No. II. The Reason.
I.
SCIENTISTS think there are laws to nature universally and constantly true. As long as this has been thought it has been thought because complete knowledge was assumed. For instance, where a solitary individual of pre-history saw rain falling and gradually forming a puddle, he might have thought, though he could not perhaps have expressed, that all larger things develop by an accumulation of smaller versions of themselves. Thus an instance becomes a law, and throughout the history of law-making the laws have changed with the instances. The man of pre-history’s law would be disproved by everything around him which could not be divided into identical but smaller versions of itself, animals for example. Yet Democritus and the other atomists of ancient times made this early conception a philosophy, and there has been a general view amongst the public from the time of Rutherford that truly all things are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. That this is not truly the case in the Standard Model of quantum physics, which boils these down further into other particles and then boils those particles down even further to a stage of an uncertain sea-like amorphous energy, is not commonly known. To reach such a stage is to do away altogether with the old Greek atoms, conceived as they were to be indivisible units, and in fact to do away with particularity itself. Everything is really one thing, and that one thing is everything.
In this the mind approaches near to that transcendence which the suitably unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing so hazily but happily discusses. It is the transcendence, because it is the eclipse, of all particular substance and thought, the true infinitude necessarily implied in monism. It is not the downward darkling reductionism of superior things in terms of their inferior fundamentals, viz., a man is only an animal, an animal is only its cells, cells are only their protoplasm, protoplasm is only its carbon, and carbon is only its particles. Science itself has concluded, although it has not taken great pains to inform, that the concluding steps in this chain are that particles are really their energy and energy is truly expansive. It is not the downward but the upward spiral which describes existence. To look down is simply to do that, to look down, it is not to go down, to reach the treasure vaults of the universe and find that the meaning of matter is dust and the meaning of life—forty-two.
Hence from science’s assumption of complete knowledge in the study of natural law the mind concludes in doubt. A law is not a law if it only last a trillion years. The moment it is broken in a single instance it simply becomes an old rule of thumb, a mere estimation of probability which held true for awhile but at last receded with the facts. Nothing is true if it be not true for eternity. That is why Christians will say, ‘truth, which is God’, or, ‘reality, which is God’, not because they are harping but because they are genuinely asserting the only adequate premise for those concepts. If not born in God then not born at all.
There sits upon the top of that mountain,
A cloud, a silken compacted fountain.
A solid and shapen thing from afar
But near and within a chaos, a war,
But far and without a silver lining,
But near and within a grief entwining,
But far and without a pearly palace,
But near and within a shaking chalice.
To treat of the reason or logic whereby a person might validly forego the undoubtedly easy and defensible position of atheism, and take up the mantle of a glorious but copious and unwieldy faith, it is above all necessary to begin with the beginning; to question the method before questioning the conclusion. For the conclusion must be the consequence of the method and if the method appears sound, though it possess howsoever many perplexities and paradoxes, its conclusion will be trusted. That is why a scientifically bolstered atheism prevails to-day in England and other important places. The mass of people believe, and not without evidence or many sufficient reasons, in the method of science and thus consent however reluctantly, or as it may be—gladly, in its seeming conclusion against theism. Modern analysis rips apart the flimsy substance of Biblical evidence and sets afire the oily coating of apologetic philosophy. We know we feel, and we feel we know, that science makes for results which can be practically exploited for the convenience of mankind. If we lose the comfort of a Father which art in Heaven we gain the comfort of an electric heater in our living rooms. If we cannot upon our consciences attend Sunday’s Morning Prayer we can upon our consciences attend Sunday’s afternoon races, or concerts, or drinking parties.
Experience is constantly asserting contrarieties and reason persists in its attempts to harmonise these, but only trust in a method of enquiry can ever provide the rudder’s stability in such treacherous waters. There are currents here and currents there, tides oppose the winds and winds oppose the tides; for that matter tides oppose the tides and winds oppose the winds, but little rudders manoeuvre vast ships. A simple fin of wood or metal turned by a simpler rod guides great vessels forth. This might be counted a metaphor for the right exploration of knowledge. The earth’s interiors are mapped and settled, the great conquests of matter are made, but in the infinite realm of thought there is a limitless possibility, in the expression of Newton there are still untold pebbles to be gathered upon that eternal beach, and the event of the debate upon God, in spite of all recent fashion, is very far from being decided.
So be it, yet it is wrong so long to précis a challenge as never to undertake it. It is decided the question is upon the existence of God, the motive or choice for believing in Him has been formerly expressed—that is a matter of emotion—now the satisfactory and profound reason for thinking His existence likely must be considered, or else in a rational age the theistic belief becomes little more than a pathetic hope. In order, however, to be at all satisfied by the reason one must be satisfied by the method. Therefore, in rivalry to the pure mechanism of applied science, and the popular fire of oratorical contest, I shall now begin to delineate my opinions as to the true nature of philosophical enquiry and how it can find the answers to problems which no other method possibly could.
In the first place I do not believe the old phrases ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ are very relevant to truth, in fact I believe that they have been very nearly the death of modern philosophy. Nowadays it seems that the students of philosophy consider any assertion made a priori to be almost certainly false and any assertion made a posteriori to be in all likelihood true, especially if made with the proofs of a scientific experiment. Thus has the import of philosophy shrunk in the minds of most people. Bertrand Russell both admitted and regretted this fact. In a recorded interview with him he said something to the effect that, ‘the old school of philosophy, with which I no longer agree, was more full-blooded in a way’. He also said that, in the light of the advances of modern science, he would not have chosen to study philosophy if he were then, in 1960 or so, a young student.
