Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at CambridgeRashdall, Hastings
Religion
Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge
Rashdall, Hastings
Christianity; Philosophy and religion
Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist
that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an
unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of
them, exactly {46} half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or
Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.
And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that
these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side
with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they
do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we
can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes
of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what
thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too
involves generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. Bradley has
shown us) much that was present in the living experience of actual
perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of
reproduction--and a very imperfect reproduction--of actual, living,
sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the
same distinction between actual present experience and the universal
concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again,
willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates
the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only
achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner
between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not
cause and the tiny fragment {47} of the Universe which by means of this
knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God
must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and
Feeling--emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to
human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind--that we shall
attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do
you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge?
Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters--of what
goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own
immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what
goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other
people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains
very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek
to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it
would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it
would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no
knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts
and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not
so with our knowledge of God? The Gnosticism which forgets the immensity
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