God and the Absolute

Cornelius Van Til

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Princeton University In Candidacy for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
 Introduction
In many quarters the idea seems to prevail that the God of Christianity and
the Absolute of modern idealistic philosophy are identical. Idealism and
Christianity seem to have formed an alliance against all forms of Realism and
Pragmatism. It is granted that there is some difference between Idealism and
Christianity in its creedal statement but then the former has brought out the
logical implications of the latter and gives a more systematic and coherent
expression to the principle underlying Christianity. This better and more complete
expression has been accomplished through Idealism’s emphasis on the
immanence of God. Not as though the Christian Church had not confessed this
doctrine, but it had never been taken seriously, since a deistic doctrine of
transcendence was also retained. In the Idealistic emphasis on immanence the
essence of Christianity is said to be retained and its form relieved of some
unsymmetrical edges.

The alliance thus formed is hailed by philosophers and theologians alike as

prophetic of a glorious dawn of peace and progress. Clasping hands we have
stopped our wrangle and at last have found an outlet for our energies in the
improvement of the human race. Yet there are some murmurings to be heard
here and there that all is not gold that glitters. Now since I find myself among the
group of malcontents who have not joined their voice to the applause of peace,
peace, because there is no peace, I am here called upon to give an account of the
faith that is in me. I still believe in the God of Christianity and not in the Absolute
of Idealism. Believing my faith to be a “reasonable faith” I shall in this paper
attempt to prove that the apparent similarity between Idealism and Christianity
covers a fundamental diversity, that consequently we must make a choice
between them and that the choice for Christianity is philosophically the more
tenable.

To do this it will be sufficient to take the pivotal conception of God which lies
at the basis of all Christian theism and contend that it is the only conception that
can offer a possible unity to human experience. The only alternative to belief in
this God is scepticism. The course of our argument will be that Idealism
beginning with the sanguine expectation of finding complete rationality in
experience must slowly give up its high ideal and come around to the Pragmatic
camp of thought which regards all attempts at metaphysics as futile. To establish
the above argument would be sufficient for our contention were it not that some
of the more recent idealists seem to have relinquished the hope of complete
rationality and have to that extent already yielded to the Pragmatic position.
Hence we shall have to preface our controversy with Idealism with a brief
discussion of the Pragmatic conception of thought in order to justify the search
for complete unity in experience.

God and the Absolute

All philosophy begins with experience and seeks for its implications. By
experience we mean that which happens to and through human beings who find
themselves in a spatio-temporal environment. We do not include in this term the
implications or presuppositions that may be necessary to make it intelligible. As
human beings we are here somehow, whatever we are, wherever we have come
from and whithersoever we are going.

Beginning with the simplest of data Christian Theism contends that they imply
the existence of an Absolute God. The origin, preservation and destiny of the
phenomenal world have their explanation in God only. Without the conception of
a self-sufficient God our human experience would be meaningless. It is well to
note at once the nature of the argument; it is transcendental and not formally
logical. An argument for the existence of God based on formal logic would imply
the ability to define God and arrive at a comprehensive rationality of all our
experience. A transcendental argument on the contrary, is negative in so far that
it reasons from the impossibility of the opposite. If it be said that the impossibility
of the opposite is a canon of formal logic after all, the reply is that every one
must use formal arguments but that the important point is to define their bearing
power. As to that it seems reasonable to hold that a position in which we can see
contradiction is untenable. Moreover a position which reduces our experience to
chaos cannot claim the adherence of rational creatures. That is, our basis for
rejecting certain views is always that we conceive them to be irrational. On the
other hand we accept a certain position in the philosophical world not because
we can completely rationalize all experience upon it as a basis. Our metaphysics
cannot be more geometrici demonstrata: you cannot prove your position to
anyone unless you completely have comprehensive knowledge or at least are
certainly on the way toward it. Accordingly, we do not seek to prove Christian
theism but only try to show that we can find no meaning in our human
experience unless there be a self-sufficient God to give it meaning.

But now the pragmatist questions what it calls the rationalistic assumption
just made that we must find meaning in the sense of rationality in our experience.
Only that has meaning, says the Pragmatist, which has value for biological
adjustment to our environment. In order then to justify our “rationalistic”
conception of meaning, we shall first examine the pragmatic notion of the same
term. According to the contention of Pragmatism our notion of meaning leads to
speculations about the Absolute and its ways which have no scientific or practical
value at all. F. C. S. Schiller says that even if it were true that experience, as some
Idealists maintain, is experience of the Absolute it would still have no value. 1 If a
peace-loving race on a small island knew it to be true that a band of pirates well
equipped with weapons of war dwelt on a neighboring island, would this
knowledge have no meaning for them? But waiving such extreme statements it is
said that all speculations about an Absolute are only “miasmatic exhalations of a
false intellectualism, which has misconstrued its own nature and powers.” 2 If this
be correct then our discussion had better stop at once. We might, however, ask
how it is true that the human race in its most advanced sections, seems to have
considered it a biological necessity to engage in speculation about God; to many
a martyr the concept seems to have had a meaning. But let us rather briefly trace
the argument advanced. The notion of an Absolute is meaningless because it is
based on a priori argument spun out regardless of fact. Men of equal synoptic
imagination might spin out various networks of logical thought which would fit
equally well or equally bad upon actual experience. This criticism, with the
understanding that it applies to Idealism seems warranted. Many quotations from
B. Bosanquet’s logic might be cited to bear out the contention that a logical
construction is made and experience must fit into it as best as it can. To speak of
“conditions of all possible experience,” to say that “no existence can be
established which does not precisely fit an essence” 3 may well be considered
beyond the competence of man who is temporally and physically dependent and
derived. Such statements involve a paralogism, an extension of the categories of
our thought beyond experience without sufficient warrant. How can we be certain
that there are no superior intelligences, the laws of whose being we cannot
undertake to lay down? As we shall see later it is this aphorism that we consider
to be the worm at the taproot of idealistic logic. For the present it may suffice to
say that upon its basis we have to do violence to our experience of time and
change. The most thorough attempts to intellectualize time do not seem
convincing; there is at least always the illusion of time and change that remains
unaccounted for.

1
“Axioms as Postulates,” p. 54. In, Personal Idealism Ed. by H. Stur.
2
Ibid., p. 129.
3
B. Bosanquet, Meeting of Extremes, p. 80.
 Agreeing with the negative conclusion of Pragmatism we have not done so
for the same interest entirely. Both have used the argument that Idealism does
violence to our experience. But fighting side by side we now begin to quarrel
between ourselves about the spoils. Theism holds that a great obstacle has been
removed by the destruction of a priorism which impeded its progress toward the
establishment of the existence of a supreme Intelligence. If the a priorism
referred to had not been removed it would have been impossible to contend for
the existence of a being of which we could not beforehand establish the essence;
that is only a God quantitatively greater but not qualitatively distinct could be
held to exist; all experience would have to be of one type. But the moment we
proceed by an attempt at positive argument to draw the Pragmatist toward our
belief he charges us again that we are indulging in “miasmatic exhalations.” The
reason for his opposition to Idealism was that he regards every argument for an
Absolute to be vitiated with intellectualism and a priorism. He points to the fact
that the meaning of our terms relative and absolute are meaningless to us unless
we regard them as related. This fact we cannot would deny, but it is the
conclusion drawn from this fact that seems questionable. In the first place the
rejection of the Absolute on the basis of such an argument implies that it is
unintelligible to think of an Absolute not in relation to the world, for that which is
without meaning is unintelligible. But why should it be unintelligible? It seems
quite intelligible to think of the existence of an absolute God before the existence
of the world to whom the world was present in thought only unless you place the
question on the basis of abstract logic which Pragmatism is unable to do. For a
pragmatist it should be no more difficult to conceive of an Absolute as existing
than to think of possible dwellers on the planet Mars. Our criticism of Pragmatism
on this score is therefore that it uses the weapons of a priori warfare to hold its
ground. We feel compelled to press this point. Pragmatism says the conception
of an Absolute is meaningless because the terms are relative. Above we saw that
you cannot say a thing to be meaningless if it is true and as far as Pragmatism is
concerned the existence of God might be a fact. To that it is meaningless means
in the last analysis, that it cannot be true, and to say that it cannot be true you
need a priori argument. To establish the laws for all possible experience and to
say that there can be no Absolute involves equally unwarrantable a priori
procedure.

Now if we have not been mistaken in the former paragraph we have removed
another obstacle in the way of an argument for Theism. We have seen that it is
meaningless to say that the existence of an Absolute is meaningless as this
statement comes from the mouth of a pragmatist. For the Pragmatist all things
are possible, and anything may be actual and therefore have a meaning. But since
our purpose is to deal with Idealism, we have to observe that even taking the
argument from relativity of terms on a non-pragmatic but on an intellectual basis
there is in it no neutralizing power. To conclude that there can be no Absolute
that is self-sufficient because it is factually related to the world and because we
cannot think it otherwise than as related to the world is to draw a larger
conclusion than premises warrant. Waiving the ad hominem versus Pragmatism,
waiving also the fact that it is an a priori argument which undertakes to define
positively or negatively what reality can or cannot be, there is the further
objection that even on a priori ground the conclusion to the impossibility an
Absolute is unwarranted since it assumes that to be related is to be relative. This
cannot be proved. We cannot know of a God except as related to us but why
should this necessity of knowledge be raised to a necessity of being? If with
Pragmatism we contend against Idealism that as temporally dependent creatures
we are not entitled to a priori argument, and if for other reasons, this time
against Pragmatism, we find it necessary to posit the existence of an Absolute,
the argument from the relativity of the terms need not deter us from holding our
position since we should expect that the creatures would not be able to think of
the Absolute except as related to them because he actually is and they have
never been otherwise than related to the Absolute. Nor should we expect that we
could conceive of the Absolute from his side otherwise than as thinking of the
world in idea if not in actuality. But all this cannot justify us in saying that there
could not possibly be an Absolute unrelated to the world of our experience. To
say that involves the endless existence backwards, of the world of time and space,
which we have no right to assume. Moreover on a purely logical basis it involves
the difficulty of an infinite regress which may be regarded at least as great a
difficulty as that of conceiving of an Absolute. Then also Christian Theism does
not advance an Absolute who did not eternally contemplate the creation of a
temporal world so that, granted the logical argument, there is always the
concession that God contemplated the world in idea.

Before passing on we must remark that this attack on Theism with a priori
weapon, has also yielded the positive fruit that it affords us a basis for our later
criticisms of Idealism, which will be that Idealism with its emphasis on a priori
argument must do violence to an element in our experience, namely that of time
and change and secondly that for the same reason it must hold to correlativity of
God and man; the complete correlativity of language and logic must, if carried
through on an a priori basis, lead to a correlativity of being.

