must be accepted. There is no chance for the moral consciousness to claim a decisive vote if a metaphysical system like Hegel’s demonstrates all realities in every region, and if its janissaries crush out every movement of rebellion against the tyranny of abstract thought. Is it really impossible to claim for man something between omniscience and universal nescience? ”

“ Is there no higher or broader necessity? Can we not attain to some farther-reaching philosophy?
If we answer “Yes” to that question, we pass on from intuitionalism to idealism-an idealism not on the lines of Berkeley (matter does not exist) but of Plato (things obey an ascertainable rational necessity) . This third possibility in philosophy does not enter at all into Lecky's grouping referred to above; in fact, it is very generally strange to older British thinking, [21] which, if it conceives any tertium quid besides empiricism and intuitionalism, is apt to think of scepticism. ”

“ A critic of intuitionalism might add that they are its whole strength; intuitionalism is sound upon the intellectual and moral interests of humanity, but it does little to justify them. It reasserts them, with resolute loyalty; but if philosophy ought to vindicate, to explain, perhaps incidentally to modify, even, it may be, to purify our primary beliefs, intuitionalism is hardly a philosophy at all. For good or for evil, so far as there is an accepted line of theistic doctrine, that doctrine is intuitionalist. Other schools of philosophy pay flying visits to theism ”

“ Here then characteristically intuitionalism occupies a half-way house between empiricism, with its appeal to real given fact, and idealism, with its appeal to necessity. The senses, in perception as contrasted with sensation, are held to give immediate knowledge. We perceive, beyond all possibility of doubt, that things are so and so. This is Reid's first reply to Hume. Define more carefully than Locke did, with his blunder about “ideas,” the process of perception, and you cut up scepticism by the roots! So far, this philosophy has little bearing upon theism. ”

“ An investigator, pledging himself to no beliefs—even perhaps one who definitely disbelieves and rejects theism—may yet interest himself in tracking out the psychology of religion. Or a philosopher like Hegel, armed with a metaphysical theory, may descend upon the facts of religion and interpret them in its light, till they almost lose their original significance, which we might provisionally define as consisting in this, that the believer in any religion finds himself helped or (as he claims) saved by it. ”

“ Fourthly: if we try to think of objects not built up out of sensations and not in time and space, we are baffled by contradictions or absurdities. Kant admits that we necessarily aspire to think of such objects—“God, the World, the Soul”-possibly this alleged tendency of our thought is already implied in the dream of a “perceptive understanding." But speculative knowledge breaks down or breaks off at an earlier point. If we try to know the soul, we grasp at a phantom. The self is always subject in consciousness and never can become an object of knowledge (“Paralogism of Pure Reason”) . ”

“ With all its idealism, Greek thought had difficulty in regarding rational necessity as absolute master of the physical world. Matter was a potentially recalcitrant element. Hence there are tendencies even in Plato to build up the ideal world in sharp contrast to the actual world—to the half interpenetrated or half tamed world of matter. His suggestions as to immortality are affected by this. The body is the soul’s prison. ”

“ But the Christian bias is sure to make theologians, who borrow a doctrine of the Absolute, interpret it in a Christian sense; hence we may consider it something of an accident that even an Augustine fails exactly to put the argument in form. Anselm tells us that a most perfect being must exist, since the perfection which includes existence is manifestly greater than a perfection confined to an object of thought. ”

“ The English thinkers influenced by Hegel are inclined to assert mechanism unconditionally, as the very expression of reason—the only thinkable form of order. Thus libertarian free will has to disappear from their belief. In this interpretation of the universe, the difference between mechanical or relative necessity and absolute or ideal necessity is slurred, or dogmatically affirmed to be non-existent. It might be suggested in reply that free will, whether or not it be ultimate truth, is true to the same degree of analysis as mechanical necessity itself. ”

“ Pure scientific theory cannot tell you when you have got such a cause, or whether you ever get it at all. No law of nature contains in itself a promise that it shall pass into operation. Its doing so depends upon the totality of conditions. Materialism supposes that this mechanical order is the real world and the only real world—mechanical monism. [35] Intuitionalism supposes that there are two realms—of necessity and freedom, of nature and will, of matter and mind; contiguous, independent, yet interacting—dualism. Idealism in one way or other supposes that mind is more real than matter. ”

“ But fuller conceptions of evolution raise further difficulties for intuitionalism in its wonted forms. Knowledge cannot be divided into the two components—immediate certainties, precarious inferences. The starting-point is reconsidered, modified, transformed, in the light of subsequent acquisitions. Knowledge grows, not by mechanical addition, but by organic transformation. This may help us to appreciate the meaning of Hegel's Dialectic. His thought then is not wholly paradox, whatever the expression may be. Hegel's system is, in its own way, a great evolutionary philosophy of an ideal type. ”

“ The theory found a melodious echo in Tennyson's In Memoriam, a great hymn of God, Freedom and Immortality on a basis of speculative agnosticism. “ We have but faith we cannot know, For knowledge is of things we see; ” but the moral element which Mansel despised is dominant in Tennyson. “The heart Stood up and answered, I have felt. ” If there is a reading of the new theories of evolution in nature which revives rather than darkens hope in immortality and faith in God, Tennyson gave an early sketch of that tentative modern theism. ”

