Problems of Immanence Part 7

The Coroner: It amounts to this: you believe the Almighty is a bad surgeon, but a good physician?--Our faith is not yet strong enough.

Dr. c.o.c.kell deposed that death was due to acute bronchitis.

Would she have recovered with medical attendance for a week before?--Yes.

The Coroner, in summing up, said there was no doubt Mrs. Dixon was grossly neglected.

The jury returned a verdict of "Death from acute bronchitis, accelerated by gross neglect by Mrs. D. and especially by Nurse H."

The Coroner: I am afraid that will mean manslaughter, which would be too severe. Will you alter it, gentlemen? The jury then altered the verdict to one of "severe censure on Mrs. D. and Miss H. for neglecting to obtain medical aid."

[1] _The Grammar of a.s.sent_, p. 201.

[2] _Rudimental Divine Science_, p. 10.

[3] _Op. cit._, p. 10. Mrs. Eddy is so incredibly ignorant of the meaning of words in common use that she says, "Mind in matter is pantheism." It has apparently never dawned on her that her own doctrine, "G.o.d is All--All is G.o.d" is pantheism pure and simple!

[4] _Ibid_.

[5] _Op. cit._, p. 9.

[6] Dr. Henry Rutgers Marshall, on "Psychotherapeutics," in the _Hibbert Journal_, January, 1909.

[7] The Christian Science healer is supposed to have had his or her powers trained by special tuition, for which, in the ordinary course, a fee is charged. Mrs. Eddy states that she has "never taught a Primary cla.s.s without several and sometimes seventeen free students in it," but adds significantly "The student who pays must, of necessity, do better than he who does not pay" (_op. cit._, p. 14). The "necessity" is not quite obvious, but the statement sets one wondering whether it would hold true if for "student" the word "patient" were subst.i.tuted.

[8] _Op. cit._, p. 3.

[9] _Ibid._, p. 13.

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CHAPTER IX

DETERMINISM

The under-emphasis of sin, we said, is one of the special dangers which threaten the present age; and nothing is more remarkable or disquieting to observe than the number of attacks that are being made to-day from quarter after quarter, all of them converging upon the same point. Now the cry is raised that sin is a mere mistake, due to ignorance; or that it is merely the absence of something, as a shadow indicates the absence of light[1]; or we are a.s.sured that "what we call 'evil' is only incidental to the progress and development of the [universal] order"

[2]--a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the average person's feelings are considerately soothed by {142} the p.r.o.nouncement that "the ma.s.s of a Christian congregation are about as innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance heroic saintliness" [3]--the latter a truly admirable feat of circ.u.mlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are themselves in essence negated--generally in virtue of some pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe"--as when we read that "in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will." [4]

Doubtless, these various statements, whether made in the name of Monism or Determinism, or some form of neo-Christianity, represent a reaction against that over-emphasis which taught that man was by nature under G.o.d's wrath and deserving of everlasting torments; but there can be no question that this reaction has gone very far in the direction of the opposite extreme, and that the time has come for reconsideration and a return to more balanced views.

So far as the virtual denial of human freedom, human sin, and indeed of human selfhood, {143} flows from a perversion of the doctrine of Divine immanence, we need not add anything to the observations made in earlier chapters upon this subject; we might, however, quote some pertinent words of Martineau's, affirming and explaining that distinction between the Divine and human personality which can only be ignored to the hopeless confusion of thought:

"The whole external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its s.p.a.ce, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle which establishes a _Unity_ of all external causality makes it ant.i.thetic to the internal, and establishes a _Duality_ between our own and that which is other than ours; so that, were not our personal power known to us as _one_, the cosmical power would not be guaranteed to us as the _other_.

Here, therefore, at the boundary of the proper Ego, the absorbing claim of the Supreme will arrests itself, and recognises a ground on which it does not mean to step. Did it still press on and annex this field also, it would simply abolish the very base of its own recognisable existence, and, in making itself all in all, would vanish totally from view. . .

Are we, then, to find Him in the sunshine and the rain, and to miss Him in our thought, our duty and our love? Far from it; He is with us in both: only in the former it is His _immanent_ life, in the latter His _transcendent_, with which we are in communion." [5]

Only where this fundamental principle of the non-ident.i.ty of G.o.d and man is recognised, can the facts of human personality, {144} freedom and responsibility for willed acts be rationally based and defended.

At the same time this "otherness" of G.o.d, while it is the condition, is not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in the Divine goodness. There is no _a priori_ reason making it inconceivable that the doctrine of absolute predestination might be true; but such a doctrine is not reconcilable with the belief that the Eternal Other is also the Eternal Father. The Divine Autocrat of Calvinism, who pre-ordained some of His creatures to eternal d.a.m.nation--not for any demerit of theirs, but "just choosing so"--is not unthinkable; what is unthinkable is that we could love such a One--a G.o.d who had predestined all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer.