But meanwhile we have not yet convinced the Pragmatist. If he grant us that
his argument from the correlativity of the terms Absolute and relative does not
prove his point he will say that after all his position does not depend upon
intellectual argument. It is his very criticism of intellectualism that “the organism
is active and the organism is one.” 4 Now this we grant at once. But when the
further assertion is made that therefore the intellect must become the servant of
the will and desire we reply: “the organism is one.” Voluntarism is not the only
alternative to a priorism. The criticism on a priorism is valid without the basis of
voluntarism, for it rests upon the fact that a priorism does violence to our time-
experience. If we take the unity of the organism seriously we will give intellectual
argument as much right of existence as the will; and not make the one servant to
the other. For it is not at all a slur on intellectual argument if it has historically
arisen in answer to the need of the organism. Granted that our wills and desires
have been instrumental in eliciting them, it remains to be shown that this is
incompatible with the existence of a supreme Intelligence which has first given
that organism the ability to postulate and experiment and succeed therein. If
Pragmatism still persists in maintaining that an Absolute is meaningless it will at
last be compelled to meet us face to face on metaphysical ground. Its
voluntarism cannot long endure without such basis. It is always possible to ask
the voluntarist why he refuses to go farther than so far in an infinite series, where
he gets the right to say that if there is a God he must be finite since there is evil
in the world, and for what reason our weary minds “will not acquiesce in less than
a complete harmony of its experience.” 5 Above we have noted that he sought to
justify his position by a priori argument against opposing types of metaphysics
which already presuppose a metaphysics to begin with. Here we see that the only
answer a voluntarist can give to our many questions is that it just happens or that
he is powerful enough to make things happen. Now this very fact that
Pragmatism cannot do without a metaphysics, seems to be sufficient to neutralize
its voluntarism, since there is then some characteristic of the universe which is to
justify our postulation; and we are once more free to discuss with the weapons of
ordinary thought the stability of this basis.

With our armour reluctantly restored to us we must now proceed to draw out
Pragmatism from its last retreat. We find that complete lawlessness reigns
supreme within its camp. We begin, says Schiller, without any determination. “We
may indeed shrink from the assertion of an absolute determinism, but it is certain
that we cannot say what made or determined the character of the first reaction,
and that the first establishment of the habit of reaction is a matter of immense
difficulty.” 6 But we are not alarmed of this difficulty. As with Alice in Wonderland

4
F. C. S. Schiller, Op. Cit. p. 84.
5
F. G. S. Schiller, Op. Cit, p. 91.
6
Idem., p. 56.
things just happen, often, if not always, at our wish. Meanwhile as the organism
develops and its need for a “complete harmony of experience” becomes more
urgent he must teach himself the lesson that things just happen. He postulates
that two plus two equals four because he needs arithmetic; he postulates a
uniformity of nature, a teleology, a God and they are there. In short pragmatism
with its supremacy of the will, its insistence on indetermination is compelled to
hold that all the order and rationality we see or think we see and experience has
come about by chance. Our intellectual cosmos as well as the physical universe
float freely “in a sea of the unknown,” 7 as derelict adrift on a shoreless sea.

Now there seems to be no good reason why we should accept such a view of
the universe while the rationality that is part of our natures make it more
reasonable to believe that the order we observe or experience has not come
about by chance. The unity of our natures for which Schiller and others plead
argue against a metaphysics of chance. Schiller admits this when he says: “For
granting that I have succeeded in connecting our cognitive apparatus with the
earlier functions of consciousness by means of the principle of the postulate it is
open to anyone to demand the reason why we should be capable of feeling and
volition, and so gradually to drive me back into the formless, mindless,
indifferentiated void which is conceived to precede all evolution. That this
difficulty should occur in all theories is no answer, and a poor consolation.” 8 By
denying the validity of metaphysics which begins with our experience and seeks
for the presuppositions of it Pragmatism found itself compelled to raise bare
possibility to the highest thinkable metaphysical status. This we should not
expect from a point of view that so zealously advocates clinging to the actual yet
such seems to be the natural outcome of its position. Schiller and James would
instill an optimism into our souls by saying that we can ignore the antimonies
that have harassed an incompetent mind since they are meaningless to us, but it
would appear that pessimism is the result if there is no reasonable hope that
there is an ultimate rationality at the basis of the universe that shall justify such
organisms that can acquiesce in nothing less than a complete unity of experience.
We hold it then of great practical importance to continue our search for the
Absolute; it seems a biological necessity for the human organism.

In our positive argument we can now be brief. Many a brick lies prepared to
be taken and placed into the walls of our structure. Both Pragmatism and
Idealism have emphasized an aspect of the truth. The former has taught us not to
sacrifice our time experience to the exigencies of an a priori logic while from the

7
Idem., p. 57.
8
Idem., p. 25.
latter we have learned that going to the other extreme of raising the will to the
highest power we shall return with the reward of grief that we cannot satisfy a
will apart from reason. Both Idealism and Pragmatism we believe, are weak in the
over-emphasis of one aspect of our experience. With Professor Pringle-Pattison
we would take as our starting point, as noted at the outset “the reality of
appearances.” That is the universe will ultimately answer to the many sided
demands of our natures not because we demand but because we can demand.
Otherwise expressed we can say that we begin with the validity of human
knowledge. The foregoing discussion has taught what to understand by that
term. It does not imply a priorism but the use of our reasoning faculty upon our
experience to see what presuppositions it implies.

We begin accordingly without presuppositions. Here is our bit of temporal

reality called the universe or world. All that we can see or experience moves and
changes. Yet in our natures there is the urge to rationality and system; that is we
need not have comprehensive knowledge ourselves but the nature of knowledge
seems to demand that there be a system somewhere. We begin, as Schiller says,
with our little island of reality and actuality. With what is this little island
surrounded, with bare possibility? We have seen that Schiller regards that sea of
possibility as the source of pessimism. Pragmatism of all philosophies emphasizes
the actual as the only thing in which we have much interest. But now it is
compelled to think of bare possibility as having independent meaning. Starting as
we do with the same actuality with which Pragmatism begins, we hold it more
reasonable to presuppose a complete reality and actuality from which that which
we know is derivative. We would agree then with Professor A. N. Whitehead, that
the protean character of activity as manifested in the universe compels us to
presuppose a rationality to account for the determinateness and order in the
world. 9 He thinks that an actual but non-temporal entity is required to which we
may ascribe the source of this order. That is, the temporal series of experience in
itself is not self-explanatory. The complete indetermination with which Schiller
begins cannot of itself except by accident lead us on toward determinateness and
tendency. Whitehead has felt this, but he does not appear to have carried his
argument through consistently. He feels the need of and strives to get a
transcendent God because the time series cannot do without him, lest it come
from chaos and chance, but he soon defines God as a “function” of and an
“element” in human experience. His God is after all a universal principle in
experience and therefore with the temporal series has come by chance.

9
Religion in the Making, p. 92, Lowell Lectures for 1926, N.Y. 1926.
 This would teach us the truth of Watson’s statement that the least bit of
coherent experience presupposes complete rationality. Anything short of that
cannot do since it is itself dependent upon the temporal series and comes by
chance. Or if it should be said that the series might extend infinitely without a
definite beginning it is sufficient at this point to observe that as far as our
experience is concerned chance is then more ultimate than rationality. A. E. Taylor
puts the alternative clearly: either accept the priority of the actual to the potential
or be ready to assert that you can conceive of the possible non-existence of any
reality whatever. 10

Beginning as we did with the assumption of the validity of human knowledge

we have found that this assumption implies the existence of a completely actual
experience. Hence we can now say that human knowledge presupposes the
Absolute. If our argument has been correct, then we have all the while been able
to search for the Absolute because in reality the rationality of our experience with
which we began finds its source in Him. We would not be able to bring the two
together if they were not at bottom related; the rationality we possess would be
meaningless without God. We would not be able to ask questions about the
Absolute or about anything else without the Absolute being the source of our
ability. Hence we shall from now on say that we must presuppose the Absolute of
Theism if our experience is to have meaning not forgetting that we were driven
to this presupposition by a transcendental argument that began with nothing
more than what Pragmatism also takes for granted namely, human organisms in
a spatio-temporal environment.

One very important result from this line of reasoning is that we can never
expect to explain all the difficulties involved in the conception of the relation of
God to the world. These difficulties are many and great, but they are not in a
position to do us hurt. When we said that the least experience of coherence
implies complete rationality we did not imply that it is possible for human reason
ever to attain to a comprehension of this rationality. Rather the contrary, all that
we have accomplished is to win for ourselves the right to believe in a completely
actual experience in whom the system of knowledge is. It will be our criticism of
Idealism that with the same demand of complete rationality it is bound by virtue
of its a priorism to hold that mankind can at sometime sooner or later hope to
attain complete knowledge. This may serve to distinguish between Christian
Theism and Idealism. The rivalry between them is not so much which one is least
beset with difficulties, for in that respect both have enough and more than they
can handle, but the question is which one can claim to offer any explanation at
10
Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Article on “Theism,” p. 273.
all. Christian Theism makes the bold assertion that no other philosophy can
explain reality in any sense, since on their basis God and man can be aspects of
the same reality. Now it is possible in a sense to call one aspect of the same
reality more ultimate or fundamental than another, but it does not seem possible
to carry such a distinction far enough to justify the interpretation of one aspect in
terms of another entirely. Still it is that which must be done if the a priorism of
idealistic thought is carried through since time must then be reduced to order.
On the other hand if no attempt is made to interpret one aspect in terms of
another but we desire only a mutual implication of aspects we are finally reduced
to do violence to our natures since we must then come back to chance and bare
possibility as our earlier discussion has shown. But let it be clearly understood
that though we do not hesitate to say that Idealism cannot hope to come up to
its ideal of complete rationality, we do not claim for Christian Theism that it can
explain anything more if by explain we mean the resolution of logical difficulties.
To put it very simply, as a child points to its father as the source of information
and explanation so Theism asks for the right to appeal to a logic that it is higher
than ours. Idealism cannot claim such refuge since it has laid down the pattern of
all possible experience in the human mind. The natural outcome of its a priori
reasoning is that there cannot possibly be an Experience which is different from
ours except in quantity. Hence its ideal of complete rationalisation remains that
of formal logic, resolution of all difficulties. How far Idealism is from hoping ever
to realize its ideal the constant appeals to mystery can tell us; while in so far as it
has relinquished its ideal it has to face the dangers we have seen to be lurking in
Pragmatism.

If the Absolute of Theism is therefore the most reasonable hypothesis for the
explanation of the phenomenon of coherence in our experience it follows that all
human knowledge is received from revelation. God reveals himself in nature and
man according to man’s capacity. The essence of God is known to himself
completely but can never be so known by man, or man would have to be equal
to God. Thus the idea of a transcendent God is basic to the idea of an immanent
God. The term transcendence is of course from our side relative to the term
immanence but that does not alter the fact that neither of them could for us have
an intelligible connotation except upon the pre-supposition of a self-sufficient
Absolute. The same thing holds true of such terms as absolute and relative, time
and eternity. If we cannot conceive of the former of them in each case having an
independent or positive meaning apart from the latter correlatives through which
alone we can approach them there could be no intelligence in such antitheses at
all. We are again not seeking to establish this on the logical necessity of priority
or positive meaning, but it is a deduction from the hypothesis of an absolute God
which we were compelled to make for reasons given above.

