Letter VII. Philosophy of Consciousness

Mr. Mansel’s Third and Fourth Lectures.— Philosophy of Consciousness.—the Scotch. — Schleiermacher.—Mr. Mansel’s Own Treatment of the Subject.—Prayer.

My dear Sir,

At the close of Mr. Mansel’s second Lecture, he states his reasons for using the philosophical terms Infinite, Absolute, Cause, in their dry formality, instead of introducing the awful name of God, and making that the theme of such tormenting subtleties. I appreciate the reverence which led him to adopt that course. Yet I cannot help thinking that if he reconsiders it, he may be led to detect a practical sophism in his argument. I grant it is a fearful thing to connect plays upon words with awful realities. But can he avoid the connection? Is he not answerable for bringing them together? At all events, the summary of his conclusions, with which he commences his third Lecture, must help to break down the distinction which he tried to establish in the previous one. Read, and consider it.

“My last Lecture was chiefly occupied with an examination of the ideas of the Absolute and the Infinite,—ideas which are indispensable to the foundation of a Metaphysical Theology, and of which a clear and distinct consciousness must be acquired, if such a Theology is to exist at all. I attempted to show the inadequacy of these ideas for such a purpose, by reason of the contradictions which to our apprehension they necessarily involve from every point of view. The result of that attempt may be briefly summed up as follows. We are compelled, by the constitution of our minds, to believe in the existence of an Absolute and Infinite Being,—a belief which appears forced upon us, as the complement of our consciousness of the relative and the finite. But the instant we attempt to analyze the ideas thus suggested to us, in the hope of attaining to an intelligible conception of them, we are on every side involved in inextricable confusion and contradiction. It is no matter from what point of view we commence our examination;—whether, with the Theist, we admit the co-existence of the Infinite and the Finite, as distinct realities; or, with the Pantheist, deny the real existence of the Finite; or, with the Atheist, deny the real existence of the Infinite;—on each of these suppositions alike, our reason appears divided against itself, compelled to admit the truth of one hypothesis, and yet unable to overcome the apparent impossibilities of each. The philosophy of Rationalism, thus traced upwards to its highest principles, finds no legitimate resting-place, from which to commence its deduction of religious consequences.” —(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 67, 68.)

I have put the last sentence in italics, that I may make a remark which is not more important for this passage than for the whole volume. You and I are very little concerned in ascertaining whether “the philosophy of Rationalism,” or any other philosophy, religious or irreligious, has “a legitimate resting place.” But if it is true that “our reason is divided against itself,”—if that division has reference to the question whether Theism, i.e. the doctrine that there is a God; Pantheism, i.e. the doctrine that everything is God; Atheism, i.e. the doctrine that there is no God, is the right doctrine,—this is a point of all importance to us,—this is a matter of life and death. That division must in some way be brought to an end; for what does it mean? That we have no legitimate resting-place; that there is no foundation for our being.

One more remark before I proceed to the business of the Lecture. Mr. Mansel hopes to deliver us from Hegel and the modern Germans. Have you considered to what point he takes us back, that he may effect that deliverance? Need I remind you that there was a Hume before there was a Hegel; that the utter incapacity of deciding between Theism, Pantheism, Atheism—of deciding any question whatever concerning the Nature of God—was precisely the point from which he “commenced his deduction of religious consequences.” I am far indeed from saying that Mr. Mansel’s religious consequences are the same as Hume’s. I know that they are not. But will you allow me to remark that he does not differ from Hume in this respect, that he recommends general acquiescence in the established religion of the day. Hume would have recommended the same acquiescence. He hated the Puritans as cordially as he could hate anything, because they were not acquiescent, but had wild dreams of knowing something of the Infinite and Eternal. He reverenced the Stuart policy as much as he could reverence anything, because he thought it the best check upon this extravagance. He cared for no institution more than for what he called a State Establishment of Religion, because he supposed that it restrained men from any excess of thinking respecting subjects upon which people will think, though their thinking can bring them to no result. I frankly tell you that in my judgment the latter opinion was not only the proper sequel of the first, but that it has produced immensely more mischief to English morality and English faith. According to a tradition which Sir James Mackintosh believed, Butler rather advised than discouraged the publication of one of the books on which Hume’s infidel reputation rests; so confident was he that the truth would bear discussion, and would rise more strongly out of it. But the doctrine that the Church, of which he was a Bishop, existed to keep alive the kind of indifference which he longed to disturb, would, I think, have been extremely shocking to him. Hume’s Scepticism was followed by an almost immediate reaction; the notion of him as a Defender of Ecclesiastical and Tory faith has not forsaken the minds of many clergymen, even after a century of revolutions.

This is no digression. It is the proper introduction to the subject of the coming Lecture, which is to develope the Philosophy of Consciousness as opposed to the Philosophy of Rationalism. Now I am bound to own—and I do it with great pleasure—that if we find ourselves shut in by Hume’s contradictions, this may be the best process for escaping from them. Supposing it is needful—and perhaps it may be—to travel again over that ground which our fathers in the last century travelled, that is, I conceive, the proper route. In England and in Scotland, even in France and Germany, men appear to have been led along it, if they were not able ultimately to find their ‘resting-place’ in it. I spoke of a great impatience and weariness of this ‘Consciousness,’ and, above all, of a ‘Philosophy of Consciousness,’ which has manifested itself in our time, and which I thought had much justification. I am therefore the more anxious to show what service those who spoke of Consciousness in the last age were rendering to mankind, and how much we may lose if we despise the lessons which they left us.