Such a G.o.d might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never affection. Only a good G.o.d, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through such an endowment can such an aim be realised.

And hence there are perhaps few att.i.tudes so entirely irrational as that which affects to see in a determinist interpretation of man's {145} nature a special reason for optimism. Occasionally one is invited to rejoice in the "great and glorious thought that every man is wholly a product of the Master Workman"; it is even urged that such a conception cannot change our appreciation of what is fine in human thought and action, just as "we do not admire a rose the less because we know that it could no more help being what it is than could a stinging nettle or a fungus." We can only say that such a superficial optimism seems infinitely more open to objection than the temper which, in the face of so much suffering and sin, has to struggle hard sometimes to preserve its faith in the Father's love, and half-wonders if some personal power of evil is not actively engaged in marring G.o.d's workmanship. Anyone who can believe that every man, just as he is, represents the Divine intention in concrete form--anyone who can believe this, and glory in the thought--must inhabit a strange world, remote from reality. He can never have learned anything of the greed which condemns myriads of human beings to sunless and degraded lives; he can never have been inside a police-court; he can never have seen hapless womanhood flaunting its be-rouged and be-ribboned shame under the electric light of West End thoroughfares--he can never even have reflected upon any of these things, and rejoiced in the thought that every human being was "wholly the {146} product of the Master Workman." If such a thought does not produce something like despair, it ought to do so; if it does not, then it represents not a conviction but a pose.

As a matter of fact, the determinist creed, with all its professions of charitableness towards the transgressor, and while pretending to soothe us by absolving us from responsibility for wrong-doing, fatally paralyses our endeavours. It is a message, not of liberation from guilt, but of despair. Christianity, even while condemning sin, in its very condemnation speaks of hope; it says to the sinner: "You are guilty--you ought to have done better, and you know it; you are guilty--you ought still to do better, _and you can_." That is a rousing, vitalising call: the very censure implies the possibility of better things. But Determinism says to the moral wreck: "Not only are you a wreck, but that is all you ever could have been; you not only cannot help being what you are, but in your wretchedness and degradation you are what you could not help being--this was your pre-ordained destiny from the beginning of time. We are not angry with you, any more than we are angry with tigers for being fierce, or with thorns for not bearing grapes; only, being what you are, you never _could_ have borne, and never will bear, grapes."

Truly a "great and glorious thought"! Determinism makes of the whole world of erring men a hospital, and p.r.o.nounces {147} every patient an incurable--it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each, but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a conclusion from which determinists, fortunately for themselves, escape by means of the most patent inconsistency.

But we turn to the further contention which we already mentioned in pa.s.sing, _viz._, that the acceptance of Determinism would by no means change our admiration of what was fine in human thought and action--just as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more significant confusion between things totally different--aesthetics and ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know that the experience of moral struggle and moral conquest is intensely real, not to be argued away any more than we can be argued out of any other primary fact of consciousness, which is its own sufficient evidence. Let anyone ask himself quite {148} candidly whether the feeling called forth by some rare work of art resembles remotely the emotion with which he reads of some deed of humble heroism or self-sacrifice; the psychology which discerns here no difference is singularly shallow.

But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is--a singular compliment to the "Master Workman"--he executes a _volte-face_ and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism would simply have us recognise plain facts: it would arrange for healthy hereditary influences to cradle the coming generations; it would adopt the most enlightened educational, hygienic, reformatory methods; it would provide for all the citizens of the State such an environment as would steadily make for health and beauty and happiness. There are no "sinners," it says, but only the unhappy products of conditions which foster anti-social proclivities as automatically as dirt fosters disease; instead of punishing the products, let us attack the producing conditions, and by sweeping them away bring in the millennium.

Such a plea, it must be admitted, harmonises well with our modern tolerance, our modern zeal for reform; and yet it rests upon a fundamental fallacy. No one, of course, denies the {149} moulding power of heredity and environment; no one denies such an obvious truism as that we cannot expect to grow fine specimens of humanity in the reeking slum or the sweater's workshop. But as environment is a greater power than heredity, so there is only one power greater than environment--and that is our power to alter environment. "But that," protests the determinist, "is just what we hold ought to be done." Certainly; only it is just what, on his presupposition, cannot be done. For if the slum-dweller cannot help being what he is, owing to his environment, neither can the slum-owner, or the legislator, or the community, help being what they are, owing to the self-same cause. In fact, we cannot get the word "ought" from Determinism; it is as much out of place in that connection as a free worker in a slave-compound. But every reform springs from a sense of "oughtness"; and the sense of moral obligation is itself the spontaneous expression of the consciousness of moral freedom. So far as we believe in the duty of reform--or in "duty" itself, _sans phrase_--we have already renounced Determinism, and proclaimed our belief in liberty.