The notion of a self-sufficient God thus becomes a determining factor in all

our thinking. We have reached the notion itself by transcendental argument but
once we have it we cannot modify it unless we find that our reasoning by which
we came to the conception at the beginning was wrong. Professor W. E. Hocking
expresses this truth by saying that if we have once had experience of God it will
color all our future thinking. 11 “If God has once been known, the world and the
self must thereafter be seen under the survey of this experience. I am able to
reflect upon any world-self system because and only because I have already
experienced something beyond it.” That is, God becomes for us the supreme and
ultimately interpretive category of all human experience. To give but one
illustration to bring out this idea. F. C. S. Schiller says that when we meet such
difficulties as are involved in an attempt to harmonize the presence of evil with
the existence of an omnipotent God, we simply do away with the latter. But that
procedure, if our earlier argument was correct, does away with human knowledge
as well, hence we hold to our hypothesis and search by means of subsidiary
hypothesis for the meaning of evil and if we are not able to explain all, we, as
above explained, do not give up hope of complete rationality but find it in God
alone. With the above general sketch of Christian Theism as our standard we now
proceed to a criticism of Idealism. We have already noticed that formally there is
much similarity between Theism 12 and Idealism; both hold to the priority of the
actual to the potential. But it is noteworthy that the two systems hold to this
priority chiefly for different reasons. Idealism holds to this formula because of an
analysis of the nature of judgement. We believe that Idealism is to all intents and
purposes correct in its analysis not so much because we are convinced by the
analysis itself but because for us the series of time experience is inexplicable
without the presupposition of God. Beginning from that direction our contention
is corroborated by the analysis of the nature of judgement which reveals just
what we expect it to reveal namely that unity is fundamental if not prior to
diversity. The distinction between the different routes of argument noted is
important because it again points to an underlying diversity between Idealism
and Theism. The latter does not depend on a priori argument for its position, and
what is more it considers a priori argument dangerous and invalid. As employed
by idealistic logic the argument from the analysis of judgement implies that we
can rely upon it alone when we seek to know the nature of reality. Moreover it
also implies that all possible experience is of one type, as noted above. This is

11
The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 473, New Haven, 1912.
12
we shall omit the adjective “christian.”
exceedingly dangerous to admit for any theistic philosophy. It at once strikes the
root of a qualitative distinction between God and man; we soon begin to speak
of Reality of which God and man are aspects. Then further, since we find it
difficult to rid ourselves of our time-experience we soon begin to hold that all
Reality is essentially synthetic and we are well on the road to Pragmatism for time
then becomes an aspect of it.

To trace this line of thought in more detail. The very nature of judgement,
says Bosanquet, is that unity underlies all difference. 13 By unity is not meant an
abstract unity or identity; rather the contrary a concrete unity which implies
difference. Seven plus five equals twelve is the type of all judgements in that it is
an eternal novelty. Bosanquet seeks by this analysis to escape atomism in logic
and metaphysics which tries to bring to harmony things which are independent.
This atomism reveals itself especially in indeterminism, but Bosanquet’s formula is
calculated to meet it also in this shape since there could be nothing new unless it
departed from some basis in thought or reality. The enemy of all sane Idealism is
therefore to look for a future that is unconnected with the past. We shall admit
that it seems an extreme position to maintain that this theory of the judgement
must if consistently carried through leads us to Pragmatism. Yet this seems to be
inevitably its course.

We hold that modern Idealism presents much the same history as ancient
Idealism; a marvelous logical structure slowly yielding to the pressure of an
experience that cannot fit into it. Plato began with the ideal of complete
rationalisation by the force of logic, but evil and time and space became too
strong for him. It was at this critical juncture of thought that Plato appealed to
mythology and theology as a second best and fashioned his god to account for
that which the ‘Ideas’ could not explain. 14 So it seems to us that Idealism, mindful
first of all of the demands of logic, constructs its system. Then, faced with the
same difficulties that racked Plato’s thought, Idealism coils up underneath an
ambiguity in the term Absolute. According to its most fundamental meaning the
Absolute for Idealism is identical with the whole of Reality. Throughout its logic
and metaphysics it seeks constantly for a coherence between aspects of one
general reality which is taken for granted as ultimate. But though the Absolute as
whole is the most fundamental conception of Idealism, the Absolute as the
Beyond has been the notion that seemed to be most ready to use. The

13
The Essentials of Logic, p. 79. London 1920. Cf. also his Logic, 2 vol., Oxford, 1888
and The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy, Chapter on 7 plus 5 equals
12, London 1921.
14
P. E. More, The Religion of Plato, p. 40 ff., Princeton, 1921.
masterpiece of metaphysics by F. H. Bradley 15 , could find reality only or chiefly in
a Beyond. The logical difficulties involved in the conceptions of space, time, the
self, etc. offered sufficient reason for Bradley to condemn them to “appearance,”
of a Reality which is beyond and in which the difficulties inherent in
“appearances” will somehow be resolved. Bradley, however, might be charged
with using the via negationis of Scholasticism but we find that even Bosanquet
who openly says that we are to argue positively from the implications of our
natures to the nature of the Absolute holds to much the same view as Bradley. As
human beings we are not to be set on the imperviousness of our personality; we
are to become foci through which the Absolute reveals Himself; we are to be
“adjectives” of a Beyond. Nothing so convincingly reveals the strain of acosmism
running through the thought of Bosanquet than the inverse proportion he
maintains to exist between the individual’s own interest and his love for the
Absolute. 16 Not till the individual loses his own interest does he feel the “nisus
toward the whole.” “The unit makes no insistence on its finite or isolable
character. It looks, as in religion, from itself and not to itself, and asks nothing
better than to be lost in the whole which is at the same time its own best.” 17 It is
for the individual’s best to be lost in the whole. There is to be sure also an
individual that is realized in the whole, but this latter individual has entirely
renounced the former, which was bent upon its own interests. Now it may be said
that the human individual, according to Bosanquet, forms an aspect of the whole,
rather than a momentary appearance or temporal focus of a Beyond. But in that
case the Absolute too becomes an aspect of the whole since an aspect requires a
counter aspect and there seems to be no good reason to refer to it as Beyond in
terms of which finite personality is to be interpreted; why should one aspect be
interpreted in terms of another aspect? Then further, in as much as the Absolute
is often spoken of as revealing Himself or itself,—being regarded either as
personal or as impersonal,—and in as much as this revelation is spoken of as
inexplicable 18 , the Absolute is very clearly looked upon as Beyond. Even when
the Absolute is quite consistently spoken of as the whole, this whole itself
becomes a Beyond since the human self, time and space must be
metamorphosed to be taken into it.

We see then that both Bradley and Bosanquet have followed in the footsteps
of Hegel and have done scant justice to temporal reality. It is allowed to be
dignified with the title of aspect of reality, but how humble an aspect. In short in

15
Appearance and Reality.
16
The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 153, London 1913.
17
F. H. Bradley in Mind, N.S.V. 19, p. 154.
18
The original text indicates the placement of a footnote here, but none is given.—ed.
its acosmic strain Idealism has endeavoured to intellectualize all categories of
power and force. We cannot but think that if Idealism were serious about time’s
being an aspect of the whole it could not condone a process of such
intellectualisation. The Absolute as Beyond is the fruit of the a priorism against
which Pragmatism rose in opposition. It is the product of a logic which if carried
through must destroy the very appearance of space and time. For that reason
Theism and Pragmatism are equally opposed to the Beyond of Idealism.
Naturally, Idealism will not accept the criticism that it does injustice to any aspect
of experience. The basis of our criticism, we are told, is that we raise time and
space to independent reality, while they are only subordinate aspects of the
whole. Idealism would even seem to outdo Pragmatism in its reverence for reality
since it says we have no right to question the origin of any aspect of it at all but
must take it as given and ultimate. But to do this with time-experience is rather
difficult. Hence we see Idealism, in order to live up to its demands, seeking to
transform time-experience into an aspect of a timeless Reality. For one thing we
are told, causality is a category that holds only between phenomena and cannot
be applied to reality as a whole. 19 This is true but quite irrelevant. Scarcely
anyone will be found who seeks to apply the category of causality to the whole of
reality. Theism thinks it applies to the whole of temporal reality but distinctly
avers that temporal reality is not the whole of reality. Other forms of thought that
emphasize the reality of time and the possibility of an absolute beginning and at
the same time hold that temporal reality is the whole of reality must hold that
reality came by chance, in which case also there is no question of causation. Due
to the failure to distinguish clearly between ultimate Reality in which time is
included and ultimate Reality from which time is excluded is the charge that
causation is applied to reality as a whole.

As for Idealism itself, it seems that here it meets with grave difficulties. Reality
McTaggart tells us must be timeless; it is the demand of logic. 20 But then too,
what we call time experience must be an aspect of that timeless reality. The
difficulty is so great says McTaggart that he is almost driven to despair. Timeless
reality is complete in itself. Then why the appearance of time at all? It is then
unreal. Or time appearance has some meaning but then timeless reality was
incomplete and the actual is no longer prior to the potential. Hence the attempt
is made to interpret time in terms of the timeless entirely. This looks as though
the one ultimate is interpreted in terms of another Ultimate.

19
J. E. McTaggart, Mind, N.S.V. 24, p. 326.
20
J. E. McTaggart, Mind, N.S. 2. article, “Time and the Hegelian Dialectic.”
 Another instance of the same strain of acosmism we find in Professor
Bosanquet’s discussion of value and purpose. 21 All categories that are derived
from our temporal experience, such as teleology, or purpose cannot have
meaning in absolute experience since the Absolute is not subject to our
difficulties. The Absolute need not, e.g. use means for the realisation of a
purpose. Hence we can speak of value but not of purpose in the case of the
Absolute. But surely this seems too much like a “claims and counterclaims,”
philosophy to obtain our adherence. We can well see how the difficulty becomes
insoluble on idealistic basis. As stated before the a priori nature of its thought
makes it impossible to conceive of a being who is not subject to the categories of
our experience but for whom these categories still have a meaning. There is no
doubt a logical difficulty here but that should not lead us to deny the possibility
of such a Being. To say that all possible experience must be of one type leads in
this case to choices of “either or,” which we cannot sustain in our thinking.

The purpose for which we have laid bare this acosmic strain in Idealism is to
show that even here where it has the greatest possible formal resemblance to
Theism it is at bottom not at all the same. Critics of all systems have hurled their
invectives indiscriminately at the God of Theism and the Absolute of Idealism. For
them God and the Absolute are equally transcendent and functionally valueless
and must therefore be destroyed.