The school of the analytics, as led by Russell and Moore, I have long treated as the opposite to my way of thinking. It is not that I do not admit the truth which is in some of their opinions, although I think most of them pretend to be accurate when they are in fact vague. For instance, Russell in his rather weary book entitled The History of Western Philosophy always makes it his business, as a critic, to punish the old philosophers in the use of their grammar. Talk of ‘the predicate’ is abundant in his writings. The purely linguistic meaning of this word means that which is made known (dicare, the Latin for ‘make known’) beforehand (prae, the Latin for ‘beforehand’). This seems to be merely the same mistake made in the phrase a priori, that a proposition is prior in its nature to something. This way of thinking was long ago answered and refuted by Plato.
The shapes of shadows cast on the wall of a cave, in which direction man alone can look, is a description which seems more truthful than all the possible analyses of category mistakes and logical grammar put together. This is because, whereas the analysis can but refer to the nature of language, the metaphor of the shadows actually refers to the nature of reality. Language itself only serves the function of a signalling system. Words point to things perceived, felt, or imagined, and if, by the mostly automatic and unconscious process of interpretation, our understanding of truth is correlative to a particular combination of words in a sentence we find ourselves in approval, or if not we find ourselves in disapproval. This is all very nebulous, but, like a nebula, it is very spectacular. The best nebula is the largest and the most attractive. Therefore my serious view is that, which philosophy so ever most encompasses all the hues, varieties, and shifts, of reality, is the truest. Therefore, I do not think the analytic philosophies very true. For they try to make grid lines out of existence, to squeeze the infinite through the finite, and to cut up the cloud of unknowing. Their philosophies are like chalking marks on stone: they are quaint in their way, but a sponge and a bucket of water soon effaces them forever.
There are certain terms to me which perfectly express the essence of reality and one of them is ‘reality’ itself. The analytic philosophers could say nothing about the word ‘reality’ because it is not of itself in a sentence. One finds in this that such philosophical analysts are mere grammarians, and that, to make a scientific comparison, they concern themselves with mixtures but not with elements. That being so I wonder how they have ever been considered philosophers at all, certainly how they have ever been so lauded as philosophers, for the nature of philosophical debate has always been to approach the heart of things and to avoid the peripheries. To a certain extent it is impossible to avoid the peripheries, because we are all irremediably caught within the universe, we are not quite sure how or why, we remember perhaps something, if not—nothing, of reality before our human lives began, and we try to guess at the nature of our thoughts by the linguistic expressions we are taught by example. Yet it is by the superb instincts of our intelligence, which thinks in its own language that we cannot understand till it is translated for us into speech, that we know, or rather feel the differences between left and right, north and south, centre and periphery.
Every animal’s brain, even an insect’s, understands the most abstruse mathematics. I saw one summer a wasp swoop down without hesitation, from a height of some twelve feet, to a hair’s breadth height above the surface of a pool of rain-water, which had gathered in a bucket near where I was sitting. The wasp drank of the water for a few seconds, hovering all the while at the necessary rate, to prevent itself falling into a watery death, and then flew off to other activities. I have not the most potent knowledge of biology, but if a wasp has a brain it must be very small. Yet it could pass in fractions of seconds through calculations it would require weeks to express on paper in pure mathematics. For there would have to be calculated, amongst other things, the speed of the earth round the sun, which all animals have to account for in order to move, and which man finds impaired in him when he is drunken. The spinning earth a drunken man sees is in fact the truer perception; the same effect is produced by spinning rapidly in a circle. The alcohol, or the spinning, so overwhelms the brain’s calculating powers that the compromise it usually achieves, with grips and muscular counterweights, is affected, but for once a man sees the earth as it really is, an object spinning and hurtling through space.
All of this is to say that the difference between knowledge and description is enormous. Truly I believe that every man knows a large proportion of the truth of existence. The human brain is so immensely powerful that I do really think it possible for it to grasp most of the general truths of reality. But the brain is a thing quite separate from the human personality. The human personality uses up but a very small part of the brain’s resources. This is proved by the circumstance of comatose patients who can sleep, to all intents and purposes, for years without any visible personality. Meanwhile however, the brain is active, and engaged in being its own doctor, mending injured parts of itself and maintaining the union of the various components of the body. This is also proved by what might be called the ‘light coma’ of ordinary sleep. Still scientists find it difficult to describe sleep, to find reasons why animals need it, why our eyeballs flicker during certain stages of it, what dreams are. What is undeniable however is that our personalities are quelled during sleep by the higher authorities of the brain. We cannot stop ourselves sleeping. No amount of food or external diversion can ultimately prevent the higher hand pronouncing SLEEP, and sleep we do. Insomnia itself is not the absence of sleep but the lack of sleep. Relaxed states of mind might almost be called extensions of this supreme power of the brain, which will not have it that we should be tense and useful all the time. The natural brain is not a utilitarian, it will not suffer too many unnatural exertions.
Most of the finer expressions of human thought are therefore but those expressions which prove to be closest to the natural thought of the impersonal brain. That is to say, I am in agreement with Pope’s couplet,
True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.
