the religious philosophy of plotinus and some modern philosophies of religion, w. r. inge, 1914

8/14/2019 The Religious Philosophy of Plotinus and Some Modern Philosophies of Religion, W. R. Inge, 1914

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WALSHPHILOSOPHYCOLLECTION

PRESENTED to theLIBRARIES ofthe

UNIVERSITY o/TORONTO


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JOHN M. \V.\TKINS


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THE ESSEX HALL LECTURE


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BYW. R. INGE, D.D.

LONDON

THERELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OFPLOTINUS AND SOME MODERNPHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION

&& 5 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.

THL-LIND5LYPRL33


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PRINTED BY ELSOM AND CO.MARKET PLACE, HULL


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PUBLISHER'S NOTEIN establishing the Essex Hall Lecture the

British and Foreign Unitarian Association hadno intention of making it a manifesto of adenomination or sect, but simply desired thatit should be the free utterance of the lectureron some religious subject of general interest.The first lecture was delivered in 1893 bythe Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, who discoursedon ' The Development of Theology as illustratedin English Poetry from 1780 to 1830.' ' TheRelation of Jesus to his Age and our own,' by Dr.J. Estlin Carpenter ; v The Idea and Reality ofRevelation/ by Professor H. H. Wendt ; ' TheImmortality of the Soul in the Poems of Tennysonand Browning,' by Sir Henry Jones ; ' Religionand Life,' by Professor Rudolf Eucken ; ' Heresy,its Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights,' by theRev. Alexander Gordon these are a few of thesubjects and lecturers in past years.The lecture by the Dean of St. Paul's on

' TheReligious Philosophy of Plotinus and some modernPhilosophies of Religion ' aroused widespreadinterest on the occasion of its delivery at EssexHall, 3 June, 1914, and its publication has beeneagerly looked for by many people.LONDON, 30 June, 1914.


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THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OFPLOTINUS AND SOME MODERNPHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION.

TN an age when knowledge is so much-* specialized that there is a dangerlest its votaries, like the builders of theTower of Babel, lose contact with eachother by not understanding each other'slanguage, we are apt to underestimatethe interdependence of the variousbranches of intellectual activity. Weread histories of philosophy, and ofscientific progress, and we are left tosuppose that these studies go on theirway quite unaffected by the fluctuationsof social and political movements. Poli-


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8 PLOTINUS AND MODERNtical history, in the same way, takeslittle account of philosophical theoryand scientific investigation. But evenin natural science, and still more inphilosophy, ethics, and religion, menonly see what they have eyes to see.The wish is often father to the thought,even with persons of rare intellectualhonesty. We pay close attention towhat interests us ; we follow pathswhich promise to lead us whither wewish to go. The desire to reach accept-able conclusions is apparent in meta-physics, unmistakable in ethics, andalmost barefaced in systematic theology.Even naturalists are but children oftheir age. The theory of progress firstarose in France in the generation beforethe Revolution. It was the creed ofthe Encyclopaedists and Physiocrats, of


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 9Rousseau and of the Revolution itself.It is expressed for history by Cordorcet,for biology by Lamarck. When itcrossed to England, it characteristic-ally took the form of faith in boundlessindustrial expansion. Its litanies weretrade statistics, its goal the world-widesupremacy of British commerce. Itmay be studied to advantage in thesmug and self-complacent philosophy ofMacaulay's English History. Darwin'sdoctrine of the Survival of the Fittest isno less closely connected with the domi-nant social and political tendencies ofhis day. Just as ' La carriere ouverteaux talents ' is pure Lamarckism, so' The devil take the hindmost ' is pureDarwinism. Determinism in philo-sophy and Calvinism in religion arenaturally in favour chiefly with those


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10 PLOTINUS AND MODERNwho are fairly well content with theworld as it is, and who hold the comfort-able theory that progress, being a lawof nature, may be left to take care ofitself. The English mind had turnedwith horror from the results of un-checked emotion and sentiment, as seenin the French Revolution, and theRomanticists were not strong enough tostem the tide of hard rationalism, oftenpassing into materialism.Now we see a counter-revolt againstDarwinism, against determinism, againstintellectualism, in full blast. The rootof all these new movements, whetherthey call themselves neo-Lamarckism,Vitalism, Activism, Voluntarism, Prag-matism, or what not, is the new faith inthe almost unlimited power of purposiveeffort, to ameliorate human conditions.


