GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN

By Samuel Butler

Prefatory Note

"GOD the Known and God the Unknown" first appeared in the form of aseries of articles which were published in "The Examiner" in May, June, and July, 1879. Samuel Butler subsequently revised the text of hiswork, presumably with the intention of republishing it, though henever carried the intention into effect. In the present edition I havefollowed his revised version almost without deviation. I have, however, retained a few passages which Butler proposed to omit, partly becausethey appear to me to render the course of his argument clearer, andpartly because they contain characteristic thoughts and expressions ofwhich none of his admirers would wish to be deprived. In the list ofButler's works "God the Known and God the Unknown" follows "Life andHabit, " which appeared in 1877, and "Evolution, Old and New, " which waspublished in May, 1879. It is scarcely necessary to point out that thethree works are closely akin in subject and treatment, and that "God theKnown and God the Unknown" will gain in interest by being considered inrelation to its predecessors. 

R. A. STREATFEILD

GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

MANKIND has ever been ready to discuss matters in the inverse ratio oftheir importance, so that the more closely a question is felt to touchthe hearts of all of us, the more incumbent it is considered uponprudent people to profess that it does not exist, to frown it down, totell it to hold its tongue, to maintain that it has long been finallysettled, so that there is now no question concerning it. 

So far, indeed, has this been carried through all time past that theactions which are most important to us, such as our passage through theembryonic stages, the circulation of our blood, our respiration, etc. Etc. , have long been formulated beyond all power of reopening questionconcerning them--the mere fact or manner of their being done at allbeing ranked among the great discoveries of recent ages. Yet the analogyof past settlements would lead us to suppose that so much unanimity wasnot arrived at all at once, but rather that it must have been precededby much smouldering [sic] discontent, which again was followed by openwarfare; and that even after a settlement had been ostensibly arrivedat, there was still much secret want of conviction on the part of manyfor several generations. 

There are many who see nothing in this tendency of our nature butoccasion for sarcasm; those, on the other hand, who hold that theworld is by this time old enough to be the best judge concerning themanagement of its own affairs will scrutinise [sic] this management withsome closeness before they venture to satirise [sic] it; nor willthey do so for long without finding justification for its apparentrecklessness; for we must all fear responsibility upon matters aboutwhich we feel we know but little; on the other hand we must allcontinually act, and for the most part promptly. We do so, therefore, with greater security when we can persuade both ourselves and othersthat a matter is already pigeon-holed than if we feel that we must useour own judgment for the collection, interpretation, and arrangementof the papers which deal with it. Moreover, our action is thus made toappear as if it received collective sanction; and by so appearing itreceives it. Almost any settlement, again, is felt to be better thannone, and the more nearly a matter comes home to everyone, the moreimportant is it that it should be treated as a sleeping dog, and be letto lie, for if one person begins to open his mouth, fatal developmentsmay arise in the Babel that will follow. 

It is not difficult, indeed, to show that, instead of having reason tocomplain of the desire for the postponement of important questions, asthough the world were composed mainly of knaves or fools, such fixity asanimal and vegetable forms possess is due to this very instinct. For ifthere had been no reluctance, if there were no friction and vis inertaeto be encountered even after a theoretical equilibrium had been upset, we should have had no fixed organs nor settled proclivities, but shouldhave been daily and hourly undergoing Protean transformations, and havestill been throwing out pseudopodia like the amoeba. True, we might havecome to like this fashion of living as well as our more steady-goingsystem if we had taken to it many millions of ages ago when we wereyet young; but we have contracted other habits which have become soconfirmed that we cannot break with them. We therefore now hate thatwhich we should perhaps have loved if we had practised [sic] it. This, however, does not affect the argument, for our concern is with our likesand dislikes, not with the manner in which those likes and dislikes havecome about. The discovery that organism is capable of modificationat all has occasioned so much astonishment that it has taken the mostenlightened part of the world more than a hundred years to leave offexpressing its contempt for such a crude, shallow, and preposterousconception. Perhaps in another hundred years we shall learn to admirethe good sense, endurance, and thorough Englishness of organism inhaving been so averse to change, even more than its versatility inhaving been willing to change so much. 

Nevertheless, however conservative we may be, and however much alive tothe folly and wickedness of tampering with settled convictions-no matterwhat they are-without sufficient cause, there is yet such a constantthough gradual change in our surroundings as necessitates correspondingmodification in our ideas, desires, and actions. We may think that weshould like to find ourselves always in the same surroundings as ourancestors, so that we might be guided at every touch and turn bythe experience of our race, and be saved from all self-communing orinterpretation of oracular responses uttered by the facts around us. Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of us; and we, too, change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so as to see the factsaround us as perhaps even more changed than they actually are. It hasbeen said, "Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. " The passage wouldhave been no less true if it had stood, "Nos mutamur et tempora mutanturin nobis. " Whether the organism or the surroundings began changing firstis a matter of such small moment that the two may be left to fight itout between themselves; but, whichever view is taken, the fact willremain that whenever the relations between the organism and itssurroundings have been changed, the organism must either succeed inputting the surroundings into harmony with itself, or itself intoharmony with the surroundings; or must be made so uncomfortable as tobe unable to remember itself as subjected to any such difficulties, andtherefore to die through inability to recognise [sic] its own identityfurther. 

Under these circumstances, organism must act in one or other of thesetwo ways: it must either change slowly and continuously with thesurroundings, paying cash for everything, meeting the smallest changewith a corresponding modification so far as is found convenient; or itmust put off change as long as possible, and then make larger and moresweeping changes. 

Both these courses are the same in principle, the difference being onlyone of scale, and the one being a miniature of the other, as a rippleis an Atlantic wave in little; both have their advantages anddisadvantages, so that most organisms will take the one course for oneset of things and the other for another. They will deal promptlywith things which they can get at easily, and which lie more upon thesurface; those, however, which are more troublesome to reach, and liedeeper, will be handled upon more cataclysmic principles, being allowedlonger periods of repose followed by short periods of greater activity. 

Animals breathe and circulate their blood by a little action many timesa minute; but they feed, some of them, only two or three times a day, and breed for the most part not more than once a year, their breedingseason being much their busiest time. It is on the first principle thatthe modification of animal forms has proceeded mainly; but it may bequestioned whether what is called a sport is not the organic expressionof discontent which has been long felt, but which has not been attendedto, nor been met step by step by as much small remedial modification aswas found practicable: so that when a change does come it comes by wayof revolution. Or, again (only that it comes to much the same thing), a sport may be compared to one of those happy thoughts which sometimescome to us unbidden after we have been thinking for a long time what todo, or how to arrange our ideas, and have yet been unable to arrive atany conclusion. 

So with politics, the smaller the matter the prompter, as a generalrule, the settlement; on the other hand, the more sweeping the changethat is felt to be necessary, the longer it will be deferred. 

The advantages of dealing with the larger questions by more cataclysmicmethods are obvious. For, in the first place, all composite things musthave a system, or arrangement of parts, so that some parts shall dependupon and be grouped round others, as in the articulation of a skeletonand the arrangement of muscles, nerves, tendons, etc. , which areattached to it. To meddle with the skeleton is like taking up thestreet, or the flooring of one's house; it so upsets our arrangementsthat we put it off till whatever else is found wanted, or whatever elseseems likely to be wanted for a long time hence, can be done at the sametime. Another advantage is in the rest which is given to the attentionduring the long hollows, so to speak, of the waves between the periodsof resettlement. Passion and prejudice have time to calm down, and whenattention is next directed to the same question, it is a refreshed andinvigorated attention-an attention, moreover, which may be givenwith the help of new lights derived from other quarters that were notluminous when the question was last considered. Thirdly, it is moreeasy and safer to make such alterations as experience has proved to benecessary than to forecast what is going to be wanted. Reformers arelike paymasters, of whom there are only two bad kinds, those who pay toosoon, and those who do not pay at all. 

CHAPTER II. COMMON GROUND

I HAVE now, perhaps, sufficiently proved my sympathy with the reluctancefelt by many to tolerate discussion upon such a subject as the existenceand nature of God. I trust that I may have made the reader feel that heneed fear no sarcasm or levity in my treatment of the subject which Ihave chosen. I will, therefore, proceed to sketch out a plan of what Ihope to establish, and this in no doubtful or unnatural sense, but byattaching the same meanings to words as those which we usually attach tothem, and with the same certainty, precision, and clearness as anythingelse is established which is commonly called known. 