Hume’s favourite word was Experience. How can we know anything to be true except by experience? What experience can we have about those facts and doctrines of which the believers in a Revelation talk to us? Do not they in their very nature and statement transcend Experience? Theological Apologists nibbled at this net, and tried to make or find holes in it. Actual sufferers, Christian men and women who had never heard Hume’s name, cut through it. Those who are far less familiar than you are with the phraseology of the religious men of the last generation, cannot be ignorant that Hume’s watchword was also theirs. He said there could be no experience save that which reached us through the senses, or was derived from impressions on the senses. They spoke of spiritual experiences which were not only most precious and sacred to them, but the absence of which left them bare of all motives to right and kindly actions. Were they self-deceivers, or bent upon deceiving others?—fanatics, or hypocrites? These solutions were evidently the easiest; the majority of their opponents, wits and doctors, resorted to one or the other. There were those who could not,—who had known enough of such feelings themselves, to believe that some which they had not known might be genuine. These mental operations, to whatever source they might be attributed, were surely worthy of investigation. If they could be fairly investigated according to some legitimate method already recognized, might not those which seemed ‘abnormal’ be reduced into order? might not enthusiasm be checked? might not the limits of experience be stretched at least some way beyond the point which Hume had fixed for them?

Good and evil, I conceive, were mixed in this experiment as in most others. It was good to defend the worth and verity of experiences which concern the invisible as well as the visible world; it was good to show that all human experiences have some relation to each other, and, if possible, to trace out the relation. On the other hand, there was great danger that the investigator would ‘murder to dissect;’ that he would kill the experience, of whatever kind it was, in order to examine its nature; and would discourse about Experiences which, for him, were no Experiences at all. There was fear that the student would become a contemplator of actual mental operations till they ceased to be actual, or that he would merely conceive of them, and affix certain labels to them, as if they were lying outside of him, and were not in any sense his.

But these mischievous results might perhaps be avoided. The honey might be extracted from the hives without the destruction—without more, at most, than the temporary stupefaction—of the bees that had gathered it. And there was something to encourage hope—if there was also something to make the alarm look all too reasonable—in the proceedings of those who engaged in this branch of the philosophical business.

The phrase which they adopted,—in some degree superseding that of the sceptical philosopher and of the unphilosophical believers,—was, it seems to me, a specially happy one. All words like those into which the proposition cum enters,—Conviction, Conception, Conversion, Consciousness,—are worthy of the closest study and examination; hardly any are so suggestive; hardly any contain so much light respecting our processes of thought, respecting our human nature. No one of them has more of this value than the word Consciousness; that it should have been accepted in an age by no means philological, and by men who were rather the reverse of philologers,¹ is one of those indications of a Providence that shapes our ends which ought not to be overlooked. The word ‘Experience’ might be limited to that which passed in the subject of the experience; the word ‘Consciousness’ at once hinted by its formation, showed by every one of its simplest applications, that there is a fellowship and participation between the conscious man and something else. ‘To be conscious,’ says Mr. Mansel, ‘we must be conscious of something.’ Or, as he says afterwards, in rather grander, but not better language:—‘There must be a Subject, or person conscious, and an Object or thing of which he is conscious. There can be no Consciousness without the union of these two factors.’ Exactly; and therefore my Consciousness must of necessity carry me beyond myself. If it is the lowest consciousness of mere physical pain or physical pleasure, it carries me to something which is the source of that pain or that pleasure. If it is the consciousness of regard or affection, it carries me to the person who awakens that regard or affection. If it is a consciousness of dependence, it carries me to that thing or that person on whom I am dependent; if it is a consciousness of wrong, it carries me to that which I have wronged, or to him I have wronged. What a deliverance then may this word be from those perils which I have hinted at as likely to beset those who philosophize on our mental operations! How it will remind them, at every step, of the direct relation between us and facts, between us and persons! How they will tremble if they discover that they are interposing any mere nominal or formal barriers between the conscious man and that whereof he is conscious! How anxious they will be to look at those other words to which I have alluded, in the spirit and according to the maxims which they have already brought to bear upon this one! The word ‘Conception,’ for instance,—how gladly they will avail themselves of the physical mystery which it denotes as an analogy to the mental mystery! How many confusions they will see might have been averted in the use of that word, how many hard judgments respecting other men’s use of it, if it had been recollected that every act of ours which seems most internal, most our own, implies co-operation, implies something which is not our own!

I do not complain of the Scotch philosophers for not dwelling as much as they might have done upon these truths which are latent in their own chosen phrase. They were too obvious; they lay too much on the common high-road of life to attract much of their attention. They were working out a great book-system; one ought to be thankful for every homage which they paid to ordinary facts whilst they were engaged in such a task; to have stooped too often to them would have destroyed their school reputation. We Englishmen can afford to join the late Professor Blunt in admiring Paley because he illustrated some part of his doctrine of adaptations by speaking of the great difficulty he experienced in procuring a wig which exactly fitted his head; but we cannot require other people to feel that admiration, seeing that it arises from our stupid attachment to the concrete and the practical.

