Part 13 (2/2)
_June, Aug. Sept._ 1899.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: This will perhaps be the most convenient term. In the _Summa of Aquinas_, the elaborate treatise _De vera religione_, called into existence by more recent exigencies, had no place. Still, in so far as it is constructed roughly on the same scheme and presupposes the same philosophy, and (were it not a deepening of the roots rather than an extension of the branches) might almost be regarded as a development of scholasticism, it may rightly be called ”scholastic” to distinguish it, say, from such a work as the _Grammar of a.s.sent_.]
[Footnote 2: _Science and a Future Life_, By F. W. Myers.]
[Footnote 3: i.e., If an object be adequately and exhaustively conceived under the predicates A.B.C.D., it is inadequately conceived as A.B.x.x. But if each of these properties be permeated and modified by the rest, then A in this object is not as A in any other combination, but is A as related to and modified by B.C.D.; and similarly, the other properties are each unique. Hence any part is somewhat falsely apprehended till the whole be apprehended, when we are dealing with organic as opposed to mechanical totalities.]
[Footnote 4: Not that the trans.m.u.tation of one species into another has yet been detected in any instance, or perhaps, even were it a fact, could be detected; but that such a serial graduation has been observed as might be commodiously explained by that supposition,--and also by fifty others.]
[Footnote 5: _Mind_, 1876, p. 185.]
[Footnote 6: _Mind_, 1876, p. 9.]
[Footnote 7: _Appearance and Reality_.]
XXIII.
IDEALISM IN STRAITS.
”Can any good come out of Trinity?” is a question that has been asked and answered in various senses during the recent Catholic University controversies in Ireland; but for whatever other good Catholics might look to that staunchly Elizabethan inst.i.tution, they would scarcely turn thither for theological guidance. Yet all definition is negative as well as positive; exclusive as well as inclusive; and we always know our position more deeply and accurately in the measure that we comprehend those other positions to which it is opposed. The educative value of comparing notes, quite apart from all prospect of coming to an agreement, or even of flaying our adversaries alive, is simply inestimable; we do not rightly know where we stand, except in so far as we know where others stand--for place is relative.
The Donnellan Lecturer for 1897-8 [1] took for his subject the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity in relation to contemporary idealistic philosophy. The scope of these lectures is, not to prove the doctrine of the Trinity philosophically, but to show that the difficulty besetting the conception of a multiplicity of persons united by a superpersonal bond, is just the same difficulty that brings idealistic philosophy to a dead-lock when it endeavours (1) to escape from solipsism, (2) to vindicate free-will,(3) to solve the problem of evil. He naturally speaks of Idealism as ”the only philosophy which can now be truly called living,” in the sense in which a language is said to live; that is, which is growing and changing, and endeavouring to bring new tracts of experience under its synthesis; which is current in universities of the day. Of the Realism which survives in the seminaries of the ecclesiastical world he naturally knows nothing; addressing himself to a wholly different public, he speaks to it on its own a.s.sumptions, in its own mental language; and indeed he knows no other. But having weighed idealism in the balance of criticism, he finds it far short of its pretensions to be an adequate accounting for the data of experience; he finds that it leads the mind in all directions to impa.s.sable chasms which only faith can overleap. It does not demand or suggest the mystery of the Trinity, but reveals a void which, as a fact that doctrine alone does fill. The convinced Realist will not be very interested about the problem of solipsism which for him is non-existent, but the proposed relief from the difficulties of free-will and of the existence of evil may be grateful to all indifferently; or at least may suggest principles adaptable to other systems. In his Trinitarian theology Mr. D'Arcy is in many points at variance with the later conclusions of the schools; and in some instances his argument depends vitally on this variance; but not in the main. For his main point is that as our own personality--the highest unity of which we have experience--takes under itself unities of a lower grade; so the doctrine of the Trinity implies what the hiatuses of philosophy require, namely, that personal unity is not the highest; that, beyond any power of our present conception, the personally many can be really (not only morally or socially) _one thing_. ”A wonderfully unspeakable thing it is,” says Augustine, ”and unspeakably wonderful that whereas this image of the Trinity” _(sc.,_ the human soul), ”is one person, and the sovereign Trinity itself, three persons, yet that Trinity of three persons is more inseparable than this trinity” (memory, understanding, and will) ”of one person.” This ”superpersonal” unity is of course a matter of faith and not of philosophy, yet it is a faith without which subjective philosophy must come to a stand-still; it is as much a postulate of the speculative reason as G.o.d and immortality are of the practical reason.