But we have already indicated that the Beyond of Idealism is quite distinct
from the Beyond of Theism. The latter is not the product of a priori thought and
for that reason asks no destruction of spatio-temporal reality nor even any
transmutation. On the contrary it is a concept obtained by transcendental
argument and therefore necessary for the reality of time-experience. For that
reason too it can exist, and is functionally important so that it is still too early to
speak of the “obsolescence of the Eternal.” 22 On the other hand the criticism on
the Beyond of Idealism only helped its more speedy descent into an immanent
principle within temporal experience. 23 The reaction against the Beyond of
Idealism was bound to come and appears justified. We no longer find so much
emphasis on the beyond as formerly. Several Idealists have maintained that God
would have remained partly hidden to himself if He had not manifested Himself

21
The Principle of Individuality and Value, Lect. 4.
22
Lovejoy, Phil. Rev. V. 18, 1909, p. 479.
23
Cf. S. F. Davenport, Immanence and Incarnation, Cambridge, 1925; Also J. Caird,
Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Glasgow, 1899; And W. H. Moberly, “God and the
Absolute,” in Foundations ed. by B. H. Streeter, London, 1915.—The exact location of
this footnote is unclear from original text.—ed.
in spatio-temporal reality. This seems to be the logical outcome of Hegel’s
thought when he spoke of the dialectic development of the Absolute. According
to eternal law, we find that the Absolute reveals Himself in you and me as foci
when the proper configurations have arrived. Thus we see the revelation of the
Absolute within ourselves depends upon a necessary urge within or even beyond
His being.

We should be very certain at this point not to do injustice to Idealism.

Therefore we are happy to find that such an authority as J. Watson justifies our
conclusion that the Beyond of Idealism cannot long endure. 24 He criticizes
Bosanquet on this very score. It is his contention that in as much as Bosanquet
has never openly denied and all the while positively implied that our knowledge
is absolute, not in the sense of comprehensive, but in principle, he has no right to
an Absolute as Beyond in any sense. 25 Watson holds clearly that the idealistic
theory of judgment implies that we can reasonably hope to be able to define the
nature of all reality. The real is rational and the rational is real he takes very
literally for himself and neatly shows that therein he is representative of idealistic
logic in general. Mr. Carrol makes essentially the same criticism and adds that still
Bosanquet “failed to disclaim that there is any real sense in which we can speak
of an ultimate subject.” 26 This criticism appears to be fair when we recall that
Bosanquet himself makes the whole rather than the Beyond the subject of all
predication. If we are “adjectives” of the whole, the Beyond can be no more. To
speak of the Absolute as an aspect of the whole revealing itself amounts to
asking why one part of the whole reveals itself in another part of the whole. We
would hold then that the weakness of idealistic logic lies in its a priorism, its
disregard of the fact that we as temporally and physically dependent beings
cannot be certain that we have found laws of thought that must hold for all
possible experience. It is quite possible for Objective Idealism to say that it finds
but does not make these laws and therefore cannot help that they are eternal.
But this does not dispose of our objection since the human subject is still
involved in the sense that it assumes the power to pronounce these laws as
holding in the same manner for both God and man. When a priori logic is
allowed free sway God and man tend to become correlative. God and man
become equally necessary aspects of the whole of reality. Now by the term
correlativity we do not mean that Idealism wants to make God and man equal.
God is always conceived as infinitely greater than man and it is quite possible to

24
J. Watson, Phil. Rev. V. 4, 1895, pp. 353ff; pp. 486ff. and Phil. Rev. V. 34, p. 440.
25
M. C. Carrol, Phil. Rev. V. 31, 1921,”The Nature of the Absolute in the Metaphysics
of B. Bosanquet,” p. 178.
26
The original text indicates a footnote here, but none is found.—ed.
maintain this in the sense that a universal found in many particulars is greater
than any one particular. All that interests us now to point out is that on idealistic
basis you cannot come to the conception of a God who is Absolute. By
correlativity between God and man we mean what Pringle-Pattison means when
he says: “Even granted that a divine experience is posited to correspond to
objects not known by us, it implies in the case of any so-called object, the identity
or at least the complete resemblance of the divine and human mode of
experience.” 27 It seems that McTaggart has drawn the logical conclusion from the
idealistic theory of judgment. He reduces the Beyond to the logical universal
within a plurality of individuals. The unity in his society is as fundamental as the
plurality but the plurality is also as fundamental as the unity; hence the pre-
existence of the human individual and the timelessness of reality.

The constant criticism of Theism which posits the existence of a transcendent

God who had meaning for Himself apart from the actual existence of the world, is
that such a conception is arbitrary not only but quite impossible since the terms
absolute and temporal are relative. This formal argument is the exact negative of
the positive used in the construction of the idealistic system. Hence we are doing
no injustice to Idealism when we say that on the basis of formal logic it
establishes the correlativity between God and man.

Now in the acosmic strain pervading Idealism this correlativity was not
abandoned. McTaggart raises us all to the non-temporal level with the Absolute
there to enjoy equal citizen rights with it. In fact when raised to this thin
atmosphere of acosmism the correlativity inherent in idealistic finds it more
difficult to conceal itself than in the denser air of temporal reality below. For
McTaggart God is the logical universal immanent in all particulars or else he
becomes one of the particulars Himself. Now on this basis it is not possible to
maintain that the Absolute has any meaning except that which finds realization in
the particulars. It is again quite true that Idealism does not wish to go that far
with its emphasis on immanence. It continues to speak of the Absolute as “self-
conscious” and “personal.” 28 But is Idealism entitled to such an Absolute? It
seems not; a logical universal has meaning only because of and for the particulars
in which it is manifested.

To sum up our criticism on Idealism thus far it may be said that Idealism has
by its a priori logic foreclosed the possibility of doing justice to temporal

27
Mind, N.S.V. 28, p. 5.
28
Pringle-Pattison in his Idea of God also wants God to have a meaning over and above
that which is revealed in us.
experience and for that reason has not been able to develop the necessity of an
Absolute by transcendental argument. Still feeling the need very strongly for an
Absolute it has sought to find one on the basis of a priori and formal logic only.
That is, Idealism sought to analyze the nature of judgment and construct reality
on that basis. In this procedure it could not help but make difference as
fundamental as unity. This in itself we would grant but it was assumed that
difference in time was fundamental. Reality is essentially synthetic, says
Bosanquet. The metaphysical correspondent to this logical analysis is that man,
temporally dependent, is necessary to the existence of God. It was this logical
procedure that made it impossible for Idealism to get a unity prior and
fundamental to diversity; no Absolute could be found. Put otherwise, Idealism
could not hold to its own ideal of the priority of the actual over the potential; the
logically synthetic,—if such a conception can have meaning,—will turn out to be
the temporally synthetic in the hands of men and once on this decline you will
land in the sea of bare possibility.

Now this ad hominem criticism of Idealism, if fair and to the point, lends great
support to the conception of the Absolute God of Theism as the unity that really
binds and the actual that is really prior. Again we do not say that there are no
difficulties involved in the conception but it seems at least to answer to a real
demand of our knowledge and to do no violence to any part of our nature. The
conception of unity in plurality we cannot comprehend but it does seem plain
that a unity not based upon complete actuality cannot bind, since it must unite
that which stands apart as particulars. That this is so follows from the fact that
there is then a vague possibility from which the totally unexpected may arise. The
new entities would be particulars not at all related to the old. Hence by the
common idealistic argument against Empiricism this is impossible. It is important
to see this clearly in order to show that only a unity based upon the complete
timeless actuality of Theism can ever hope to offer any coherence in experience.
But we hasten to add that such unity is beyond the possibility of our
comprehension. In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity we find unity and
difference equally fundamental, so that the unity is concrete and not abstract. It is
on the analogy of this concrete unity in difference we may conceive all human
experience to be built and to have significance on that basis.

We see then that Theism and Idealism alike have analyzed our concrete
experience and have found that unity and difference are both fundamental. But
Theism finds this to be true and possible of human experience because it is true
in its prototype, divine experience which is timeless and absolute. Now if it be
said that Idealism also makes the Absolute the prototype of the finite, this is
entirely true but the reply would be that the Absolute of Idealism cannot be truly
Absolute. To it the temporal manifestation in man is necessary as we have seen.
The difference at this point may perhaps be most clearly stated that the God of
Theism is thought to be related to the world but freely related. No Idealist will
subscribe to this; for him it has all the realistic implications of external relations.
Idealism will at once reply that no relation can be free. But to say that is to rely on
formal logic alone. It carries a priorism through to the death of our experience.
We cannot do justice to time unless we grant the possibility of an absolute
beginning of phenomenal existence; back of it lies either the void or a God
completely actual. Such was our transcendental argument. To overthrow this by
saying that all relations must be internal and necessary is to say that abstract
logic can dictate for all possible experience, divine as well as human. Abstract
logic cannot prove the existence of an Absolute, for its absolute must be related,
but neither can abstract logic prove the non-existence of an Absolute.

The justice of our contention that it is not possible on the basis of idealistic
logic to arrive at the conception of an Absolute can further be established by
citing the attempts of such men as Lindsay and H. Rashdall. They have reacted
against what appeared to them the intellectualism of Bosanquet; it seems to
them impossible to get anything but a Pantheism on the basis of Bosanquet’s
thinking. Lindsay wants a free and non-necessary relation of God to the world, 29
and Rashdall insists that God has created the world by the power of his will. Once
insert the term will into your conception of God’s relation to the world, thinks
Rashdall and you have freed yourself from all pantheistic thought. 30 But these
men halt between two opinions; they feel that idealistic logic leads them on to
Pantheism and therefore try to combine with it the formulae of theism. It is very
instructive to notice the result. Lindsay does not want a God who is “cosmically
independent,” so that he cannot well retain his other notion of a free relation of
God to the world. Similarly in the case of Rashdall, the will of God is strictly
conditioned throughout by law which is above God and by the cosmos without
which He could not exist. In the act of creation God is not the source of
possibility but wills for the best in an independent situation; possibility is greater
than God. When the critical juncture arrives and Rashdall must tell us where he
finds the source of morality he tells us that the individual’s supreme responsibility

29
Throughout Theistic Idealism, pp. 1, 24, 152, 154, London 1917.
30
A. Rashdall, “Relig. Phil. of Pringle-Pattison,” Mind, N.S.V. 28, 1918, p. 273.
Contentio Veritatis p. 34, London 1902.
is not to God as the source of moral laws but to the moral law itself or the moral
law as somehow embodied in reality as a whole. 31

Thus we see that not even an honest attempt coupled with a ready pen can
succeed to fashion a God who has a meaning apart from the existence of the
world if the starting point of idealistic logic, the essential relatedness in thought
and being between God and man can be assumed. If we have once adopted the
correlativity, as above explained to be inherent in the conception of internal
relations, attempt to insert the idea of God as Absolute is impossible. As a
consequence to say that the world is dependent upon God cannot have much
meaning since God is also dependent on the world; there is no room for the
operation of a will of God. It is difficult to see why men should still prefer the
term “creation” to either “emanation” or “revelation” unless it be a reluctant
confession that Idealism is a bit hard on our experience. 32

Our criticism of Idealism thus far has been that it does away with all
categories of power and tries to intellectualize causality. It does this because it
conceives of Reality as qualitatively of one piece. It tries to put qualitative
distinctions in when it is too late; its God can at best be a counterpart to our
experience. We may call Him the Beyond by courtesy because He is the great
invisible within each of us, we may even speak of Him as being a consciousness
and deify Him as in war time we deify the flag, but He is, when calmly reflected
on, nothing more than an eject of the human spirit. He cannot be the highest
interpretive category of Reality. Nor do we really try to make Him such. We speak,
to be sure of the world being dependent on Him because created by Him, but we
change and reinterpret God as our experience advances. We say that an Absolute
which we cannot change as our experience advances is not wanted. This may be
true but then we do not want an Absolute at all.