There is, however, a country which is supposed to be as much addicted to abstractions as Scotland. The Philosophy of Consciousness, in Germany, as it presents itself in Schleiermacher, was a rebellion against the abstract tendency. Trained in Moravian habits of reverence and affection for the Person of Christ, feeling in his manhood the full attraction of that Pantheistic movement which is, as I said in my last Letter, a vehement effort to escape from formulas into sympathy with the living Universe,—taught by his country’s sufferings the need it had of a ground for personal life and morality which neither formulas nor Pantheism could give,—instructed by his earnest study of the Socratic method in the Platonic Dialogues that the truest Philosophy does not consist in pursuing Notions, but in rising out of them—finding the orthodox defenders of Scripture, as well as the Naturalists who sought to reduce it according to their maxims, equally averse from this method, equally determined to bring the most earnest thoughts and questionings of his countrymen within their narrow rules, equally indifferent to the deepest necessities of the human soul,—perceiving in the New Testament much which met his cravings, which presented itself to him as the divine satisfaction of his wants, much that for him lay in shadow,—and being almost entirely out of sympathy with the lessons of the Old Testament, he became the most thorough, devout, accomplished defender of Consciousness as the instrument and to some extent the measure of belief whom the world ever saw or is likely to see. Mr. Mansel has testified (Lecture IV., p. 113) that Schleiermacher’s writings have had, perhaps, more influence than those of any other man, in forming the modern religious Philosophy of his own country. He adds, that his ‘views, in all their essential features, have been ably maintained, and widely diffused among ourselves.’ Those of Schleiermacher’s countrymen whom I have known, and who have described to me the influence he has exerted over them, have not spoken so much of ‘his forming their religious philosophy,’ as of his leading them to think what Philosophy was, and what Religion was. He found his disciples, they said, eager for a set of conclusions well packed and ticketed as religious or philosophical. He withdrew them from that ambition; he led them to feel for themselves after that which was needful for their own being. His teaching or method, they said, encouraged the activity and earnestness of their minds; but it forbade, by its very nature, the acceptance of the decrees or dogmas of the teacher. If, therefore, it is true, as Mr. Mansel affirms, that some are wishing to establish a Schleiermacher school among us, the best way of defeating their purpose would be, not to display Schleiermacher’s weakness, but to exhibit him in his full strength. If he was the man which his countrymen say that he was, which his Scotch or English admirers think that he was, he must be shrivelled, distorted, changed into the thing that he was not, when he becomes the representative of a certain bundle of opinions. Those who would maintain “his views in all their essential features,” will commit a practical solecism, of which that slipslop phrase is a tolerably faithful exponent.

I should grieve much for the sake of Schleiermacher’s own character, still more for the sake of our English faith and honesty, if there was this attempt to copy, or rather to caricature, him in England. But Mr. Mansel certainly has done nothing to avert the danger by describing Schleiermacher “as the chief modern representative of Eclectical Christianity.” Such language will at once be felt by those who know the facts to be coarse and unjust, merely adapted to the prejudices of English hearers. A man who seeks that which he needs for his moral life is the very reverse of an eclectic, who takes that which will fit into his system, and leaves out that which disturbs it. Nor will the far more sympathizing criticism on Schleiermacher, part of which Mr. Mansel quotes (Note, p. 419) from Mr. Vaughan’s ‘Remains,’ have much effect on those who have felt his power. That accomplished writer made a clever point when he demanded that the man who built so much on religious consciousness, should have had a religious consciousness of the fidelity of all the statements in the Old and New Testament. But Mr. Vaughan, with his knowledge of the processes of German thought, must have felt that this statement was only a clever point, and must have lamented it as one of the dulcia vitia into which reviewers are apt to be betrayed. He was perfectly aware that Schleiermacher’s effort to realize facts as his own was avowedly a protest against the opinion that they were to be received merely on the authority of the Scriptural documents. To ask him to receive that authority as part of his consciousness, was simply asking him to contemplate the subject from another point of view, to assume another ground. I do not think that a pious demand, any more than a consistent or a wise one. If there was in the German divines, when Schleiermacher appeared, an inclination to mere opinions about Scripture, either positive or negative, it is not too great an exercise of faith in God to suppose that He may have led a student into a course of inquiry which at least made portions of Scripture very dear to him. And if this is so, the study of his course of thought, as it was, must be more profitable to us than a remonstrance against the direction which was imparted to it. I believe that study may be very useful indeed. An ordinary English reader of Mr. Mansel’s book might easily suppose that Schleiermacher and Hegel exhibited the same habit of mind in different measures. He could scarcely conjecture that they were direct opponents; that Hegelism is fled to by numbers just because the Consciousness of Schleiermacher is felt to be unsatisfactory, because it is thought to make Truth dependent upon our feelings instead of being fixed and eternal; that Schleiermacher is fled to by numbers because Hegel’s absolute teaching appears to be so hard and inhuman. A fair examination of this conflict might surely avail more to make us feel what is weak and wanting in each, and to prevent us from accepting the dogmas of either, than a denunciation of both. Such an examination would, I believe, prepare us for appreciating the deep worth and reality of those parts of our creed which Schleiermacher rejected, would prepare us also to feel the unspeakable worth of that Evangelical movement in favour of conscious faith to which we owe what is most vital in our English Christianity, to which we owe it that the notion of Christianity has not extinguished the belief in a personal Christ. Mr. Mansel, the common foe of Schleiermacher and Hegel, is also, it seems to me, the foe of all that conscious faith “in the finite and relative” which characterized our Evangelical teachers, of that Revelation of the Eternal which “complements it.” I proceed to illustrate this assertion from the third and fourth Lectures.

I have pointed out already the valuable hints which Mr. Mansel has given us for the study of Consciousness, in the two propositions that we must be conscious of something, and that all consciousness supposes relation between a subject and an object. Equally promising is the assurance that he will speak of “human consciousness in general before he speaks of the religious consciousness in particular.” No method could be so desirable. If those principles are adhered to,—if this method is followed,—we must receive the greatest help from the discussion. For before any attempt is made to tell us what consciousness is not, we shall of course be led, by a gradual inductive method, such as Reid and Stewart professed, to discover what it is; we shall hear nothing of the Infinite, with which Consciousness is said not to be concerned, till we have been shown how it is concerned with the Finite; the domain of the relative will be thoroughly explored, if it be only in order that we may not presume to approach the Absolute. Hear how these obvious conditions of such an investigation are complied with. Thus it is that Mr. Mansel commences his whole argument.

