Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at CambridgeRashdall, Hastings
Religion
Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge
Rashdall, Hastings
Christianity; Philosophy and religion
And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view
of the relation between God and human or other souls. To me, as I have
already intimated, it seems simply meaningless to speak of one
consciousness as included in another consciousness. The essence of a
consciousness is to be for itself: whether it be a thought, a feeling, or
an emotion, the essence of that consciousness is what it is for me.
Every moment of consciousness is unique. Another being may have a {102}
similar feeling: in that case there are two feelings, and not one.
Another mind may know what I feel, but the knowledge of another's agony
is (fortunately) a very different thing from the agony itself. It is
fashionable in some quarters to ridicule the idea of 'impenetrable'
souls. If 'impenetrable' means that another soul cannot know what goes
on in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe
that God knows what occurs in my soul in an infinitely completer way than
that in which any human being can know it. Further, I believe that every
soul is kept in existence from moment to moment by a continuous act of
the divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon that Will, and forms
part of one system with Him. On the other hand I believe that (through
the analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the moral consciousness) I
do know, imperfectly and inadequately, 'as in a mirror darkly,' what goes
on in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean identity, the theory
that souls are penetrable seems to me mainly unintelligible. The
acceptance which it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, wholly
to the influence of that most fertile source of philosophical
confusion--misapplied spacial metaphor.[5] It seems easy to talk about a
mind being {103} something in itself, and yet part of another mind,
because we are familiar with the idea of things in space forming part of
larger things in space--Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger
ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are
not in space at all. Space is in the mind: the mind is not in space. A
mind is not a thing which can be round or square: you can't say that the
intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so many inches by so many:
equally impossible is it to talk about such an intellect being a part of
a more extensive intellect.
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