Let us examine Dr. Caird's account of self-consciousness. Everything hinges upon this. For only in so far as we have a clear knowledge of the self alone immediately known to us, can there be a clear knowledge of the Divine Being; and in so far as there is obscurity in the view of ourselves, a corresponding obscurity must cloud our knowledge of the Divine. Self-consciousness (says Dr. Caird) implies a dualism. You cannot define mind or spirit as a substance which exists by itself, prior to or apart from its relations to other substances, for its very nature and essence is to exist in and through its relations to other substances. They are a part of its being. It discovers or realizes its own nature only through natures that are foreign to or outside of itself.* 'Mind or spirit cannot be thought of as a substance distinct from all other substances, for it has no reality apart from them.' The distinction between self and not self, between the individual mind and the world of outward objects, is a distinction which thought, by the very fact that it can make it, shows that it can transcend, and has already virtually transcended.' In short, we are invited to ignore the law of identity and contradiction, to assume that thought is the same with being, to dissolve mind and matter, Nature, man, and God, with an ideal or organic universality,' to enter upon a process of perpetual affirmation, perpetual negative, solved in re-affirmation; as the result of which we shall find that we have given up ourself, and have become identified in thought and being with the Universal or Absolute Self which is not mine nor yours, &c. Sir, there is a great deal here of what is called metaphysics,' Dr. Johnson might have said. Briefly, we would answer Dr. Caird: First, that life is before thought; and self-consciousness is but the making clearer to ourselves an original feeling of self. The child has this selffeeling long before it is metaphysical enough to say, I am I, and other than the things I touch;' this self-feeling can by no means arise from the consciousness of an opposition to the outer world. Rather in this feeling we are aware of an opposition that is quite unique, and incomparable with any other opposition of two objects. The analogies of centre and circumference, of north and south pole, &c., are distinctly false analogies, in our opinion, in the way they are used by Dr. Caird. We admit that Ego is only thinkable in relation to non-Ego; but Ego is liveable long before any such relation. The early experimental knowledge alone makes possible the *Pages 225, 226, 205. Pages 125, 136. Page 23. later or more scientific knowledge. Personality or self-hood is not to be confounded with self-consciousness. Every feeling of pleasure or pain, every kind of self-enjoyment, includes the original basis of personality, an immediate beingfor-self; who may be made clearer by oppositions and comparisons and be enhanced in value by those means, but cannot by them be artificially generated. Secondly, selfdevelopment does not require the opposition of a nature foreign to self; the external world furnishes only occasions and incitements to the finite being for an activity which it cannot of itself generate; but all the forms of its activity, all its life of sense and feeling and expression, are its own. By a finite being we mean one which has its defined place in the universe, and which is therefore not what another is, yet as a member of the universe is related to that other in its whole development, and is forced to harmonize with it. Its place, time, and mode of development are determined by the whole of which it is a part. But not so with the Infinite Being. And when Dr. Caird maintains that to conceive of God as a self-identical Infinite, complete and self contained in his own being,' would be to omit the element of love from His being, this seems a self-contradiction. For what we mean by the Infinite Being is One who comprises all that is finite in Himself, without whom the finite cannot be what it is. Love in the finite being must have its source in the Infinite, no less than life. He, unlike ourselves, needs no external impulse for His self-realization. From the very conception of Him that defect is absent which makes the impulse from without necessary for the finite being, and the efficiency of it thinkable. He needs not to harmonize in any way with that which is not Himself; and He contains in His own self-sufficient nature the impulse to every stage of the development of His life. Something like this has always been thought by 'ordinary' people, so far as they felt competent to think at all on such high themes. And when the Hegelian peremptorily announces that 'this abstract, self-referent Infinite must, equally with an abstract, self-referent Finite, yield to another and higher idea;§ that, in other words, we must give up all that is commonly meant and felt by personality, and God must give up all that is commonly meant by that sublime Name, in honour of the Absolute Spirit or Self-consciousness;' all this may be very fine, but it is very unintelligible to the † Page 252. ? Caird, p. 251. * Cf. Lotze, 'Mikrok.' i. 270 ff., iii. 565 ff. ordinary' man. An me ludis obscura canendo? We would rather keep our old superstitions, if such they be, than addict ourselves to this fetish worship of abstractions. * Thirdly. The Law of Identity is attacked. This law is simply the expression of our immediate certainty of the constancy and persistence of our mind and its objects. We could not establish any possible connection between two things, we could not draw a conclusion nor expect a consequence of any kind, if the things about which we reason might at the same time be something else than they are. If we attempt the trick of fancying any simple definite content to be that which it is, and that which it is not, the immediate certainty of the proposition of identity becomes apparent. If, then, Dr. Caird finds it impossible to hold fast by the notion of