“To be conscious, we must be conscious of something; and that something can only be known, as that which it is, by being distinguished from that which it is not. But distinction is necessarily limitation; for, if one object is to be distinguished from another, it must possess some form of existence which the other has not, or it must not possess some form which the other has. But it is obvious that the Infinite cannot be distinguished, as such, from the Finite, by the absence of any quality which the Finite possesses; for such absence would be a limitation. Nor yet can it be distinguished by the presence of an attribute which the Finite has not; for, as no finite part can be a constituent of an infinite whole, this differential characteristic must itself be infinite; and must at the same time have nothing in common with the finite. We are thus thrown back upon our former impossibility; for this second infinite will be distinguished from the finite by the absence of qualities which the latter possesses. A consciousness of the Infinite as such thus necessarily involves a self-contradiction; for it implies the recognition, by limitation and difference, of that which can only be given as unlimited and indifferent.

That man can be conscious of the Infinite, is thus a supposition which, in the very terms in which it is expressed, annihilates itself. Consciousness is essentially a limitation; for it is the determination of the mind to one actual out of many possible modifications. But the Infinite, if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially everything and actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing. But again, it must also be conceived as actually everything and potentially nothing; for an unrealized potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as incomplete, and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually everything, it possesses no characteristic feature, by which it can be distinguished from anything else, and discerned as an object of consciousness.

This contradiction, which is utterly inexplicable on the supposition that the infinite is a positive object of human thought, is at once accounted for, when it is regarded as the mere negation of thought. If all thought is limitation:—if whatever we conceive is, by the very act of conception, regarded as finite,—the infinite, from a human point of view, is merely a name for the absence of those conditions under which thought is possible. To speak of a Conception of the Infinite is, therefore, at once to affirm those conditions and to deny them. The contradiction, which we discover in such a conception, is only that which we have ourselves placed there, by tacitly assuming the conceivability of the inconceivable. The condition of consciousness is distinction; and the condition of distinction is limitation. We can have no consciousness of Being in general which is not some Being in particular: a thing, in consciousness, is one thing out of many. In assuming the possibility of an infinite object of consciousness, I assume, therefore, that it is at the same time limited and unlimited; actually something, without which it could not be an object of consciousness, and actually nothing, without which it could not be infinite.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 70–73.)

What is this? An account of the facts of human Consciousness generally as distinguished from the facts of Religious Consciousness specially? I ask you to read over the passage which I have extracted, and the rest of the Lecture, down to the beginning of the ninety-sixth page, in which the author announces that he has concluded this first portion of the argument, and is ready to enter upon the second, and to say whether I am or am not justified in making these assertions. (1.) That instead of examining any single instance of Consciousness as applied to some finite thing which he admits to be a legitimate and possible object of it, he at once plunges into the question of the Infinite, and the impossibility of exercising consciousness upon that. (2.) That, so far from holding himself aloof from questions concerning the religious Consciousness in this part of his inquiry, all the most awful subjects with which, rightly or wrongly, religious Consciousness has been assumed to have some connection—the Consciousness, Personality, Nature of God—come into the discussion, and the settlement of them is taken for granted. (3.) That this violation, not of some other method, but of that which Mr. Mansel has chosen for himself, enables him to introduce a number of topics for censure and condemnation, which serve admirably the purpose of a rhetorician who wishes to prepossess his hearers with a horror of any opinion but his own, but which either Sir William Hamilton, Bishop Butler, or any person whose judgment is entitled to respect, would have pronounced worthless for the purposes of the argument.²

But this is a small part of my complaint. I could have forgiven Mr. Mansel for anticipating what was to come hereafter, if he had done the very smallest justice to the subject which lay before him. But when he enters the region of Consciousness he is so far from forsaking the dry terminology with which we found him exclusively occupied in the last Lecture, that we have here a mere repetition of that terminology. His whole argument turns not on my consciousness of finite things, and my incapacity for being conscious of infinite things; but upon my consciousness of the term finite, and the term infinite. I could not convince myself for some time, that a man of Mr. Mansel’s clearness of mind had fallen into so monstrous a confusion as this. I looked again and again at passages which proved that he knew as well as any one that terms are no objects of thought, nay, in which he denounced other philosophers for making them so. I gave all weight to these remarks and denunciations. I confessed that they were in the strictest accordance with his own primary maxim; and yet, when I considered the passage which I am about to quote, I could not but fall back upon the conviction that Terms and Realities are hopelessly mingled in his intellect, nay even in his conscience.

This contradiction, again, admits of the same explanation as the former. Our whole notion of existence is necessarily relative; for it is existence as conceived by us. But Existence, as we conceive it, is but a name for the several ways in which objects are presented to our consciousness,—a general term, embracing a variety of relations. The Absolute, on the other hand, is a term expressing no object of thought, but only a denial of the relation by which thought is constituted. To assume absolute existence as an object of thought, is thus to suppose a relation existing when the related terms exist no longer. An object of thought exists, as such, in and through its relation to a thinker; while the Absolute, as such, is independent of all relation. The Conception of the Absolute thus implies at the same time the presence and the absence of the relation by which thought is constituted; and our various endeavours to represent it are only so many modified forms of the contradiction involved in our original assumption. Here, too, the contradiction is one which we ourselves have made. It does not imply that the Absolute cannot exist; but it implies, most certainly, that we cannot conceive it as existing.—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 75, 76.)

What deep truth is contained in the last part of this extract! Here is a contradiction which we ourselves have made. Assuredly it is. I make the term Existence, and use that term to denote a variety of objects which are presented to my consciousness; I make the term Absolute, to denote something that is not relative. I make the term Infinite to denote that which is not finite. None of these terms can possibly have anything to do with my consciousness. For never let us forget ‘I am conscious of something.’ But the term finite is just as much nothing as the term infinite, the term relative as the term absolute.