This is very important to regard in conceiving any theory of the understanding, because it shows that, like icebergs, the larger parts of us are invisible thoughts, although they are not unimaginable. We cannot see the vast immersed parts of an iceberg from a surface boat but our imaginations can guess at them. This is the same regarding the understanding of truth. The brain understands perhaps a million times more than we can adequately express. The struggle in education is to become able to express the truth, to describe it, rather than to know it; for I believe we know most things from birth already. Therefore, in common with Plato, I think chiefly of knowledge as remembering rather than learning, it is ‘discovered’ not ‘found’.[1]
This is of course largely a linguistic difference, but, regarding the distinctions of words, I do not think they can be ever adequately explained. Scholarship has done much to try and fix them, and most languages have their great figures who determine many usages. Yet Dr. Johnson was fundamentally of the opinion that the original coining of words, and therefore of language, was the result of a ‘direct inspiration’. Thus he refers to God, for that is the direction he means, as the force of all preservation in the universe. Johnson himself might not have asserted that, but I think it the natural implication of his very apt remark. For if God provided the direct inspiration of the original words of man, from which all later words were purely derivative and variant, then he is at once the Creator (in the minds of men) and the Preserver of language. He created man’s inspiration; but He had first to preserve the Source of the inspiration. This indeed forms a circle or an overlap, but I have remarked how the truest philosophy is the most encompassing, and the most false philosophy the most incisive and reductive. This brings me to the principal of all I have been attempting to express.
In the whole pantheon of philosophers I place myself most squarely at the feet of Spinoza. It is not that I think his system is infallibly expressed, it is to be regretted that it is not, but that his insight was really very profound. However I was always vexed by the main problem of his monist or singular logic, namely, how a really singular thing could possibly take on the appearance of plural entities. This is one of the grave paradoxes of human perception, but it was in fact through the reading of Spinoza that I eventually came to realise how the necessary logic of monism could be reconciled to the undeniable perception of pluralities.
Spinoza elaborates his proof in the Ethics, perhaps unnecessarily, by dividing up existence into three categories: substance, attributes, and modes. In fact I think by these Cartesian expressions Spinoza really meant to convey the very simple idea that there are Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary, kinds of existence in the human understanding. The human understanding is like a colander, which cannot contain a complete body of water but must separate it through several apertures. So with truth, my mind cannot adequately think of Salisbury and Canterbury at the same time. I know that they both are cities in southern England with fine cathedrals, and that Salisbury’s cathedral is, in my opinion, the most beautiful man-made edifice on earth, but in order for me to adequately conceive of either city I must stop thinking on the other. For quite as I cannot walk through Salisbury and Canterbury at the same time, so I cannot think of them at the same time without confounding both.
Yet each is in southern England; each is on earth; each is in the Solar System of the Milky Way galaxy in a particular patch of the universe. Therefore, logically speaking, I am already in both cities at the same time, for both cities already exist in the thing I exist in. All of their stones, timbers, mortars, glass things, vegetable, mineral, and animal, objects, are a part of the main of which I too am a part.
This seems ridiculous to most people, as did the idea the earth was a ball upon a time. The facts are however, as I see them, that the parts which we ascribe to the general universe are only parts of our imagination (the imagination itself being a thing amongst the infinite contiguity of existence). Because, however, no particular intellect could ever fully comprise the whole of infinity, but is on the contrary only one point, position, or aspect, of infinity, (for it would be wrong to really call it a part) it becomes necessary to fathom The One as the many. As when a sock is pulled inside out it inverts and reverses itself, yet it is still the same sock, so I believe certain aspects of infinite existence act in the intellects of mortal animals. They appear to be finite, because they appear to be utterly isolated, yet reflection contradicts this, thus the wise man realises and appreciates the unity of God’s existence. By God he means the totality, the real sovereignty, the sovereignty of the complete instead of the isolated. Yet, in order to make the most of what is placed in our power, we ration the material around us and christen its variety with separating names.
Spinoza explains this rather cursorily in his definitions of modes, or the Tertiary expressions of existence. He defines a mode as ‘the Modifications of a substance or that which is in something else through which it may be conceived’. In other words ‘red’ is a mode which cannot be understood without the mode of ‘colour’, ‘colour’ is a mode which cannot be understood without the attribute of ‘thought’, but thought is an attribute and not a mode because it is imagined as an essence. We can imagine a world of thought without perceptions or objects, it might be contended we in fact enter such a world when we dream, but we cannot imagine a world of perceptions or objects without thought, for to imagine at all is to think. Thus thought is an essence and an attribute. Spinoza also christens ‘extension’ an attribute. The Cartesian concept of extension, taken at its immediate value, means the motions of matter in space. Therefore both shrinking and stretching are qualities of extension, for extension means any kind of operation within the canvas of space. This he calls an attribute; so that he implies the world of matter could in fact exist without the world of thought, because it is an essence. This is the main difference between Spinoza’s realism and Hegel’s idealism. Hegel thinks that because a world of matter without thought cannot be imagined, therefore it could not exist. From this he deduces that all matter is only a kind of thought. But Spinoza asserts that although a world of matter cannot be imagined without thought, nevertheless it might possibly exist without thought, because no thought is necessary to its existence. It is not necessary to think of thought to think of matter but it is necessary to think. Therefore, it is impossible to imagine matter without thought, but it is not therefore impossible for matter to exist without thought. This point is not ultimately important however because neither is really a substance.
The real substance is that which absorbs everything else. Thought is not the real substance because it evidently ceases at certain points in our experience, although it meets at many different points. The real substance, which I think is more properly expressed in the divine word of ‘existence’ uses thought as only one of its infinite expressions. For this reason Spinoza was quite convinced that in our mortal lives we are witness to only a few of the untold varieties of existence. This is even sustained nowadays by the sciences and their talk of ‘dark’ things: dark matter, dark energy, the names assigned to ignorance, which comprise, in their somewhat staid and mathematical estimations, some nine-tenths of all the universe. Even in such immeasurable scales the scientists think they can quantify. So long as they think in those terms they will never, in my opinion, breach the walls between mechanical skill and wisdom. Howbeit, none can deny that we are all of us born, raised, educated, encouraged, forced one moment into bed and another moment out of it, without the least consent on our parts. This must surely suggest that the circumstances which lead to things, which lead to the expressions of an eternal universe, are part of a fundamental unity. For if all things were divided one from another there could be no interaction, and like the cracks which first part the foam of the sea in halves, and then in quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and so on, the tendency to diminish must in the course of eternity leave nothing at all. As therefore eternity has elapsed eternally already, otherwise it were not eternal, there ought not to be a single shred of existence left. Yet we find more than shreds around us.
