THEISM 247 Philo sophy of the Ab solute. which to raise theism or any solid religious construction. In no form has it been able to prove its legitimacy, to maintain its self- consistency, or to defend itself successfully against the agnosticism of unbelief. It is, therefore, not surprising that it should have been very generally regarded as dangerous to theism in reality, even when friendly to it in intention. Yet there is much in the theory of cognition on which it proceeds which the theist can utilize. Indeed, no theory of cognition can afford a satisfactory basis to theism which does not largely adopt and assimilate that of Kant. He has conclusively shown that all our knowledge is a synthesis of contingent impressions and necessary conditions ; that without the latter there can be neither sense, understanding, nor reason; that they constitute intelligence, and are the light of mind ; that they also pervade the whole world of experience and illuminate it ; that there is neither thing nor thought in the uni verse which does not exhibit thein in some of their aspects ; that apart from them there can be no reality, no truth, no science. The agnostic corollaries appended to this theory by Kant and others, instead of being necessary consequences from it, are incon sistent with it. Kant and the agnostics say that we know only the conditioned; but what they prove is that we know also the conditions of thought, and that these conditions are themselves unconditioned, otherwise they would not be necessary. They affirm that we can know only the phenomenal and relative, but what they establish is that it is as impossible to know only the relative and phenomenal as to know only the absolute and noumenal, and that in so far as we know at all we know through ideas which are absolute and noumenal in the only intelligible, and in a very real and important, sense. They maintain, what is very true, if not a truism, that the categories are only valid for experience, and they imply that this is because experience limits and defines the cate gories, whereas, according to their own theory, it is the categories which condition experience and enter as constituents into all experience, so that to say that the categories are only valid for experience means veiy little, experience merely existing so far as the categories enable us to have it, and being valid so far as the categories are legitimately applied, although not farther, which leaves no more presumption against religious experience than against sensible experience. They have denied the objective validity of the categories or necessary conditions of thought. This denial is the distinctive feature of all modern agnosticism ; and the theist who would vindicate the reality of his knowledge of God, the legi timacy of his belief in God, the worth of his religious experience, must refute the reasonings by which it has been supported ; show that consciousness testifies against it, the subjectivity of any true category being unthinkable and inconceivable ; and indicate how its admission must subvert not only the foundation of theology but of all other sciences, and resolve them all into castles in the air, or into such stuff as dreams are made of. In the accomplishment of this task as much guidance and aid may be found, perhaps, in the theories of cognition of Ferrier and Rosmini as from those of any of the Germans ; but Hegel and his followers, not a few of the Herbartists, Ulrici, Harms, and many other German thinkers, have contributed to show the falsity of the critical theory at this point. Amended here, it is a theory admirably fitted to be the corner-stone of a philosophical theism. More may be attempted to be done in the region of the necessary and unconditioned. The conditions of thought, the categories of experience, the ideas of reason are all linked together, so that each has its own place and is part of a whole. And of what whole ? The idea of God. All the metaphysical categories are included therein, for God is the Absolute Being ; all the physical categories, for He is Absolute Force and Life ; all the mental categories, for He is Absolute Spirit ; all the moral categories, for He is the Absolutely Good. The idea of God is the richest, the most inclusive, the most comprehensive, of all ideas. It is the idea of ideas, for it takes up all other ideas into itself and gives them unity, so that they constitute a system. The whole system issues into, and is rendered organic by, the idea of God, which, indeed, contains within itself all the ideas which are the conditions of human reason and the grounds of known existence. All sciences, and even all phases and varieties of human experience, are only developments of some of the ideas included in this supreme and all-comprehensive idea, and the developments have in no instance exhausted the ideas. Hence in the idea of God must be the whole truth of the universe as well as of the mind. These sentences are an attempt to express in the briefest intelligible form what it was the aim of the so-called philosophy of the Absolute to prove to be not only true, but the truth. Hegel and Schelling, Krause and Baader, and their associates, all felt themselves to have the one mission in life of making manifest that God was thus the truth, the light of all knowledge, self-revealing in all science, the sole object of all philosophy. The Absolute with which they occupied themselves so earnestly was no abstraction, no fiction, such as Hamilton and Mansel supposed it to be, not the wholly indeter minate, not that which is out of all relation to everything or to anything, not the Unknowable, but the ground of all relationship, the foundation alike of existence and of thought, that which it is not only not impossible to know, but which it is impossible not to know, the knowledge of it