If we are thus defeated of all the help and guidance we were promised respecting the ordinary human consciousness,—if we can hear nothing of them except what they are not,—it is not to be expected that the special religious consciousness should be treated more satisfactorily. This beginning does not seem to me very hopeful.

“Taking, then, as the basis of our inquiry, the admission that the whole consciousness of man, whether in thought, or in feeling, or in volition, is limited in the manner of its operation and in the objects to which it is related, let us endeavour, with regard to the religious consciousness in particular, to separate from each other the complicated threads which, in their united web, constitute the conviction of man’s relation to a Supreme Being. In distinguishing, however, one portion of these as forming the origin of this conviction, and another portion as contributing rather to its further development and direction, I must not be understood to maintain or imply that the former could have existed and been recognized, prior to and independently of the co-operation of the latter. Consciousness, in its earliest discernible form, is only possible as the result of a union of the reflective with the intuitive faculties. A state of mind, to be known at all as existing, must be distinguished from other states; and, to make this distinction, we must think of it, as well experience it. Without thought as well as sensation, there could be no consciousness of the existence of an external world: without thought as well as emotion and volition, there could be no consciousness of the moral nature of man. Sensation without thought would at most amount to no more than an indefinite sense of uneasiness or momentary irritation, without any power of discerning in what manner we are affected, or of distinguishing our successive affections from each other. To distinguish, for example, in the visible world, any one object from any other, to know the house as a house, or the tree as a tree, we must be able to refer them to distinct notions; and such reference is an act of thought. The same condition holds good of the religious consciousness also. In whatever mental affection we become conscious of our relation to a Supreme Being, we can discern that consciousness, as such, only by reflecting upon it as conceived under its proper notion. Without this, we could not know our religious consciousness to be what it is: and, as the knowledge of a fact of consciousness is identical with its existence, without this, the religious consciousness, as such, could not exist.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd edit., pp. 105-107.)

To ascertain, then, what Religious Consciousness is, we begin with laying down what the whole Consciousness of man is not. But have we even that starting-point? Have we found even the Limits to this general Consciousness? We have found that there are terms or limits which no doubt have their meaning and use. But apparently they are verbal limits merely; therefore limits which do not apply, and cannot apply, to that which is a vital act, or nothing. The effect of the confusion in the first stage of the inquiry becomes sadly evident in this. The Religious Consciousness, just like the general Consciousness, perishes in the statement of it. “In whatever affection we become conscious of our relation to a Supreme Being, we can discern that Consciousness as such only by reflecting on it under its proper notion.” Read over these words four or five times. Examine them word by word. Weigh them in your mind. And then ask yourself whether you ever met with language which so entirely bewildered and extinguished (I can use no other word) the feeling which it professes to set forth. What becomes of the actual Consciousness thus “reflected upon as conceived under its proper notion”?

But let us hope for some path through this wilderness of words; for some heavenly manna to drop on us when we are quite faint with travelling through it. We now approach the positive part of the Lecture.

* Religious thought, if it is to exist at all, can only exist as representative of some fact of religious intuition,—of some individual state of mind, in which is presented, as an immediate fact, that relation of man to God, of which man, by reflection, may become distinctly and definitely conscious.

“Two such states may be specified, as dividing between them the rude materials out of which Reflection builds up the edifice of Religious Consciousness. These are the Feeling of Dependence and the Conviction of Moral Obligation. To these two facts of the inner consciousness may be traced, as to their sources, the two great outward acts by which religion in various forms has been manifested among men;—Prayer, by which they seek to win God’s blessing upon the future, and Expiation, by which they strive to atone for the offences of the past. The Feeling of Dependence is the instinct which urges us to pray. It is the feeling that our existence and welfare are in the hands of a superior Power;—not of an inexorable Fate or immutable Law; but of a Being having at least so far the attributes of Personality, that He can show favour or severity to those dependent upon Him, and can be regarded by them with the feelings of hope, and fear, and reverence, and gratitude. It is a feeling similar in kind, though higher in degree, to that which is awakened in the mind of the child toward his parent, who is first manifested to him as the giver of such things as are needful, and to whom the first language he addresses is that of entreaty. It is the feeling so fully and intensely expressed in the language of the Psalmist: ‘Thou art he that took me out of my mother’s womb: thou wast my hope, when I hanged yet upon my mother’s breasts. I have been left unto thee ever since I was born. Thou art my God even from my mother’s womb. Be not thou far from me, O Lord: thou art my succour, haste thee to help me. I will declare thy Name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.’ With the first development of consciousness, there grows up, as a part of it, the innate feeling that our life, natural and spiritual, is not in our power to sustain or to prolong; that there is One above us, on whom we are dependent, whose existence we learn, and whose presence we realize, by the sure instinct of Prayer. We have thus, in the Sense of Dependence, the foundation of one great element of Religion,—the Fear of God.

But the mere consciousness of dependence does not of itself exhibit the character of the Being on whom we depend. It is as consistent with superstition as with religion;—with the belief in a malevolent, as in a benevolent Deity: it is as much called into existence by the severities, as by the mercies of God; by the sufferings which we are unable to avert, as by the benefits which we did not ourselves procure. The Being on whom we depend is, in that single relation, manifested in the infliction of pain, as well as in the bestowal of happiness. But in order to make suffering, as well as enjoyment, contribute to the religious education of man, it is necessary that he should be conscious, not merely of suffering, but of sin;—that he should look upon pain not merely as inflicted, but as deserved; and should recognize in its Author the justice that punishes, not merely the anger that harms. In the feeling of dependence, we are conscious of the Power of God, but not necessarily of His Goodness. This deficiency, however, is supplied by the other element of religion,—the Consciousness of Moral Obligation, carrying with it, as it necessarily does, the Conviction of Sin.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 108-110.)