The implication of the theistic argument, therefore, is that the Absolute in

order to be absolute and be a category that we seriously employ for the
interpretation of Reality can not be modified at will. If we modify Him He is not
Absolute; and has lost interpretive value. As in so many cases Idealism has taught
us to hold fast to this truth. Only, we maintain, Theism has been more loyal to
this truth than Idealism could be; the logic of Idealism leaves no room for an
Absolute.

31
Contentio Veritatis, pp. 38, 39.
32
Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, Chapter on Creation.
 To substantiate our high claim for Theism here we must turn to those who
have made most of the truth that an Absolute must be presupposed and, in our
opinion, still could not succeed. B. Bosanquet criticizes Neo-Idealism that it has
substituted for the true insight: “If God is not then I am nothing” the other
statement: “If God is then I am not.” “The reason,” he continues, “as I have
explained elsewhere, I believe to lie in the equation of thought with thinking and
of thinking with reality, which is another aspect of the rejection of all
transcendence.” 33 Passages such as this coming from the pen of a great logician
reassures us of the formal correctness of our argument. Throughout we have
maintained that formally Idealism and Theism are in cordial agreement. “If God is
not then I am nothing,” to that both will readily give their assent. To the very last
Bosanquet clung to the position that “possibility is within the real, not reality
within the possible.”Meeting of Extremes, p. 180. Similarly E. Hocking says we exist
knowing the Absolute and adds the significant and determining statement: “If
God has once been known, the world and self must thereafter be seen under the
survey of this experience.” 34

What we need now to investigate, accordingly, is whether Bosanquet and

Hocking have done the one thing they regard as indispensable, making God as
the Absolute the presupposition of their thought. Now we hold that no one has
presupposed an Absolute unless this Absolute be considered as self-sufficient. An
Absolute which is cosmically dependent is no Absolute. McTaggart felt this very
keenly; for him an Absolute must be timeless. 35 But since he was bound by his
position to regard what we at least call time experience as an indispensable part
of the Absolute he proceeded to make time unreal. Since Idealism conceives of
God as cosmically dependent, it has made of God the counterpart but not the
source of phenomenal reality. God and the world are aspects of a Reality which
simply is. But it is really still too much to say of this whole Reality that it is for the
question of “is” could never have come into our minds since in no way would it
be possible to think of the opposite. Hence we could only stammer: Reality! But
even that privilege would at last be taken from us for even such stammering
implies the possibility of non-existence which would then be out of the question.

However, since we cannot help but think of the possibility of non-existence of

the phenomenal world because of the change we see within it, and since with
Idealism we hold that it is impossible to think of bare possibility or the non-

33
B. Bosanquet, Meeting of Extremes, p. 70.
34
Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 473.
35
J. E. McTaggart, “Time and the Hegelian Dialectic,” Mind, N.S.V. 2. 1893, p. 490.
Mind, N.S.V. 1894, p. 190; Mind, N.S. 17, 1908, p. 457.
existence of the whole of reality we are driven to presuppose the Absolute as
freely related to the world. Or, to put it more generally and therefore less open to
objection from Idealism because it says nothing about the necessary origination
of the temporal world, we might say that the very possibility of thinking of non-
existence intelligently at all brings us to the same conclusion. We cannot think of
the non-existence of the whole of Reality unless, as A. E. Taylor points out, we are
prepared to deny coherence of experience in any sense, and posit the priority of
bare possibility and potentially to reality and actuality. 36 And by parity of
reasoning we can add that since for us possibility is a valid thought and non-
existence a perfectly natural conception these categories have their application to
the world and not to God. As an ad hominem against Idealism we can say that
even the demands of formal logic seem better satisfied if we conceive of God as
the timelessly complete actuality and reality. At any rate, it will be seen that
Idealism, because it conceives of God as cosmically dependent, has not been able
to regard Him as Absolute and has by so doing not escaped any logical
difficulties except by creating others. Granted then that Idealism has presupposed
an Absolute it has not presupposed one that can really be called such.

We must now proceed to draw a further consequence from the idealistic

failure to presuppose a genuine Absolute namely that it really amounts to doing
without an Absolute in any sense, i.e. making human experience and temporal
reality self-interpretative. If we say that our experience is meaningless without the
presupposition of the Absolute we cannot then turn about and say that the
Absolute has no meaning except in dependence on us. If you do, you have not
presupposed an Absolute but a correlative or counterpart and are in for an
infinite regress, bouncing back and forth between two semi-absolutes. This being
unsatisfactory and refusing to accept the Absolute as sole source of meaning, so
that you give it interpretive authority, you are trying to do without an Absolute
altogether.

Since the day of Kant Idealism has been ready to act on this principle. It
openly avows its hostility to a transcendent God who might be complete without
the existence of the world; it would be for experience to transcend itself which
would be meaningless. Idealism would speak of the mutual implication of all the
various aspects of reality but rejects the interpretation of man in terms of God
alone. It is admitted on all sides that Kant’s greatest service for morality was that
he freed it from metaphysics. All heteronomy, all authority by God or man is
thrown over board. The majestic law within is independent of both God and man.
Kant still needs a God lest the independent morality operate in vain. But when it
36
Hastings, E. R. E., p. 278.
is said that Kant bowed out God at the front door to leave Him in again at the
back it ought in justice to him be said that he was not guilty of such an
inconsistency except in name. The God he let into the back door is quite a
different one from the one he bowed out at the front, or, if you will, he has been
sent out to rearrange Himself in order to be readmitted. In short, it is as Pringle-
Pattison already says in his “Lectures on Theism,” Kant had grasped, especially in
his conception of morality, the principle of immanence to be so greatly
developed by Hegelianism. According to it God and man are elements within the
whole of Reality and are subject to the laws that operate therein.

Kant did yeoman’s service for this line of speculation by his development of
the exclusively activistic character of thought. It is not without significance that
Italian Idealism has madly grasped for this aspect of Kant’s thought in order to
hold to its exclusive immanence views. 37 It was not so much by his criticism of
the theistic arguments as such that Kant has done most harm to Theism as by his
conception of the nature of thought. If thought is considered to be totally non-
receptive but active only, the a priorism of which we have spoken above
inevitably follows and men begin to speak of laws which must hold for all
possible experience, divine and human alike. This makes it impossible for a
qualitative distinction to exist between God and man, and no self-sufficient
Absolute can be presupposed.

For let us note that an Absolute that is not merely one in name implies that
man, who must be interpreted in terms of Him, must have a mind that is
receptive as well as active. A self-sufficient God can be known in no way by
revelation of Himself which revelation man must then receive. I do not say that
the human mind must be passive in the sense of immobile but receptive in the
sense that it can and does receive a revelation from the Absolute. The
metaphysical self-sufficiency of the Absolute implies that his rational creatures
must be in their consciousness actively receptive of the revelation of the Absolute
in nature and in man. This furthermore implies that man must regard the laws of
morality and thought applicable to humanity in a different sense than to God.
Time is also real for man in a different way than for God. If this were not so, God
could not be Absolute, or we should be absolute with God. These distinctions
amount to saying that for man there will always be a difference between the
unknown and the unknowable; the being of God cannot be fully revealed in man.

37
G. de Ruggiero, Modern Philosophy, tr. by A. H. Hannay and R. C. Collingwood,
London 1921.
 But the exclusive activity view of consciousness can not tolerate these
distinctions. It maintains that we can and must speak of a general nature of
thought that must needs describe every conceivable type of consciousness. This
wipes out the distinction between the unknown and the unknowable for man as
well as God. Now it is clear that we cannot speak of either an unknown or an
unknowable for God if we hold that He is absolute and fulfills the demand of
logic that actuality be prior to potentiality. But it is quite conceivable to hold to a
distinction between unknown and unknowable in the case of man and if we are
to accept an Absolute at all we must conceive of his relation to the universe to be
free. Then only can He give a revelation of Himself to man according to the
latter’s capacity. But all this is quite impossible on the basis of the immanence
principle introduced by Kant. Upon its basis the God of theism is an abstraction; a
more readily functioning deity was sought and the result could only be that deity
did not function at all for the deity is no longer absolute.

Now when philosophy has thus crossed the rubicon and resolves to do
without an absolute it has a difficult task to perform. We had accepted the
validity of human knowledge not because of its great scope but because of its
firm basis, because the Absolute without whom we could have no knowledge at
all is the guarantee of that knowledge which we have. We do not hold as the
modern realist, that you can patch its replica to a fragment of reality and say that
you have truth; coherence must be the basis of correspondence. But the
coherence itself is a matter of faith; that is, complete coherence can lie in the
Absolute alone. Having taken away, as noted above, the essential distinction
between God and man Idealism has no escape from holding “the real as rational”
to be an ideal attainable by man or otherwise appeal to a mystery beyond
rationality. When the theist says he does not know or as we say appeals to
mystery he visualizes back of that mystery the self-conscious rationality of God;
when the Idealist appeals to mystery it is into the abyss of the barely possible he
looks since the mystery holds for God as well as man. Or otherwise expressed the
Idealist has no right to appeal to mystery except in the sense of the not yet
known, if he would cling to his motto that the real is rational.

Idealism seeks to rationalize experience, and every now and then appeals to
mystery. Bradley speaks of the resolution of difficulties “somehow” in the Beyond.
So also when faced with the problem of human freedom Pringle-Pattison says we
know we are free by immediate intuition. 38 But no Idealist seems to have the
right thus to appeal to immediacy instead of to rationality. Idealism can speak of

38
Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, retained and explained in Idea of God,
p. 369 Note.
the unknown as the not yet known but according to its principle it must hold that
man has within himself the means of correcting his own errors and eventually rise
to the knowledge of a completed system. In other words Idealism has accepted
the contest between rival systems upon the basis of formal logic alone i.e., that
system is to win which is least beset with difficulty; hence its ruthless a priori, but
hence also its acosmism, and its intellectualization of our experience.

Theism, accordingly, does not accept the challenge on this basis. It holds that
anyone who seeks unassisted to cross the whole channel or perish will more than
likely perish; scepticism is the only alternative to Theism. Theism too is sceptical
as to man’s ability to know the whole of truth but it has sought by transcendental
argument to establish the philosophical tenability of the existence of a timeless
reality which is completed self-conscious actuality in which it rests for the validity
of our knowledge as far as it goes. As above expressed God lies behind mystery
and possibility. Theism is sceptical too of ever knowing the Absolute because
man would have to know the Absolute be absolute himself. But Idealism has to
be sceptical in the sense that it sees man and God together growing in
knowledge, mutually dependent, mutually interpretive, but the whole whence is
it, and whither is it going, it knows not; mystery is ultimate: possibility greater
than actuality.

