CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM.

"The world by wisdom knew not God."

THE sphere of the visible world, which has been constantly embracing man and which has formed his conscious experience in all ages, may be called a revelation, if we so please; but it is not a revelation in the sense in which that term is usually employed. Revelation, as commonly understood, is the mode of communicating a form of truth which cannot, it is supposed, be learned from the external world. The revelations sometimes spoken of as having been received through nature, more nearly resemble incipient forms of science, deified, as we now say. But it may be asked, how did these forms of truth first become deified? And here we meet with that constantly recurring obstacle in our researches of past life and thought-the difficulty of reading the conceptions of former times through language. The words expressive of the profoundest truths in religion, like the words employed for the ordinary experiences of life, gain or lose in connotation, or both gain and lose by the lapse of time. In asking a question like the one now proposed, we are not to be held bound to account for all that is included in the modern conception of deity. If we carefully construe to ourselves the import of this idea, as it was understood by man in the mythological period of which I have spoken, we shall see that this conception, which is to us one of exceeding complexity, was in the mythological stage one of great simplicity. Worship, which has been always connected with this idea as the external expression of the internal thought or feeling, may have been, whether in fetish or idol worship, a mere superstitious growth upon a very simple and innocent practice. From what we know of the habits of savage tribes, these objects or figures seem to be regarded as symbolical representations of kosmical conception, or as the temporary habitation of the spirit or life or power of some natural force; kosmical conception being, as we have seen, in this less abstract age, necessarily regarded as personal. From this personal view of nature men soon came to consider it as cruel or kind in its action towards them, and this gave rise to the widespread dualism

in worship; a dualism whose fundamental idea was purely kosmical to begin with, and into which other relations, such as moral and spiritual, may have entered at a much later period. We have still this kosmical starting point preserved in the expressions we use, with altered meanings, for spiritual and moral goodness and evil; these are traceable to sensible ideas-they bear upon them the marks of their physical origin.

The attitude assumed by men towards these personified physical forces, was naturally and by degrees, one of worship, dictated partly by fear and partly by affection. But the practice of sometimes punishing these artificial objects by whipping, pricking, and even banishing them for faithlessness to their promises, or by throwing them in the mud in fits of disappointment, shows that worship had not all at once attained persistence, and that the reverence was hardly what we mean by Divine, but rather a fluctuating personal regard. It does not accord with the feelings that have place in veneration, to consider the figures that are thus defaced and repaired as anything more than a kind of charm, which by long habit, and more or less constant association, have gained a tolerably consistent regard and respect, broken by temporary fits of dislike.

These primitive minds undoubtedly imagine their fetish charm, as they imagine everything else, to be tenanted by a personal being; the reflection, as we have seen, of their own inner feelings. We fail very much through modern civilisation to enter into the spirit that distinguishes this early cultus, and to understand its monitions from the material world. We require to be constantly on our guard against judging this age of the childhood of man exactly by our self-conscious life, and applying our present theories, without modification, to its distinctive manifestations. Dreams have been supposed to account for this phase of human thought and feeling, and very likely they did operate in strengthening other impressions. The impressions, however, are first made in waking moments. We have yet amid the grander and stiller forms of nature a vague sense of intangibility, immateriality,-of what we now sometimes call sanctity, of something "far more deeply interfused," and which no amount of scientific observation or nice and accurate discrimination of sensible phenomena can gainsay or affirm. We are fast receding, it is true, from this living recognition of nature; we have little room in our modern scientific work for undefined old-world imaginings such as these; analysis, tangible and visible investigation, banish all this inborn sense of that which appears to be neither tangible nor

visible, as not coming within the range of our method of cognising things. Our nearest approach to this is the middle ground between the extremes of former and present times, occupied by poetry, in so far as this is the resignation of the spirit or mind in sensitivity, to the united impression of the Tó Tâν-to what appears to one in this attitude of mind to be the realised presence of a spirit in the universe, resulting from the conjoined action of the great immensity of being, which crushes necessarily the individual and isolated faculty of perception, and for a time leaves no place for analysis and particular observation, but bears in upon the mind a sense of personality commensurate with the vastness; and thus imparts to the whole sum of things such a unity, and life in this unity, as no minute investigation of causes can comprehend. It was something resembling this impression that the primitive man felt in the solitudes of nature; and there is nothing to wonder at in the apparent spiritual, or rather superhuman element which appeared to him to be present in it, both in the whole, and in its parts. We do not now, unless in artificial and rhetorical language, speak of the spirit of a wood or the genius of a place, although there was unquestionably a time when men honestly spoke of such things. We would not now talk, far less pray, to a stone or a piece of wood; but who, even in what we now call our higher culture, is not sometimes filled with awe before an imposing natural spectacle, or lifted out of himself, as we say, by the dread silences of nature, her calms, her terrible beauty, and forced to let the pagan soul within him speak and worship? The deification of natural objects, as it is called, may thus be, partially at least, explained on the mythicoscientific hypothesis. It would then be a result of the perception of nature peculiar to a stage in mental development. Half-awakened spiritual instincts no doubt might, under this form, be unconsciously aspiring to objects that could alone satisfy them; but the pure form of the Divine and spiritual God, as we conceive God, was not revealed to them in the way I have described.