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION II

Inspired by it, biologists began to noticewhat looked like spontaneous adapta-tions of living creatures to their environ-ment, and welcomed signs of a wild andplayful exuberance in the creative forcesof nature ; philosophers began to in-terpret reality in terms not of substanceor idea, but of life and activity ; someexalted the freedom of the will till itseemed as if, for them, even the lawsof nature were malleable to humandesires ; others disparaged intellectualconcepts as mere counters, and talked of4 the will-world as the only real world ' ;others maintained that the mind con-structs its pictures of an external worldpurely for its own convenience, and thatonly that can be called true which isproved to be a good working hypothesis.' The gates of the future are open.' So


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12 PLOTINUS AND MODERNBergson has said, with his usual felicityin epigram. That is what our genera-tion wishes to believe in politics andsocial reform ; and it has welcomed withopen arms the French, or rather Jewishphilosopher, who has told us exactlywhat we wanted to hear. Our de-light was increased when we were toldthat the intellect is only one, and notthe best, line of progress ; that some-thing called instinct, which at any rate isnot an intellectual process, often pro-vides a short cut to the point which wewant to reach. Thinking is hard work ;what a joy to hear that it is mostlywaste of time !

There are other factors also, besidesthose which I have mentioned, whichadd strength to the revolt against whatis now called intellectualism. Democ-


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 13racy finds very half-hearted supportfrom science and philosophy. If we canlump together all students who do notthink with one finger on the popularpulse under the derisive name of ' intel-lectuals,' we shall at any rate discoverthat they are few and weak, and is notthis much the same, for all good demo-crats, as proving that they are wrong ?Then too there are the conservativeforces of religious orthodoxy, which werehalf-silenced but not at all convincedduring the heyday of materialisticscience. Supernaturalism, which waslong ago called ' Faith's dearest child,'can lift up her head again under theshelter of the new philosophy. Not onlyis free-will rehabilitated, but the primi-tive spiritism of the savage can comeforth unabashed from its lurking-places


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14 PLOTINUS AND MODERNin the minds of the half-educated.Ghosts once more walk abroad, andare patronized by the highly respect-able gentlemen and ladies who study' psychical research.' The medicine-man reappears as a ' faith-healer,' andmakes a good income. ' Christian Sci-ence ' churches, and hotels at Lourdes,do a roaring trade. Priests of the basersort are overjoyed at the unexpectedboom in their earliest line of business.The pride of the ' intellectuals ' hasindeed received a blow. They havelearned that the ingrained mental habitsof fifty thousand years are not to bedestroyed by the labours of a few uni-versity professors.

If this revolt of the natural barbarianin civilized man takes form as a philo-sophical system, that system will have


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 15to be a form of dualism. Already inLotze we had a sharp distinction be-tween persons and things ; while othershave separated will and intellect dual-istically. In Kant the rift was stillwithin the reason. If the practical andthe theoretical reason could come intocontact with each other, the problemwould be solved. But in his successors,war has been declared against thetheoretical or speculative reason itself.Herbert Spencer already saw the danger,and protested against it. ' Let thosewho can, believe that there is eternalwar between our intellectual facultiesand our moral obligations. I for one canadmit no such radical vice in the constitu-tion of things.' But Herbert Spenceris out of fashion. * Practical reason 'is no longer for our contemporaries what


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l6 PLOTINUS AND MODERNit was for Kant. It is almost an equiva-lent for irrational will. And since willcan hardly exist in an atmosphere wherereason is excluded, ' practical reason '

has suffered a still further degradation,and is confounded with hysterical senti-ment. Our extreme dislike of theeighteenth century, and our tendency tovilify this period and all its works, arevery symptomatic. The eighteenth cen-tury believed in reason, and dislikedmoods of excitement.The position of physical science in the

midst of this strange movement is verycurious. Such philosophies as those ofWilliam James and Bergson might seemto be absolutely destructive of thenatural sciences. A ' wild universe,'which administers shocks even to itsCreator (as William James suggests)


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION IJwould be the despair of biologist,physicist, and historian alike. AndBergson's theory of time, if I under-stand it rightly, introduces an incalcul-able and confusing element into everyscientific calculation except pure mathe-matics. A few men of science have takenfright and lost their tempers over thenew philosophy ; but science as a wholesimply ignores it, except that vitalistictheories in biology now receive a respect-ful attention which they would nothave won thirty years ago. In all otherways, science is entirely untroubled bythe new dualism, and will remain un-troubled by it, as long as its own resultscontinue to confirm its working hypo-theses. In fact, the whole movementwhich I have described seems to merather superficial. It is popular with


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18 PLOTINUS AND MODERNcertain classes, for reasons which arefairly obvious ; but in a general way,unless we have some prejudice to defend,we assume, as our fathers did, thatnature is uniform and continuous.