As to what God is, beyond the fact that he is the Spirit and theLife which creates, governs, and upholds all living things, I can saynothing. I cannot pretend that I can show more than others have donein what Spirit and the Life consists, which governs living things andanimates them. I cannot show the connection between consciousness andthe will, and the organ, much less can I tear away the veil from theface of God, so as to show wherein will and consciousness consist. No philosopher, whether Christian or Rationalist, has attempted thiswithout discomfiture; but I can, I hope, do two things: Firstly, I candemonstrate, perhaps more clearly than modern science is prepared toadmit, that there does exist a single Being or Animator of all livingthings--a single Spirit, whom we cannot think of under any meaner namethan God; and, secondly, I can show something more of the persona orbodily expression, mask, and mouthpiece of this vast Living Spirit thanI know of as having been familiarly expressed elsewhere, or as beingaccessible to myself or others, though doubtless many works exist inwhich what I am going to say has been already said. 

Aware that much of this is widely accepted under the name of Pantheism, I venture to think it differs from Pantheism with all the differencethat exists between a coherent, intelligible conception and anincoherent unintelligible one. I shall therefore proceed to examinethe doctrine called Pantheism, and to show how incomprehensible andvalueless it is. 

I will then indicate the Living and Personal God about whose existenceand about many of whose attributes there is no room for question; I willshow that man has been so far made in the likeness of this Person orGod, that He possesses all its essential characteristics, and that it isthis God who has called man and all other living forms, whether animalsor plants, into existence, so that our bodies are the temples of Hisspirit; that it is this which sustains them in their life and growth, who is one with them, living, moving, and having His being in them; inwhom, also, they live and move, they in Him and He in them; He beingnot a Trinity in Unity only, but an Infinity in Unity, and a Unity in anInfinity; eternal in time past, for so much time at least that our mindscan come no nearer to eternity than this; eternal for the future as longas the universe shall exist; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, andto-day, and for ever. And I will show this with so little ambiguity thatit shall be perceived not as a phantom or hallucination following upona painful straining of the mind and a vain endeavour [sic] to givecoherency to incoherent and inconsistent ideas, but with the same ease, comfort, and palpable flesh-and-blood clearness with which we see thosenear to us; whom, though we see them at the best as through a glassdarkly, we still see face to face, even as we are ourselves seen. 

I will also show in what way this Being exercises a moral governmentover the world, and rewards and punishes us according to His own laws. 

Having done this I shall proceed to compare this conception of God withthose that are currently accepted, and will endeavour [sic] to show thatthe ideas now current are in truth efforts to grasp the one on whichI shall here insist. Finally, I shall persuade the reader that thedifferences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist aredifferences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even themost prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existenceof this God, while few theists will feel that this, the naturalconception of God, is a less worthy one than that to which they havebeen accustomed. 

CHAPTER III. PANTHEISM. 

THE Rev. J. H. Blunt, in his "Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc. , "defines Pantheists as "those who hold that God is everything, andeverything is God. "

If it is granted that the value of words lies in the definiteness andcoherency of the ideas that present themselves to us when the wordsare heard or spoken-then such a sentence as "God is everything andeverything is God" is worthless. 

For we have so long associated the word "God" with the idea of a LivingPerson, who can see, hear, will, feel pleasure, displeasure, etc. , thatwe cannot think of God, and also of something which we have not beenaccustomed to think of as a Living Person, at one and the same time, soas to connect the two ideas and fuse them into a coherent thought. Whilewe are thinking of the one, our minds involuntarily exclude the other, and vice versa; so that it is as impossible for us to think of anythingas God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as aPerson, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid betweentwo widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness ofinconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species orgenera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybridsbeing due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising frominability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I haveinsisted on this at some length in "Life and Habit, " but can do so nofurther here. (Note: Butler returned to this subject in "Luck, orcunning?" which was originally published in 1887. }

In like manner we have so long associated the word "Person" with theidea of a substantial visible body, limited in extent, and animatedby an invisible something which we call Spirit, that we can think ofnothing as a person which does not also bring these ideas before us. Anyattempt to make us imagine God as a Person who does not fulfil [sic] theconditions which our ideas attach to the word "person, " is ipso factoatheistic, as rendering the word God without meaning, and thereforewithout reality, and therefore non-existent to us. Our ideas are likeour organism, they will stand a vast amount of modification if it iseffected slowly and without shock, but the life departs out of them, leaving the form of an idea without the power thereof, if they arejarred too rudely. 

Any being, then, whom we can imagine as God, must have all thequalities, capabilities, and also all the limitations which are impliedwhen the word "person" is used. 

But, again, we cannot conceive of "everything" as a person. "Everything"must comprehend all that is to be found on earth, or outside of it, and we know of no such persons as this. When we say "persons" we intendliving people with flesh and blood; sometimes we extend our conceptionsto animals and plants, but we have not hitherto done so as generally asI hope we shall some day come to do. Below animals and plants we havenever in any seriousness gone. All that we have been able to regard aspersonal has had what we can call a living body, even though thatbody is vegetable only; and this body has been tangible, and has beencomprised within certain definite limits, or within limits which have atany rate struck the eye as definite. And every part within these limitshas been animated by an unseen something which we call soul or spirit. Aperson must be a persona--that is to say, the living mask and mouthpieceof an energy saturating it, and speaking through it. It must be animatein all its parts. 

But "everything" is not animate. Animals and plants alone produce in usthose ideas which can make reasonable people call them "persons" withconsistency of intention. We can conceive of each animal and of eachplant as a person; we can conceive again of a compound person like thecoral polypes [sic], or like a tree which is composed of a congeries ofsubordinate persons, inasmuch as each bud is a separate and individualplant. We can go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to show, we ought to do so; that is to say, we shall find it easier and moreagreeable with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we shouldsee all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till latelyinvisible ramification, so that all living things are one tree-likegrowth, forming a single person. But we cannot conceive of oceans, continents, and air as forming parts of a person at all; much lesscan we think of them as forming one person with the living forms thatinhabit them. 

To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water inwhich three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish. We cannotdo it any more than we can do something physically impossible. We cansee the gold-fish as forming one family, and therefore as in a wayunited to the personality of the parents from which they sprang, andtherefore as members one of another, and therefore as forming a singlegrowth of gold-fish, as boughs and buds unite to form a tree; but wecannot by any effort of the imagination introduce the bowl and the waterinto the personality, for we have never been accustomed to think of suchthings as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that "Godis everything, and everything is God, " require us to see "everything"as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a person, which again wecannot. 

Continuing the article of Mr. Blunt from which I have already quoted, Iread:--

"Linus, in a passage which has been preserved by Stobaeus, exactlyexpresses the notion afterwards adopted by Spinoza: 'One sole energygoverns all things; all things are unity, and each portion is All; forof one integer all things were born; in the end of time all things shallagain become unity; the unity of multiplicity. ' Orpheus, his disciple, taught no other doctrine. "

According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy, " "the soulof the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every portionof the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The world, too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of God. "John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all. " Williamof Champeaux, again, two hundred years later, maintained that "allindividuality is one in substance, and varies only in its non-essentialaccidents and transient properties. " Amalric of Bena and David of Dinantfollowed the theory out "into a thoroughgoing Pantheism. " Amalric heldthat "All is God and God is all. The Creator and the creature are oneBeing. Ideas are at once creative and created, subjective and objective. God is the end of all, and all return to Him. As every variety ofhumanity forms one manhood, so the world contains individual formsof one eternal essence. " David of Dinant only varied upon this by"imagining a corporeal unity. Although body, soul, and eternal substanceare three, these three are one and the same being. "

Giordano Bruno maintained the world of sense to be "a vast animal havingthe Deity for its living soul. " The inanimate part of the world isthus excluded from participation in the Deity, and a conception thatour minds can embrace is offered us instead of one which they cannotentertain, except as in a dream, incoherently. But without such a viewof evolution as was prevalent at the beginning of this century, it wasimpossible to see "the world of sense" intelligently, as forming "a vastanimal. " Unless, therefore, Giordano Bruno held the opinions of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with more definiteness than I amyet aware of his having done, his contention must be considered as asplendid prophecy, but as little more than a prophecy. He continues, "Birth is expansion from the one centre of Life; life is itscontinuance, and death is the necessary return of the ray to the centreof light. " This begins finely, but ends mystically. I have not, however, compared the English translation with the original, and must reserve afuller examination of Giordano Bruno's teaching for another opportunity. 