“ Sense-knowledge is an endless process, inconsistent with the requirements of thought. We can by no means regard the physical world as the real world. But we possess knowledge of the physical world and of it alone. “Things in themselves”-whether defined by Kant, illogically enough, as causes of sensations, or again defined by him as the ultimate realities towards which thought vaguely points-in either case, “things in themselves” are unattainable by any definite knowledge. ”

“ Modern doubt does not say there is no God; it says, We don't know. Popular scepticism-perhaps even Charles Darwin's; Huxley himself was a student of Hume-understands by agnosticism that science is certain while philosophy and theology are baseless. ”

“ Pantheism does not favour free will or immortality, and may move indefinitely near to materialism. Out of pantheism again pessimism develops. If the principle of the universe is impersonal or unconscious, personal consciousness in finite spirits comes to wear the appearance of a blunder. Conversely, if God cares for men, despair is impossible. For another systematic grouping, see A. C. Fraser’s Gifford Lectures. Wolff’s list is of some historical importance—atheism, deism (a God without care for men) and naturalism (denial of supernatural revelation) ”

“ Yet it remains doubtful whether he was a theist with large pantheistic elements—such as every ues on speculative mind will be likely to incorporate in theism—or a pantheist rejecting theism altogether. We may regard his ambitious programme as the last logical development of idealism and indeed of philosophy itself. If perfect knowledge be possible for us, it must take the form of such a system as Hegel offers. If the world exists purely to be known, and if every other working of reason comes into consideration qua incomplete knowledge, Hegel is right with his sweeping intellectualism. ”

“ In a different region, the tradition of Descartes passes on to G. W. Leibnitz. He accepts the ontological argument with a qualification—almost like his disciple Wolff, who tries to use it for defining the divine attributes. Leibnitz’s Monadology—which has little influence on his theism may be viewed as a strong recoil from Spinoza's all-swallowing substance. The more Spinozistic side of Leibnitz's thought-God as Monad of Monads—is a theistic postulate if hardly a theistic proof. The free will which Leibnitz teaches is not libertarian but determinist. ”

“ In Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher Berkeley gives the fullest statement of this argument, while adding more commonplace attacks on the pettiness of religious scepticism. David Hume, following up Berkeley’s leading suggestion, pointed out that the inference to God is as precarious as the inference to matter, and that the assertion of a continuous or immaterial mind in man also goes beyond the immediate facts. The truth is, that all truth is uncertain! ”

“ Accordingly, even in a hurried survey of the history of theism, we must try to question the systems we are reviewing upon their attitude towards human freedom and immortality, as well as upon their doctrine of God. Sometimes it will be found that free will is asserted as an assured fact, as a datum, Free and so as a ground of inference to God. But some- Wi”times free will is rather a probanduin. In Christian theology, much labour has been spent upon vindicating man's freedom against God's intrusion, or upon blotting out human power in order to leave room for the divine. ”

“ It is profoundly unsatisfactory to regard mechanism as the whole ultimate truth. For such a role it is in no sense fitted. If it is ultimate truth in its own region, that region cannot be accepted as more than half the entire universe of reality (common sense intuitionalism; dualism) . If mechanical determination applies to the whole universe, it cannot be ultimate truth at all (cf. H. Lotze; more drastic in Ward's N naturalism and Agnosticism) .
Quite a different view of necessity is the moral necessity pointed to by Kant's “ Practical Reason.” ”

“ For anything like personal immortality the medieval Schoolmen searched him anxiously but in vain.
Epicureanism need not detain us. It is a system of empiricism and materialism, remarkable only for teaching free will. Atoms swerved as they fell endlessly downwards, and thus introduced an indeterminate or irrational element into the processes of the world. ”

“ On the other hand, theism does not desire to see necessity or Fate—ranked as superior to the living God.
One great change and only one since Kant's day has affected the outlook upon theistic problems—the increasing belief in evolution. It is a manifest weakness in intuitionalism it finds such difficulty in leaving room for evolutionary change. All men may perhaps be aiming everywhere at the same moral ideal, [37] but it is absurd to say that all men actually formulate the same moral judgments. ”

“ Hegel offers a supposed proof that Time and Space, Matter, Nature, are ascertainable and deinable necessities in a reasonable universe. Rational system is the first and last word in this philosophy. The element of givenness, dominant in empiricism, and partially surviving through intuitionalism even into Kant, is sublimated in Hegel's thinking. Everything is to be exhibited, in outline or in essence, as the working of necessary truth. You need not wish anything in the universe to be other than it is ”

“ Once again, empiricism may lead to some qualified and restricted form of agnosticism, religious or anti-religious. If polytheism is to be seriously defended at all, the basis must be empiricist. [68] Intuitionalism in its turn may harden out of “natural” dualism into moral dualism; either a literally Manichaean scheme—a good God impeded by an evil personality or principle (Bayle) —or belief in a good God of limited powers (Mill) . And idealism in some cases may interpret itself in favour of pantheism rather than of theism. ”

“ Aristotle has impressed the ordinary mind chiefly by his criticism of Plato's ideal theory; and therefore he is often ranked as the father of empiricists. But those who treat him as the great Realist make him almost if not quite intuitionalist; while there is also an idealist reading possible. The threatened dualism of ideal and material becomes for Aristotle mainly a contrast of matter and form; the lower stage in development desires or aims at the higher, matter more and more tending to pass into form, till God is form without any matter. ”