[1] Of course a newborn baby will not remember Einstein’s theory of relativity, but that does not show the universe is not truly one thing in constant communication with itself, and so never actually learning a thing new but ever interacting with the ancient throughout eternity.
Two mirrors in eternal reflection.
The various implications of this very pantheism I will not too much describe. Suffice to say that I think most are mistaken in concluding them. Spinoza himself dwelt too much on the necessity of things in pantheism, but this necessity of his is of so free a nature that it is clearly an inadequate word. To say it is necessary that there should be freedom is true, but it seems too paradoxical to support. Providence is a far greater word, which accounts for the free agency of some things and the destiny of others. It is beyond our proper understanding, but not our proper sympathy. I think in fact the understanding really is sympathy; it is the acknowledgement that we all have our parts to play. The thought of us being in God and Him in us is vastly comforting. Egoists, like Omar Khayyam, tend think it an annoyance that there should be something higher than themselves. But that is only a passing fancy. We must be glad of it on our deathbeds.
Therefore, in fine, these are my main philosophical opinions: firstly, that the phrases a priori and a posteriori are both of them mistaken; nothing is prior or posterior, everything is present and unconsciously known; description is the only business of consciousness. Secondly, a common, infinite, and unending, unity links together all things which our imaginations can conceive of as separate. Because this unity comprises all power, all knowledge, all time, and all life, I believe this unity possesses the qualities of God. This pantheistic God however, to be understood, must only be considered in His entirety. To think of Him in part is not to think of Him; that is the reason for the existence of atheism and human evil. Although mankind can never really think of God in total with a faultless adequacy, nevertheless, to think generally of His infinity places our thoughts into a better symmetry with His, and this is the only true cause of happiness. My ethics then are that any religion which is really godly, which is inspired by all the divine and infinite qualities of God, is a harbinger of the very strongest mortal happiness. I think the teachings of Christ show the highest moral sympathy with God’s omnipotence, and I think the philosophy of Spinoza shows the widest intellectual sympathy. Therefore I cannot think that these two are opposites at all. To call a Spinozistic Christian a heretic is an utter contradiction. Christ’s ethics justified the existence of all men, and Spinoza’s philosophy explained the existence of Christ through God. Therefore each is complementary to blessedness. Philosophy is the wisdom of godliness, religion is the art of godliness, and godliness is the expansion of hope from selfishness, a hope borne on the wings of modesty. Modesty is the recognition that, however great we might be, God is always greater. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I consider the mechanical successes of the sciences, which generally take a finitude of the universe for a certainty, as being merely the result of limitation pleasing limitation. Mankind will never be able to understand and use nature as nature understands and uses herself. The nuclear bomb is a remarkable testament of power; but the sun is a more remarkable testament, the sun comprises millions of nuclear bombs a second. The reason then that infinity and pantheism, Spinoza and religion, mysticism and poetry, are things largely neglected and out of favour in this scientific age is simply as follows: that we have, for the moment, forgotten our own temporality and self-centred limitations, mistaken parts for a total, and supposed it impossible that anything could ever exceed our own experience.
II.
Nature and thought are altogether, matter and spirit. Consider the senses. One establishes the probability of immediate vision, one of immediate sound, one of immediate smell, one of immediate touch, one of immediate taste. All of these are immediate, they detect present sensations, and all of these are only probable, for yet it is impossible to fully see, hear, smell, or touch, or taste, anything, which is why people disagree both amongst themselves and in themselves at one time or another. Thought is just the same as these senses but that it combines something of them all, and thus makes something greater than each; it is also intermediate. Its perceptions are not in the present but are either between the present and the past or the future and the present. Its abstractions, on the contrary, are not confined to any time of place but seem to partake of the eternity above them. Hence one might think in the intermediary of the present and the past by contemplating the taste of a meal, or one might think in the intermediary of the future and the present by speculating on one’s future prospects, but one must think in eternity to think of such abstractions as colour, or Purpose, or Substance. These conceptions, not the incidents of time but the properties which make for time and all of its incidents, are the highest in existence. They partake of the divine nature, and establish man as far above the animals as God is established above man, and as philosophy is established above empiricism.