It remains to speak of the results ofthe new movement in religion. Duringthe tyranny of the mechanical theory,religion was in the painful position ofbeing driven from pillar to post. Itsdogmas had been formed to suit thehypothesis of supranaturalistic dualismor occasional intervention, and duringthe so-called Ages of Faith it was re-garded as certain that the world consistsof two * Orders,' the natural and thesupernatural. Miracles were believed tobe frequent ; and the obscene super-natural in witchcraft was as much inevidence as the * mystical phenomena :


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGIONwhich stamped the approval of heavenupon the macerations and devotions ofthe cloister. In Roman Catholic the-ology, a line is still drawn betweennatural and supernatural phenomena,and between natural and supernaturalvirtues. Lecky, in his History of Ra-tionalism, has shown how the domain ofthe supernatural began to shrink withthe beginning of the modern period, andhow, in the countries which have enjoyedthe most advanced civilization, rational-ism has gradually captured one strong-hold of supernaturalism after another,till the defenders of the older world-viewwere driven to take refuge in the gapsstill unfilled by science, gaps which werefilling so rapidly that those who hid inthem began to find themselves in a verytight place. For most religious persons,


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20 PLOTINUS AND MODERNthe new attacks upon scientific deter-minism were very welcome, and I thinkjustifiably so. But in the Modernistmovement Christian apologetics tookanother turn, which promised a com-plete deliverance from the attacks ofscience and criticism. The movementbegan in the Latin countries, wherecontroversies on the most serious issuesare conducted with a fearless logic whichfew in England or Germany care toapply to them. The Modernists declarethat their philosophical theory wasforced upon them by the results of theirhistorical criticism. This criticism ledthem to see in organized Christianity asyncretistic religion which owed quiteas much to the beliefs and practicesof the European peoples among whomit won its chief triumphs, as to the


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 21

teaching of its Founder. In dealingwith the life and teaching of the his-torical Christ, they brushed aside allthat the piety of German scholars haddone to bring his life and teaching intoconnexion with modern problems andideals. They stripped the figure ofChrist of all that Christians have lovedto see in him, and left us only anenthusiastic peasant, obsessed with theMessianic expectations which were com-mon at the time in Palestine. Thus itbecame necessary to distinguish ' commedeux Christs,' the one the historicalprophet, who had few claims on thereverence of posterity, and the other theobject of the Church's worship, a non-historical dying and rising Saviour-God.It was this latter idea of Christ which,in the opinion of this school, formed


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22 PLOTINUS AND MODERNthe centre of the Christian religion,and it was something of a historicalaccident that it attached itself tothe name of a ' Messiah ' who sharedthe fate of other Messiahs in the firstcentury of our era. This theory ofChristian origins is, I think, untenablein this harsh form ; but with necessaryqualifications it is a theory which is likelyto commend itself to many who do notbelieve in the Christian revelation. Butthe Modernists were not in this posi-tion. They were, or wished to be, loyalCatholics ; many of them were, andwished to remain, priests of the RomanCatholic Church. How were they toreconcile their love for the Catholiccultus and discipline with their ex-tremely subversive opinions in historicalcriticism ? How could they worship a


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 23Christ whose historical career was whatthey believed it to have been ? Christ-ianity after all is a religion based onevents which are supposed to be his-torical. It always felt itself to be areligion of a different type from the otherreligions of the Empire, in which theworship, through sacraments and dra-matic representations, of a dying andrising God, was quite familiar. TheCatholic Church would never come toany terms with these religions. It wastherefore necessary for the Moderniststo maintain that in accepting theChurch's creeds, which ascribe the attri-butes of Deity to Jesus Christ, they weresomehow speaking the truth. Thus the' two Christs ' are affirmed by two kindsof truth. Historical criticism deals withtruths of fact, while religion deals with


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24 PLOTINUS AND MODERNtruths of faith. The former are ' theo-retical ' truths, the latter are ' practical 'truths. And the philosophy of prag-matism lies ready to hand, offering toprove that practical truths are muchmore important, and much more true,than theoretical truths. Thus the ques-tion whether an event ever happened is,at any rate for religion, almost frivolous.The only important question is, Whatbelief has the value of truth for me ?Lex orandi, lex credendi. All the termsof religion belong to the sphere of faith.

