deduce from it the verity of our primary beliefs, and then they become rational truths. Or, starting from these primary beliefs I may argue the existence of God, and thus His existence becomes a rational truth. In the first volume I have shewn that philosophical systems are divided into three groups; the school which starts from the exterior world, as really existing, that which argues from the reality of personal consciousness, and that of the sceptics who refused to argue from assumptions. Thus, the Ionic school and that of Pythagoras laid down the existence of the Universe as an indisputable fact. The Eleatics distinguished the essence of being from phenomena. Protagoras made man the measure of all things, and Socrates and Plato followed his lead. The same antagonism reemerged in the Epicurean and Stoic schools, and the new sceptics trod them both under foot with a denial of the first axiom of both, declaring that it was sheer impossibility to arrive at truth from internal consciousness or from sensible observation. Descartes re-affirmed the conscient self as the only true foundation on which philosophy could be reared; Hobbes and Hume place all knowledge in the evidence of the senses; Kant returned to the Cartesian thesis, and rooted his system in rational intuition. Fichte and Hegel continued his work. The Positivists, at once inconsistent and Catholic, despairing of attaining Truth by metaphysical argument, reject all evidence that is not sensibly knowable, and then accept both reason and sensation as the criteria of truth, and base their philosophy, not on one, but on two undemonstrable hypotheses. Christianity is, in like manner, based on hypotheses which are beyond the possibility of demonstration, without assuming other hypotheses. If I take the Incarnation as an irrational verity, I can argue from it to other truths which are rational. Or starting from the existence of the world and the facts of human nature, I can argue up to it. My course, in the first five chapters, has been to shew from the constitution of man and his nature that such a dogma is essential to him. In the sequel I shall argue from the Incarnation to its logical consequences. But before proceeding with my argument, I wish to say a few words which may remove some of the difficulties besetting the conciliation of the rational idea of God, and the sentimental Ideal. According to the hypothesis Christ harmonizes both; that is, in Him both are true. The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God. The sentimental conception of God is that He is the perfection of relations; the tendency of sentimentalism is to deny that He is absolute. Both are true and both are false; both are true in their positive assertions, both are false in their negations. Before the world was, God was the Absolute, inconceivable save as being. We cannot attribute to Him any quality, for qualities are inconceivable apart from matter. Properly speaking, the name of God is not to be given to the Absolute before creation; the Absolute is the only philosophical name admissible, and that is unsatisfactory, for it is negative; but the idea of God before matter was must be incomprehensible by material beings. This transcendent principle, superior to the world and to all thought, is the fixed, immanent, immutable Being, force in vacuum, unrealized, unrevealed. By love, the Absolute calls the world into being, and becomes God, that is-let me be clearly understood-He is at once absolute and relative, and as relative He is God, and clothes Himself in attributes. Towards creation He is good, wise, just; nay, the perfection of goodness, wisdom and justice, the Ideal of the heart. The creation is the first step, the Incarnation is the second. The first leads necessarily to the second; it is the passage from relations simple to relations perfect; it is the bringing within the range of man's vision the Divine Personality. I know that the question has been ventilated, whether personality implies limitation, and therefore makes it impossible for the Deity to be a person. It has been asserted that to precise the idea of I-myself is to distinguish one's self from others; and that, as nothing can exist outside of God, God cannot distinguish Himself from other things, and therefore He cannot be personal. But to this I answer, that our ideas of personality are purely relative. Human thought can only attain God in His relations to the world, and the limits of our knowledge are not the boundaries of reality. If one wishes to make the personality of God an express philosophical proposition, without abandoning the idea of personality being necessarily relative, one may say that God constituted Himself a person by the act of creation. Those who deny the divine personality probably deny creation. God is not a person in the human sense, which is exclusive of other personalities. He is immutable, all-inclusive, absolutely free, intelligent and loving, that is, He is personal, because the world exists, and by its existence He becomes relative. Thus, the proposition that every personality is limited and relative does not exclude the Divine personality. But this thesis, taken in itself, is very contestable; it reposes H on a confusion of the idea of universality, infinity and absolutism, and on an abuse of the facts of conscience. Man, it is quite true, only recognizes himself as a person by excluding other persons; but it does not follow that this relation is essential to personality. One might say with the same right that personality implies conscience of a body, which is true in the same sense. There is therefore no rational motive for contesting the Divine personality. CHAPTER VIII THE DOGMA OF MEDIATION "Versteh! Unendliches und Endliches, das dir scheint So unvereinbar, ist durch Eines doch vereint."-RUCKERT. The advantage of the Hegelian trichotomy-dread of Hegelianism-unreasonable—Hegel's method destined to reconcile philosophy to religion— The finite and the infinite supposed to be irreconcileable-The Incarnation consequently rejected as absurd-The true idea of the infinite-of space and time-The ideas of space and time inapplicable to Godrelative only—The Word the equation between the Infinite and the finite-He is the Mediator as well. T HE Hegelian method has this paramount advantage that it complements all other philosophical systems If we establish the reality of the phenomenal, material anc finite world, we establish at the same time its opposite, the super-phenomenal, immaterial and infinite, and also the link man, touching simultaneously the material and the imma terial. If we start from man, his vague consciousness of the supernatural and his vivid apprehension of the natural point him out to be the axis of two moments, leaning unduly to the latter, may be, but nevertheless conscious of the former, and thus establishing the reality of the Boundless and the Bounded. 1 "Understand; infinite and finite, what appears to thee |