The reader will ask why I stop at these words, ‘Conviction of Sin.’ Do they not point to the most awful fact of human experience? Ought I not, in all justice, to let the writer show, by his interpretation of them, that he does mean Consciousness by Consciousness, Conviction by Conviction,—that he does not, after all, merely put them at a distance from himself, and range them under “their proper notion”? I would gladly have continued the quotation, if it had thrown any light—even the faintest—upon those fearful struggles in the human spirit which this scriptural phrase so wonderfully expresses. But the moment it has been uttered, Mr. Mansel proceeds to refute Kant’s doctrine of an ‘Autonomy of the Will;’ as well as to attack “the fiction of an absolute law binding on all rational beings.” I may venture to meet him again, some time or other, on that last question; but I will not be diverted by it from the one that is now in hand.

We are speaking of Religious Consciousness; let us confine ourselves to that. It is said to be “an edifice built up” “of the rude materials” formed out of “two states of mind.” The first rude material is the feeling of Dependence. Surely a most deep and wonderful feeling or state of mind! But is it not itself a Consciousness? Am I not conscious of actual dependence on something or some Person? The Child is so, from whom Mr. Mansel draws the best, because the simplest, of all illustrations and proofs. David is so, in that Psalm which he quotes. Neither the child nor the king builds up a Consciousness out of one or two states of mind. Each has a deep want and is drawn by it to a Person who meets the want, to a Person who has been the awakener of it. Is it not a grievous thing to put a multitude of phrases between this fact and ourselves? Do not David’s words take us into the very heart of the Consciousness? If it is anything but a school phrase, is it not this? And what do we gain by reducing it into this school jargon, but the destruction of the thing which that jargon endeavours to explain? The words of the Psalmist tell us of an act of direct trust in a Person, in whom for some reason or other he can trust, whose character (or Name) is worthy of his trust, and worthy of other men’s trust too, seeing that he says he will proclaim it to his brethren and to the Congregation. And am I the better for being told that this is the ‘foundation of one great element of Religion.’ It is impossible that an accomplished scholar could have spoken of the foundation of an element, if he had not been busy in leading us further and further from the real and the actual into vagueness and emptiness.

Mr. Mansel speaks next of another of these elements of Religion,—the Consciousness of Moral Obligation. Here, again, one is pained by finding how the near is explained by the distant, the known by the unknown, the undoubted fact by the logical term. That the Consciousness of Sin in us involves the Consciousness of God’s Goodness, is a remark as practical as it is profound; if Mr. Mansel would have dwelt upon it, he would have seen, I fancy, the necessity of altering many of the moral statements which occur in the latter part of his book; he would have made this part of it far clearer and simpler. But to do so, he must have faced those actual experiences of sin which devout men have recorded. He must have asked himself whether they were deceived in supposing that Sin meant an alienation from a Being with whom they were meant to be united,—an opposition between their character and His who has made them to be like Him. No doubt, they would one and all have entirely acquiesced in his statement that this Consciousness of evil had been a part, a necessary and wonderful part, of their “religious education.” They would have testified, more strongly than he does, to the connection between the Consciousness of Suffering and of Sin in this Education. They would have said that they regarded all the bodily or outward sufferings they had undergone, as of unspeakable worth, because they had been instruments by which the Spirit of God had awakened in them the Conviction of Sin, that so He might lead them on to the Conviction of Righteousness. But if, after all, these Experiences were resolved into the ‘Consciousness of Moral Obligation,’ I think they would have exclaimed that a tame, respectable, presentable school-formula was substituted for living facts; that the facts were required to give the formula a meaning; that they had always recognized ‘moral obligation,’ without attaching a very distinct signification to either the adjective or the substantive; that they had learnt, by their Experience, who obliged them, and what was obliged; how a moral obligation differs from the force which acts upon the mere brute nature. Such persons would, unless I am greatly mistaken, read such a passage as the following with something more than a chill. They would feel that it carries them round in a weary circle of words and notions, each returning into the other, till all reality is lost, all practical guidance for life becomes hopeless, all personal consciousness is extinguished.

We are thus compelled, by the consciousness of a moral obligation, to assume the existence of a moral Deity, and to regard the absolute standard of right and wrong as constituted by the nature of that Deity. The conception of this standard, in the human mind, may indeed be faint and fluctuating, and must be imperfect: it may vary with the intellectual and moral culture of the nation or the individual: and in its highest human representation, it must fall far short of the reality. But it is present to all mankind, as a basis of moral obligation and an inducement to moral progress: it is present in the universal consciousness of sin; in the conviction that we are offenders against God; in the expiatory rites by which, whether inspired by some natural instinct, or inherited from some primeval tradition, divers nations have, in their various modes, striven to atone for their transgressions, and to satisfy the wrath of their righteous Judge. However erroneously the particular acts of religious service may have been understood by men; yet, in the universal consciousness of innocence and guilt, of duty and disobedience, of an appeased and offended God, there is exhibited the instinctive confession of all mankind, that the moral nature of man, as subject to a law of obligation, reflects and represents, in some degree, the moral nature of a Deity by whom that obligation is imposed.—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 112, 113.)