individual identity with which popular thought contents itself,' and thinks that the individual can only by the negation or surrender of his individual self to a larger or universal self, realize the true meaning of his nature as a spiritual being,' this is because he confounds figures of speech with scientific statements. To deny one's self, die to ourselves, &c. : these are strong figures of relative import, as everybody understands; to construe them as if they meant or could mean anything so strictly impossible as the effacement of one's identity, seems a grave mistake in a book professedly scientific. There is an inveterate confusion between the form and the content of personality or of spiritual being in all this. Just as in the old 'mythopoeic' times a god as a spiritual being might be conceived in any visible form, of man, animal, plant, or stone, without ceasing from his identity, as in the fable of the Golden Ass the hero under his metamorphosis is still himself and none other-so we, though by an effort of fancy we clothe ourselves in the forms of others, and our experiences in endless variety of expression, are still one under every shifting of costume and every change of rôle. Dr. Caird would cancel individuality in the name of the idea.' It appears that we cannot reach the idea of the family by combining a number of individuals; we must first think the family in order to know the individual.' This reminds of the Platonic notion that the table is only the table through its participation in the eternal idea of the table, and that dirt is only dirt through participation in the eternal idea of dirt. And humorous pictures present themselves of long-haired, pallid, spectacled youths at the German universities in the early part of the century, redolent of tobacco, and raving about the idea.' These attempts at † Page 242. * Pages 241, 242. grasping the idea are indeed like Æneas' efforts to embrace a Shade: Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, Lastly. The assertion of the identity of thought and being on which this whole system of philosophical idealism rests, is nothing but an extreme stretch of fancy. By thought' the Hegelian means some special and higher action of the mind, which pierces through the illusions of sense and of re presentation and discovers genuine being. We see nothing in this but an instance of the common error of fancying that when we have labelled something with a name, we have produced a thought. But just as 'blue' and sweet,' 'hard' and 'soft,' 'good' and 'evil' are signs of impressions, and no amount of thought can possibly make clear what they signify to one who has never been the subject of these impressions; so neither can any effort of thought make 'being' comprehensible to one who does not immediately know what the word means. No definition of the word is possible. And so of 'becoming,' 'operation,'' consequence,' 'relation,' and the rest. Thought, whether it passes by the name of realism or idealism, can but relate our intuitions and perceptions together under original representations and laws: the things themselves remain unknown, their nature inaccessible. The satire of Molière represents the delight of his Bourgeois Gentilhomme' in finding that sounds he could frame with his mouth bore names so fine as 'vowels' and 'consonants,' and that he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it; and it is very far-reaching. The common people like to dress the commonest thoughts in the finery of phrase; and we all find a pleasure in fresh-coined expressions for experiences old as the world. In this way the dialect of Hegel seems to exercise a great fascination, probably only temporary, over the minds of many. But nothing can be more illusory than to set a value upon these phrases greater than that of the old language of popular religion; or to suppose that the mastery of forms of thought is anything but subsidiary to the experimental religion of the heart. The speculative philosophy of religion has not succeeded in explaining the facts of the religious consciousness in such a way as to supersede the ordinary theology. Whatever the defects or the undue pretensions of that theology, it still held fast to the conception of a personal God as the doctrine of the Bible, and as that which alone can give full satisfaction to the an religious imagination. The philosophers have attempted to My hunger both to be and know the thing I am, And all growth in self-knowledge means a sharper conception of the bounds set to our being both in achievement and in thought, a deeper sense of our extreme infirmity. How then can it be just to reason after the analogy of such a being as ours, to that Being who hovers before the minds of all men as absolutely perfect? And how can it be sound to carry over to such a Being objections to personality which spring only from the consideration of our poor personality? 'In fact, we have little reason to speak of the personality of finite beings. It is an ideal which, like all that is ideal, is only proper in its unconditioned quality to the Infinite, but is only ours, like all that is good, in a conditioned and therefore iucomplete way.' It is but a 'weak imitation' of that full personality which is only in God. In so far, however, as we feel love to be the very life and essence of personality, under that analogy it will be ever safe to reason about the Supreme. And thus we are brought back to old texts and old confessions. Lotze, whose philosophy may be described as a philosophy of appreciation, traces the aberrations of philosophy to the over-appreciation of logical forms, which has come down to us from the Greek schools. The means have been mistaken for the end. It was long before the living imagination of the peoples found in thought the bridle which might guide its course in steadiness, safety, and truth. Perhaps it will be equally long before it is recognized that the bridle cannot generate the movement it is designed to guide. The shadows |