' The historian,' says Loisy, ' does notneed to remove God from history, forhe never encounters Him there.'Here is indeed a radical dualism,

which can only escape from the chargeof ' cutting the world in two with ahatchet ' by reducing the world of


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 25* brute fact ' to an unsubstantial shadow.It is, I think, hardly worth takingseriously. It is the desperate expedientof men who wish to remain Catholicsafter they have ceased to be Christians.Incidentally, they have done Catholicismthe fatal disservice of explaining it, byshowing how large an element of whatthe despised intellectualist would call' make-believe ' is retained for its prag-matic value, and is notwithstandingpresented as belonging to the order ofhistorical fact. Such a method is effec-tive and innocuous so long as it is quitenaive and unconscious ; but no longer.If the ' two kinds of truth ' are keptwholly apart, their pragmatical valueis gone. If they are deliberately allowedto exchange values, moral sincerity isfatally compromised.


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26 PLOTINUS AND MODERNSuch seems to me to be the position

to-day. The stiff determinism of nine-teenth century science has been reallyundermined. The mechanical theory ofthe nineteenth century was not sufficientto explain the phenomena of life. Itwas a working hypothesis for investi-gating the laws of inorganic matter ; andChristian apologists were quite justifiedin protesting against its application tobeings endowed with conscious or self-conscious life. So much heavy artilleryhas been turned upon the crude meta-physics of naturalism that it is hardlynecessary to recapitulate the arguments.The mechanical explanation of life andmind is a hypothesis which does notaccount for observed facts ; it attemptsto explain everything by what it grewout of, whereas the truer method is that


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 27of Aristotle, to discover the nature(v


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28 PLOTINUS AND MODERNpossible, and our strongest philosophicalinstinct revolts against it. We seem tobe threatened with an impasse, such ashas befallen philosophy more than oncebefore in its long history. The ma-terialist philosophy, unsatisfactory as itwas, presented a clear-cut scheme whichprofessed to explain everything. Weseem to be in danger of being drivenback upon illogical eclecticism, orscepticism.

Can we get any help from the philo-sophical mystics ? It is my belief thatwe can. They at least think that theyhave found what we want to find. Theyare absolutists that is to say, theybelieve that a knowledge of ultimatereality is possible to man ; they aremonists their whole quest is for theOne in whom all contradictions are


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 29reconciled ; their faith is not onlythought out but lived out their highestachievement is a beatific vision seen indirect experience ; they are deeply re-ligious, and their devotion is blendedwith their speculation, so that the' intellectual love of God ' is no merephrase for them. And finally, thestrange uniformity of their system inwidely different ages and countries seemsto indicate that this type of thought andbelief is less influenced by temporarycurrents than most others. Let us thensketch very briefly the kind of way inwhich a disciple of Plotinus, whom wemay take as by far the greatest thinkerof this school, would deal with some ofthe questions which are agitating theminds of our generation.It may be taken as certain that neither


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30 PLOTINUS AND MODERNidealism in the modern sense (the doc-trine that all reality is mental) nor theopposite theory of naive realism, whichmakes mind only an epiphenomenon,ought to satisfy us. For the philo-sophical mystic reality is spiritual itis constituted by the unity in dualityof the perceiving spirit and the spiritualworld which it perceives. Thus ' heaven 'is for this philosophy something muchmore than the place where God lives.It is the outer side of his life and beingthe whole content of his mind andentirely inseparable from it. It is nota place but an order of being the onlymode of being which is fully and com-pletely real. This spiritual world con-tains every thought in the mind of God,every purpose in his will. Every personhas there a distinct, though not exactly


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 31a separate existence. All values arethere preserved inviolable. We maysay with Plotinus that nothing whichtruly is, can ever perish. This perfectspiritual world is not static and im-mobile, like a marble statue. It is not* faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidlynull.' It is essentially life and activity.And though we cannot allow that thereis any development in the life andmind of God himself, he enjoys a higherkind of activity, in which change andstationariness, movement and rest, aretranscended. The life of Spirit andof spirits, for in that world we retainour individuality is eternal ; but thiseternity is not an endless series ofmoments, snipped off at one end butnot at the other ; it is a mode of exist-ence, of which indestructibility is one