Such, we believe, must be the outcome of the Kantian line of thought. But
perhaps there are those that cannot see this steep descent to the denial of all
transcendence. They will point to the tremendous revival of the religion and
worship of the Absolute that has grown out of this very thought of Kant via the
Hegelian emphasis on immanence. We must therefore prove more fully than
even in the most developed and refined of idealistic thinkers God is not
presupposed as the Absolute, and that therefore their attempt to make God
count for something as a category of interpretation does not succeed. We have
already said that Kant bowed out one God and received another; the former
wanted to make Kant in his image, the latter was made in the image of Kant;
surely a “Copernican revolution.” It was the only thing Kant could logically do
from his standpoint that all possible experience had to be of one type; God and
man were subject to the same laws or at least law was considered to be
intelligible apart from God; the right is right in itself apart from God. Subsequent
Idealism once more joined morality and metaphysics and even attempted to find
the basis of morality in the nature of God. Yet this should not blind us to the fact
that there is only development of but no radical departure from Kantian thought
in this new alliance between metaphysics and morals. The contrary opinion is
sometimes entertained; Hegel is represented as building up again what Kant had
broken down; even the theistic arguments were revived; the identification of the
rational with the real was the best ontological proof that had ever been devised.

In order to test whether Hegelianism made any real advance on Kant in this
respect it is fair to ask what sort of God Hegel gave back to men. Perhaps Kant
himself would have been glad to welcome Hegel’s God. Hegel’s God is not at all
the one Kant identified with the totally transcendent God who sustained no
known relation to the world. The real God of Hegel is the one born of the
dialectical process, temporally or logically received, revealed in and realized
through nature and man and continuous with these. In short, Hegel’s God is
called the Absolute by courtesy alone; He is rather an immanent principle in
reality. On this basis it is not difficult to establish the ontological proof but the
question is whether it serves a purpose to do so.

But we must continue our search for an Idealist who has really taken his
Absolute seriously as a presupposition of his thought. We have already when
criticizing the idealistic theory of judgment dealt with Bosanquet the chief among
Idealistic logicians. Accordingly we now turn to others who have refined the
conception of the Absolute and defined most carefully his functional relation to
experience. Bradley may be mentioned in passing. Under cover of sacrificing all
“appearance” to the Absolute he at least reserved the right to define the Absolute
negatively and on the basis of human experience thought himself justified in
telling us what the Absolute cannot be. Such negative definition is quite common
among the avowed enemies of the Absolute. There we are told again and again
that a non-temporal Absolute could have no possible meaning. But neither is
negative definition uncommon among Idealists. It can only be built upon the
assumption of the activistic nature of thought with its implication of a single type
of consciousness. It sounds more modest to say what the Absolute cannot be
than to say positively what He must be but in both cases you assume the power
of definition and with it the reign of a priori thought; the same intellectualism
that destroys time and space in one direction defines the Absolute positively or
negatively in the other direction. Only the Absolute can define the Absolute.

The more recent attempts to find a functional relation for an Absolute in

human experience have been less dialectical and more empirical. Of such
attempts those of C. C. J. Webb and W. E. Hocking have been perhaps the most
thorough. We have in Webb’s philosophy a welcome witness clearly portraying, in
the whole development of his thought that he who builds his philosophy upon
idealistic logic must sooner or later attempt to do without an Absolute
altogether; or reserve the right of transformation indefinitely. In his work
Problems in the Relation of God and Man, Webb clearly pronounces his general
agreement with the idealistic theory of judgment. Still he thinks it quite possible
to study the phenomenon if the religious consciousness without any
metaphysical presuppositions. But the most improved methods of the
psychology of religion can never by themselves yield any fruit. Some philosophy
is assumed at the outset. Webb has assumed that religion must be the worship of
the whole. It is strange that an Idealist should take the finality of the moral
consciousness for granted when it pronounces judgment on matters of religion.
Against Pragmatism our argument was that we must say who we are, what place
we occupy in the universe before we have the right to say that the Absolute is
meaningless. Similarly here, if we hold that our moral consciousness has the right
to define the nature of the God we are going to serve we should expect a
justification of this procedure. This is not to militate against the attempt to study
the phenomena of the moral and religious life as impartially as we can. The only
thing in question is the justice of rejecting a notion about God on the basis of the
moral or religious consciousness alone. Webb without hesitation assumes this
power for the moral judgment. Looking at the terrifying extent and character of
evil and the hypothesis of a God who foreknows that if He creates us we will do
evil Webb disclaims the ability of God to judge in the matter, 39 since at best He is
finite and subject to the conditions in a universe beyond His control. And if He is
finite we have as much right to judge as He. Moreover, it is upon the decisions of
our moral consciousness that we decide whether God is finite or not. Seeing
much evil in the world we decide He cannot be omnipotent, since He either
needs this evil to realize His purposes or He cannot avoid it at all.

Now Theism holds that this is not a fair procedure. Our moral consciousness
as found in spatially temporally conditioned beings cannot assume this role of
judge unless it has very good reasons for doing so. But on the contrary we have
found reason to believe that our whole human existence is meaningless and
springs from the void unless the Absolute gives it meaning. If this metaphysics is
right then it involves a different attitude toward the dicta of the moral
consciousness. As our intellects cannot solve every difficulty in logic but we do
not therefore give up the idea of the Absolute, so if our moral consciousness
cannot find a complete theodicy that has no difficulties we do not therefore
relinquish the notion of a God who is good and all-powerful. If we have found the
notion of God as the Absolute necessary for our existence then that notion has a
determining force over our moral consciousness. With this we mean the very
opposite from what Webb means; he grants to the moral consciousness the

39
Problems in the Relations of God and Man, London 1911, p. 105.
authority to change the idea of God at will; we hold that the notion of God stands
firm and we are to adjust our moral consciousness as far as we can. Our moral
consciousness is based upon the idea of an absolute God, and can be depended
upon only in so far as this idea of God is left intact. If then there remain problems
unsolved we have also here earned the right to appeal to the mystery of the
Absolute. Also here, as well as in the case of directly intellectual problems, the
self-conscious Absolute lies back of our mystery; what seems to have no purpose
for us may have a purpose for Him.

And now it is important to note how completely Idealism tries to do without

the Absolute. In questions of morality and religion this fact comes out far more
clearly than in exclusively intellectual problems. Many an idealist would perhaps
agree that it is the Absolute which gives our intellect its meaning, that the validity
of our knowledge finds its source in the Absolute will not hesitate to proclaim
with Kant the complete autonomy of the moral consciousness. That morality
since the day of Kant has been bound up with metaphysics again does not alter
the matter. If our argument has been correct, it was the same tendency towards
autonomy that underlay Kant’s intellectual as well as moral endeavor. In both
cases there issue from the human mind by a strict a priori process the laws of
thought and morality that are to hold for all possible experience divine as well as
human. Idealism has followed in this train. Granted that it says the laws of
thought and morals are found and not made, as long as it maintains the right to
say that they must hold equally for God and man it does what Kant was doing.

Thus we see that the view of the moral consciousness as entertained by

Webb, Rashdall and others is the natural outcome of the Kantian line of thought
and fits in with the emphasis on the immanence of God by later Idealism. Thus
we also see that Idealism is coming very close to Pragmatism: both advocate the
self-sufficiency of man and give him power to say what has and can have
meaning for him; both give him power to modify the Absolute at will or reject
Him altogether.

Perhaps one of the keenest attempts of recent years to make the experience
of God real to men is found in W. E. Hocking’s work The Meaning of God in
Human Experience. With a deep religious insight Hocking would make the
experience of God basic so that it will control the whole of life. Yes even further:
“Evil becomes a problem only because the consciousness of the Absolute is there:
apart from this fact, the colour of evil would be mere contents of experience.” 40
Here Hocking mentions with specific reference to evil what we have maintained

40
Meaning of God, p. 203.
above as a general truth that no temporal experience of any kind could become a
question at all were it not for the more fundamental God-consciousness. Hence
Hocking seeks to bring God into experience at the earliest and lowest possible
level. The human self without the God-consciousness is but an “irrelevant
universal”; it presupposes for the experience of itself the experience of God.
Consciousness being essentially social it is not man but God who is the first to be
met with in experience. Early in life one has to face the grim reality that has
produced us and yet seems to overwhelm its offspring and devour it.
Immediately we sense our rights and “The God-idea thus appears as a postulate
of our moral consciousness: an original object of resolve which tends to make
itself good in experience.” 41 We see how basic Hocking makes the God-idea.
Hence the older forms of the ontological argument must be revised. We do not
first have an idea of God and then logically deduce His existence, but the idea
itself is the fruit of a more fundamental intuition. “We are only justified in
attributing reality to an idea of reality if reality is already present in the discovery
of the idea.” 42 No God is found at the level of ideas that is not already found at
the level of sensation. 43 “The whole tale of Descartes’ discovery is not told in the
proposition, I exist, knowing. It is rather told in the proposition, I exist, knowing
the Absolute, or I exist, knowing God. The self taken alone, or in the presence of
contents of experience as they come, is a fairly irrelevant universal. But set before
that self in its dealings with experience an Absolute object; and its own existence
becomes fruitful of differences.” 44 D. C. Macintosh calls this line of argument
pursued by Hocking an “empirical development of Absolutism,” and describes his
method as “empirical intuitionism.” He sums up Hocking’s point by saying: “From
the idea of the religious object, then, from the idea of Absolute Reality, Reality as
a whole, one can affirm its existence—because the idea itself is possible only
through an experience of the presence of Reality as a whole.” 45 Now it will be
observed at once that our argument for Theism has been formally much the
same as this one of Hocking. The human self placed within the stream of
experience would itself have no meaning and be an “irrelevant universal,” nor
would all the current of phenomena urge upon us any question, were it not that
at the outset the consciousness of the Absolute is fundamental. As far as the
argument itself is concerned we may therefore claim Hocking as an authority. But
there is just one point, it seems, where he has not carried through his own
argument. He tells us that the moment we face a grim forbidding Reality our

41
Idem., p. 147.
42
Idem., p. 313.
43
Idem., p. 313.
44
Idem., p. 201.
45
Phil. Rev. V. 23, 1914, p. 27 ff.
sense of justice awakes and we demand a God. Whence now this sense of justice?
By carrying Hocking’s argument through does it not function because of a God-
consciousness which is fundamental to it? Yet for Hocking the first functioning of
the moral consciousness is totally independent in sensing its rights against a grim
universe. 46 It is this exactly that leads him in the same direction that we saw
Webb was moving; the idea of God is constantly revised. The pivotal question is
after all: what sort of God exists and is presupposed. Hocking’s God cannot be
the Absolute. And if not Absolute He becomes an aspect of a developing whole
and changes with that whole; it is not only our idea of God that changes, but God
Himself unless He be regarded as Absolute apart from the time process. The
argument as employed by Hocking might be used by men of less strenuous
moral conviction than he and they would find Gods different from his. For why
should we speak of presupposing a God who is really the evergrowing and ever
changing Ideal of the moral consciousness? If God is not Absolute then he
becomes an aspect of Reality as a whole of which we too are aspects and we can
ask about the characteristics of these aspects, but it is difficult to see why one
aspect of the whole should be dignified with the name of God. Hocking himself
says that the problem of religious knowledge is a “problem of the attributes of
reality,” 47 i.e., a reality inclusive of both God and man.