Let it be said once more, before we pa.s.s from this particular aspect of our subject, that too much may be set down to, or expected from, even environment; everybody knows that from gentle homes, surrounded by what seemed the most favouring influences, {150} there have sprung vicious and depraved characters. We ask ourselves, in encountering such cases, "Wanting is--what?" And the answer must be given in Kant's famous dictum: that which is "the only good thing in the world--_a good will_."

In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted acknowledgment of man's consciousness of freedom, _viz._, where that consciousness appears as the sense of sin. Of course, when a writer like Mr. Dole a.s.sures us that "there is no objection to a moral and spiritual Determinism that binds all things over into the unity of good," [6] we merely reply that on the contrary there is the very serious objection that "all things" are not good. But most advocates of the determinist position are, to do them justice, well aware of the existence of wrong and discord in human life; and their object is, by emphasising the influence of heredity and environment, to remove or at least materially to lighten, the crushing burden of the sense of sin. The same intention underlies the effort, occasionally made, to persuade men that, seeing they are such as G.o.d created them, it is not for them to repine at being what they are, nor to "take too serious a view" of any "penchant for {151} revolt"--another delightful phrase--they may discover within themselves; as a recent writer has it, "The responsibility of its presence _and action_ does not rest with us, nor are we justified in insulting G.o.d who made us, by repenting of what He has done. _We might as well repent of the tiger and the snake, the earthquake and the tempest in nature._" [7] What are we to say of this attempt to make G.o.d answerable, not merely for the presence, but for the action, of whatever impulse to "revolt" of which we may be conscious?

To be quite frank, we cannot think the utterance we have just quoted other than extraordinarily ill-considered. The simple fact that we cannot follow _all_ the impulses which arise in us, but have to choose between higher and lower--the fact that we are well aware of this conflict of unharmonisable elements within ourselves, some of which can only triumph at the expense of others--seems sufficiently to dispose of this writer's main contention. We may not be responsible for the presence of these warring instincts, but we are undoubtedly responsible for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or practise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the penchant for revolt," but exert ourselves to lay--

The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet and be free;

we must

Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.

Granted that the lower impulses, the inheritance from our animal ancestry, are left in us by Divine decree, they are there, not to be indulged on the plea that to repent would be tantamount to "insulting G.o.d who made us," but to be conquered by the exercise of that freedom which is the earnest of our call to claim our birthright as children of G.o.d.

But when we are further told that, as well as repent of our actions, we might repent of the tiger and the snake, we are immediately conscious of a double confusion of thought behind that statement; for in the first place, we are not even called upon to repent of _each other's_ failings but only of our own, and in the second there is no a.n.a.logy between ourselves and the tiger and snake, creatures which act according to their animal natures, and are incapable of desiring to be other than they are.

Our capacity of, and desire for, better things attest our possession of a measure of liberty, and {153} indicate at once our responsibility for the course we take, and the essential distinction between the animal creation and ourselves--a distinction wittily expressed in the remark that "everybody would admit that very few men are really manly; but n.o.body would contend that very few whales were really whaley."

But those who seek to spare us the discomfort of repentance by teaching us to declare with a new inflection, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves," forget that there is another side to this argument. It is, of course, very alluring to be told that we are not really blameworthy for acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for--that our impulses are G.o.d-given--that "the sinner is merely a learner in a lower grade in the school," [8] and so forth; one can understand how grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. Says Ca.s.sius to Brutus:--

Have you not love enough to bear with me When that rash humour which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful?

And Brutus answers with a smile:--

Yes, Ca.s.sius, and from henceforth, When you are over-earnest with your Brutus, He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so!

{154} But, after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt praise_worthy_, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting power stamped it a reality, and not an illusion. But Determinism leaves no room for this emotion, any more than for that of remorse or blame-worthiness; we cannot get rid of the sense of sin, yet retain the sense of righteousness. The determinist sponge pa.s.ses over the whole moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult G.o.d by taking credit to ourselves for what He has done. Are we prepared to surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing?

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And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus or thus--this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose aright or amiss--is both anterior and superior to all argument; it a.s.serts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities, such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our freedom circ.u.mscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from the mistake of applying time-relations to G.o.d at all, and thinking of eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present, excluding both "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." We, of course, have to think under the category of time, remembering and looking forward; but the Divine _modus cognoscendi_ excludes either of these processes, being the timeless act of One who "knoweth altogether"--in whose sight a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. To the Eternal Intelligence, living in an unbeginning and unending Present, "past" and "future" must be equally unmeaning; to such a One we cannot but think that all events must be equally and simultaneously present, "for all live unto Him." If we could behold the drama of existence _sub specie aeternitatis_, we might be able to understand how {156} Divine omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for us--it is high, and we cannot attain unto it." We know that we cannot know. In any case, even while the Divine omniscience may present itself to us as a necessity of thought, human freedom remains a reality of experience and a postulate of morals.[9]