The mind in abstraction is faster than the speed of light, so Thales observed, for it can span the universe in an instant and, through its sympathy, be more or less assimilated into God. Yet it is a strange but certain fact that the more one probes into the ways of the human mind the more likely one is to lose it. Life is so astonishing a thing that to think of it without precaution is dangerous, and even sometimes fatal. For to think of life is one third to turn outwards and two thirds to turn inwards. Consequently many very wise people perform a demarcation in their minds. How is it that Pitt, Byron, and Hemingway; Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, and Dickens; Aurelius, Wilde, Caravaggio; Beethoven, Newton, Pythagoras, Marlowe; Chaucer, Milton, Nelson, and Cowper; not to say Caesar, Nietzsche, Puccini; Rochester, Flaubert, Tchaikovsky, and Hugo; as well as, it seems, most kings, have all combined some measure of public glory with private chaos? Cowper never worked and tried a few times to destroy himself; Pitt, Hemingway, Coleridge, and Chaucer, were among the addicts of substances, the first two of alcohol, the second two of drugs; Beethoven like Cowper was plagued by melancholy; the five last with Byron, Shelley, Dickens (by rumour), Shakespeare (on his sonnets), Wilde, and Nelson, were all touched with the concupiscent malady, although Nelson was in fairness cabined in a ship for years at a time; Milton’s public life was dreadful, Marlowe was probably a spy killed on or off duty, Nietzsche and Pythagoras became mad, Beethoven nearly so; Caravaggio was a murderer, Aurelius, great in his government, wise in his writings, sired one of the most infamous individuals in history; and so on and so forth. All of these great men, to varying degrees of course, had placed a division between themselves and their work, but character itself is the main work of all men. Only it is harder to achieve than it is to consider.
‘He who wants little is most like the gods, who want nothing.’
Many turn with disgust from the knots of angst in the self-conscious mind and fall upon a crutch; it might be the crutch of alcohol, lust, or superstition, that obsessive and selfish strain of mystical thought. Faith in God can be merely a crutch if more emphasis is placed on the motive of that faith than its object. Yet of all crutches the faith in God is the best if it is sincere, it will probably lead to wisdom in the end and become a staff when the others turn to snakes. There is also this to consider: that if the most complete understanding is to be attained in life it must have for its study the most complete concept, and that concept is God, which thought is the origin of the great and famous Ontological Argument of St. Anselm.
It is simultaneously the most conclusive and the least believable of logical proofs, which is unique in the history of reason. The first is the most important fact, it is a proof which has been mathematically formulated and shown to resist logical machines. The second has been the most influential fact; almost nobody who reads the Ontological Argument without sympathy will believe it. In the same manner, nobody without sympathy for the uses of decimals would believe that ten divided by three is an unendingly recurring third. Yet the logic of the Ontological Argument is irrefutable. It is brief and perfect, and thus proceeds:
I. Grant that the definition of God is the greatest thing.
II. Suppose however that God does not exist.
III. If God does not exist He is not the greatest thing.
IV. But the greatest thing must exist in order to be great.
V. Therefore God exists.
The only two unusual premises required for this argument are: the existence of the quality of greatness, and the correctness of the status of existence. Upon these two grounds alone have all the assailants of the Ontological Argument been reduced to fight; atheists are somewhat startled to discover that they cannot employ their usual rhetoric against the corruption of churches, the contradictions of scripture, and the absurdity of miracles. They have been obliged to contend against this argument on these two grounds of greatness and existence alone, and it is remarkable that they have blunted all their weapons without taking the prize.
Upon the question of existence Kant suggested that it is not a predicate, or thing that can be attained from a prior condition, therefore its use is inappropriate in an argument which asserts that greatness attains existence. This mistake comes about due to a misunderstanding of the terms. Greatness does not attain existence, it is not prior to its existence in any respect, greatness must exist as part of its nature in order to be great. There is no timescale in the logic. Greatness to be greatness must exist, that is the assertion, not that greatness has a habit of coming into existence from a prior condition because it is so very great. That certainly is absurd, but that was never the argument.
It has also been contested that existence is so general a term it is become meaningless. On the contrary it is a very specific term that has the most general application. All it means is whether a thing is real or not. Many different things are real in different ways, and some are more real than others, but that it is meaningless to say ‘Salisbury Cathedral exists’ cannot be admitted even though it is also meaningful to say ‘pies exist’, ‘plates exist’, and ‘dung beetles exist’; for all of these statements are true. ‘But,’ says the atheist, ‘we have seen Salisbury Cathedral, and pies, and plates, and dung beetles; but never God.’ Of this it may be said, ‘If we have seen these things, we may be sure we have seen something of God, however infinitesimal and minor. Yet God has been defined as “the greatest thing” and therefore it is not very correct to talk of seeing all of Him at once, or even a large part of Him. Nobody doubts the existence of the other side of the Moon, although no one has seen it.’
This diverts again to the question of greatness and whether it is really just to speak of things having the quality of greatness, or perfection, as other verbalisations of the Ontological Argument express it. It is a matter easily resolved; either things exist in a scale of comparable attainments and reality or they do not. If they do not, how can anything on earth be explained? How can anyone think? How can anyone speak? How can anyone decide a course of action or hold a set of opinions without this presumption? How can anyone choose to live instead of to die? How can matter exist? How can light exist? How can dimensions exist? If there is no reality to the scale of greatness in the dimensions of length, height, breadth, and time, they cannot possibly exist. Greatness, not simply of size but of power, attainments, quality, and so forth, is the guarantor of all reality in things, it is the quality that shows to the perceiving intellect what a thing is by what it indicates. ‘But,’ objects the atheist, ‘that does not mean the greatest thing is a being. For if it did mean that, it would also have to mean that the greatest thing was the greatest island, the greatest bicycle, the greatest teaspoon, the greatest version of everything which is once identified, at one and the same time.’ That is folly. An island asserts nothing except that it is bordered by the sea, a bicycle is positive only to the point of two wheels, a teaspoon only between the point and the round and concave end, but a being asserts an enormously positive quality, it asserts life. Ultimately all dead matter can only be compared in greatness by dimensions, their uses are only relevant to the beings who use them, but the state of being opens an enormous range of comparisons in greatness. Whether a being is strongest, wisest, healthiest, most virtuous, most loving, these are all unique sub-scales in the total scale of greatness. None, therefore, could possibly suggest without suspicion of dishonesty that it is not greater to be a being than to be a stone, yet those who deny the scale of greatness do assert this. They assert that nothing is either greater or inferior; therefore there is nothing to assert. For how could anything be asserted without being truer or better than another thing, such as the former statement demands that it should be considered, without this implicit presumption of scale in greatness?
