The Conception of God. Josiah Royce

theory. The nature of the Eternal Ground of things appeared to need a radical reconception, to adjust it to the evidences, felt to be irresistible, of the presence of evolution in the world. The way was thus made, over a field widely prepared, for the favourable reception of a philosophy that proposed nothing less than the harmonious satisfaction and fulfilment, in an alleged Higher Synthesis, of the conflicting interests reflected in the Agnosticism of Hamilton, in the Positivism of Comte, in the evolutional results of science, and even in the Theism of the traditional religious consciousness. The theist was to be shown right, in so far as he resisted the positivist by asserting the fact of an “Ultimate Reality”; for this was not only an “absolute datum of consciousness,” but the unavoidable presupposition ​of the fact of evolution, which could only be explained by “the reality of an Omnipresent Energy.” The positivist, in his turn, was to be shown right, in so far as he maintained against the theist, theological or metaphysical, traditional or philosophical, the weighty discovery that all knowledge is necessarily relative to the constitution of the knowing subject, therefore cannot be the knowledge of any Ultimate Reality, nor of things as they are in themselves, but must be knowledge of phenomena only—of things as they appear to conscious experience, limited as this is by correlation with a specific nervous organism. The agnostic, however, was to be shown the most comprehensively right of all: for his was the truth that embraced and harmonised the truth of the positivist and the truth of the theist, at once and together; his was the immovable assurance of the fact of an Ultimate Reality, whose nature nevertheless could only be stated as the “Unknowable,” or as the Power present in all things, the Eternal Mystery immanent in all worlds; his was the possession, too, of a boundless cosmos of phenomena, indefinitely receding into the mysterious recesses of the past, and unfolding by orderly evolution, ever more richly complex both in psychic and in physical intricacy, into the indefinite mystery of the future. Thus he was able, moreover, to meet the genuine demands of the religious consciousness, and to meet them supremely; namely, by an Eternal Power immanent in the world, instead of by an anthropomorphic God transcendent of the world—to meet them supremely, because religion, at its authentic base, was founded in Solemnity and ​Awe, and these had their only secure footing in the unfathomable and the mysterious—the omnipresence of the Omnipotent, from which none can escape, whose ways are past finding out. Thus, finally—let it not be overlooked—the belief of traditional religion in the Personality of God, in the self-conscious purposive Wisdom and Love at the root of all things, was to disappear. Not, to be sure, in behalf of Materialism; not in behalf of Atheism, taken as the dogmatic denial of God; but in behalf of Agnosticism, the far subtler avoidance of a Personal Absolute—an avoidance all the more plausible from its appeal to the impartiality which is of the essence of reason; an appeal to the rational neutrality that would no more deny than it would assert God, would no more assert than it would deny the eternity of Matter, but with disciplined self-restraint would confine itself to the affirmation, declared alone defensible, of simply some Ultimate Reality, whose nature was impenetrable to our knowledge.

      Confronted as our human intelligence always is with the fact of our ignorance, and bred as the religious thinking of that day had been in apologetics based on an agnostic philosophy such as Hamilton’s; impressed, too, as the general public was, religious and non-religious alike, with the steadfast march of natural science towards bringing all facts under the reign of physical law—above all, under the law of evolution—we need not wonder that this public was widely and deeply influenced by this philosophy. It is accessible to the general intelligence, and its evidences are impressive to minds unacquainted with the ​subtleties inseparable from the most searching thought, while its refutation unavoidably carries the thinker into the intricacies of dialectic that to the general mind are least inviting, or are even repellent.

      Since the diffusion of the doctrines of Darwin and Spencer, the more alert portion of the religious world has exhibited a busy haste to readjust its theological conceptions to the new views. In fact, these efforts have been noticeable for their speed and adroitness rather than for their large or considerate judgment; in their anxiety for harmony with the new, they have not seldom lost sight of the cardinal truths in the old. Memorable, unrivalled among them, was the proposal of Matthew Arnold, in the rôle of a devoted English Churchman, to replace the Personal God of “the religion in which we have been brought up,” and in the name of saving this religion, by his now famous “Power, not ourselves, that makes for Righteousness”: a proposal which while sacrificing the very heart of the warrant for calling the religion Christian—the belief in the divine Personality—was put forward in the most evident good faith that it was Christian still, and in a form so eminent for literary excellence that it beyond doubt increased the spread of its agnostic views in the very act of satirising the “Unknowable,” and preserved for the New Negation, in a lasting monument of English letters, the aesthetic charm which it added to the cause.

      Agnosticism thus became adult and adorned, and made its conquests. But it was to meet a mortal foe; a foe, too, sprung from its own germinal stock. The ​successive stages of its growth, by the express declaration of their authors, all had their impulse in doctrines of Kant. Though their religious negations were connected with Kant by a more or less violent misinterpretation of his philosophical method and aim, Kant’s own way of dealing with what he called Theoretical as distinguished from Practical Reason was doubtless still largely responsible for these results, so erasive of Personality, in all its genuine characters, from the whole of existence. The counter-movement in thought was also founded on Kant, by another one-sided construction of his doctrines.

      For meanwhile, indeed during a whole generation prior to these negative movements in the English-speaking world and in France, there had followed Kant’s thinking, in Kant’s own fatherland, a succession of systems deriving from his theoretical principles, and distinguished by the great names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each aiming to surmount the Agnosticism lurking in Kant’s doctrine of knowledge. If Kant made the bold attempt to remove religion beyond the reach of intellectual assault forever, by drawing around the intellect, under the depreciatory name of the Theoretical Reason, the boundary of restriction to objects of sense; if he thus left religion in the supposed impregnable seat of the Practical Reason, which alone dealt with supersensible things—with God, with Freedom, and with Immortality—but dealt with them unassailably, as the very postulates of its own being and action; and if to him this made religion, in all its several aspects of devotion, of aspiration, and of hope, the ​direct expression of human rational will: to all of his great successors, on the contrary, this rescuing of faith by identifying it with pure will, after depriving it of all support from intelligence, seemed in fact the evaporation of freedom itself into a merely formal or nominal power, meaningless because void of intelligible contents; and hence the method, so far from being the support, appeared to be simply the undermining of religion. So, in ways successively developing an organic logic, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel set seriously about the task of bringing the entire conscious life, religion included, within the unbroken compass of knowledge. But as they all alike accepted one characteristic tenet of Kant’s theory of knowledge, namely, that the possibility of knowledge is conditional upon its object’s being embraced in the same “unity of consciousness” with its subject, they either had to confess God—for religious consciousness the Supreme Object—unknowable and unprovable (as Kant had maintained in his famous assault on the standard theoretical arguments for God’s existence), or else had to say that God must henceforth be conceived as literally immanent in the world, not as strictly transcendent of it. God, as an intelligibly defensible Reality, thus appeared to become indisputably immanent in our human minds also: this, too, whether our minds were conceived, with Fichte, as having the physical world immanent in them; or, with Schelling, as being embraced in Nature as component members of the Whole informed with God; or, again, with Hegel, as standing over against the members of Nature, members in a ​correlated world of Mind, and implicated together with Nature in the consciousness of God—components in that Consciousness, in fact—items in the Divine Self-Expression unfolding from eternity to eternity. By this theory of a Divine Immanence, fulfilling the “Divine Omnipresence” of the traditional faith, they aimed at once to convict Kant of construing God as a “thing in itself,”—of the very fallacy of “transcendental illusion” which he had himself exposed in his Transcendental Dialectic—and to refute his criticism, made in the same place, of the Ontological Proof for the existence of God. Drop, they said,