Then there is one further point to learn from Hocking’s argument. If he has
been correct in holding that our experience is purely factual and produces no
questions unless we have a consciousness of an Absolute it follows that moral
ideals cast ahead of itself by humanity could have no coercive power unless this
drawing power be derived from the Absolute. Our moral ideals themselves
presuppose the Absolute; but Hocking has regarded them as acting
independently; hence they hang in the air or at best can give us some intimations
of a religious character, or the nature of the universe. But the moral laws do not
find their coercive power immediately in God and herein Hocking’s position is
distinguishable from that of Theism. For how does one know when his religious
experience has become sufficiently empirical and scientific? Yet “only then can we
know that the God of whom we have an idea really exists.” Or how could we on
this basis of the fundamental independence of the moral consciousness ever find
a God the knowledge of whom would colour all our future experience, as
Hocking says it must?

Thus we see that in the most subtle and earnest attempts of Idealism the
Absolute is made after the pattern laid down by the moral consciousness which is

46
Meaning of God, p. 146.
47
Idem. p. 143.
assumed to be the ultimate standard. The result is that no Absolute is really
attained. Even if we go further than Webb and speak of the personality of God as
well as of personality in God which he admits is really all we can say on idealistic
basis, and even if we should with Lindsay speak of a free relation of God to the
world this God is at best a God who like Plato’s has to fashion an independent
situation as far as he can; idealism wants in most of its spokesmen, no finite God,
yet a finite God is all it can make provision for. It will be a God quantitatively
greater than we no doubt, and if we carry the idea through far enough He can
perhaps be called infinite, but He cannot be qualitatively distinct from us in any
sense other than that one finite person is distinct from another, since all the laws
of thought and morality hold in the same manner for both God and man.

Thus far we have tried to show that the essential relatedness between God
and man presupposed in idealistic logic or the natural outcome of it leads in the
end to the attempt to do without an Absolute entirely. This was true even when
the attempt was made to lift the nature of thought above the change involved in
time. Yet it was chiefly on the non-temporal basis that Idealism thought itself
secure; there a priori logic reigned supreme. The acosmic tendency we have
traced bears witness to the fact that Idealism itself felt that if you allow of time as
ultimate you have really attacked the basis of idealistic logic that unity is
fundamental to difference and actuality prior to potentiality. Says Bosanquet: “If
the basis of the universe were changeable the basis of our argument, whatever it
might be, would vanish with the stability of the whole.” 48

Now we must attempt to show that the basis of the universe does change if
Idealism is correct and that the later Idealists realize this themselves. It is difficult
to see how Bosanquet can seriously mean that he has a changeless base to the
universe unless he has a changeless whole. Not because this conception itself is
impossible; Theism would maintain the necessity of it very strongly. But as we
have seen Bosanquet holds that God and man are essentially related. Together
they form one whole of Reality. This whole of reality is either changeless or
changing. If Idealism had not felt the weakness of its position when it spoke of
one aspect of Reality changing and the other aspect being changeless it could
not well have gone to the length it did in its acosmic tendency. McTaggart tells
us that if we grant any reality whatever to time it spells an incompleteness in
reality as a whole. What we call change, be it ever so small an aspect of the whole
must in some small way modify the whole. The flower in the crannied wall will tell
us the same story; the coherence theory of truth demands it. From the side of the
Absolute also we would have to hold with Pragmatism that a changeless
48
Meeting of Extremes, p. 191.
Absolute is functionless; the “obsolescence of the eternal” is at hand. If we call
the Absolute a Beyond and ascribe consciousness to Him change would have to
have the same meaning for that consciousness that it has for us, since all possible
experience must be subject to the same laws of thought. We are clearly placed
before the dilemma of McTaggart; either make time entirely unreal or make it
ultimate as well as real. The distinction made by Bosanquet that time may be
“real” but not “ultimate” we shall accept of him for Theism which is not bound by
logic to make all that is “real” to be also “ultimate.” Idealism cannot claim to put
an intelligible connotation into that distinction. Since it is certainly constantly
asserted that we must take Reality as it is for granted and not ask where it or any
aspect of it came from. True, J. S. Mackenzie following suggestions in Kant’s
thought does not consider an absolute origin to be an absurdity as many others
do. 49 But then we must add that he thinks it a possibility to think of reality as just
stepping forth from the void. If he then means by “reality” the whole as
commonly conceived by Idealists he has avowedly given up all attempt at
interpretation making the potential prior to the actual. On the other hand if he
still wishes to retain a permanent base that does not suddenly step forth it would
be difficult for him to relate this part of reality to that which suddenly appeared. If
he regarded them as aspects of another there could be no such sudden stepping
forth of which he speaks, while if he would speak of an Absolute and hold this
Absolute to be actually related to the world he would arrive at the theistic
doctrine of a temporal creation which he cannot accept.

We would hold then that it is fair to say of Idealism that it makes the equally
underived aspects of Reality equally ultimate unless it can be shown that among
these aspects one has a more rightful title to dignity than another. It was only
with reluctance that Idealism made use of that expedient. Bradley was driven to it
at last when an “appearance” considered as equal to nothing could scarcely say
that it was an appearance at all. Accordingly he accorded “appearance” a lower
sort of reality than Reality itself. But Reality must necessarily appear, then
“appearance” becomes an aspect of the Real, so that there seems to be little
reason why the “appearance” should be called less real than the “Real,” nor yet
why the “Real” should be called more real than its “appearances.” An analogy
might be found in an organism in which one member may receive higher honour
than another but in which all members are equally indispensable. For the
distinction between degrees of reality to have meaning, Bosanquet admits, the
one must be interpreted in terms of another, i.e. the lower in terms of the higher.
This it would not seem possible to do if the “lower” and the “higher” to be related

49
Article in Mind N.S.V. 21, 1912, p. 329.
are time experience and timeless law respectively and you also wish to retain
them as aspects one another. Inseparable from all time-experience of human
beings is change and decay. Our minds are connected with our bodies and our
bodies dependent on the earth, and nothing is more evident in the physical
universe than change. Granted it were feasible to reduce causality as we know it,
even between conscious beings and inanimate nature, to mere sequence of
events, it remains impossible if you would explain causation not to explain this
sequence of events itself and in some way relate it to changeless reality which is
then said to be of “higher” importance. How interpret motion or the illusion of
motion in terms of stability, if this stability itself has no meaning apart from
motion? The one must always form the correlative to the other and neither has
the preeminence over the other. If motion is finite in the sense that it has had an
absolute beginning and you wish to interpret it in terms of a higher and
changeless reality the doctrine of creation as implied in the theistic conception of
the Absolute would appear to be the most reasonable one. For if you say that it
simply stepped forth you are not connecting it with any timeless reality. While if
you say that it was necessarily created motion is not finite at all unless that by
whom or from which it was created is also finite and the void lies back of all
again. If motion is infinite, i.e. without a beginning and you still wish to interpret
it in terms of a “higher” reality the task will be more difficult still because the first
thing to be shown then is why there should even be an emotional preference for
the timeless over the changing. That is, the chief reason why we speak of
interpreting the lower in terms of the higher lies in the fact that we consider the
lower to be incapable of having meaning in itself. But if we make the lower a
necessary element to the higher it will at once raise its head to claim its rightful
title to be called “higher” as well. Or again, we think motion and change need
interpretation because it is unintelligible in itself, but if we make motion eternal
or endless there is no reason left why it should be interpreted in terms of the
motionless.

We conclude therefore that when the most patent characteristics of the

phenomenal world are not to be ignored and there is to be a genuine meaning in
the altogether reasonable demand of Idealism that the lower be interpreted in
terms of the higher, the creation doctrine of Theism offers the most reasonable
hypothesis. This doctrine too has its difficulties chief of which is why a timeless
complete experience should create at all and how the created product can have
meaning for Him. For He does not sit in Aristotelian fashion aloof from the strife
of time, but is immanent in his creation with his power sustaining and guiding it
to a purpose for Himself. When faced with these difficulties the Theist readily
confesses that it is for him incomprehensible but he retains his dialectical right to
appeal to the mystery of infinite wisdom.

Idealism too, must finally appeal to mystery but the difference between these
appeals to mystery is that the Idealist has by his a priorism made it impossible to
place an Absolute Rationality back of his mystery. He has no appeal to a logic
that is higher than his, because he has made logic to be the highest that can be.
It is not at all surprising that since on idealistic basis the whole is the ultimate
subject of predication flatly contradictory adjectives should modify the same
noun. All the predicates applicable to our temporal existence, change, decay,
origination, evil, must “somehow” have application to the ultimate base of reality
which must also somehow be beyond all these things; there must be time in the
Absolute yet the Absolute is not evil. If then the dictum that the actual is prior to
the potential is to be taken seriously it seems that all time experience must be
made unreal, while if time experience is allowed to have a meaning for the whole
then bare possibility must have independent meaning. Hegel felt very keenly that
his Gott had to be prior in his dialectic temporal or logical was to have any
meaning, yet completed truth he found only in the Begriff that was the actual
completion of the process. It was not a completed process that he was straining
for in all his thought. One thing all philosophy has learned from Plato that the
Ideas must be connected with our experience if they are to be the interpretation
of it; but perhaps we are forgetting the other lesson Plato taught that the Ideas
must be real in themselves or otherwise they can still less be of use to explain
temporal existence.

It was easier for ancient thought to intellectualize experience than it is today.

The attempt was made none the less, in the acosmic strain of idealistic
philosophy. But the reaction came.

Bosanquet himself has given occasion for opposition to his acosmic thought;
it was an unnatural ideal he had placed before himself. As an ideal Bosanquet
holds that reality cannot without contradiction be conceived as changing. 50 On
the other hand reality is that which thought operating on experience finds it to
be. In other words he would begin from the actuality and validity of finite
experience. But since thought as we know it is of the moving man, and since ex
hypothesi all thought is of the same type Bosanquet cannot leap ˆ la Bradley to a
timeless Absolute. The inevitable consequence is that the Absolute is lowered; for
we cannot deny reality to that which moves. Realizing the forces of this tendency
Bosanquet at times defines the Absolute as “the high-water mark of fluctuations

50
G. W. Cunningham, Phil. Rev. V. 31, 1922, p. 500.
in experience of which, in general, we are daily and normally aware.” 51
Cunningham says Bosanquet fails to distinguish clearly between two conceptions
of the “totality of things” sometimes regarding it as really non-temporal
altogether and at other times regarding it as in process of realizing itself making
time a necessary aspect, “being driven by the difficulty that he experiences in
regarding his conception of transcendence in purely non-temporal terms.” 52

Under pressure of realistic and pragmatic criticism it seems that Bosanquet

began to speak more of reality as “inherently synthetic,” so that no change from
itself is needed at all to account for differences which are novel and creative, with
perfect continuity.” 53 The non-temporal character of the Absolute, be he Beyond
or whole is slowly allowed to slip, and to that extent also the demand that the
actual is prior to the potential. Says H. Haldar: “But to say that the Absolute an
all-inclusive whole does not itself change is not to deny that it is realized in and
through the successive events of flowing time.” 54 To trace this tendency which
may be called temporalism because it considers time and change to be an
ultimate characteristic of reality, we can begin with Pringle-Pattison. In his book
Hegelianism and Personality he sounded the bugle call among Idealists against
the aggressiveness of the Absolute. It was his contention that life may not be
sacrificed to the exigencies of an a priori logic. Hence he spoke of the
“imperviousness” of the finite individual. He later realized that a phrase of that
sort laid him open to the charge of empiricism and realism which “forgets the
abstraction under which it apprehends the structure of experience.” 55 To
safeguard against that he said in his later writings he had always believed in the
“essential relatedness” between the Absolute and man. We have, it appears, two
tendencies in the thought of Pringle-Pattison. On the one hand he openly avows
his allegiance to the position of Bosanquet that the individual can have no
meaning independent from the Absolute; Pluralism can no more be his starting
point than theirs. But it is the opposite tendency in his thinking that it is
important for our point.

