BOOK III

THE PHILOSOPHER OF RELIGION

CHAPTER I

KNOWLEDGE

WE come now to Dr. Martineau's contribution to the philosophy of religion. In the forefront of all inquiries in this field is the question of knowledge: What can we know? What themes are within the range of human faculty? Dr. Martineau's thesis is a "Divine Mind and Will ruling the universe." The first question is not whether this thesis is true, but whether it is one with which the mind is competent to deal. Phenomena I am allowed to say I know. Through all my senses they are borne in upon me; I group them in their orders, I discover their relations, I detect their laws; but through them alone I do not come to a Divine Mind and Will. Here clearly is assumption of something other than phenomena, and which he must press beyond their confines to justify; and the question of our times is whether these confines do not fix the limit beyond which human intellect may not go. Time was when this question could have awakened no anxiety; when he who would investigate the higher problems of human interest approached them nothing doubting that in the human mind was capacity for dealing with them. The era of this happy confidence passed when men saw the significance of Kant's philosophy.

For from Kant we date the prevailing trend of modern agnosticism. I say Kant, not forgetting Hume, who has been held by some the master of those who do not know. In recent years his views have been the ward of men of science. Professor Huxley calls him the "protagonist of Agnosticism," from his pen a generous but candid praise. He was, however, too near to being the despair of thought to fix its vogue even in the domain of agnostic theory. Agnosticism, while denying us the certainty we call knowledge, may yet leave us the certitude we call faith, and in some measure must do so in order to establish an ascendency with us. Hume conducts to scepticism, and leaves us but its hopeless blank.

It will help us to see these two agnosticisms together. Hume finds the origin of all our ideas in sensations. The organism receives impressions; the ideas of the mind are copies of these; and this view unfolded and applied is his doctrine. But there are ideas which we cannot refer to individual impressions. Yes, impressions occur in definite relations, and the mind takes ideas from these. They occur, for instance, in succession, a fact that passes into the mind as the idea of time; they occur simultaneously, and hence the idea of space. Time and space are the mental presentation of these two orders of impressions; and other meaning they have none with which the philosopher need concern himself. But there are other ideas which thinkers had supposed to come out of the mind itself, as identity and causality, and which we are able to trace to no impressions. For instance, identity. It seems to me the tree I look upon from my window is the object I saw standing there yesterday, and that the man who read Hume's Essays last week was the very man who is thinking about them this morning. The tree may have greener or browner leaves to-day, may have lost a number or put forth a few; yet it seems to me I use language the natural

and unforced meaning of which is true when I say it is the same tree. Likewise the thinker of this morning may be in some particulars other than the reader of a week ago; but the difference seems to me to lie on the surface of a fundamental identity. Every such consideration Hume meets with the comprehensive denial that any interior principle of things or of ourselves can be known. What we have in either case is a close resemblance of impressions, which, however close, are really different. The congeries of impressions received to-day is so like the congeries of impressions received yesterday that the mind conceives them the same. Identity, that is, is an illusion. So the relation of cause and effect which seems to rule the world. We see the sun shine and the ice melt, medicine given and pain relieved; and so ever a prior event and a sequent one, and regard the sequent event as contingent upon the prior, and as occurring through its agency. Here Hume breaks with us. Sequences of events may be plain enough, but causal law he will allow none. In the sequences that pass before us it is just the sequences that we see, not any bond between them. There is what we call antecedent, and there is what we call consequent; but that unity between them that makes them two aspects of a composite phenomenon he will not suffer us to affirm. Events, he would say, are conjoined, but how can we say they are united? The origin of the causal idea he thus explains: Certain impressions always occur in pairs and in the same order; and so from multiplied experience of these there results a subjective cohesiveness between them, which compels us, discerning one member of the pair, to look for the other one. The idea of cause means nothing more than a habit of the mind which results from long experience.

The issue of this we need no deep insight to discover. Identity denied me, I am with respect to my interior nature but a congeries of fleeting impressions; causality discred