being implied in all knowledge. Hegel expressed not only his own conviction, but the central and vital thought of the whole anti-agnostic movement which culminated in him when he wrote, "The object of religion is, like that of philo sophy, the eternal truth itself in its objective existence : it is God, and nothing but God, and the explanation of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but a knowledge of the unworldly ; not a knowledge >of outward matter, of empirical being and life, but knowledge of that which is eternal, of that which is God and which flows from His nature, as that must manifest and develop itself. Hence philosophy in explaining religion explains itself, and in explaining itself explains religion. Philosophy and religion thus coincide iu that they have one and the same object." The adherents of the philosophy of the Absolute must be admitted to have fallen, in their revulsion from agnosticism, into many extra vagances of gnosticism ; but a theist who does not sympathize with their main aim, and even accepts most of the results as to which they are agreed, cannot be credited with having much philosophical insight into what a thorough and consistent theism implies. A God who is not the Absolute as they understood the term, not the Unconditioned revealed in all that is conditioned, and the essential content of all knowledge at its highest, cannot be the God either of a profound philosophy or a fully-developed religion. The philosophy of the Absolute was, on the whole, a great advance towards a philosophical theism. 1 And yet it was largely pantheistic, and tended strongly towards pantheism. This was not surprising. Any philosophy which is in thorough earnest to show that God is the ground of all existence and the condition of all knowledge must find it difficult to retain a firm grasp of the personality and transcendence of the Divine and to set them forth with due prominence. Certainly some of the most influential representatives of the philosophy of the Absolute ignored or misrepresented them. The consequence was, however, that a band of thinkers soon appeared who were animated with the most zealous desire to do justice to these aspects of the Absolute, and to make evident the one-sidedness and inadequacy of every pantheistic conception of the Divine. This was the common aim of those who gathered around the younger Fichte, and whose literary organ was the Zeitschrift fur Philosophic. Chalybaus, K. Ph. Fischer, Sengler, "Weisse, Wirth, and Ulrici may be named as among the ablest and most active. The Roman Catholic Giinther and his followers worked in much the same spirit. Lotze has effectively co-operated by his ingenious defence of the thesis that "perfect personality is to be found only in God, while in all finite spirits there exists only a weak imitation of personality ; the fmiteness of the finite is not a productive condi tion of personality, but rather a limiting barrier to its perfect development." This movement also, then, has tended to develop and contributed to enrich the theory of theism. Its special mis sion has been to prove that theism is wider than pantheism, and can include all the truth in pantheism, while pantheism must necessarily exclude truth, in theism essential to the vitality and vigour both of religion and of morality. 2 The philosophy of the Absolute, judged of from a distinctly theistic point of view, was defective on another side. It regarded too exclusively the necessary and formal in thought, trusted almost entirely to its insight into the significance of the categories and its powers of rational deduction. Hence the idea of the Divine which it attained, if vast and comprehensive, was also vague and abstract, shadowy and unimpressive. Correction was needed on this side also, and it came through Schleiermacher and that large company of theologians, among whom Lipsius and Ritschl are at present the most prominent, who have dwelt on the importance of proceed ing from immediate personal experience, from the direct testimony of pious feeling, from the practical needs of the moral life, &c. From these theologians may be learned that God is to be known, not through mere intellectual cognition, but through spiritual experience, an d that no dicta as to the Divine not verifiable in experience, not efficacious to sustain piety and to promote virtue, to elevate and purify the heart, to invigorate the will, to ennoble 1 On the doctrine of God propounded by the philosophers of the Absolute may be consulted the histories of philosophy by Chalybaus, Michelet, Erdmann, Ueberweg, K. Fischer, Harms, Zeller, &c., also Ptinjer, ii. bks. 3 and 5 ; the chapters in Pfleiderer on Schelling, Hegel, Neo-Schellingianism, and Neo- Hegelianism ; Corner s Hist, of P rot. Th., ii. 257, 395; Lichtemberger s Hist, des Ide es Religieuses en Allemagne, &c., passim; Ehrenhaus s Hegel s Gottesbegriff, &c. ; Franz on Schelling s Positive Philosophie ; Opzoomer s Leer van God, bij Krause ; K. Ph. Fischer s Characteristik der Theosophie Baaders ; <fcc. 2 See art. "Theismus," by Ulrici, in Herzog s Real-Encyklopddie, xv. As representing this phase of theism the following works may be named : C. H. Weisse s Idee der Gottheit, 1844, and Philosophische Dogmatik, 1855 ; Wirth s Speculative Idee Gottes, 1845 ; Sengler s Idee Gottes, 1S45-J7 ; J. H. Fichte s Speculative Theologie, 1846-47 ; Hanne s Idee der absoluten Persoiilichkeit, 1867 ; Ulrici s Gott u. die Natur, 1875 ; and Lotze s Microcosmos, ii. ix. 4-5 (Eng. tr.). The school is well represented in America by Prof. Bowne. See his Studies in Theism, especially ch. 7-9. See also art. of Prof. J. S. Candlish on "The Personality of God," in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1884, and of Gardiner on "Lotze s
Theistic Philosophy," in Presb j. Rev., Oct. 1885.