Spinoza disbelieved in the world rather than in God. He was an Acosmist, to use Jacobi's expression, rather than an Atheist. According to him, "the Deity and the Universe are but one substance, at the same timeboth spirit and matter, thought and extension, which are the only knownattributes of the Deity. "

My readers will, I think, agree with me that there is very little of theabove which conveys ideas with the fluency and comfort which accompanygood words. Words are like servants: it is not enough that we shouldhave them-we must have the most able and willing that we can find, andat the smallest wages that will content them. Having got them we mustmake the best and not the worst of them. Surely, in the greater part ofwhat has been quoted above, the words are barren letters only: they donot quicken within us and enable us to conceive a thought, such as wecan in our turn impress upon dead matter, and mould [sic] that matterinto another shape than its own, through the thought which has becomealive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed upon them, or, ifany at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and with such want of alacrity, that we loathe them as malformations and miscarriages of our minds. Granted that if we examine them closely we shall at length find themto embody a little germ of truth-that is to say, of coherency with ourother ideas; but there is too little truth in proportion to the troublenecessary to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, morecoherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in otherways. 

But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are difficult andunremunerative, and that later developments of Pantheism may be moreintelligible than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not thecase. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists ahundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyedinto a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-wedoubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can donothing with them but look at them and pass them by. 

In my next chapter I propose to show the end which the early Pantheistswere striving after, and the reason and naturalness of their error. 

CHAPTER IV. PANTHEISM. 

The earlier Pantheists were misled by the endeavour [sic] to lay hold oftwo distinct ideas, the one of which was a reality that has since beengrasped and is of inestimable value, the other a phantom which hasmisled all who have followed it. The reality is the unity of Life, theoneness of the guiding and animating spirit which quickens animals andplants, so that they are all the outcome and expression of a commonmind, and are in truth one animal; the phantom is the endeavour [sic] tofind the origin of things, to reach the fountain-head of all energy, and thus to lay the foundations on which a philosophy may be constructedwhich none can accuse of being baseless, or of arguing in a circle. 

In following as through a thick wood after the phantom our forefathersfrom time to time caught glimpses of the reality, which seemed sowonderful as it eluded them, and flitted back again into the thickets, that they declared it must be the phantom they were in search of, whichwas thus evidenced as actually existing. Whereon, instead of masteringsuch of the facts they met with as could be captured easily-which factswould have betrayed the hiding-places of others, and these again ofothers, and so ad infinitum-they overlooked what was within their reach, and followed hotly through brier and brake after an imaginary greaterprize. 

Great thoughts are not to be caught in this way. They must presentthemselves for capture of their own free will, or be taken after alittle coyness only. They are like wealth and power, which, if a manis not born to them, are the more likely to take him, the more he hasrestrained himself from an attempt to snatch them. They hanker afterthose only who have tamed their nearer thoughts. Nevertheless, it isimpossible not to feel that the early Pantheists were true prophets andseers, though the things were unknown to them without which a completeview was unattainable. What does Linus mean, we ask ourselves, when hesays:--"One sole energy governs all things"? How can one sole energygovern, we will say, the reader and the chair on which he sits? Whatis meant by an energy governing a chair? If by an effort we have madeourselves believe we understand something which can be better expressedby these words than by any others, no sooner do we turn our backs thanthe ideas so painfully collected fly apart again. No matter how often wego in search of them, and force them into juxtaposition, they prove tohave none of that innate coherent power with which ideas combine that wecan hold as true and profitable. 

Yet if Linus had confined his statement to living things, and had saidthat one sole energy governed all plants and animals, he would have comenear both to being intelligible and true. For if, as we now believe, all animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must beconsidered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-likeanimal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one andthe same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years oldis one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown. This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made to appear simplerpresently. 

When Linus says, "All things are unity, and each portion is All; for ofone integer all things were born, " it is impossible for plain people-whodo not wish to use words unless they mean the same things by them asboth they and others have been in the habit of meaning-to understandwhat is intended. How can each portion be all? How can one Londonerbe all London? I know that this, too, can in a way be shown, but theresulting idea is too far to fetch, and when fetched does not fit inwell enough with our other ideas to give it practical and commercialvalue. How, again, can all things be said to be born of one integer, unless the statement is confined to living things, which can alone beborn at all, and unless a theory of evolution is intended, such as Linuswould hardly have accepted?

Yet limit the "all things" to "all living things, " grant the theory ofevolution, and explain "each portion is All" to mean that all life isakin, and possesses the same essential fundamental characteristics, and it is surprising how nearly Linus approaches both to truth andintelligibility. 

It may be said that the animate and the inanimate have the samefundamental substance, so that a chair might rot and be absorbed bygrass, which grass might be eaten by a cow, which cow might be eaten bya man; and by similar processes the man might become a chair; but thesefacts are not presented to the mind by saying that "one energy governsall things"-a chair, we will say, and a man; we could only say that oneenergy governed a man and a chair, if the chair were a reasonable livingperson, who was actively and consciously engaged in helping the man toattain a certain end, unless, that is to say, we are to depart fromall usual interpretation of words, in which case we invalidate theadvantages of language and all the sanctions of morality. 

"All things shall again become unity" is intelligible as meaning thatall things probably have come from a single elementary substance, say hydrogen or what not, and that they will return to it; but theexplanation of unity as being the "unity of multiplicity" puzzles; ifthere is any meaning it is too recondite to be of service to us. 

What, again, is meant by saying that "the soul of the world is theDivine energy which interpenetrates every portion of the mass"? The soulof the world is an expression which, to myself, and, I should imagine, to most people, is without propriety. We cannot think of the worldexcept as earth, air, and water, in this or that state, on and in whichthere grow plants and animals. What is meant by saying that earth has asoul, and lives? Does it move from place to place erratically? Does itfeed? Does it reproduce itself? Does it make such noises, or commit suchvagaries as shall make us say that it feels? Can it achieve its ends, and fail of achieving them through mistake? If it cannot, how has it asoul more than a dead man has a soul, out of whom we say that the soulhas departed, and whose body we conceive of as returning to dead earth, inasmuch as it is now soulless? Is there any unnatural violence whichcan be done to our thoughts by which we can bring the ideas of a souland of water, or of a stone into combination, and keep them there forlong together? The ancients, indeed, said they believed their rivers tobe gods, and carved likenesses of them under the forms of men; but evensupposing this to have been their real mind, can it by any conceivablemeans become our own? Granted that a stone is kept from falling to dustby an energy which compels its particles to cohere, which energy can betaken out of it and converted into some other form of energy; granted(which may or may not be true) also, that the life of a living body isonly the energy which keeps the particles which compose it in a certaindisposition; and granted that the energy of the stone may be convertibleinto the energy of a living form, and that thus, after a long journeya tired idea may lag after the sound of such words as "the soul of theworld. " Granted all the above, nevertheless to speak of the world ashaving a soul is not sufficiently in harmony with our common notions, nor does it go sufficiently with the grain of our thoughts to render theexpression a meaning one, or one that can be now used with any proprietyor fitness, except by those who do not know their own meaninglessness. Vigorous minds will harbour [sic] vigorous thoughts only, or such as bidfair to become so; and vigorous thoughts are always simple, definite, and in harmony with everyday ideas. 

We can imagine a soul as living in the lowest slime that moves, feeds, reproduces itself, remembers, and dies. The amoeba wants things, knowsit wants them, alters itself so as to try and alter them, thus preparingfor an intended modification of outside matter by a preliminarymodification of itself. It thrives if the modification from within isfollowed by the desired modification in the external object; it knowsthat it is well, and breeds more freely in consequence. If it cannotget hold of outside matter, or cannot proselytise [sic] that matter andpersuade it to see things through its own (the amoeba's) spectacles-ifit cannot convert that matter, if the matter persists in disagreeingwith it-its spirits droop, its soul is disquieted within it, it becomeslistless like a withering flower-it languishes and dies. We cannotimagine a thing to live at all and yet be soulless except in sleep fora short time, and even so not quite soulless. The idea of a soul, or ofthat unknown something for which the word "soul" is our hieroglyphic, and the idea of living organism, unite so spontaneously, and sticktogether so inseparably, that no matter how often we sunder them theywill elude our vigilance and come together, like true lovers, in spiteof us. Let us not attempt to divorce ideas that have so long been weddedtogether. 