”If man is to retain the full endowment of his moral nature, we must make up our minds to accept for ourselves an incomplete theory of things.” A philosophy which should unify the sum-total of human experience, including the supernatural facts of Christianity, is impossible; but even excluding these facts there is always need of some kind of non-rational a.s.sent, which, however reasonable and prudent in the very interests of thought, is not necessitated by the laws of thought--is not, in the strictest sense philosophical. Idealism, like other philosophies, ”is not satisfied with an imperfect knowledge of the greatest things. It must rise to the Divine standpoint and comprehend the concrete universal,” and so, of course, it breaks down. ”But it would surely be a hasty inference,” says Mr. D'Arcy, ”that philosophy must needs be exhausted because idealism has done its work and delivered its message to mankind,” that is, has explored another blind alley, and has arrived at the _cul de sac_. In fact, if idealism is a living philosophy, it is nevertheless showing signs of age and decay. Ptolemaic astronomy, as an explanation of planetary movements, proved its exhaustion by a liberal recourse to epicycles as the answer to all awkward objections; and philosophies show themselves moribund in an a.n.a.logous way, by a monotonous pressing of some one hackneyed principle to a degree that makes common-sense revolt and fling the whole theory to the winds--chaff and grain indiscriminately. But philosophy must be distinguished from philosophies, as religion from religions. The imperfection of the various concrete attempts to satisfy either spiritual need, may make the desperate-minded wish to cut themselves free from all connection with any particular system; but the desire and effort to have a knowledge of the whole (_i.e._, a philosophy) is as natural and ineradicable as the desire to live and breathe. In this general sense, philosophy ”takes human experience, sets it out in all its main elements, and then endeavours to form a plan of systematic thought which will account for the whole. It has one fundamental postulate, that there is a meaning, or, in other words, that there is an all-pervading unity.” This ”faith” in the ultimate coherence and unity of everything is the presupposition and motive of the very attempt to philosophize or to determine the nature of that unity. It is not, therefore, itself a product of philosophy; it is an innate conviction that can be denied only from the teeth outwards, but can neither be proved nor disproved by the finite mind.
To ”explain” is in one way or another to liken the less known to what is better known; and thus every philosophy is an attempt to express--by means of sundry extensions and limitations--the universe of our experience in the terms of some totality with which we are more familiar; plainly, it is also an endeavour to express the greater in terms of the less, and must therefore be almost infinitely inadequate even at the best. At one time the Whole has been conceived as the unity of a mere aggregate--of a heap of stones; at another, as a mere sand-storm of fortuitous atoms; there has been the egg-theory, and the tortoise-theory, and many others, no less grotesque to our seeming. But, leaving fanciful and poetical philosophies aside, and considering only those which pretend to be strictly rational, we find the objective philosophy and the subjective confronting one another; the former likening the universe to the works of men's hands; the latter likening it to man himself; the former taking its metaphors from the artificer shaping his material according to a preconceived plan for a definite purpose; the latter, from the thinking and willing self considered as the creator of its own personal experience.
There is enough uniformity of plan throughout the animal body to make any one part of the organism a likeness of the whole--the eye, the heart, or the hand. And so, presumably, there is hardly any unity we can think of in our own little corner of experience that does not offer some similitude of the universal unity. But to take this as an adequate explanation; to force the metaphor to its logical consequences, to the exclusion of every other reasonable though non-rational a.s.sent, is the commonest but most fatal form of intellectual provincialism and narrowness. Our mind is essentially limited not merely in that it cannot know everything, but in that its mode of knowledge is imperfect and a.n.a.logical in regard to all that is greater than itself. It is broad only when conscious of its narrowness.
The first difficulty into which idealism gets itself is that of solipsism. According to its rigidly argued principles, ”mind is separated from mind by a barrier which is, not figuratively, but literally impa.s.sable. It is impossible for any _ego_ to leap this barrier and enter into the experience of any other _ego_.” It is not an abstract self-in-general, but my one solitary concrete self for which all experience exists. There is no room for any other person. But this philosophy does not account for our common-sense belief in Nature as existing independently of self and of other selfs; or in those other selfs with their several and distinct spheres of experience.
The unification it effects when treated rigorously as a complete philosophy leaves out of account the best part of what it was bound to account for. In spite of idealism, the idealist goes on _believing_ in other persons or spheres of experience, and in Nature as the experience of a Divine Person. But since, on his principles, persons are mutually exclusive, and none can enter the sphere of another's experience, to see with his eyes, or to feel with his nerves, since,
Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart,
we are thrown back on a disconnected plurality of beings, and G.o.d Himself, viewed as personal (in this sense) is but one among many.
Albeit immeasurably the greatest, He cannot be regarded as the ground of the possibility and existence of all the rest--the home and bond of union of all other spirits which in Him live and move and have their being.
The belief in the personality of G.o.d is all-essential for the satisfaction of our religious cravings, as a presupposition of trust, love, prayer, obedience, and such relations.h.i.+ps; as bringing out the transcendence in contrast with the all-pervading immanence of the deity; as checking the pantheistic perversion of this latter truth by which, in turn, its own deistic perversion is checked. G.o.d is not only in and through all things; but also outside and above all things; just as Christ is not only the soul of the Church, but also its Head and Ruler.
Between these two compensating statements the exact truth is hidden from our eyes.
But it is not to the conception of the Divine personality and separateness that we are to look for the missing bond by which the head and members are to be knit together, and the essential disconnection of these ”spheres of experience” overcome. The ultimate unity is a mystery; in a word, philosophy, as a quest of that unity, breaks down. The solution is suggested only by the revelation of a superpersonal unity in some sense prior to the multiplicity of Divine Persons, a unity in which they being many are one, and in which we too are, not merged, but unified without prejudice to our personal distinctness.
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