Physical order even, which in our times has been much relied on by a certain class of minds, for communications of a spiritual nature, or for proofs thereof, has been lately felt to be a very doubtful means of arriving at spiritual facts. As a proof, it is at best one after the fact, and not the source or one of the sources of the evidence. All the intercourse that exists between man and the outer world in the first instance, and apart from an illuminated spiritual life, and those occasional vague feelings which I have

described, is a sense-given experience: the idea of God has no place in it; and, as a consequence, has no place in pure science. It is very probable, as we shall afterwards learn, that the visible creation and the revelation of the invisible bear an analogy to each other; but instead of going through kosmical order to spiritual intelligence, the proper course for us is to pass from spiritual intelligence to kosmical order. It is true that the world-creation is a necessary prelude, just as we shall find other things presupposed in any given revelation. As we are constituted, some platform is needed on which to operate. But those who have the invisible historic creation of the spiritual world need never attempt to construct the same from the material which external nature alone supplies. If they do, they will introduce into their argument much that is irrelevant. For if they do not introduce this irrelevant matter, how comes it that they get so much more out of their argument than was formerly obtained? If modern theism, for instance, is purer and higher, is it not by some equivocation in the terms? Theism, as held by many at present, is no longer purely so, but is mingled with Christian conceptions. Unmixed theism of the nineteenth century would neither be more nor less than a wide generalisation of the kosmical revelation of the early mind; and when closely interrogated, and stripped of that which does not properly belong to it, we shall find the same fundamental characteristics distinguishing both. The idea of law, and the conception of design, cannot of themselves give us the idea of a Divine Will working behind all phenomena. The ancient mind did not really rise above a material or indefinite efficient antecedent more or less personified, and the modern view, apart from revelation, is at its root the very same. We have not even lost the personification entirely. The idea of cause, which is such a stumbling-block in science and philosophy, is a remnant of this personality formerly seen in nature a projection of internal experiences into external phenomena analogically resembling these experiences. The arguments often urged in support of the idea of causation are in fact derived from the feelings of intelligent life; the argument for design is no less drawn from the same sphere of life. These two fundamental positions of the theist are thus in spirit, and in a great measure in form and substance, equivalent to the views of a rude state of civilisation. On more minute consideration it will be found that we have not altogether severed ourselves from our antecedents. Were psychologists in their analysis of the idea of cause, to inquire into the origin

and history of the conception in the early stage of thought noticed in the last chapter, they would find that it is largely a survival of the mode of representation of external facts prevalent among children and savages-the transference of the personal experiences of volitional and intelligent life to objects that have neither. The answer that is sometimes given to this is in reality no answer at all. It has been said, for example, by Sir William Hamilton to be refuted by the consideration that between the overt act of corporeal movement, of which we are cognisant, and the internal act of mental determination, of which we are also cognisant, there intervene a numerous series of intermediate agencies, of which we have no knowledge, and, consequently, that we can have no consciousness of any causal connection between the extreme links of this chain-the volition to move and the limb moving. As a reply to a particular philosophical theory of causation this may be accepted as sufficient; but it misses the main point in regard to the conception of cause in itself considered. In the first place, it is an application of the observations of a matured consciousness to the infancy of mental experience. Hundreds of conceptions vulgarly believed, and originating in a rude state of life and society, have been dissipated as opposed to facts well observed; but these unanswerable conclusions of exact science do not in the least affect the conceptions as psychological phenomena to be accounted for: the mental law that produced the belief, is a separate matter from the belief itself, as correct or incorrect to fact. Nor is it only wrong as being the application of experience in one phase of society, to test experience in another, and very different phase; it is, in the second place, erroneous as a theory. If, as the objector urges, the two factors of which we are alone conscious, be the first and last numbers of a series, whose intermediate links, however numerous, are entirely without our knowledge, would not, beyond question, a connection be established in the mind between these conscious links, volition and bodily movements? If we are not conscious of the mediated motions of nerves and muscles, and if, as was the case, observation had not discovered these intervening motions, the uncritical mind would inevitably form its conception of changes effected by itself, without consideration of the intervening causes and effects actually operative, but unfelt and unknown. This was really done, and is yet done, by untutored minds. The primitive theory of causation was complete when the explanation of change, where persons were concerned, was extended to ordinary events without apparent personality, which I