The Conception of God. Josiah Royce

the Person, cannot with truth be thus confounded with the logical singular; and that personality, as reached by this doctrine, is so truncated as to cease being true personality. The central topic of the book, proving thus to be this question of Free Personality, marks by the region entered, and by the method of investigation employed, the advance of philosophical thought into a new stadium.

      On a different matter, of high philosophical import, with weighty religious consequences, the parties in the discussion all appear to agree. They unite in recognising, in some form or other, an organic correlation among the three main objects common to philosophy and religion—God, Freedom, Immortality. They differ, to be sure, as to precisely what, and exactly how much, these three elements of the One Truth mean; but they agree that neither of the three can adequately be stated except with the help of the properly correlative statement of the other two. Thus: No God except with human Selves ​free and immortal in some sense, in some degree or other; and so, likewise, mutatis mutandis, of Freedom and of Immortality. The differences here are as to the sense in which Freedom and Immortality are to be taken—whether with unabated completeness or with a suppression and reduction. On this issue. Professor Le Conte, as to the resulting state of Real Existence aimed at by his method, is at one with Professor Howison: both hold to a God distinctly real, in relation with distinctly real souls, though Professor Howison questions the conceptions on which Professor Le Conte bases his method for reaching this result. Opposed to them stands Professor Royce. Professor Mezes perhaps supports this opposition with tacit assent, though he has refrained from any open expression.

Restating in the usual but more technical language of the schools the main divergence as now brought out, one would say that it is an issue between two views concerning the Whole of Real Existence—between the view known as Monism, and the view known as Pluralism. Professor Royce, and apparently Professor Mezes, adheres to Monism; Professor Le Conte and Professor Howison hold by Pluralism, though Professor Le Conte colours this with an intermediary Monism, as the means by which the final Pluralism comes to be. Only it is of essential importance to add, that both parties interpret their views in terms of Idealism. To both alike, all reality at last comes back to the reality of Mind; to the primary reality of self-consciousness, and the derivative reality of “things,” or objects ordinarily so called, as real items in such self​consciousness. The difference is, as to whether there really are many minds, or, in the last resort, there is only one Mind; whether the Absolute Reality is a system of self-active beings forming a Unity, or is after all, with whatever included variety, a continuous Unit; whether it is a free Harmony, or, as Professor James satirically calls it, a “solid Block.” The one view, then, would be more accurately designated Idealistic Monism, as Professor Royce himself prefers to call it; or Monistic Idealism, as it has sometimes been named; or Cosmic Theism, as still others at times call it—though this last title is oftener used in an agnostic than in an idealistic sense. The opposed view would in like manner be called Pluralistic Idealism, or Ethical Idealism;^[1] or, again, as its supporter would prefer, simply Personal Idealism, since all other forms of Idealism are, as he thinks, in the last analysis non-personal—are unable to achieve the reality of any genuine Person. Professor Le Conte’s special form of Pluralism has sometimes been called, with his approval, Evolutional Idealism; and this is descriptive of what he regards as the most important factors in it, and is in so far suitable. ​

      So much for the chief sides represented in the discussion. Its significance for the existing situation in philosophy and religion can be made duly clear by exhibiting its place in that larger movement of thought which has most prominently marked the century now passing away.

      This movement, so far as it affected our English-speaking communities, was in its bearing on the rational foundations of religion professedly defensive; but only so by intent, and on the surface of its thinking; in its deep undertow it was from its springs profoundly negative—destructive in tendency. When in the mind of the early century the question first clearly uttered itself: “What will all our scientific discoveries, all our independent philosophisings, all our historical, textual, and other critical doubts, leave us of our religious tradition?—above all, is the Personal God of past faith to remain intact for us?” the pressure of the situation, having borne the anthropomorphic supports of Theism indiscriminately away, forced thinking people to ask further: “What, then, do we indeed mean by ‘God,’ since we are no longer to think him ‘altogether such an one as ourselves’?—has the meaning gone out of the word ‘God’ entirely?” To many—as, for instance, to Sir William Hamilton—it seemed that, substantially, the answer must come in this form: “God, surely, is the Absolute, the one and only unconditioned Reality; the universal Ground of all, which it is impossible not to account real: for it is impossible not to believe that Something is real, and therefore impossible not to believe there is an Ultimate Reality, What is ​sensibly present is finite, is thereby only derivatively real, and thus is intrinsically conditioned by this Ground of all, which is thus, again, intrinsically the Unconditioned. Hence, though God therefore certainly is, he is forever unknown and unknowable: because to know is to think, to think is to condition, and to condition the Unconditioned is a self-contradiction.” In this way the so-called being of God was supposed to be saved at the cost of his essence; and the mysteries of traditional faith were held to be further preserved and vindicated, because, as it was announced, need was now shown, and a way made, for Revelation, since our human knowledge had been demonstrated incompetent.

      In contrast to this attempted theistic Agnosticism, there appeared almost simultaneously, issuing from France through Comte, an Agnosticism openly atheistic. It was entitled Positivism, as restricting, its credence to the only things certain by “positive” evidence—the immediate and autocratic evidence of sensible experience. It said: “Let there be an end now, not only to theological, but to all metaphysical Entities quite as much; for all are alike the illusory products of mere abstraction and conjecture.” As the substitution of the “Ultimate Reality” for God had turned God into something unknowable, God—and the “Ultimate Reality” too, as for that—became, as the positivist justly enough observed, an affair of no more concern to us knowers than if he or it didn’t exist. So, let human life be organised without any reference to any “Reality” beyond phenomena, and let us confine our knowledge to its ​authentic objects, namely, “the things which do appear.” Comte brought to the task of this “positive” organisation of life a comprehensive acquaintance with the results and the general methods of all the sciences, and a noticeable facility in classified and generalised statement. These qualities, joined with an ardour of conviction and an insistence of advocacy that lent their possessor something of the character of the prophet and the apostle, earned for the new cause an attention sufificient not only to found a new sect, intense in cohesion, if limited in numbers, but to spread the contagion of its general empirical view wide through a world interested in the theory of knowledge, however indifferent to the religious powers claimed for the new doctrine. A philosophy insisting on the sole credibility of scientific evidence, and chiefly busied in formulating scientific truths in generalisations so rarefied as to seem from their unexpectedness like new scientific discoveries, naturally appealed to many a scientific expert, but still more to the ever-swelling throng of general readers who fed upon scientific “results,” and gradually formed the public now known to the venders of “popular science.”

      So matters stood, in the world that was balancing between the interests of philosophy and of religion, till about the middle of the century. At that juncture, following upon the latest developments in the sciences, particularly in the field of biology, Herbert Spencer appeared with his project of a “Synthetic Philosophy,” based on the principle of Evolution carried out to cosmic extent. This view presently ​received an almost overwhelming reinforcement, at least for the general scientific intelligence, by the unexpected scientific proofs of biological evolution, worked out chiefly by Darwin. The change of front in the scientific world, upon the question of Species and of Origins, was almost as immediate as it was revolutionary. The conception of the origin of natural things in a direct act of “creation”—a supposed instant effect of a Divine Will operating without any means—thus seemed to the popular mind to be assailed in the seat of its life. Many felt, indeed, that this view, so ingrained in the religious tradition, had received its deathblow. In this feeling, as fact requires us to acknowledge, they had at any rate