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32 PLOTINUS AND MODERNof the attributes. It is wholly abovetime and place, which belong, not tothe world of Spirit, but to what Plotinuscalls the world of Soul, which is createdby Spirit. For although Spirit is per-fect in itself, and needs nothing outsideitself for its own fullness of life, it is inits nature creative. By an inner neces-sity of its nature, it must produce aworld after its likeness. God is thusthe Author of Nature, in the samesense, nearly, in which a man mightbe said to be the author of his ownphotograph. This is indeed the sense inwhich many early Christian theologiansused the phrase. God is immanent inthe world, not in the sense that he liveshis own life in and by means of thevisible universe, but because the uni-verse derives its being from him, reflects


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 33his thoughts and purposes, exhibitseverywhere footprints of His Wisdom,Goodness, and Beauty, and in variousdegrees of conscious desire, strives tobe reunited with him. It is not at alldifficult to bring this philosophicalworld-view into correspondence withthe Logos-theology of Greek Christianity,which indeed in its later phases, asdeveloped by Basil and the two Gregorys,owed a great deal to Plotinus. It is im-portant to recognize that this philo-sophy draws no hard lines across thefield of existence ; those who have calledit dualistic have misunderstood it fromtop to bottom. There is no barrierbetween Soul and Spirit the spiritualworld is the true home of spirits, a hometo which they all hope to return one day.God ' sent the souls down ' in order to


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34 PLOTINUS AND MODERNguide and give rational and moral formto what is below Soul; for Soul re-sembles the higher principle in beingirresistibly impelled to create to createafter the image of its own Creator.

' Seethat thou make all things according tothe pattern showed thee in the mount,'is the command given by the DivineSpirit to each human soul.One great advantage which this philo-

sophy has over many others is that itrecognizes that what we loosely regardas * the world known to science ' is nosimple self-existing cosmos, independentof us who perceive it, nor yet a meresubjective creation of our minds, butis an unstable projection of the averagepsychic life a conglomerate of theforms which the soul has impressedupon that nebulous abstraction ' Matter.'


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 35Matter in Plotinus is not material ; itis not the name of ponderable and ex-tended stuff. It is that which hypo-thetically would be left if we couldabstract from objects all that gives themform and meaning all, in fact, whichmakes them possible objects of thought.The world of science is demonstrably notthe objects perceived by the senses ; itis rather a system of laws which the Soulboth makes and finds for the real-idealism of his doctrine of God deter-mines our philosopher's view of soul-lifealso. The laws which the scientistthinks that he finds in Nature are thework of his own mind, which notwith-standing finds itself in those objectswhich are its own image, and moreremotely the image of its own Author.Soul and its world are real, though on


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36 PLOTINUS AND MODERNthe lower confines of reality. Thisworld resembles the spiritual world asfar as it can ; but in it reality is polarizedand split up ; the very conditions ofsoul-life forbid it to be as perfect as itsarchetype. In our world, every ideaof God appears as a purpose in processof realization. Our world consists of avast complex of such purposes, all finite,with a beginning, middle, and end, inter-lacing with each other, wheels withinwheels, and only to be recognized asdivine ideas when they are gathered upin their full development and comple-tion. Time is the form of purpose, andaccordingly all our experience is set inthe framework of Time. Space too is anecessary condition of our experience ;

though Plotinus, rightlyI think, gives

Space a lower position than Time. Ideas


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 37of space are the clearest, but the poorest,of our ideas. The reality of our worldthen consists in its power of expressing,under the form of processes in Space andTime, the ideas and purposes of theDivine mind. The truest view of theworld is that which sees in it a systemof law not, however, in the limitedsense in which naturalists talk of naturallaw, but as a system of harmoniousvalues, which may be classified underthree heads the Good, the True, andthe Beautiful. Our world as it really is,is the sphere in which these three divineattributes are exhibited under the formof purposes in process of realization. Adeep and subtle network of sympathiespervades the whole system ; and there-fore it is that the Soul must never bewrapped up in itself. The isolated, im-


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38 PLOTINUS AND MODERNpenetrable self is a dangerous delusion ;it has no existence. The Soul can onlysave itself by losing itself by forgettingthe distinction between ' I ' and ' Not-I

'; by reaching out in all directions

after fuller experience, wider activity,richer affections. There is no naturallimit to its expansion ; the Soul ispotentially all-embracing. In knowingits world it comes to know itself, and inknowing itself it knows its world ; thetwo processes are interdependent andreally one. The Soul creates in know-ing, and knows by creating ; it stampsitself on Matter, and is reflected inMatter. But the Soul itself, and itsworld, are wholly dependent on thatgreat spiritual world of eternal existenceand eternal activity, which are theobject of the Soul's worship, the source


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 39from which it flowed, and the goal towhich it strives to return.