The argument may be expressed in another way: the idea of God could not exist without the being, for the being by definition involves the origin of ideas themselves, as well as of being itself and all other things, so it is necessary that the one should demand the others. This is something which has been contradicted, but contradicted mistakenly, by asserting that no idea necessarily exists for its being imagined or described; that Frankenstein the monster does not necessarily exist because Frankenstein the novel exists, nor unicorns because they have been painted. Well if God were not defined as He is, by being rendered synonymous with perfection, which is a genuine and stimulating proposition of metaphysics aside from all other considerations, that would be a relevant counterpoint. But he is so defined, meanwhile monsters and unicorns are creatures of the mind’s picking, not metaphysical propositions, and therefore of little relevance to the question.
For in order to understand the ontological argument it is vitally necessary to understand what is meant by God. There are some persons such as John Stuart Mill who, having ached in attempts to reconcile the idea of God to the reality of suffering, and supposed that no godly beneficence could endure the very remotest evil, have preferred to assert God’s benevolence at the price of His omnipotence. They have felt that no all-benevolent, all-knowing, and all-powerful, being could possibly allow a child to die of cancer, or the beautiful to be smitten by the wicked. They have attempted to show that such a God as the Christian God might be all-beneficent but could not be omnipotent, as that would be a contradiction. He would stay the hand of the murderer otherwise or thwart the course of the tumour. It seems quite logical to think so; and if mice could philosophise they would say that God would never permit the trap.
Of course, the trouble with this notion is that it is not a notion of God. God is indeed all-wise and all-powerful but He is not all-benevolent. Such a thing would be a great imperfection in the deity, and a merely common attribute. Certainly there are many people who walk in kindness, who notwithstanding their mortal frailties are divested of cruelty, who detest suffering and its justifications. Animals are often all-benevolent; they have no malice aforethought, no passion for injury. Worms and bees are no very glorious creatures, but they are all-beneficent, for what creature does not profit by the soils of the former and the pollinations of the latter? Their very predators depend on them. Some insane murderers have been all-benevolent, had never deliberated evil or intended harm, had in fact intended the contrary, but had dreadfully erred, for actions and intentions are far related. Frolicking strength will often kill the vulnerable as maddened elephants trample their young, and tragedy bears less malignance than mischance.
Neither is benevolence infallible. Does not almsgiving cause beggary, and coddling cause weakness, and flattery delusion? Such people inevitably come to mischief, perhaps even to misery. ‘I now too plainly perceive my error; my vanity, in attempting to please all by fearing to offend any; my meanness in approving folly lest fools should disapprove. Henceforth, therefore, it shall be my study to reserve my pity for real distress; my friendship for true merit; and any love for her, who first taught me what it is to be happy.’ GOLDSMITH, FROM THE GOOD-NATURED MAN.
God is not all-benevolent, He does not smile on torturers, He does not savour disseminated misery, He does not revel in revellers’ iniquities, it is not in His providence that good should come squarely of ill, nor happiness squarely of crime. He is however benevolent, yet in the course of a long extenuating providence, entwined with wisdom, not in the blindness of sheer prodigality. This much is evident of the world, that he who is indiscriminate is blind, and he who is profligate not generous. God’s nature is beyond a mortal understanding, but a mortal understanding can speculate from private experience which is the likeliest, that God is nearer akin to a man like Genghis Khan or nearer akin to a man like Jesus Christ. Jesus could not eliminate suffering from the world, He certainly could not eliminate His own suffering from the world, but nearly all of His sayings tended towards the establishment of the compassionate ethic. In this world, which is so constructed that its glory cannot be quite divided from its shame nor its shame from its glory, He lit a flame which lived upon its fuel but did not consume it, which shone more brightly than the strongest brazier. Everything he taught he taught for the good of everyone, whereas Genghis Khan, among many sterling merits and useful deeds, was fundamentally selfish to himself. He was not true to the spirit of life, he was truer to the urge for death. In an immortal being which character would seem the more likely?
These are treacherous waters, but much has been written upon the character of Jesus Christ and its approximation with God’s. Acceptance, nobility, patience, kindness, humility in mixture with an unselfish pride, wisdom for the ways of the earth. His knowledge was not of biology but of life. He knew not of photosynthesis but he could consider the lilies of the field, he knew not of anatomy but he knew of mankind. Such was his understanding, a spanning thing which saw through and not with the eye. The scientific method, though useful in many practical respects, can no more discover the purpose of the universe than the purpose of a man can be discovered by an autopsy of his flesh.
Therefore God is to be conceived not lightly as the collagist makes a face, by taking a few stereotypical parts and adhering them unnaturally together. The notion of God must be considered, as aforementioned, a metaphysical concept if it is to be considered with justice. From Perfection, which is a thought synonymous with a truly infinite God, omnipotence and omniscience may be readily deduced, for power and knowledge have often been called two sides of the same coin, and truly they refer to the influence or gravity which a thing possesses. Naturally if God is synonymous with the infinite existence of a universe so conceived, as He must be if He is to be at all comprehended as God, then his influence is absolute and paramount. But the notion that He has a benevolence which is absolutely unrestrained can only be justly understood if that benevolence is defined within certain limits, viz., that His is the benevolence which accords all things their existence—which is true. Most people however tend to think of an omni-benevolent being in the light of one who will save us, if we pray enough, from disaster, and gift us, if we pray enough again, with a jackpot. Such a nature cannot be reconciled with God if it can even be reconciled with benevolence.