“We are compelled”—by what? “by the consciousness of moral obligation,”—i.e. of moral compulsion, “to assume the existence of a moral Deity.” But what is moral? Do I derive my knowledge of its meaning from this compulsion which has not been explained, or from something else? I am further compelled to regard “the absolute standard of right and wrong as constituted by the Nature of that Deity.” Now we begin to see light. Now we can know what morality is; now we can know what a moral compulsion is. Ah, no! Read the next passage. In place of the standard itself, we have a “conception of this standard in the human mind,” which may “vary with the intellectual and moral culture of the individual and the nation;” which in fact therefore is no standard at all. But there is this consolation. This varying conception is “present to all mankind as a basis of moral obligation and an inducement to moral progress.” We started from the consciousness of moral obligation. We have had the glimpse of a standard which would tell us what that is. We have lost that glimpse, and now we have the conception of this standard, i.e. (if it is anything) the consciousness of moral obligation, as a basis of moral obligation! And all we can find out about this basis of moral obligation is, that “there are expiatory rites by which divers nations have in their various modes striven to atone for their transgressions and to satisfy the wrath of their righteous Judge;” e.g. the offerings to Moloch and to the Queen of Heaven, which the God of Abraham pronounced to be abomination in His sight. ‘Moral obligation’ has certainly a very firm ‘basis’! And this is the lore which our sons are to hear from a University pulpit!

A portion of the Lecture is devoted to the subject of Prayer. One might have hoped that while speaking of it, Mr. Mansel would have cared more to express his own convictions, than to prove how absurd are the convictions of other men. But it would seem that to confute is the one “moral obligation” of a Preacher. When he refers to Communion with God, it is that he may denounce a theory of Schleiermacher, which has been adopted, he says, by Mr. Morell. This theory is described in the following language.

“According to Schleiermacher, the essence of Religion is to be found in a feeling of absolute and entire dependence, in which the mutual action and reaction of subject and object upon each other, which constitutes the ordinary consciousness of mankind, gives way to a sense of utter, passive helplessness,—to a consciousness that our entire personal agency is annihilated in the presence of the infinite energy of the Godhead. In our intercourse with the world, he tells us, whether in relation to nature or to human society, the feeling of freedom and that of dependence are always present in mutual operation upon each other; sometimes in equilibrium; sometimes with a vast preponderance of the one or the other feeling; but never to the entire exclusion of either. But in our communion with God, there is always an accompanying consciousness that the whole activity is absolutely and entirely dependent upon Him; that, whatever amount of freedom may be apparent in the individual moments of life, these are but detached and isolated portions of a passively dependent whole.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., p. 114.)

Now I think any one who will be at the pains to refer to the ‘Christliche Glaube,’ of Schleiermacher, will discover that he certainly was not putting forth a theory on the subject of Religion³ or of Prayer. Rightly or wrongly, he had evidently a dread of theories in this region. He was disposed, his opponents always say, to exaggerate the feeling above the intellect. “Piety in itself,” he says, in one of his fundamental axioms, “is neither a knowing nor a doing (weder ein Wissen noch ein Thun), but an inclination and determination of the Feeling (eine Neigung und Bestimmtheit des Gefühls).” Evidently he desired to describe what he regarded as a fact, or rather as the central fact of his own being, that in which he could not be singular or different from other men, but in which he most realized what was common to him with them all. There was a consciousness, it seemed, which lay beneath all others: it expressed the deepest necessity of the creatures in whom the other Consciousnesses dwelt,—it was the want of his own very self. He confessed a Being not imperfect and limited, like himself, apart from whom he could not be, in whom he could lose himself and find rest. Such a statement as this has surely nothing in it of the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the Philosopher. It may be inadequate; no one probably would have felt the inadequacy of words to represent the profoundest reality more than its author. But something like it, I think, all persons who have ever prayed, or tried to pray, have coveted and adopted as the expression of their own impotency, of their surrender to the Almighty and the All-good.

Mr. Mansel makes the following comments upon it:—

“Of this theory it may be observed, in the first place, that it contemplates God chiefly in the character of an object of infinite magnitude. The relations of the object to the subject, in our consciousness of the world, and in that of God, differ from each other in degree rather than in kind. The Deity is manifested with no attribute of personality; He is merely the world magnified to infinity: and the feeling of absolute dependence is in fact that of the annihilation of our personal existence in the Infinite Being of the Universe. Of this feeling, the intellectual exponent is pure Pantheism; and the infinite object is but the indefinite abstraction of Being in general, with no distinguishing characteristic to constitute a Deity. For the distinctness of an object of consciousness is in the inverse ratio to the intensity of the passive affection. As the feeling of dependence becomes more powerful, the knowledge of the character of the object on which we depend, must necessarily become less and less; for the discernment of any object as such, is a state of mental energy and reaction of thought upon that object. Hence the feeling of absolute dependence, supposing it possible, could convey no consciousness of God as God, but merely an indefinite impression of dependence upon something. Towards an object so vague and meaningless, no real religious relation is possible.

In the second place, the consciousness of an absolute dependence in which our activity is annihilated, is a contradiction in terms; for consciousness itself is an activity. We can be conscious of a state of mind as such, only by attending to it; and attention is in all cases a mode of our active energy. Thus the state of absolute dependence, supposing it to exist at all, could not be distinguished from other states; and, as all consciousness is distinction, it could not, by any mode of consciousness, be known to exist.” (Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 115-117.)

The remark that one who prays thus must contemplate God “as an infinite magnitude,” is the most astounding I ever met with. How can any human being feel that an infinite magnitude overpowers his will, subjects his restlessness, leads him captive? And what a strange fancy that this is the meaning and attraction of Pantheism! Doubtless, Schleiermacher had heard, as most earnest men, at some time or other, have heard, the singing of the Mermaid who would draw down the fisherman into the deep; doubtless the charm of sinking all personal existence in the vast whole had once seemed to him irresistible. But never, we may be sure, for a single moment did the hope of being crushed under an infinite magnitude dawn upon him as a vision of delight. He must have known even then too much of the nature of self, and of the burden of self, to think of bulk as having anything to do with the power that extinguished it. As he grew better to understand what that Self is which is identical with Sin,—what that independence is which is only another name for slavery,—he will have known that no infinite world could receive the sacrifice, that nothing can claim the subjection of the spirit, but an infinite Love.