This philosophy is a form of Abso-lutism, in that it makes the ultimatereality something which Spirit is notfree to construct for itself, and which isnot contingent on human needs ordesires. It is a knowable and unchange-able system of values and existences,which is itself the source of all thathappens in space and time. The Abso-lute is not to be identified with theSpiritual World here the philosophy ofmysticism parts company with Hegeland Bosanquet and others who up to thispoint have strong affinities with it. TheSpiritual World cannot be the Absolute,because in it the subject-object relation,though harmonized, is not transcended.The whole world of existence is per-


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40 PLOTINUS AND MODERNmeated with and indeed constituted bythis duality in unity. We can form nonotions of anything whatsoever withoutleaving the Absolute standpoint. Omnisdeterminatio est negatio. And yet ourtheory of the relations of subject andobject necessarily implies an Absolute inwhich this distinction is transcended.Only this Absolute must be, as Plotinussays, ' beyond existence.' This doesnot mean non-existent. It only meansthat the forms of our thought which dealwith finite existences are demonstrablyinadequate to conceive or describe theAbsolute. We are justified in speakingof it as the Source of all Being ; and weare justified in regarding it as theineffable Unity towards which the mindturns as the resolution of all contra-dictions, the ineffable Goodness towards


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 4!which the moral will turns as the finalvictory over all evil and imperfection,the ineffable Beauty which satisfies thelove-longings of the Soul. Even inheaven, we may say, the beatified Spiritis able to look upwards, to love, and toaspire. In the human soul, which is amicrocosm, having affinities with everygrade of existence from top to bottom,there is an unknowable, super-existentialelement, by which we may at raremoments enter into immediate rela-tions with the Absolute, the Godhead.It is an experience which is wholly in-describable. We may attempt to de-scribe it by negatives it is not thought,not will, not feeling, and so on. But inso saying the mystic means, it is the goalof thought, of will, and of feeling astate in which our faculties, in gaining


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42 PLOTINUS AND MODERNall for which they exist, transcend theconditions of their own activities. How-ever, this vision of the One is no neces-sary part of the spiritual life. TheAbsolute is the necessary backgroundof this philosophy ; but it need not bean object of experience, which indeed,strictly speaking, it hardly can be. Themystical state, which is not confined tothis vision, but in a sense awaits us atevery step above our empirical selves,does not add anything to our knowledge.It rather enables us to feel and see whatwe already know ; but knowledge is nottrue knowledge until it is seen and feltuntil, that is to say, we have made our-selves one with it and with its object.Now how does this philosophy affectthe question of the uniformity of Nature ?All Nature is the work of creative Spirit,


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 43acting freely. There is no question ofexternal compulsion. The regularitywhich we observe in Nature is what weshould expect to find, if our hypothesisis true. For order and limitation are,Plotinus tells us, divine attributes. IfGod seems to do nothing, it is becausehe does everything. The observed uni-formity of Nature in no way supportsthe theory of mechanical determinism.It does not oblige us to reduce intelli-gence to mechanism. These two thingsare sharply contrasted ; and our theorydenies mechanism throughout. In amachine, all movements are transac-tions between one part and another part;they take place in accordance withconstant laws ; and in such transactionsthere is no unity, nor anything new.For Plotinus, the view of Nature as a


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44 PLOTINUS AND MODERNmechanism is an abstraction, useful forcertain purposes, but by no means thefinal truth. The ' laws ' of which itspeaks are the imprint of Soul ; they donot belong to Matter. And we cannotexpress the truth, even about externalNature, in merely quantitative categor-ies, which is what the mechanical theoryattempts to do. Much less do quantita-tive categories suffice to account forthe operations of life and spirit. In thehigher forms of existence, intelligenceoperates with far more apparent freedom.We are here in a region where mechanicallaws do not apply. There is no fixedquantity of spiritual energy in the world.We can acquire more of it withoutabstracting a corresponding amountfrom some one else. The good thingsof the Spirit are increased by sharing.