I submit, then, that Pantheism, even as explained by those who hadentered on the outskirts only of its great morass, nevertheless holdsout so little hope of leading to any comfortable conclusion that it willbe more reasonable to occupy our minds with other matter than to followPantheism further. The Pantheists speak of a person without meaning aperson; they speak of a "him" and a "he" without having in theirminds the idea of a living person with all its inevitable limitations. Pantheism is, therefore, as is said by Mr. Blunt in another article, "practically nothing else than Atheism; it has no belief in a personaldeity overruling the affairs of the world, as Divine Providence, and is, therefore, Atheistic, " and again, "Theism believes in a spiritsuperior to matter, and so does Pantheism; but the spirit of Theism isself-conscious, and therefore personal and of individual existence-anature per se, and upholding all things by an active control; whilePantheism believes in spirit that is of a higher nature than brutematter, but is a mere unconscious principle of life, impersonal, irrational as the brute matter that it quickens. "

If this verdict concerning Pantheism is true--and from all I can gatherit is as nearly true as anything can be said to be which is predicatedof an incoherent idea--the Pantheistic God is an attempt to lay hold of atruth which has nevertheless eluded its pursuers. 

In my next chapter I will consider the commonly received, orthodoxconception of God, and compare it with the Pantheistic. I will show thatit, too, is Atheistic, inasmuch as, in spite of its professing to giveus a conception of God, it raises no ideas in our minds of a person orLiving Being--and a God who is not this is non-existent. 

CHAPTER V. ORTHODOX THEISM

We have seen that Pantheism fails to satisfy, inasmuch as it requires usto mean something different by the word "God" from what we have beenin the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that noconception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does notinvolve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffablewisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for thefuture. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident, directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. If otherwise, there is no God, or none, at any rate, so far as we can know, none withwhom we need concern ourselves. No conscious personality, no God. Animpersonal God is as much a contradiction in terms as an impersonalperson. 

Unfortunately, when we question orthodox theology closely, we find thatit supposes God to be a person who has no material body such as couldcome within the range of any human sense, and make an impression uponit. He is supposed to be of a spiritual nature only, except in so faras one part of his triune personality is, according to the AthanasianCreed, "perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. "

Here, then, we find ourselves in a dilemma. On the one hand, we areinvolved in the same difficulty as in the case of Pantheism, inasmuchas a person without flesh and blood, or something analogous, is not aperson; we are required, therefore, to believe in a personal God, whohas no true person; to believe, that is to say, in an impersonal person. 

This, as we have seen already, is Atheism under another name, being, asit is, destructive of all idea of God whatever; for these words do notconvey an idea of something which human intelligence can understandup to a certain point, and which it can watch going out of sight intoregions beyond our view, but in the same direction-as we may infer otherstars in space beyond the farthest that we know of; they convey utterlyself-destructive ideas, which can have no real meaning, and can only bethought to have a meaning by ignorant and uncultivated people. Otherwisesuch foundation as human reason rests upon-that is to say, the currentopinion of those whom the world appraises as reasonable and agreeable, or capable of being agreed with for any time-is sapped; the whole thingtumbles down, and we may have square circles and round triangles, whichmay be declared to be no longer absurdities and contradictions in terms, but mysteries that go beyond our reason, without being contrary to it. Few will maintain this, and those few may be neglected; an impersonalperson must therefore be admitted to be nonsense, and an immaterial Godto be Atheism in another shape. 

On the other hand, if God is "of a reasonable soul and human fleshsubsisting, " and if he thus has the body without which he is-as far aswe are concerned-non-existent, this body must yet be reasonablylike other bodies, and must exist in some place and at some time. Furthermore, it must do sufficiently nearly what all other "human flesh"belonging to "perfect man" must do, or cease to be human flesh. Ourideas are like our organisms; they have some little elasticity andcircumstance-suiting power, some little margin on which, as I haveelsewhere said, side-notes may be written, and glosses on the originaltext; but this power is very limited. As offspring will only, as ageneral rule, vary very little from its immediate parents, and as itwill fail either immediately or in the second generation if the parentsdiffer too widely from one another, so we cannot get our idea of-wewill say a horse-to conjure up to our minds the idea of any animal moreunlike a horse than a pony is; nor can we get a well-defined idea of acombination between a horse and any animal more remote from it than anass, zebra, or giraffe. We may, indeed, make a statue of a flying horse, but the idea is one which cannot be made plausible to any but ignorantpeople. So "human flesh" may vary a little from "human flesh" withoutundue violence being done to our reason and to the right use oflanguage, but it cannot differ from it so much as not to eat, drink, norwaste and repair itself. "Human flesh, " which is without these necessaryadjuncts, is human flesh only to those who can believe in flying horseswith feathered wings and bills like birds-that is to say, to vulgar andsuperstitious persons. 

Lastly, not only must the "perfect man, " who is the second person ofthe Godhead according to the orthodox faith, and who subsists of "humanflesh" as well as of a "reasonable soul, " not only must this personexist, but he must exist in some place either on this earth or outsideit. If he exists on earth, he must be in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or on some island, and if he were met with he must be capable of beingseen and handled in the same way as all other things that can be calledperfect man are seen; otherwise he is a perfect man who is not only nota perfect man, but who does not in any considerable degree resemble one. It is not, however, pretended by anyone that God, the "perfect man, " isto be looked for in any place upon the surface of the globe. 

If, on the other hand, the person of God exists in some sphere outsidethe earth, his human flesh again proves to be of an entirely differentkind from all other human flesh, for we know that such flesh cannotexist except on earth; if in space unsupported, it must fall to theground, or into some other planet, or into a sun, or go on revolvinground the earth or some other heavenly body-or not be personal. None ofthose whose opinions will carry weight will assign a position either insome country on this earth, or yet again in space, to Jesus Christ, butthis involves the rendering meaningless of all expressions which involvehis personality. 

The Christian conception, therefore, of the Deity proves when examinedwith any desire to understand our own meaning (and what lawlessness sogreat as the attempt to impose words upon our understandings which haveno lawful settlement within them?) to be no less a contradiction interms than the Pantheistic conception. It is Atheistic, as offering usa God which is not a God, inasmuch as we can conceive of no suchbeing, nor of anything in the least like it. It is, like Pantheism, anillusion, which can be believed only by those who repeat a formula whichthey have learnt by heart in a foreign language of which they understandnothing, and yet aver that they believe it. There are doubtless many whowill say that this is possible, but the majority of my readers will holdthat no proposition can be believed or disbelieved until its nature isunderstood. 

It may perhaps be said that there is another conception of God possible, and that we may see him as personal, without at the same time believingthat he has any actual tangible existence. Thus we personify hope, truth, and justice, without intending to convey to anyone the impressionthat these qualities are women, with flesh and blood. Again, we do notthink of Nature as an actual woman, though we call her one; why may wenot conceive of God, then, as an expression whereby we personify, by afigure of speech only; the thing that is intended being no person, butour own highest ideal of power, wisdom, and duration. 

There would be no reason to complain of this if this manner of using theword "God" were well understood. Many words have two meanings, or eventhree, without any mischievous confusion of thought following. Therecan not only be no objection to the use of the word God as a manner ofexpressing the highest ideal of which our minds can conceive, but on thecontrary no better expression can be found, and it is a pity the word isnot thus more generally used. 

Few, however, would be content with any such limitation of God as thathe should be an idea only, an expression for certain qualities of humanthought and action. Whence, it may be fairly asked, did our deeplyrooted belief in God as a Living Person originate? The idea of him asof an inconceivably vast, ancient, powerful, loving, and yet formidablePerson is one which survives all changes of detail in men's opinion. Ibelieve there are a few very savage tribes who are as absolutely withoutreligious sense as the beasts of the field, but the vast majority for along time past have been possessed with an idea that there is somewherea Living God who is the Spirit and the Life of all that is, and who is atrue Person with an individuality and self-consciousness of his own. Itis only natural that we should be asked how such an idea has remained inthe minds of so many--who differ upon almost every other part of theirphilosophy-for so long a time if it was without foundation, and a pieceof dreamy mysticism only. 