The second objection is curiously in accordance with Mr. Mansel’s treatment of the whole subject. “An absolute dependence in which our activity is annihilated, is a contradiction in terms.” Of course it is; but is it a contradiction in fact? It is a paradox certainly. All Consciousness is a paradox on this very ground, that it is an activity in us, and yet that it is always passing out of us into that of which we are conscious. Every feeling of child, friend, lover, is tending towards this consummation. When the activity is highest, it becomes self-forgetfulness. And what is “putting our trust in the Lord, believing in Him, casting our burden upon Him,” but the full realization of this self-oblivion? Can Prayer, if it be communion with God, be anything but that? And if we believe, as the Scripture teaches us, that all Prayer is but our response to God’s voice in us—if it is the Spirit who maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered—is not Schleiermacher’s language something more in accordance with the Spirit of Psalmists, Prophets, Evangelists, and Apostles, than the following passage, though it appeals so confidently to their authority?

“In the third place, the theory is inconsistent with the duty of Prayer. Prayer is essentially a state in which man is in active relation towards God; in which he is intensely conscious of his personal existence and its wants; in which he endeavours, by entreaty, to prevail with God. Let any one consider for a moment the strong energy of the language of the Apostle; ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me:’ or the consciousness of a personal need, which pervades that Psalm in which David so emphatically declares his dependence upon God. ‘My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me, and art so far from my health, and from the words of my complaint? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season also I take no rest:’—let him ponder the words of our Lord himself,—‘Shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him?’—and then let him say if such language is compatible with the theory which asserts that man’s personality is annihilated in his communion with God.

But, lastly, there is another fatal objection to the above theory. It makes our moral and religious consciousness subversive of each other, and reduces us to the dilemma, that either our faith or our practice must be founded on a delusion. The actual relation of man to God is the same, in whatever degree man may be conscious of it. If man’s dependence on God is not really destructive of his personal freedom, the religious consciousness, in denying that freedom, is a false consciousness. If, on the contrary, man is in reality passively dependent upon God, the consciousness of moral responsibility, which bears witness to his free agency, is a lying witness. Actually, in the sight of God, we are either totally dependent, or, partially at least, free. And as this condition must be always the same, whether we are conscious of it or not, it follows, that, in proportion as one of these modes of consciousness reveals to us the truth, the other must be regarded as testifying to a falsehood.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 117, 118.)

To the argument from the Psalms I have replied already. That they express the utmost energy of the human spirit is admitted at once. But is not that energy put forth in acts of dependence and trust? Is not its regular expression: “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”? Does it not reach its highest power and agony in the words of the only-begotten Son: “Not my will, but thine be done”?

A note, which is subjoined to this passage, is necessary for the full illustration of it.

Schleiermacher himself admits (‘Christliche Glaube,’ § 38) that the theory of absolute dependence is incompatible with the belief that God can be moved by any human action. He endeavours, however, to reconcile this admission with the duty of prayer by maintaining (§ 147) that the true Christian will pray for nothing but that which it comes within God’s absolute purpose to grant. This implies something like omniscience in the true Christian, and something like hypocrisy in every act of prayer.⁴—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., Note 16, p. 360.)

Is not this a direct answer—not to Schleiermacher, but—to the Apostle John? ‘If omniscience in the act of prayer,’—if ‘something like hypocrisy in every act of prayer,’ is chargeable on the writer of the ‘Christliche Glaube,’ is not the writer of an Epistle which contains these wonderful words still more open to that blame?—“And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His Will, He heareth us. And if we know that He heareth us, we know that we have the petition that we desired of Him.” Another deep paradox, surely! Infidels have again and again applied to it the very language which Mr. Mansel applies to the German author. To me it seems that the whole paradox of our Consciousness, as well as all the paradox of Christ’s Gospel, is hidden here. To me it seems, that for the prayer which is not this—for that prayer which answers to Mr. Mansel’s idea of conscious activity in beseeching a Being of whose will we know nothing—we must seek our precedent, not in the New Testament, not in the Book of Psalms, but in that memorable passage of the Book of Kings: “And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us! but there was no voice nor any that regarded.”

Surely it is not to such prayers as these that an Oxford Teacher in the nineteenth century of the Christian era would bring us back. It is clear, from the concluding passage of his Lecture, that a very different idea of Prayer is present to his inner mind, than that which his religious Philosophy builds up by Reflection out of Consciousness. He speaks of our drawing nigh to God as sinners, and as sharers in a common Redemption. If we will but ask ourselves how our sin has separated us from God, what He is from whom it has separated us, out of what slavery He has redeemed us, to what freedom He has brought us;—if we will but consider what answers the Bible gives us to these questions, what answers we receive to them as we kneel,—our ardour to refute ‘opposing theories’ will be less, our desire to receive any light which comes from any one who has himself prayed and suffered greater; we shall feel that dependence on an Unknown Being who is very near us, and in whom we are living, becomes impossible through the restless eagerness of our intellect to conceive and create objects for itself out of the things which we see; that utter dependence upon that Being when He has made Himself known,—when He has revealed Himself to us in His Son as the Absolute, Infinite, Eternal Good, who has called us to be His children, —is possible,—is the highest realization of all that the spirit within us craves for,—since it craves to be lost in itself, to be found in Him.

Faithfully yours,