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 45Nor are spirits forbidden to penetrateeach other by any material laws. Lovelaughs at metaphysical, no less than atphysical barriers. Quantitative cate-gories, in a word, fail where value comesin ; and value cannot be kept out. It isnot a question of freedom versus deter-minism. Psychical facts may be asorderly as physical. And if they arenot orderly, they may still be deter-mined by some higher power, just asthe orderly sequences of inanimateNature may be determined by somehigher power. But psychical facts can-not be explained in terms of physicalattraction and repulsion, of weight andvelocity. It is something if we can getthis admitted. Mr. Bosanquet indeedthinks that all phenomena, includingpsychical, are theoretically capable of a


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46 PLOTINUS AND MODERNmechanical explanation. But the me-chanical system would have to be veryseriously modified in order to accountfor psychical phenomena ; and I shoulddispute the assertion that the mechani-cal theory can explain anything. It cannote invariable sequence ; but causality,which implies creative action, is acategory which it is debarred from using.

Vitalism, then, to my mind, assertsintelligence as against mechanism ; andso far it is right. When it seeks to carrywar into the enemy's country, andbrings confusion into the orderly fieldof science, it is wrong. The votary ofhuman freedom has no need to postulatea ' wild ' universe, with W. James ; norwould his position be helped in any wayby doing so. The world is free, becauseits Creator is free ; it is orderly, because


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 47his method of ruling it is not habitualinattention varied by ebullitions ofspasmodic interest.What really happens is that the higher

forms of life exhibit higher grades ofvalue, and approach more nearly to thelife of God (or Spirit) himself. A neworgan, consciousness, has been evolvedgradually for this purpose. Conscious-ness perhaps belongs to a state of un-stable equilibrium, when the mind hasto adjust itself to new conditions, andto form new habits. It is for conscious-ness that finite foci of life exist. I amdisposed to agree with Plotinus, inopposition to most modern philosophers,in refusing to attribute a central andabsolute value to consciousness, or towhat modern philosophers call ' self-consciousness.' Strictly, there can be


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48 PLOTINUS AND MODERNno such thing as self-consciousness untilwe rise quite above the empirical self.In the ordinary soul-life, the mind andits object are never the same when wetry to think about ourselves. And, asPlotinus observes, we do most thingsbadly when we are self-conscious. ' Self-consciousness ' makes us at once pain-fully aware of a not-self, and incapableof attending properly to it.

Consciousness is only one of the giftswhich the soul acquires during its ascent.It receives an illumination which trans-forms itself and its environment to-gether. Soul, in the terminology ofPlotinus, is irradiated by Spirit, andbecomes Spirit. This is, of course, nota ' merely intellectual ' gain. I agreewith Mr. Bosanquet (i. 348) that thepresence of adequate ideas which are


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 49inoperative in moral matters is greatlyexaggerated. Ideas which are part ofthe main structure of the mind must'beoperative, as a light cannot help shining.The highest goodness, as Plotinus sawclearly, is of this spontaneous order.It is those who set God always beforethem who help their brother-man mosteffectually.And here at last we come to Eucken,

whom I have not yet named, althoughthere is not much that I have said aboutPlotinus that does not apply to him.The ' New Birth ' is the central doctrineof Eucken's philosophy. He is nevertired of insisting that salvation consistsin a definite transition from the com-mon experience of life to a new andhigher sphere, which he calls the lifeof Spirit. The doubt which I have


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50 PLOTINUS AND MODERNfrequently felt about Eucken's philo-sophy is whether he does not contrastthe two lives too dualistically. Some-times he seems anxious to smash hisneighbour Haeckel's universe as wellas to build up his own. I do not forgetthat the same sharp contrasts occur insome of the best Christian philosophy,e.g., in that which underlies the FourthGospel. But while ethics may befrankly dualistic, since morality livesin the radical antithesis between goodand evil, metaphysics must beware ofbeing persuaded by ethics to draw theworld in silhouette. Admission into thespiritual life is after all a matter ofdegree, and I am jealous of the richspiritual treasure which resides in thestudy and knowledge of Nature andits laws.


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 51But I find that Mr. Tudor Jones,

whose ' Interpretation of Eucken'sPhilosophy ' pleases me better than anyother books about the great teacher ofJena, does not understand Eucken tomaintain this sharp severance betweenthe higher and the lower life. Hebrings Eucken very near to Plotinus.' Eucken would insist (he says) thatthe mental and spiritual are presentfrom the very beginning, and bringto a mental focus the impressions ofthe senses. In the interpretation ofEucken's philosophy several writershave missed the author's meaning here.They have conceived of spiritual life assomething entirely different from themental life. It is different, but onlyas the bud is different from the blossom ;it means at the religious level a greater


