Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

yet denied him self-determination and free will. But we do not take self-consciousness to be the all of personality-that is, identical with it. For self-determination is personality, and infinite selfdetermination means for us the infinite personality called God.

The theistic philosophy of our time properly inquires, whether that self-activity, which is the property of spirit, is something that may be thought of by itself, or requires that we posit a self-active Being for its Ground. So far as it consists of mechanism, the outgoings of soul-life might conceivably be due to their being the expression of material workings dependent on an impersonal primitive Ground (Urgrund) of things. But it is otherwise with its self-activity, which cannot be founded or based but on a self-active Being. We take it to be now well understood that personality is, to theistic philosophy, that which gives to man his unity as an unanalysed self or individual consciousness; that its active elements are knowledge or intelligence, feeling or sensibility, and will or volition; and that its implicates are inclusive of self-consciousness and self-determination or freedom. Personality is to it, in our view, nothing but the capability of a self-determination which shall include thought, selfconsciousness, and moral self-determination. The self-consciousness is for us condition and presupposition of this moral self-determination. And the power by which man is able so to resolve and de

THE ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY.

271

termine, is just that freedom of his will which is later to occupy our attention.

Now, the manifestations of Deity are, as we judge, so grounded in self-determination as to presuppose the personality of God. These things we may surely say without professing to attempt a psychology of the Eternal. Hence to the theistic philosophy the Divine Personality, as ideal or absolute, represents, as the Eternal Energy self-determined in His own Supreme Reason, the essential elements in personality raised to their highest power or perfection. It seems to find beginnings of this personality in the Ontological proof of perfect being, to gather strength for its conclusion in the apparent cosmological craving for Will as the originative force or power, to gain confirmation from the Intelligence that marks the Teleological reasoning, and to reach the highest seal of self-existent personality in the evidences of man's mind and of moral law. As little as may be can it be questioned that recent philosophy of theism has stepped out in advance of the inherent absurdity of the position assumed by those thinkers who, in postulating that Deity, personally non-existent, may yet be higher than personality, place being plus intelligence below that which has it not, and who, in face of the selfevidencing power of the theistic idea, assign that which is self-conscious and self-determining to a lower platform than that which blindly moves on to its ends. A perfectly absurd and even impos

sible conception is this of infinite impersonal being, a conception which is quite incapable of being thought by any human mind. This impossibility of resting in any "World-Ground" that shall be impersonal and unconscious, say, the unconscious Will of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, as that with which, in the religious relation, the finite spirit is to hold commerce, has been strenuously declared by the theistic philosophy of late years, in opposition to pantheistic tendencies. What is non-personal it has felt compelled to treat as for it sub-personal, since it cannot suffice for the high ends and conscious relations of religion. It has not suffered itself to forget that the ends of which we have been speaking are ends living and rational; and it has not seen the wisdom of a philosophy which should postulate the evolution of spiritual qualities and the results of thought, while there should be no conscious apprehension of the former, and none of the attributes that should accompany the latter.

Theistic philosophy has been more sensibly aware of how truly her warfare must be waged on the field of pure thought, on which she must, perchance, engage the philosophy of the unconscious more seriously than has yet been done. Even now it is to be hoped she has been duly impressed with the wonderfulness of the unconscious Absolute, with which, however little intelligible, her thought has to do. For, has she not seen it to be an Unconscious which, as "by sorcery," is

CRITICISM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS ABSOLUTE. 273

at any moment "able to destroy matter and to call it again into existence"; an Absolute which knows everything excepting always itself; an Unconscious "which is a spirit," and "not only possesses reason and intelligence, but is endowed with a clear-sighted wisdom infinitely superior to any conceivable consciousness," and which, without being itself personal, does everything we are wont to ascribe to personality? There is, in view of all this, perhaps little wonder that theistic philosophy has found it to have been declared-by Karl Peters, of course-that this philosophy of the Unconscious really represents a transition to theism. We cannot but justify her refusal to recognise this manifest self- contradiction called an Unconscious Absolute, or to sanction the separation of willthe irrational will of Hartmann's Unconscious— under any form or circumstance from intellect, as only part of the groundless and arbitrary procedure of that philosopher. We think theistic philosophy may well stand excused if she insists on making her Deity more than a giant dreamer, doing He knows not what. We cannot but indorse her view of Hartmann's recognition of the presence and evidence of mind as disclosed in the universe, while he attributes them to nothing higher than an unintelligent and unconscious potentiality, as a contradictory and irrational position. What do we know of intelligence and will acting as severed from consciousness? Certainly we have

S

activities of our own which, thanks to habit, have grown unconscious; but these activities themselves in their initial stages, and all our most real activities, are conscious activities. And if we know nothing of will and intelligence operating save as inseparably associated with consciousness, what warrant has our rational selfhood for reasoning up except as it reasons up from what is known? According to Hartmann, it is sufficient for the religious interest, which attaches itself to theism, to postulate an intelligent first being or principle (Urwesen) without self-determination: a reflectionless, intuitive intelligence is called in by him to explain the immanent, unconscious, teleological principle of the world. When he so tries to bridge the gulf between the real theistic position and the pantheistic leanings of his pessimism, we must be grateful to him, we suppose, for regarding us as products of an intelligence. But to the phil

osophy of theism it can be no great advance on a purely mechanical view of things if the intelligence from which we are sprung is so unconscious and unrelated to our life as neither to appoint its ends, nor impart its higher worth, nor lend supernal aid in the fulfilment of its imposed ends and aims.

We do not think theistic philosophy can be said to have found its mind expressed in the "Cosmic theism" of Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy,' in the second volume of which he inveighs against postu

[ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »