Letter VI. Struggle for Reality

Latter Part of the Second Lecture.—Philosophical Terms.—Struggle for Reality.

My dear Sir,

You are very much nearer to your undergraduate years than I am to mine. But they do rise up at times vividly before me. Certainly nothing has brought them back so vividly as reading the latter part of Mr. Mansel’s second Lecture. I listened to many sermons in St. Mary’s, when I was at Oxford, which chilled my heart. I think, if I had heard that one, it would have turned my brain. I do not think it would have made me asceptic, for I fancy I had met with most of the statements about the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Cause, in the pages of different sophists, or that they had been presented to my own mind. That which would have utterly bewildered me would have been to hear them reproduced in a Christian pulpit as a defence of Christianity. I hope I should have profited by the preacher’s last words. I hope I should have said, ‘Lord, to whom shall I go when Thy servants consider it their business to uphold Thy cause by proving to us that there is nothing around, beneath, above, but confusion and darkness?’ I hope I should have said, ‘Thou hast the words of Eternal Life,’ though we are told that the Eternal lies at a hopeless distance from us, that we can have no fellowship with it. But I might have said, ‘If that is true, what Lord is there to whom we can go? Where is He? What have I to do with Him?’

It is because I feel painfully convinced that many who heard and who read Mr. Mansel’s sermon will say this;—that the argument which he looks upon as so conclusive that it must shatter every form of unbelief, is likely to shatter the feeble faith which it finds, and to bewilder the more earnest faith;—it is because everything in the circumstances and temptations of those who sat in the galleries when this Lecture was delivered, is likely to make it more mischievous to them than it would be to those of any other class or age,—it is therefore that I undertake the task—which, when I am right-minded, is very disagreeable, which I tremble at most when it becomes at all pleasant—of pointing out why I look upon the whole course of his argument on this subject as worthless for its professed object of exposing either Rationalists or Pantheists, and as utterly mischievous if it is supposed to be a mode of removing objections to the Bible. I will begin with quoting the passage which introduces the subject:—

“There are three terms, familiar as household words in the vocabulary of Philosophy, which must be taken into account in every system of Metaphysical Theology. To conceive the Deity as He is, we must conceive Him as First Cause, as Absolute, and as Infinite. By the First Cause, is meant that which produces all things, and is itself produced of none. By the Absolute, is meant that which exists in and by itself, having no necessary relation to any other Being. By the Infinite is meant that which is free from all possible limitation; that than which a greater is inconceivable; and which consequently can receive no additional attribute or mode of existence, which it had not from all eternity.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 44, 45.)

Will you read over to yourself the first line of this passage? “There are three terms, familiar as household words in the vocabulary of Philosophy.” These are key-words to the after discourse. It is with the terms, First Cause, Absolute, and Infinite, that Mr. Mansel deals here and throughout his volume. Terms are all in all to him. To get beyond terms is with him impossible. “Words, words, words” do not drive him mad as they did poor Hamlet; they entirely satisfy him. He does not deny that there is something lying beyond them, something which they express. There is a region of mist and darkness, what he considers the region of faith, which cannot be put into formulas of logic, and therefore about which nothing can be known, which we have no criterion for judging of. But within this circle lies his world, and any one who tries to find a ground for his feet outside of that world, is for him a fool if he can reduce him under the notion of a Dogmatist, a dangerous disturber of men’s serenity if he can bring him under the notion of a Rationalist. Once, with exceeding naiveté, he intimates that there must be reality, but that we are quite unable to conceive what it is, it cannot be brought under its proper notion. His book should be studied as the great apotheosis of Logic. Terrible as the name may sound to him, he actually becomes transcendental in his reverence for the formulas that are to exclude all transcendentalism.

You may remember that I noticed this tendency as characteristic of Sir William Hamilton. I spoke of him as emphatically a notional Philosopher. I believe that grand forehead of his showed that he was capable of being something immeasurably higher than this. If he had not been possessed by a love of fact, a reverence for fact, he could not have admired the phrase of Plato as he did; he could not have risen so far above his predecessors in the schools of Consciousness, whom he, somewhat haughtily, patronizes. He brought Scotch Philosophy to its climax. So now we know all about it, what it can and cannot do. He enables us to understand that fierce reaction against it which one discovers in his countrymen. Evidently they must have been utterly crushed under ‘notions’ and ‘consciousnesses;’ crushed till all breath and life seemed to be impossible for them. It has been nothing less than a question for them whether the woods and fields in which Burns grew up, and of which he sang, should be withered by a school Sirocco; whether the life of those who fought and bled on the soil should be turned into mere moralities about life and fighting and bleeding; whether the manhood of the present generation should perish along with the manhood of their forefathers. Mr. Carlyle has been welcomed by Scotchmen and Englishmen as the great protester against notions, the witness for Fact and History. He has avowed his indifference to anything else. He long ago abjured metaphysics, German or Scotch. In his latest work he has abjured poets as not sufficiently savouring of the reality; he has complained of Shakespeare and Goethe for devoting their amazing powers to dramas or novels, when they might have explained what has been actually done in the world.¹

A reaction against logical formulas, proceeding from an entirely different quarter, prompted by different feelings, and leading to quite different results, is more associated with English history than with Scotch, with Oxford than with Edinburgh. A young member of University College, who, while he was there, delighted, it is said, especially in the services of the chapel and in all the venerable traditions of the place, having been deprived of those opportunities of culture by the wisdom or unwisdom of the authorities of that time, became the pantheistical poet of our land, the man who embodied in his verse and character the thoughts, dreams, aspirations, to which that name is most correctly affixed, those which were floating and are floating in the atmosphere of England as well as of France and Germany. In his ‘Queen Mab,’ his ‘Alastor,’ his ‘Sensitive Plant,’ his ‘Skylark,’ some only discover the denial of all which Christians believe; some have heard “the wailings of a child seeking for its Father.” But one as much as the other must feel that that spirit could be circumscribed by no terms of logic. Sea, sky, air, birds, trees, flowers,—to these he fled from notions and formulas; with these he was certain he had a sympathy and a fellowship. They gave him his sense of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, by which he meant that which could not be put into the terms and forms of logic, that which a spirit within him was yearning after. If you could tell him how those yearnings might be satisfied without losing a personal God and his own personal being, you might reach his ear; if not, you would leave him a pantheist as you found him, exercising a charm over the freshest and noblest among the youth of his land, a charm which is most commonly broken by their sinking into the service of Mammon, now and then by their claiming their heritage as redeemed sons of God.

There is a third reaction against this tyranny of notions which I believe is beginning to be felt with particular strength in Oxford. It is what I would call the scientific reaction. I have hinted already, in my second Letter, at the strife between Sir William Hamilton and the mathematicians,—at his strong and apparently well-grounded conviction that he must destroy them before he could establish his own position securely. But is there not a science of Morals as well as of Physics? Aristotle has certainly led Oxford men to seek after one, to feel that they cannot dispense with one, whether he has himself discovered it to them or not. I think we have all been forced to feel that he is not the practical philosopher he wished to be, that he has not at all events given us the help we want for our lives, if—as some pretend, with whom I do not the least agree—he has merely taught us to look for a mean between two extremes. Our age has had plentiful experience of this seeking for a middle in Politics and Morals as well as in Theology. Something may perhaps come out of it hereafter. What has come out of it already has been described with considerable life and accuracy by the poet Cowper.

“Some fretful tempers wince at every touch,
You always do too little or too much;
You speak with life, in hopes to entertain:
Your elevated voice goes through the brain.
You fall at once into a lower key:
That’s worse, the drone-pipe of an humble-bee.
The southern sash admits too strong a light;
You rise and drop the curtain: now ’tis night.
He shakes with cold; you stir the fire and strive
To make a blaze: that’s roasting him alive.

Your hope to please him vain on every plan,
Himself should work that wonder if he can.
Alas! his efforts double his distress;
He likes yours little, and his own still less.
Thus, always teasing others, always teazed,
His only pleasure is to be displeased.”

A moderation of this kind is scarcely satisfactory for those who have actually to fight their way through the world,—to choose a path for themselves, not merely to find fault with the extreme paths of every one else.

Butler too, I have contended already, has awakened in us the search after a scientific Morality, i.e. a Morality which has some ground in reality and not in notions. And Butler has certainly not satisfied the desire which he has kindled if, as some would tell us, he has only taught us that probability is the ground of all human actions. We have specimens enough among our statesmen, as well, I am afraid, as among our divines, of persons who have taken in that maxim in its fullness,—who think that the art of steering their life’s vessel consists in following all chance currents, or in merely resisting them,—who have no principles to determine when they should yield or when they should resist,—who have a set of opinions to which they swore to adhere when they entered upon the business of the world, and from which they were forced to drift away when they become actually conversant with the business of it. These are not examples to encourage us in the worship of probability, but beacons to warn us from it. I am sure that Butler would have been more shocked than we can be at the results to which the supposed following of his precept is leading us. I am sure he would have told us, ‘All probabilities and appearances will drag you into perdition, if there are not some fixed and unchangeable lights by which you are directing your course.’

Where then are these fixed and unchangeable lights to be found? Where is that immutable Morality which all earnest men have sought after? When Kant had discovered that no notions could possibly contain it or represent it, “he built again,” Mr. Mansel indignantly exclaims, “the things which he destroyed, so making himself a transgressor;” or, as I have stated the case somewhat differently in my last letter, he confessed that there was a witness in man for truths which he could not comprehend in notions, and that this witness had the closest connection with his practical morality. What connection it has is a subject of earnest interest to Englishmen and Germans. Each has discussed it in their own way. Each has felt that a morality which is not tied by our limitations, is at the root of that which is. Mr. Mansel tramples them all down in this triumphant style:—

“The Infinite, as contemplated by this philosophy, cannot be regarded as consisting of a limited number of attributes, each unlimited in its kind. It cannot be conceived, for example, after the analogy of a line, infinite in length, but not in breadth; or of a surface, infinite in two dimensions of space, but bounded in the third; or of an intelligent being, possessing some one or more modes of consciousness in an infinite degree, but devoid of others. Even if it be granted, which is not the case, that such a partial infinite may without contradiction be conceived, still it will have a relative infinity only, and be altogether incompatible with the idea of the Absolute. The line limited in breadth is thereby necessarily related to the space that limits it; the intelligence endowed with a limited number of attributes, coexists with others which are thereby related to it, as cognate or opposite modes of consciousness. The metaphysical representation of the Deity, as absolute and infinite, must necessarily, as the profoundest metaphysicians have acknowledged, amount to nothing less than the sum of all reality. ‘What kind of an absolute Being is that,’ says Hegel, ‘which does not contain in itself all that is actual, even evil included?’ We may repudiate the conclusion with indignation; but the reasoning is unassailable. If the Absolute and Infinite is an object of human conception at all, this, and none other, is the conception required. That which is conceived as absolute and infinite must be conceived as containing within itself the sum, not only of all actual, but of all possible modes of being. For if any actual mode can be denied of it, it is related to that mode, and limited by it; and if any possible mode can be denied of it, it is capable of becoming more than it now is, and such a capability is a limitation. Indeed it is obvious that the entire distinction between the possible and the actual can have no existence as regards the absolutely infinite; for an unrealized possibility is necessarily a relation and a limit.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 45-47.)

Again:—

“Not only is the Absolute, as conceived, incapable of a necessary relation to anything else, but it is also incapable of containing, by the constitution of its own nature, an essential relation within itself; as a whole, for instance, composed of parts, or as a substance consisting of attributes, or as a conscious subject in antithesis to an object. For if there is in the absolute any principle of unity, distinct from the mere accumulation of parts or attributes, this principle alone is the true absolute. If, on the other hand, there is no such principle, then there is no absolute at all, but only a plurality of relatives. The almost unanimous voice of philosophy, in pronouncing that the absolute is both one and simple, must be accepted as the voice of reason also, so far as reason has any voice in the matter. But this absolute unity, as indifferent and containing no attributes, can neither be distinguished from the multiplicity of finite beings by any characteristic feature, nor be identified with them in their multiplicity. Thus we are landed in an inextricable dilemma. The Absolute cannot be conceived as conscious, neither can it be conceived as unconscious: it cannot be conceived as complex, neither can it be conceived as simple: it cannot be conceived by difference, neither can it be conceived by the absence of difference: it cannot be identified with the universe, neither can it be distinguished from it. The One and the Many, regarded as the beginning of existence, are thus alike incomprehensible.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 49, 50.)

Or this:—

“Again, how can the Relative be conceived as coming into being? If it is a distinct reality from the absolute, it must be conceived as passing from non-existence into existence. But to conceive an object as non-existent, is again a self-contradiction; for that which is conceived exists, as an object of thought, in and by that conception. We may abstain from thinking of an object at all; but, if we think of it, we cannot but think of it as existing. It is possible at one time not to think of an object at all, and at another to think of it as already in being; but to think of it in the act of becoming, in the progress from not being into being, is to think that which, in the very thought, annihilates itself. Here again the Pantheistic hypothesis seems forced upon us. We can think of creation only as a change in the condition of that which already exists; and thus the creature is conceivable only as a phenomenal mode of the being of the Creator.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 53, 54.)

What greater proof do we need than these passages furnish, that so long as we are busy with the terms of logic, so long we shall never arrive at the truth of things? The acknowledgment of these contradictions is common to Mr. Mansel with all the three classes of which I have spoken. Those who seek for the meaning of common facts, will joyfully refer to his Lecture as a proof that you cannot leave that ground and enter the logical ground without being involved in a series of hopeless quibbles which no human being ought to trouble himself with, unless he means to abandon the business of existence, and to give himself up to feats of jugglery. The Pantheist, in one mood of his mind, will be strengthened by Mr. Mansel’s victorious analysis in his persuasion,

That nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream;

in another, will exclaim triumphantly, ‘Yes! now I know that I must fly to Nature and lose myself in the great Universe, and seek a God there, since you show me so clearly that He is not to be found in any of your notions and dogmas.’ And what will he who is at the most opposite point to Pantheism, who longs to escape from vagueness, and to find some safe foundation for his own thoughts and acts—for his own self—say to these elaborate logical confutations of his right to engage in any such pursuit? What can he say but this?—‘After working diligently through Aldrich, reading Whately, studying Mill, I did not require to be told that the terms Finite and Infinite, Absolute and Relative, exclude each other,—that you cannot comprehend the Many under the One, or the One under the Many,—that the intellect unawares assumes a beginning for that which it calls First Cause. I thought these were nuts for children to crack, conundrums for breakfast-parties; if introduced into the solemn lecture-room, to be noticed there only for the purpose of explaining how dishonest men had turned them to vile services—how verbal contradictions had been used by Athenian rhetoricians as a plea for atrocious deeds—or for the purpose of illustrating the method by which Socrates cut these webs and brought his disciples back through converse with homely life and actual things into a perception of their deepest necessities, into a conviction that for them they must seek a real, not a nominal satisfaction. I never dreamed that these riddles were to be Church entertainments, that the Christian teacher inherited the functions of Protagoras and Prodicus. But if that is settled,—if Christianity does wrap herself in these conceits, and pronounce herself incapable of meeting those demands which remain just as deep, just as practical, after these demonstrations as before,—what have we to do? The term Finite, in the schools, does, we know, exclude the term Infinite. The actual finite in ourselves, the partial good we perceive in ourselves and in those about us, compels us to ask if there is not that which is good in itself, which is not partial. The term Relative excludes the term Absolute. But since my brother is a being in himself, and not only a brother, since every father is a being in himself, and not only a father,—the actual relation, the living relation, drives us to seek for an Absolute, which lies beyond and behind the Relation. Of course we entangle ourselves in contradictions every time we try to think of a Cause. It is that very entanglement which drives us to ask for some ground beneath our thoughts, not included in them, but the only explanation of them. I know that the One and the Many negative each other. But I know that amidst a world of pluralities, I must seek Unity. What then does your arguing reprove? What effect has it but to force us beyond the confines of your Logic, and therefore, as it seems from your statement, beyond the confines of what you call your Revelation?’

Alas! alas! for those critics of human doubts and questionings who, like the critic in Sterne, never look at the living countenance of him on whom they are commenting, but only at their stop-watches! They never find out what the opponent means, what he wants; they only find out what he does not mean and does not want! What they suppose are green withs, fresh cut, that will be sure to bind Samson, especially when he is asleep—are in truth very dry withs, not green at all, which he has broken from off his limbs a hundred times, and which he will arouse himself in a moment to break again. But may you not be doing a worse thing? May you not have found the secret of his strength, the lock that has not yet been severed from the head? May you not be robbing him of that? May you not, with your fine logic, have been scattering that belief in an Eternal Goodness and Truth which has been the treasure, if as yet the unrealized treasure, of his life? May you not have been convincing him that what has come to him continually a thousand times as the dawn of a distant hope,—what has sometimes come very nigh to him as a word in his heart,—is a delusion after all? Oh, what have you done for his present life, for his future life, when you have done this?

There is an awful passage in Milton’s letter to Mr. Hartlib, which I used to hope had scarcely any application to the Oxford of the present day. Read it,—I doubt not you know it already,—in connection with the passages I have quoted from the Bampton Lecturer, and judge.

“And for the usual method of teaching Arts, I deem it to be an old error of Universities not yet well recovered from the Scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with Arts most easie, and those be such as are most obvious to the sense, they present their young unmatriculated Novices at first comming with the most intellective abstractions of Logick and Metaphysicks: So that they, having but newly left those grammatick flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate to be tost and turmoil’d with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversie, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of Learning, mockt and deluded all this while with ragged Notions and Babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge; till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several wayes, and hasten them with the sway of friends either to an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous Divinity; Some allur’d to the trade of Law, grounding their purposes not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees; others betake them to State affairs, with souls so unprincipl’d in vertue, and true generous breeding, that flattery, and Court shifts and tyrannous Aphorisms appear to them the highest points of wisdom; instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery, if, as I rather think, it be not fein’d. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airie spirit, retire themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their daies in feast and jollity; which indeed is the wisest and the safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are the errours, and these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at the Schools and Universities as we do, either in learning meer words or such things chiefly, as were better unlearnt.”

These are fearful considerations—all of them. But oh, I beseech you, dwell most upon that which concerns you most! Consider whether ‘these intellective abstractions’ can ever be the ground for your Gospel, ever the defence of your Bible? Is not your Gospel a message concerning the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal? Is not your Bible a book of Facts by which men are led gradually on to know what the ground is at their feet; to feel, through the actual finite, for the Infinite,—through the actual temporal, for the Eternal? If it is, as Mr. Mansel delights to tell us, unsystematical, is not that because it is in the highest sense methodical? Does it not begin with the facts of family life, discovering a God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at work in them? Does it not go on to the facts of National life, discovering an I Am, an unchangeable Lawgiver and King and Judge in the midst of them? Does it not explain at last the facts of Human or universal Life, the mystery of a Father, a Son, and a Spirit, being discovered through these? If you speak out of this Bible, will you not have something else to tell the student of Facts than that he cannot reconcile opposing Notions,—the seeker of a divine Morality, than that he cannot bring his finite notions into fellowship with the Infinite,—the yearner after the sympathy of the Universe, than that he cannot prove his right to it in the schools? May you not bid the first rejoice and give thanks that the Highest of All has explained His government over His creatures through facts, and not through notions? May we not say to the second, that the whole Law and Gospel is a discovery of that Absolute Goodness and Truth which lie at the foundation of all Goodness and Truth in us? May we not ask the Pantheist if the revelation of a God in Whom we are living and moving and having our being, the Life-giver to all creatures,—of One who is above all and through all and in us all,—will not satisfy the cravings of his spirit, without compelling him to forget the eternal boundaries of Right and Wrong?

Ever yours faithfully,