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52 PLOTINUS AND MODERNunfolding of a life which has been presentat every stage in the history of civiliza-tion and culture.' Mr. Jones goes onto show how the life of the community,with the effort and sacrifice which itentails on the individual, ' calls intoactivity a still deeper, reserved energy ofthe soul. The soul now recognizes avalue beyond the values of culture andcivilization. The Good, the True, andthe Beautiful appear as the sole realitiesby the side of which everything thatpreceded, if taken as complete in itself,appears as a great shadow or illusion.. . . Life is now viewed as consistingin a great and constant quest after thesereligious ideals. ... A break takesplace with the natural self ; the mentallife of concepts, though necessary, is nowseen to be insufficient ; and life is now


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 53viewed as having a pearl of great pricebefore its gaze. Here the Siirb undwerde of Paul and Goethe becomesnecessary. The real education of mannow begins. His life becomes guidedand governed by norms whose limitscannot be discovered, and which havenever been realized in their wholenesson the face of our earth. What canthese mean ? They cannot be delusionsor illusions, for they answer too deep aneed of the soul to be reduced to thatlevel. When the soul concentrates itsdeepest attention on these norms orideals, they fascinate it, they drawhidden energies into activity, they giveinklings of immortality. Is it not farmore conceivable that such a vision ofmeaning, of beauty, and of enchantmentis a new kind of reality cosmic in its


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54 PLOTINUS AND MODERNnature, and eternal in its duration ? '

Such, according to his able interpreter,is the gist of Eucken's message about thespiritual life. Those who are acquaintedwith his own books will admit thejustice of the summary. Are the affirma-tions of the illuminated soul tragic illu-sions or cosmic realities ? That is thequestion ; and if we follow Plotinus andEucken we shall be in no doubt aboutthe answer. The higher life has alreadybeen lived by very many. They agreein what they tell us about it. Theyspeak that they do know, and testifythat they have seen. Why should wenot receive their witness ?The great popularity of Eucken's

writings both in Germany and Englandshows that our generation is ripe forthis kind of religion. It is a very good


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PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 55sign, if it is so. For this philosophy oflife has nothing to fear from scientific orhistorical criticism. It is broad-basedon personal experience, and buttressedby sound metaphysics. Its morality ispure and elevated ; it cares nothing fordenominational barriers ; it finds ampleroom for science and art, honouringboth ; and like Christianity, with whichit has so much in common, it gives us avaluation of the good and evil of life,and is so a guide to practical wisdom.I will not speak of ' the religion of thefuture,' for there will be asmany religionsin the future as in the past ; but thatthis is the true line of progress in religionas well as in philosophy, I have nodoubt whatever.


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THE ESSEX HALL LECTURESONE SHILLING EACH NET1893. The Development of Theology, as illustrated in

English Poetry from 1780 to 1830, by StopfordA. Brooke, M.A., LL.D.1 894. Unitarians and the Future, by Mrs. Humphry Ward.1895. The Relation of Jesus to his Age and our own,by J. Estlin Carpenter, M.A., D.D., D.Litt.1897. The Significance of the Teaching of Jesus, byRichard Acland Armstrong, B.A.1899. The Religion of Time and the Religion of Eternity.Relations between Mediaeval and Modern Thought,by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A.1902. Some Thoughts on Christology, by JamesDrummond, M.A., LL.D., Litt.D., D.D.1903. Emerson : A Study of his Life and Influence,by the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell, K.C.1904. The Idea and Reality of Revelation, by Prof. H. H.Wendt, Ph.D., D.D.1905. The Immortality of the Soul in the Poems ofTennyson and Browning, by Sir Henry Jones.1906. The Making of Religion, by Samuel M. Crothers,D.D., Cambridge, U.S.A.1908. Dogma and History, by Prof. Dr. Gustav Kruger,

University of Giessen,1909. The Bearings of the Darwinian Theory of Evolu-tion on Moral and Religious Progress, by Prof.F. E. Weiss, D.Sc., F.L.S.1910. The Story and Significance of the Unitarian Move-

ment, by W. G. Tarrant, B.A.1911. Religion and Life, by Professor Rudolf Eucken.1913. Heresy : its Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rightsin these Kingdoms, by Alexander Gordon, M.A.1914. The Religious Philosophy of Plotinus, and ModernPhilosophies of Religion, by W. R. Inge, D.D.LINDSEY PRESS, 5, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.


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the religious philosophy of plotinus and some modern philosophies of religion, w. r. inge, 1914

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