True, it has generally been declared that this God is an infinite God, and an infinite God is a God without any bounds or limitations; anda God without bounds or limitations is an impersonal God; and animpersonal God is Atheism. But may not this be the incoherency ofprophecy which precedes the successful mastering of an idea? May we notthink of this illusory expression as having arisen from inability tosee the whereabouts of a certain vast but tangible Person as to whoseexistence men were nevertheless clear? If they felt that it existed, andyet could not say where, nor wherein it was to be laid hands on, theywould be very likely to get out of the difficulty by saying that itexisted as an infinite Spirit, partly from a desire to magnify what theyfelt must be so vast and powerful, and partly because they had asyet only a vague conception of what they were aiming at, and must, therefore, best express it vaguely. 

We must not be surprised that when an idea is still inchoate itsexpression should be inconsistent and imperfect-ideas will almost alwaysduring the earlier history of a thought be put together experimentallyso as to see whether or no they will cohere. Partly out of indolence, partly out of the desire of those who brought the ideas together to bedeclared right, and partly out of joy that the truth should be supposedfound, incoherent ideas will be kept together longer than they shouldbe; nevertheless they will in the end detach themselves and go, ifothers present themselves which fit into their place better. There is noconsistency which has not once been inconsistent, nor coherency that hasnot been incoherent. The incoherency of our ideas concerning God is dueto the fact that we have not yet truly found him, but it does not arguethat he does not exist and cannot be found anywhere after more diligentsearch; on the contrary, the persistence of the main idea, in spiteof the incoherency of its details, points strongly in the direction ofbelieving that it rests upon a foundation in fact. 

But it must be remembered there can be no God who is not personal andmaterial: and if personal, then, though inconceivably vast in comparisonwith man, still limited in space and time, and capable of makingmistakes concerning his own interests, though as a general rule right inhis estimates concerning them. Where, then, is this Being? He must beon earth, or what folly can be greater than speaking of him as a person?What are persons on any other earth to us, or we to them? He must haveexisted and be going to exist through all time, and he must have atangible body. Where, then, is the body of this God? And what is themystery of his Incarnation?

It will be my business to show this in the following chapter. 

CHAPTER VI. THE TREE OF LIFE

Atheism denies knowledge of a God of any kind. Pantheism and Theismalike profess to give us a God, but they alike fail to perform what theyhave promised. We can know nothing of the God they offer us, for noteven do they themselves profess that any of our senses can be cognisant[sic] of him. They tell us that he is a personal God, but that he has nomaterial person. This is disguised Atheism. What we want is a PersonalGod, the glory of whose Presence can be made in part evident to oursenses, though what we can realise [sic] is less than nothing incomparison with what we must leave for ever unimagined. 

And truly such a God is not far from every one of us; for if we surveythe broader and deeper currents of men's thoughts during the last threethousand years, we may observe two great and steady sets as havingcarried away with them the more eligible races of mankind. The one isa tendency from Polytheism to Monotheism; the other from Polytypism toMonotypism of the earliest forms of life-all animal and vegetable formshaving at length come to be regarded as differentiations of a singlesubstance-to wit, protoplasm. 

No man does well so to kick against the pricks as to set himself againsttendencies of such depth, strength, and permanence as this. If he isto be in harmony with the dominant opinion of his own and of many pastages, he will see a single God-impregnate substance as having been theparent from which all living forms have sprung. One spirit, and one formcapable of such modification as its directing spirit shall think fit;one soul and one body, one God and one Life. 

For the time has come when the two unities so painfully arrived at mustbe joined together as body and soul, and be seen not as two, but one. There is no living organism untenanted by the Spirit of God, nor anySpirit of God perceivable by man apart from organism embodying andexpressing it. God and the Life of the World are like a mountain, whichwill present different aspects as we look at it from different sides, but which, when we have gone all round it, proves to be one only. Godis the animal and vegetable world, and the animal and vegetable world isGod. 

I have repeatedly said that we ought to see all animal and vegetablelife as uniting to form a single personality. I should perhaps explainthis more fully, for the idea of a compound person is one which at firstis not very easy to grasp, inasmuch as we are not conscious of any butour more superficial aspects, and have therefore until lately failedto understand that we are ourselves compound persons. I may perhaps beallowed to quote from an earlier work. 

"Each cell in the human body is now admitted by physiologists to be aperson with an intelligent soul, differing from our own more complexsoul in degree and not in kind, and, like ourselves, being born, living, and dying. It would appear, then, as though 'we, ' 'our souls, ' or'selves, ' or 'personalities, ' or by whatever name we may prefer tobe called, are but the consensus and full-flowing stream of countlesssensations and impulses on the part of our tributary souls or 'selves, 'who probably no more know that we exist, and that they exist as a partof us, than a microscopic insect knows the results of spectrum analysis, or than an agricultural labourer [sic] knows the working of the BritishConstitution; and of whom we know no more than we do of the habitsand feelings of some class widely separated from our own. "-("Life andHabit, " p. 110. )

After which it became natural to ask the following question:--"Is itpossible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves atoms, undesignedlycombining to form some vaster being, though we are utterly incapable ofperceiving this being as a single individual, or of realising [sic] thescheme and scope of our own combination? And this, too, not a spiritualbeing, which, without matter or what we think matter of some sort, isas complete nonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon anintelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh and bloodand bones, with organs, senses, dimensions in some way analogous to ourown, into some other part of which being at the time of our great changewe must infallibly re-enter, starting clean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for ever from age or antecedents. 

"'An organic being, ' writes Mr. Darwin, 'is a microcosm, a littleuniverse, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms inconceivablyminute and numerous as the stars in Heaven. ' As these myriads of smallerorganisms are parts and processes of us, so are we parts and processesof life at large. "

A tree is composed of a multitude of subordinate trees, each bud beinga distinct individual. So coral polypes [sic] form a tree-like growthof animal life, with branches from which spring individual polypes[sic] that are connected by a common tissue and supported by a commonskeleton. We have no difficulty in seeing a unity in multitude, anda multitude in unity here, because we can observe the wood and thegelatinous tissue connecting together all the individuals which composeeither the tree or the mass of polypes [sic]. Yet the skeleton, whetherof tree or of polype [sic], is inanimate; and the tissue, whether ofbark or gelatine [sic], is only the matted roots of the individual buds;so that the outward and striking connection between the individualsis more delusive than real. The true connection is one which cannot beseen, and consists in the animation of each bud by a like spirit-in thecommunity of soul, in "the voice of the Lord which maketh men to beof one mind in an house"-"to dwell together in unity"-to take what arepractically identical views of things, and express themselves in concertunder all circumstances. Provided this-the true unifier of organism-canbe shown to exist, the absence of gross outward and visible butinanimate common skeleton is no bar to oneness of personality. 

Let us picture to our minds a tree of which all the woody fibre [sic]shall be invisible, the buds and leaves seeming to stand in mid-airunsupported and unconnected with one another, so that there is nothingbut a certain tree-like collocation of foliage to suggest any commonprinciple of growth uniting the leaves. 

Three or four leaves of different ages stand living together at theplace in the air where the end of each bough should be; of these theyoungest are still tender and in the bud, while the older ones areturning yellow and on the point of falling. Between these leaves a sortof twig-like growth can be detected if they are looked at in certainlights, but it is hard to see, except perhaps when a bud is on the pointof coming out. Then there does appear to be a connection which might becalled branch-like. 

The separate tufts are very different from one another, so that oakleaves, ash leaves, horse-chestnut leaves, etc. , are each represented, but there is one species only at the end of each bough. 

Though the trunk and all the inner boughs and leaves have disappeared, yet there hang here and there fossil leaves, also in mid-air; theyappear to have been petrified, without method or selection, by what wecall the caprices of nature; they hang in the path which the boughs andtwigs would have taken, and they seem to indicate that if the tree couldhave been seen a million years earlier, before it had grown near itspresent size, the leaves standing at the end of each bough would havebeen found very different from what they are now. Let us suppose thatall the leaves at the end of all the invisible boughs, no matter howdifferent they now are from one another, were found in earliest budhoodto be absolutely indistinguishable, and afterwards to develop towardseach differentiation through stages which were indicated by the fossilleaves. Lastly, let us suppose that though the boughs which seem wantedto connect all the living forms of leaves with the fossil leaves, andwith countless forms of which all trace has disappeared, and also witha single root-have become invisible, yet that there is irrefragableevidence to show that they once actually existed, and indeed areexisting at this moment, in a condition as real though as invisibleto the eye as air or electricity. Should we, I ask, under thesecircumstances hesitate to call our imaginary plant or tree by a singlename, and to think of it as one person, merely upon the score that thewoody fibre [sic] was invisible? Should we not esteem the common soul, memories and principles of growth which are preserved between all thebuds, no matter how widely they differ in detail, as a more livingbond of union than a framework of wood would be, which, though it werevisible to the eye, would still be inanimate?