Consequently the consideration of God’s nature becomes the consideration of the universe’s nature, with the added essence of being. It is my view as it was Spinoza’s that this is a justified step. Do we call the tiger and the whale gods? Some civilisations may have upon a time, but we tend to call them animals. Could we call any animal under any sun a god or God? Suppose one descended upon the earth, a fifty feet tall humanoid creature, one who could read everyone’s minds, who could burn anything to cinders with his left hand and create a perfect copy of a thing with his right. He would certainly be an extraordinary animal, many might be inclined to christen him a god, but is there any defensible argument which could establish him so? God, instead of a god, which is merely a term of parlance and praise, must be a being absolutely omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. It would not matter if this creature were immortal himself, if he could know all there is to be known on earth, if his powers were a thousand times greater than already described, he still could not be defensibly called God. He could not be so because evidently he would be a limited agent in the universe. However powerful in the universe, however impressive, the explanations and causes of himself must be outside himself. He would be in God all the same, as the lowest cockroach is in God. For God in order to be God, justifiably God as a metaphysical concept, cannot be limited by any space, shape, or time; for he cannot be limited in any respect whatsoever. So to be a superman is presumably a very grand and empowering thing, but it is also a very limiting thing to one with the title of God. No restrictions of any sort are tolerable to such a one.
Yet what is there which is unrestricted in its nature or conception? No single thing, for to be definably a thing is to define everything it is not. And yet—indeed a single thing, but not a thing which can be grasped in isolation from others. Only a thing which encompasses all things, which renders all particularisation invalid in fact, though it be valid and useful in imagination. Thus a tree is a tree in thought and in name for the sake of ease, in order that people should freely and easily think and discuss upon arboreal matters, but it is not in truth a tree. It is God, which is the universe, which is apparent under the appearances which Englishmen have named trees. Such is the distinction between part and whole. If a part is not a part it is the whole, and if a part is a part it is of the whole, so that there is always a whole.
This notion that all things are really one thing may be readily visualised on a fast-moving train. Those objects nearest to the window will appear completely blurred, because they are witnessed moving at a far greater rate than usual. That is also the explanation of philosophical enquiry's manumission of individual things or events, because all that is treated is treated more fully and quickly perforce all things become one in essence and reality. Mutability itself depends upon the immutability of its existence.
For if the universe is only as it seems to the slowest and least inspired of thoughts, if it is indeed only itself on the barest face of things, the solid lumps of matter, rock, clay, and chalk, it would seem strange that inspiration should exist at all, that religion should exist, or any experience for that matter. If the universe is only as it seems, it would seem strange that things should seem strange. Mechanical explanations seem very probable, and would doubtless be true, if there were no such thing as consciousness. Nothing in mechanism explains consciousness, there is no reason why particular combinations of carbon and water should write the Iliad. The fact of consciousness is a startling flash, a thing of awe and reverence to the mystical, an annoying glare to the mechanical, which cannot be accounted for in the dust of the ground. No one has ever seen dust produce a man, but when a man saws a log he produces dust, so that dust may come from consciousness but not consciousness from dust, at least by the test of one’s eyes. That is empiricism. It is rather an invalid point, and twenty-first century theists spend too much time upon the home ground of scientists. What is valid is that consciousness, though not alien to the material world as Descartes supposed, is something very indicative of the universal frame around us. If consciousness came from dust then something very mysterious is implied in dust, if dust came from consciousness then something very mysterious is still implied in dust, have it either way, the dust of the ground is gold dust. Probably each can arise from the other, but what does that show? That neither is quite as it seems.
Analysis cannot precede a story, nor criticism an object, nor science a world. Therefore, whenever science attempts to describe the origins of existence it attempts the impossible. How could an ember exceed the light of its bonfire? It is rather like Sir Roger Penrose’s opinion that thought itself is not calculation. That thought can produce calculation is evident, but that thought itself is therefore pure calculation is equivalent to saying something like: the sun enables candles to exist therefore the sun is a candle. It is not just thinking to be always recessive, as scientists tend to be. Naturally to trace some complexities from simplicities can and has yielded knowledge, but what is a simplicity? Well to say that an atom is simpler than a dog, but the existence of the atom is no simpler a fact than the existence of the dog. Existence itself is the most complex question and it is begged in things considered both relatively complex and relatively simple. Suppose the essence of the universe were a mass of tangled string, which some scientists actually think although it is more comprehensible as an analogy, then it would serve no purpose to observe that one knot is simpler than the other, or that one cord seemed to be explained by another somewhat smaller series of cords binding round it. Ultimately it is the mass of string itself which is the mystery and not the various properties of its parts.
Properties however can serve to imply certain things about an object, although only to a certain extent. This being the case, why is it that science is so downward looking in the matter of consciousness. It must always be the case in modern science, so it seems, that mechanism is to explain consciousness, but man is as much an explanation of nature as nature is an explanation of man. This truth is underestimated by those who, perhaps rightly and perhaps wrongly, look to the natural world for the answers to their manifold questions. Consequently the expressions of human consciousness, to be seen in such remarkable and individualist creations as Van Gogh’s Midnight Café and the music to Of the Father’s heart begotten, tend to be dismissed, at least scientifically. Oh, indeed, they might be tacitly acknowledged as works of genius, but works of genius themselves are of no significance to the physicist. They do not discover the neutrino. Sonnets butter no parsnips.
The significance of consciousness and abstracted knowledge is not to be lightly deprecated by a set too much accustomed to obedience and applause. These things are facts as well, although they prove the more slippery and elusive facts. My own view is that they signify a very great deal rather than a very measly amount. Consciousness is not simply a thing people employ to plan the new sewerage arrangements in the local metropolitan borough. It is a startling testament to reality, the whole universal reality in which we are all involved, and it confers magic upon everything and everyone. Modern scientific doctrine, as distinguished from the formless nature of pure science, tends to dust our faces with the crudity of our origins and the shame of our inevitable end. What could be more absurd when, by an absolute necessity, the universe must be involved in an eternal life which has birthed us like bubbles in a glass of champagne?
Science itself implies much of such a view. Only regard those things called variously zero-point energy, vacuum energy, or the cosmological constant, to see that the science of is necessarily monist in its philosophy. For if all light and all matter are energy, and if all fundamental energy is infinite and constant (as is the necessary implication of the cosmological constant) then the universe is One thing Undivided, only variant in its appearances. But this is inevitable of all thought; rivers that seem isolated of great waters when they pass through the arid zones of land (as through the arid zones of idle presumption) are simultaneously lost and found, slain and born, in Ocean.
This divine immanence is actual transcendence, so far as its totality transcends all which its parts can fathom. All things refer to it, its eclipse of us as its units is only natural, as the sun itself is more than the rays it causes. Although infinite diversity appears impossible to us because the microscopic world seems not only much smaller but much simpler than our own, nevertheless, allowance ought to be made for the limitations of our perception before assertions are made as to the limitations of actual reality. It is unknown whether some things in the atomic world have sight, but if they did that world would certainly seem as vast and various as our own. Suppose a blood cell were conscious and linguistic, suppose it formed a civilisation, suppose it developed a telescope and looked beyond the vein to see some distant veins dying and others forming. Suppose the blood cell developed a theory, with its wealth of bland observance, that all it could see within its telescope was the universe, that there was little beyond it, and whatever else might be must be simply the repetition of veins and arteries; that there are no other bodies, there is no eternal life; a Big Clot began and a Big Clot will end all the bursting of existence. Suppose further that the blood cell were called Sir Stephen Hawking, or N.A.S.A. or C.E.R.N., and we have modern science; all we observe is all there is. Yet it is of course perfectly possible that the world of proximately human size is placed above the world of the microscopic, the microscopic world being responsible for the structures of our visible world, and that the microscopic world would be placed above a lower-microscopic world which accounts for the structures of the upper-microscopic, and then another even lower-microscopic world below the first lower-microscopic world, and so on. Also in regard to the dimensions above the earth-relative or human-scaled world, we admit the utterly vast extent of the sun and then another entire scale between the sun and larger suns, from larger suns to wider nebulæ and wider nebulæ to even broader galaxies, the vast is dwindled to the diminutive by the vaster, and the diminutive is heightened to the vast by the even lesser. Yet even all this scale is only as it may be observed by the senses of man or the instruments of man. We may say as we cannot perceive anymore that there is therefore no more to perceive, so might the bat reason of sight, but the overwhelming probability remains that of all that man can perceive he has perceived only a small fraction, and of all that exists man can perceive only a corner of a piece of a morsel.
Then what pray is man to presume so much? It is said that no cell in the human body can live longer than seven years, and that every cell in every quarter of our flesh is continually reproducing itself. That is perhaps as extraordinary a fact as anyone could think of, and frankly constitutes a disproof of human identity. From out our bourne of time and place we all are faced with the blackest and most silent regions of the unknown. Eventually, the rich man and the pauper, the adored and the despised, the jovial and the wretched, must all be quietened by the master hand which, by its grace, first let us sing in the first place. At that time, all our dreams and fancies which we tend to call our reality will blow away and fade like so much vapour into the air. No more will be heard of them then.
Winston Churchill wrote upon the subject of his faith, ‘the facts led nowhere, moreover the process was comforting.’ To say the facts lead nowhere is indeed literally true. Man is no nearer to the destination of his journey by knowing about gravity, photosynthesis, quantum leaps, or chemical reactions. These may be some sights on the journey but not all of them together come near to the remotest suggestion of fulfilling that human purpose which Christianity achieves so thoroughly. If Christianity only achieves this through the apparent suspension or contravention of certain scientific facts, and science cannot achieve an inch of this no matter how many facts it accumulates, then it is obvious to an impartial observer that facts are worth no more and no less than their face value, whereas faith is worth infinity. It is not at all certain however that a pure Christianity, yet to be fully refined, will not soon establish itself which does away with some of the more eccentric bulls of its devotion and leave the facts to fend for themselves. Doubtless many Christians already enjoy so rarefied a devotion, and treat the frailties of their churches’ doctrines with a sympathetic indulgence as they glory in the beauty of their artistic achievements.
O bow down then and worship! If you would do it for a million pounds, do it for eternity’s glory! It is to proceed like a sullen child with his hands to his ears when there is a harp plucking forth the honey of silence to resist, it is to live forever with eyes cast down in fear of a little rain; look up! There is a glorious light! Conformal churchgoing is not true, it is a pose, it is nothing near the actual reaction to the magnificent reality of God. How many again would bow down and lick the slime of the earth for a million pounds, a sure promise of a million pounds? Or what would be the reaction to winning a lottery? Joy? Rapture? Euphoria? But what are pounds? What are they to this overwhelming, astounding, hope-lighting, fact. God exists. He exists. Think of it. He is not a character in a play, or a memory of a tradition of a fancy, He is real. The earth is as a grain of dust to His heel.
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