The mistletoe appears as closely connected with the tree on which itgrows as any of the buds of the tree itself; it is fed upon the same sapas the other buds are, which sap-however much it may modify it atthe last moment-it draws through the same fibres [sic] as do itsfoster-brothers-why then do we at once feel that the mistletoe is nopart of the apple tree? Not from any want of manifest continuity, butfrom the spiritual difference-from the profoundly different views oflife and things which are taken by the parasite and the tree on which itgrows-the two are now different because they think differently-aslong as they thought alike they were alike-that is to say they wereprotoplasm-they and we and all that lives meeting in this commonsubstance. 

We ought therefore to regard our supposed tufts of leaves as a tree, that is to say, as a compound existence, each one of whose componentitems is compounded of others which are also in their turn compounded. But the tree above described is no imaginary parallel to the conditionof life upon the globe; it is perhaps as accurate a description of theTree of Life as can be put into so small a compass. The most sure proofof a man's identity is the power to remember that such and such thingshappened, which none but he can know; the most sure proof of hisremembering is the power to react his part in the original drama, whatever it may have been; if a man can repeat a performance withconsummate truth, and can stand any amount of cross-questioning aboutit, he is the performer of the original performance, whatever it was. The memories which all living forms prove by their actions that theypossess-the memories of their common identity with a single person inwhom they meet-this is incontestable proof of their being animated bya common soul. It is certain, therefore, that all living forms, whetheranimal or vegetable, are in reality one animal; we and the mosses beingpart of the same vast person in no figurative sense, but with as muchbona fide literal truth as when we say that a man's finger-nails and hiseyes are parts of the same man. 

It is in this Person that we may see the Body of God-and in theevolution of this Person, the mystery of His Incarnation. 

[In "Unconscious Memory, " Chapter V, Butler wrote: "In the articlesabove alluded to ("God the Known and God the Unknown") I separated theorganic from the inorganic, but when I came to rewrite them I found thatthis could not be done, and that I must reconstruct what I had written. "This reconstruction never having been effected, it may be well to quotefurther from "Unconscious Memory" (concluding chapter): "At parting, therefore, I would recommend the reader to see every atom in theuniverse as living and able to feel and remember, but in a humble way. He must have life eternal as well as matter eternal; and the life andthe matter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul toone another. Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who repeatphrases conventionally, but as people who would have their words takenaccording to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he will feelthat the main difference between him and many of those who oppose himlies in the fact that whereas both he and they use the same language, his opponents only half mean what they say, while he means itentirely. . . We shall endeavour [sic] to see the so-called inorganic asliving, in respect of the qualities it has in common with the organic, rather than the organic as non-living in respect of the qualities it hasin common with the inorganic. "]

CHAPTER VII. THE LIKENESS OF GOD

In my last chapter I endeavoured [sic] to show that each living being, whether animal or plant, throughout the world is a component item ofa single personality, in the same way as each individual citizen of acommunity is a member of one state, or as each cell of our own bodiesis a separate person, or each bud of a tree a separate plant. We musttherefore see the whole varied congeries of living things as a singlevery ancient Being, of inconceivable vastness, and animated by oneSpirit. 

We call the octogenarian one person with the embryo of a few days oldfrom which he has developed. An oak or yew tree may be two thousandyears old, but we call it one plant with the seed from which it hasgrown. Millions of individual buds have come and gone, to the yearlywasting and repairing of its substance; but the tree still lives andthrives, and the dead leaves have life therein. So the Tree of Lifestill lives and thrives as a single person, no matter how many newfeatures it has acquired during its development, nor, again, how manyof its individual leaves fall yellow to the ground daily. The spirit orsoul of this person is the Spirit of God, and its body-for we know of nosoul or spirit without a body, nor of any living body without a spiritor soul, and if there is a God at all there must be a body of God-isthe many-membered outgrowth of protoplasm, the ensemble of animal andvegetable life. 

To repeat. The Theologian of to-day tells us that there is a God, but ishorrified at the idea of that God having a body. We say that we believein God, but that our minds refuse to realise [sic] an intelligent Beingwho has no bodily person. "Where then, " says the Theologian, "is thebody of your God?" We have answered, "In the living forms upon theearth, which, though they look many, are, when we regard them by thelight of their history and of true analogies, one person only. " Thespiritual connection between them is a more real bond of union than thevisible discontinuity of material parts is ground for separating them inour thoughts. 

Let the reader look at a case of moths in the shop-window of anaturalist, and note the unspeakable delicacy, beauty, and yetserviceableness of their wings; or let him look at a case ofhumming-birds, and remember how infinitely small a part of Nature isthe whole group of the animals he may be considering, and how infinitelysmall a part of that group is the case that he is looking at. Let himbear in mind that he is looking on the dead husks only of what wasinconceivably more marvellous [sic] when the moths or humming-birds werealive. Let him think of the vastness of the earth, and of the activityby day and night through countless ages of such countless forms ofanimal and vegetable life as that no human mind can form the faintestapproach to anything that can be called a conception of their multitude, and let him remember that all these forms have touched and touched andtouched other living beings till they meet back on a common substance inwhich they are rooted, and from which they all branch forth so as to beone animal. Will he not in this real and tangible existence find a Godwho is as much more worthy of admiration than the God of the ordinaryTheologian-as He is also more easy of comprehension?

For the Theologian dreams of a God sitting above the clouds among thecherubim, who blow their loud uplifted angel trumpets before Him, andhumour [sic] Him as though He were some despot in an Oriental tale; butwe enthrone Him upon the wings of birds, on the petals of flowers, onthe faces of our friends, and upon whatever we most delight in of allthat lives upon the earth. We then can not only love Him, but we cando that without which love has neither power nor sweetness, but is aphantom only, an impersonal person, a vain stretching forth of armstowards something that can never fill them-we can express our love andhave it expressed to us in return. And this not in the uprearing ofstone temples-for the Lord dwelleth [sic] in temples made with otherorgans than hands-nor yet in the cleansing of our hearts, but in thecaress bestowed upon horse and dog, and kisses upon the lips of those welove. 

Wide, however, as is the difference between the orthodox Theologian andourselves, it is not more remarkable than the number of the points onwhich we can agree with him, and on which, moreover, we can make hismeaning clearer to himself than it can have ever hitherto been. He, forexample, says that man has been made in the image of God, but he cannotmean what he says, unless his God has a material body; we, on the otherhand, do not indeed believe that the body of God-the incorporation ofall life-is like the body of a man, more than we believe each one of ourown cells or subordinate personalities to be like a man in miniature;but we nevertheless hold that each of our tributary selves is so farmade after the likeness of the body corporate that it possesses all ourmain and essential characteristics-that is to say, that it can wasteand repair itself; can feel, move, and remember. To this extent, also, we-who stand in mean proportional between our tributary personalitiesand God-are made in the likeness of God; for we, and God, and oursubordinate cells alike possess the essential characteristics of lifewhich have been above recited. It is more true, therefore, for us to saythat we are made in the likeness of God than for the orthodox Theologianto do so. 

Nor, again, do we find difficulty in adopting such an expression as that"God has taken our nature upon Him. " We hold this as firmly, and muchmore so, than Christians can do, but we say that this is no new thingfor Him to do, for that He has taken flesh and dwelt among us from theday that He first assumed our shape, some millions of years ago, untilnow. God cannot become man more especially than He can become otherliving forms, any more than we can be our eyes more especially than anyother of our organs. We may develop larger eyes, so that our eyes maycome to occupy a still more important place in our economy than theydo at present; and in a similar way the human race may become a morepredominant part of God than it now is-but we cannot admit that oneliving form is more like God than another; we must hold all equally likeHim, inasmuch as they "keep ever, " as Buffon says, "the same fundamentalunity, in spite of differences of detail-nutrition, development, reproduction" (and, I would add, "memory") "being the common traits ofall organic bodies. " The utmost we can admit is, that some embodimentsof the Spirit of Life may be more important than others to the welfareof Life as a whole, in the same way as some of our organs are moreimportant than others to ourselves. 

But the above resemblances between the language which we can adoptintelligently and that which Theologians use vaguely, seem to reduce thedifferences of opinion between the two contending parties to disputesabout detail. For even those who believe their ideas to be the mostdefinite, and who picture to themselves a God as anthropomorphic as Hewas represented by Raffaelle, are yet not prepared to stand by theirideas if they are hard pressed in the same way as we are by ours. Thosewho say that God became man and took flesh upon Him, and that He isnow perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human fleshsubsisting, will yet not mean that Christ has a heart, blood, a stomach, etc. , like man's, which, if he has not, it is idle to speak of him as"perfect man. " I am persuaded that they do not mean this, nor wish tomean it; but that they have been led into saying it by a series of stepswhich it is very easy to understand and sympathise [sic] with, if theyare considered with any diligence. 

For our forefathers, though they might and did feel the existence of aPersonal God in the world, yet could not demonstrate this existence, andmade mistakes in their endeavour [sic] to persuade themselves that theyunderstood thoroughly a truth which they had as yet perceived only froma long distance. Hence all the dogmatism and theology of many centuries. It was impossible for them to form a clear or definite conceptionconcerning God until they had studied His works more deeply, so as tograsp the idea of many animals of different kinds and with no apparentconnection between them, being yet truly parts of one and the sameanimal which comprised them in the same way as a tree comprises all itsbuds. They might speak of this by a figure of speech, but they couldnot see it as a fact. Before this could be intended literally, Evolutionmust be grasped, and not Evolution as taught in what is now commonlycalled Darwinism, but the old teleological Darwinism of eighty yearsago. Nor is this again sufficient, for it must be supplemented by aperception of the oneness of personality between parents and offspring, the persistence of memory through all generations, the latency of thismemory until rekindled by the recurrence of the associated ideas, andthe unconsciousness with which repeated acts come to be performed. These are modern ideas which might be caught sight of now and again byprophets in time past, but which are even now mastered and held firmlyonly by the few. 

When once, however, these ideas have been accepted, the chief differencebetween the orthodox God and the God who can be seen of all men is, thatthe first is supposed to have existed from all time, while the secondhas only lived for more millions of years than our minds can reckonintelligently; the first is omnipresent in all space, while the secondis only present in the living forms upon this earth-that is to say, isonly more widely present than our minds can intelligently embrace. Thefirst is omnipotent and all-wise; the second is only quasi-omnipotentand quasi all-wise. It is true, then, that we deprive God of thatinfinity which orthodox Theologians have ascribed to Him, but thebounds we leave Him are of such incalculable extent that nothing can beimagined more glorious or vaster; and in return for the limitations wehave assigned to Him, we render it possible for men to believe in Him, and love Him, not with their lips only, but with their hearts and lives. 

Which, I may now venture to ask my readers, is the true God-the God ofthe Theologian, or He whom we may see around us, and in whose presencewe stand each hour and moment of our lives?

CHAPTER VIII. THE LIFE EVERLASTING

Let us now consider the life which we can look forward to with certaintyafter death, and the moral government of the world here on earth. 

If we could hear the leaves complaining to one another that they mustdie, and commiserating the hardness of their lot in having ever beeninduced to bud forth, we should, I imagine, despise them for theirpeevishness more than we should pity them. We should tell them thatthough we could not see reason for thinking that they would ever hangagain upon the same-or any at all similar-bough as the same individualleaves, after they had once faded and fallen off, yet that as they hadbeen changing personalities without feeling it during the whole of theirleafhood, so they would on death continue to do this selfsame thingby entering into new phases of life. True, death will deprive them ofconscious memory concerning their now current life; but, though they dieas leaves, they live in the tree whom they have helped to vivify, andwhose growth and continued well-being is due solely to this life anddeath of its component personalities. 

We consider the cells which are born and die within us yearly to havebeen sufficiently honoured [sic] in having contributed their quotum toour life; why should we have such difficulty in seeing that a healthyenjoyment and employment of our life will give us a sufficient reward inthat growth of God wherein we may live more truly and effectually afterdeath than we have lived when we were conscious of existence? Is Handeldead when he influences and sets in motion more human beings in threemonths now than during the whole, probably, of the years in which hethought that he was alive? What is being alive if the power to draw menfor many miles in order that they may put themselves en rapport withhim is not being so? True, Handel no longer knows the power which he hasover us, but this is a small matter; he no longer animates six feet offlesh and blood, but he lives in us as the dead leaf lives in the tree. He is with God, and God knows him though he knows himself no more. 

This should suffice, and I observe in practice does suffice, for allreasonable persons. It may be said that one day the tree itself mustdie, and the leaves no longer live therein; and so, also, that the veryGod or Life of the World will one day perish, as all that is born mustsurely in the end die. But they who fret upon such grounds as this mustbe in so much want of a grievance that it were a cruelty to rob them ofone: if a man who is fond of music tortures himself on the ground thatone day all possible combinations and permutations of sounds will havebeen exhausted so that there can be no more new tunes, the only thingwe can do with him is to pity him and leave him; nor is there any bettercourse than this to take with those idle people who worry themselvesand others on the score that they will one day be unable to rememberthe small balance of their lives that they have not already forgottenas unimportant to them-that they will one day die to the balance ofwhat they have not already died to. I never knew a well-bred or amiableperson who complained seriously of the fact that he would have to die. Granted we must all sometimes find ourselves feeling sorry that wecannot remain for ever at our present age, and that we may die so muchsooner than we like; but these regrets are passing with well-disposedpeople, and are a sine qua non for the existence of life at all. For ifpeople could live for ever so as to suffer from no such regret, therewould be no growth nor development in life; if, on the other hand, there were no unwillingness to die, people would commit suicide upon thesmallest contradiction, and the race would end in a twelvemonth. 

We then offer immortality, but we do not offer resurrection from thedead; we say that those who die live in the Lord whether they be justor unjust, and that the present growth of God is the outcome of all pastlives; but we believe that as they live in God-in the effect they haveproduced upon the universal life-when once their individual life isended, so it is God who knows of their life thenceforward and notthemselves; and we urge that this immortality, this entrance intothe joy of the Lord, this being ever with God, is true, and can beapprehended by all men, and that the perception of it should and willtend to make them lead happier, healthier lives; whereas the commonlyreceived opinion is true with a stage truth only, and has littlepermanent effect upon those who are best worth considering. Neverthelessthe expressions in common use among the orthodox fit in so perfectlywith facts, which we must all acknowledge, that it is impossible notto regard the expressions as founded upon a prophetic perception of thefacts. 

Two things stand out with sufficient clearness. The first is the rarityof suicide even among those who rail at life most bitterly. The otheris the little eagerness with which those who cry out most loudly for aresurrection desire to begin their new life. When comforting a husbandupon the loss of his wife we do not tell him we hope he will soon joinher; but we should certainly do this if we could even pretend we thoughtthe husband would like it. I can never remember having felt or witnessedany pain, bodily or mental, which would have made me or anyoneelse receive a suggestion that we had better commit suicide withoutindignantly asking how our adviser would like to commit suicide himself. Yet there are so many and such easy ways of dying that indignation atbeing advised to commit suicide arises more from enjoyment of life thanfrom fear of the mere physical pain of dying. Granted that there is muchdeplorable pain in the world from ill-health, loss of money, loss ofreputation, misconduct of those nearest to us, or what not, and grantedthat in some cases these causes do drive men to actual self-destruction, yet suffering such as this happens to a comparatively small number, andoccupies comparatively a small space in the lives of those to whom itdoes happen. 

What, however, have we to say to those cases in which suffering andinjustice are inflicted upon defenceless [sic] people for years andyears, so that the iron enters into their souls, and they have noavenger. Can we give any comfort to such sufferers? and, if not, is ourreligion any better than a mockery-a filling the rich with good thingsand sending the hungry empty away? Can we tell them, when they areoppressed with burdens, yet that their cry will come up to God and beheard? The question suggests its own answer, for assuredly our God knowsour innermost secrets: there is not a word in our hearts but He knowethit altogether; He knoweth our down-sitting and our uprising, He isabout our path and about our bed, and spieth out all our ways; He hasfashioned us behind and before, and "we cannot attain such knowledge, "for, like all knowledge when it has become perfect, "it is too excellentfor us. "

"Whither then, " says David, "shall I go from thy Spirit, or whithershall I go, then, from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven thou artthere; if I go down into hell thou art there also. If I take the wingsof the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even therealso shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I sayperadventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turnedinto day: the darkness and light to thee are both alike. For my reinsare thine; thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. My bones are nothid from thee: though I be made secretly and fashioned beneath in theearth, thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect; and in thybook were all my members written, which day by day were fashioned whenas yet there was none of them. Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hatethee? and am I not grieved with them that rise up against thee? Yea, Ihate them right sore, as though they were mine enemies. " (PsalmCXXXIX. ) There is not a word of this which we cannot endorse with moresignificance, as well as with greater heartiness than those can wholook upon God as He is commonly represented to them; whatever comfort, therefore, those in distress have been in the habit of receiving fromthese and kindred passages, we intensify rather than not. We cannot, alas! make pain cease to be pain, nor injustice easy to bear; but wecan show that no pain is bootless, and that there is a tendency in allinjustice to right itself; suffering is not inflicted wilfully, [sic] asit were by a magician who could have averted it; nor is it vain in itsresults, but unless we are cut off from God by having dwelt in someplace where none of our kind can know of what has happened to us, itwill move God's heart to redress our grievance, and will tend to thehappiness of those who come after us, even if not to our own. 

The moral government of God over the world is exercised through us, whoare his ministers and persons, and a government of this descriptionis the only one which can be observed as practically influencingmen's conduct. God helps those who help themselves, because in helpingthemselves they are helping Him. Again, Vox Populi vox Dei. The currentfeeling of our peers is what we instinctively turn to when we would knowwhether such and such a course of conduct is right or wrong; and so Paulclenches his list of things that the Philippians were to hold fast withthe words, "whatsoever things are of good fame"-that is to say, he fallsback upon an appeal to the educated conscience of his age. Certainlythe wicked do sometimes appear to escape punishment, but it must beremembered there are punishments from within which do not meet the eye. If these fall on a man, he is sufficiently punished; if they do not fallon him, it is probable we have been over hasty in assuming that he iswicked. 

CHAPTER IX. GOD THE UNKNOWN

The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conception ofGod-the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising all livingunits in His own single person-does not help us to understand the originof matter, nor yet that of the primordial cell which has grown andunfolded itself into the present life of the world. How was the worldrendered fit for the habitation of the first germ of Life? How came itto have air and water, without which nothing that we know of as livingcan exist? Was the world fashioned and furnished with aqueous andatmospheric adjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infantmonad, and to his due development? If so, we have evidence of design, and if so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vaster Personwho looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same relation to himas he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may beyet another, and another, and another. 

It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its ownfuture requirements. For the world was at one time red hot, and therecan have been no living being upon it. Nor is it conceivable that matterin which there was no life-inasmuch as it was infinitely hotter than thehottest infusion which any living germ can support-could gradually cometo be alive without impregnation from a living parent. All living thingsthat we know of have come from other living things with bodies andsouls, whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite oftheir being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the worldwas once without life, and since no analogy points in the direction ofthinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we are driven to supposethat it was introduced into this world from some other source extraneousto it altogether, and if so we find ourselves irresistibly drawn tothe inquiry whether the source of the life that is in the world-theimpregnator of this earth-may not also have prepared the earth for thereception of his offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach astone for the protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn tothe inquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth was soprepared designedly by a Person with body and soul who knew beforehandthe kind of thing he required, and who took the necessary steps to bringit about. 

If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but weare not his children; we are children of the Unknown and Vaster God whocalled him into existence; and this in a far more literal sense than wehave been in the habit of realising [sic] to ourselves. For it may bedoubted whether the monads are not as truly seminal in character as theprocreative matter from which all animals spring. 

It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view put forwardin "Life and Habit, " and in "Evolution Old and New" (and I have metwith no serious attempt to upset the line of argument taken in eitherof these books), then no complex animal or plant can reach its fulldevelopment without having already gone through the stages of thatdevelopment on an infinite number of past occasions. An egg makes itselfinto a hen because it knows the way to do so, having already madeitself into a hen millions and millions of times over; the ease andunconsciousness with which it grows being in themselves sufficientdemonstration of this fact. At each stage in its growth the chicken isreminded, by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that itshould take, and it accordingly takes it. 

But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all the living formsin the world must be regarded as a single person, throughout their longgrowth from the primordial cell onwards to the present day, then, byparity of reasoning, the person thus compounded-that is to say, Life orGod-should have already passed through a growth analogous to that whichwe find he has taken upon this earth on an infinite number of pastoccasions; and the development of each class of life, with itsculmination in the vertebrate animals and in man, should be due torecollection by God of his having passed through the same stages, ornearly so, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personalrecollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of our bodies, but concerning which we have no other knowledge whatsoever. 

So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further thereflections which suggest themselves. A few concluding considerationsare here alone possible. 

We know of three great concentric phases of life, and we are not withoutreason to suspect a fourth. If there are so many there are very likelymore, but we do not know whether there are or not. The innermost sphereof life we know of is that of our own cells. These people live in aworld of their own, knowing nothing of us, nor being known by ourselvesuntil very recently. Yet they can be seen under a microscope; they canbe taken out of us, and may then be watched going here and there inperturbation of mind, endeavouring [sic] to find something in theirnew environment that will suit them, and then dying on finding howhopelessly different it is from any to which they have been accustomed. They live in us, and make us up into the single person which we conceiveourselves to form; we are to them a world comprising an organic and aninorganic kingdom, of which they consider themselves to be the organic, and whatever is not very like themselves to be the inorganic. Whetherthey are composed of subordinate personalities or not we do not know, but we have no reason to think that they are, and if we touch ground, soto speak, with life in the units of which our own bodies are composed, it is likely that there is a limit also in an upward direction, though we have nothing whatever to guide us as to where it is, nor anycertainty that there is a limit at all. 

We are ourselves the second concentric sphere of life, we being theconstituent cells which unite to form the body of God. Of the thirdsphere we know a single member only-the God of this world; but we seealso the stars in heaven, and know their multitude. Analogy pointsirresistibly in the direction of thinking that these other worlds arelike our own, begodded and full of life; it also bids us believe thatthe God of their world is begotten of one more or less like himself, and that his growth has followed the same course as that of all othergrowths we know of. 

If so, he is one of the constituent units of an unknown and vasterpersonality who is composed of Gods, as our God is composed of all theliving forms on earth, and as all those living forms are composed ofcells. This is the Unknown God. Beyond this second God we cannot atpresent go, nor should we wish to do so, if we are wise. It is noreproach to a system that it does not profess to give an account of theorigin of things; the reproach rather should lie against a systemwhich professed to explain it, for we may be well assured that such aprofession would, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast. It isenough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws new lighton old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope of furtheraddition to our knowledge, and this I believe may be fairly claimed forthe theory of life put forward in "Life and Habit" and "Evolution, Old and New, " and for the corollary insisted upon in these pages; acorollary which follows logically and irresistibly if the position Ihave taken in the above-named books is admitted. 

Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composed couldattain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which he uniteswith other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as to form a greatercompound person of whom he has hitherto known nothing at all. Would henot do well to content himself with the mastering of this conception, at any rate for a considerable time? Would it be any just ground ofcomplaint against him on the part of his brother cells, that he hadfailed to explain to them who made the man (or, as he would call it, theomnipotent deity) whose existence and relations to himself he had justcaught sight of?

But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those on which hehad travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at the conclusion that theremight be other men in the world. Besides the one whom he had justlearnt to apprehend, it would be still no refutation or just ground ofcomplaint against him that he had failed to show the manner in which hissupposed human race had come into existence. 

Here our cell would probably stop. He could hardly be expected to arriveat the existence of animals and plants differing from the human race, and uniting with that race to form a single Person or God, in thesame way as he has himself united with other cells to form man. Theexistence, and much more the roundness of the earth itself, would beunknown to him, except by way of inference and deduction. The onlyuniverse which he could at all understand would be the body of the manof whom he was a component part. 

How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we know ourselvescould be suddenly revealed to him, so that not only should the vastnessof this earth burst upon his dazzled view, but that of the sun and ofhis planets also, and not only these, but the countless other suns whichwe may see by night around us. Yet it is probable that an actual beingis hidden from us, which no less transcends the wildest dream of ourtheologians than the existence of the heavenly bodies transcends theperception of our own constituent cells. 

THE END