Pringle-Pattison does not want the human individual to be “in ultimate

analysis connections of content within the real individual to which they belong.”
He seems to grant that the idealistic logic if carried through does injustice to
human individuality. Hence he appeals to immediacy versus logic. But at a later

51
Phil. Rev. V. 32, 1923, p. 587.
52
Phil. Rev. V. 31, 1922, p. 562.
53
Phil. Rev. V. 32, 1923, p. 596.
54
Phil. Rev. V. 27, 1918, p. 389.
55
Bosanquet, Proceedings Aristotelian Society N.S.V. 18, 1917–18, p. 484.
stage arguments are not lacking. In his valuable book on The Idea of God he
seeks in the first series of lectures to establish the existence of so-called
“appearances.” In this first series he has little or need of the category of the
Absolute. He tells us this himself in answer to a criticism of his views by Rashdall.
A confession of this sort from the mouth of an Idealist means much; it implies
that the Absolute has only a very subordinate meaning for him. In the
Symposium held before the Aristotelian Society on the subject whether
individuals have substantive or adjectival existence Pringle-Pattison emphasizes
and develops the same line of thought. The individual seems “the only
conceivable goal of divine endeavor.” 56 He puts it as basic to a correct
knowledge of God that we have a correct knowledge of man. 57 This is no doubt
true but it would be more fundamental and idealistic to say that to have a true
conception of man we must have a true conception of God. When Bosanquet
criticizes his view of the individual as “members” within the Absolute, as Pringle-
Pattison had developed this in The Idea of God because it would lead to Pluralism,
Pringle-Pattison’s reply in the Symposium is that Bosanquet in turn should
recognize “the significance of numerical identity as the basal characteristic of
concrete existence.” 58 In themselves these individuals are no doubt abstractions
but so is the Absolute by itself an abstraction. Bosanquet, he intimates,
substitutes Kantian unity of apperception as an abstract logical universal for a
true unity in difference. There is similar determination in Bosanquet as in
Materialism “to teach a formal identity by abstracting from differences on which
the very character of the universe as a spiritual cosmos depends.” 59

Idealism could not well help but move in this direction. But is the Absolute
when thus brought in closer contact with the individuals anything but a logical
universal within the various individuals or one among them of their kind? Pringle-
Pattison tells us that we are to maintain a difference between God and man
because their very reality depends upon it. 60 This is fine as an ideal. But how the
Absolute is to have any independent significance when numerical identity of
individuals is made a “basal characteristic” of Reality is difficult to see.

If this argument were carried through upon a non-temporal basis it would

lead to a position similar to that of McTaggart, a society of equally ultimate
individuals among whom an Absolute could subsist only in the form of a logical

56
Proceedings, 1917–18 p. 511.
57
Idea of God, p. 254.
58
Proceedings 1917–18, p. 512.
59
Proceedings 1917–18, p. 522.
60
Proceedings, 1917–18 p. 522.
universal. But the important point here is that the individuals to whom
membership in Ultimate Reality is accorded are temporally and materially
conditioned. Pluralism becomes Pluralism in flux. The meaning of the Absolute is
taken up into this flowing reality. “What meaning or value can the process have,
from the side of the Absolute; save as mediating the existence of spiritual beings,
objects of divine care and love, and themselves capable of responsive love and
fellowship.” 61 Slowly the Absolute of Idealism is completing his course; from
being the presupposition of possible experience he has become its logical
universal or counterpart and is finally submerged as a vague statility within a
developing whole till finally He surges out on the crest of human thought to
reappear as the Ideal of humanity that is realizing itself within us. “The presence
of the Ideal is the reality of God within us.” 62 Or again: “The presence and power
of the Ideal is the solution of the question at issue in the ever renewed debate
between immanence, and transcendence. Without the acknowledgment of the
Ideal, a doctrine of immanence must degenerate into an acceptance and
justification of the actual just as we find it.” 63 But with the acknowledgment of
the Absolute as nothing but an Ideal we are looking upon Reality as a self-
developing whole. In this position Idealism harbours once more the enemy of all
sound Idealism as Bosanquet conceived of it namely that hope lies in the future
alone.

Failure to heed to warning of Plato that unity if it is to be a real unity must be

found prior to temporal diversity compelled Idealism to look for system in the
course of time experience. To say, as Bosanquet said that we cannot really speak
of purpose but only of value begs the question since it rests on the acosmic
assumption that time-experience has no reality. Later Bosanquet seeks to
rehabilitate the cast-out category of purpose by basing it upon that of value. But
if under acosmic impulse you first deny the validity of temporal categories
altogether and then still seek for some significance in them you must hold to the
“obsolescence of the eternal” entirely. If our argument for Theism be correct then
purpose apart from value has no meaning but on the other hand it is only
through purpose that we have any conception of value. Hence we hold to the
possibility and actuality of value independent of purpose in order to have it
furnish a basis for the actual purpose that exists. Unable to do this, Idealism,

61
Proceedings, 1917–18, p. 524.
62
Idea of God, p. 243. Cf. also Mind, 1919, p. 11, note, where Pringle-Pattison replies to
a criticism of H. Rashdall on this statement in Mind, July, 1918. He says: “The Ideal is
precisely the most real thing in the world” so that he thinks his view maintains
“transfinite reality.” But this does not affect the course of our argument.
63
Idea of God, p. 253.
takes either the one or the other or tries impossible methods of combination
between the two. Having found it impossible to deny purpose and employ value
only, it now in the person of Pringle-Pattison seeks for an independent meaning
in purpose. Still, Pringle-Pattison would object to such a bald statement of his
attempt perhaps. He wants to bring purpose and value together. He tries to do
this by turning about the mutual relation of time and purpose. It is the time
aspect of purpose that has been obnoxious to Idealists. But Pringle-Pattison
thinks that if time is made subordinate to purpose the category will be quite
unobjectionable and self-intelligible. To quote: “Purpose was condemned as
essentially a temporal category. This is true but the relation of the two terms is
now reversed, for purposive activity is seen to be the concrete reality of which
time is merely an abstract form.” 64 Again: “Time is the abstraction of unachieved
purpose or of purpose on the way to achievement.” “The eternal view of the time
process is not the view of all its stages simultaneously but the view of them as
elements of or members of a completed purpose.” 65 But this turning about of the
conceptions of time and purpose does not bring about the desired result. Time
remains an inseparable aspect of the category of purpose as known to us.
Whether time is the abstraction from purpose or vice versa both are abstractions
unless related to value. But it is just this necessary relation of purpose to value
that Pringle-Pattison seems to question. He finds intelligible reality in the
temporal process itself apart from an Absolute. “Movement, activity, process, is
for us the very differentia of concrete reality from the abstractions of science or
of logic; and therefore so far as this involves time, time must be retained in any
conception we can form of an Absolute Experience.” 66 The apologetic garb in
which Pringle-Pattison clothes the Absolute by this time well begrimed with his
submergence into the slimy sea of time is entirely cast away by J. Watson. If
Pringle-Pattison says at times that the independence of the finite individual is
really something mysterious when maintained upon the basis of idealistic logic, J.
Watson proclaims it outright that all of Bosanquet’s difficulties in trying to
harmonize the Absolute and the relative were artificial because he had somehow
erected a non-temporal Beyond. He thinks rather that it is the neutral outcome of
the principle the Real is the Rational that there is no Beyond at all, i.e., no Beyond
that is not subject to temporal categories. This is a very daring position and we
believe it to be fundamentally sound on the basis of idealistic logic that all
possible experience is of one type. It would seem to be impossible then to hold
to a supra-temporal experience; J. Watson boldly accepts the consequences of
idealistic logic. He thinks that the very nature of all thought must be temporal.

64
Idea of God, p. 358.
65
Idea of God, p. 358.
66
Idea of God, 361.
The very nature of judgment tells us this. Reality in its completeness must be a
thinkable reality. Hence it will not do to separate the “what” from the “that” too
sharply as Bradley has done. And this reality in its broadest sense “is not for us
stationary, but grows in content as thought, which is the faculty of unifying the
distinguishable elements of reality, develops in the process by which those
elements are more fully distinguished and unified.” 67 This conception of the
developing and growing whole Watson correctly holds to be the logical outcome
of the idealistic theory of judgment. Watson sees in it the only safeguard against
Agnosticism. The reason seems to be that God has become entirely immanent
and there is nothing to be agnostic about. Still even Watson speaks of an
Absolute, even a self-conscious Absolute. At times he speaks of the Absolute
manifesting Himself in time, as thought he were beyond the time process. “The
origination of ever higher forms of being is conceivable so long as the totality of
these beings is regarded as implying a Being from whom they originate.” 68 The
Absolute does not develop. Yet the Absolute cannot be separated from the time
process. Watson made it a specific point of criticism on Bosanquet that the latter
had not seen that the very nature of the judgment allows of no non-temporal
Absolute. He will not hear of the question why the Absolute should reveal itself.
“If it is asked why the Absolute reveals itself gradually in the finite, I should
answer that the question is absurd: we cannot go behind reality in order to
explain why it is what it is: we can only state what its nature, as known to us,
involves.” 69 Why then should Watson still speak of the Absolute revealing itself.
He seems to flee to this idea because he realizes that if we are to have
explanation there must be a self determining principle and he cannot find this if
the whole of reality is in time. Yet time is for Watson an inseparable aspect of the
Absolute. All reality “implies succession, and hence we must say there is no
conceivable reality which does not present the aspect of succession or process.” 70

Now it is this emphasis on time and succession as an inseparable aspect of

the whole of reality that leads Idealism very close to Pragmatism. The distinction
made by Theism between an Absolute and timeless reality creating the universe
which is in time Idealism is unable to accept because of the incomprehensibility
of a relation between the two. Yet the impasse to which we are led if we
disregard the conception of a temporal creation might cause us to reconsider it.
We are told that it involves the idea of absolute origination which is absurd. With
this the theist agrees. Apologists appealing to Renouvier to obtain philosophical

67
Phil. Rev. V. 4, 1895, p. 360.
68
Phil. Rev. V. 4, 1895, p. 367.
69
Idem., p. 368.
70
Idem., p. 497.
justification for their notion of temporal creation because he conceives of the
Absolute origination as a possibility make the mistake of simultaneously
undermining the possibility of belief in God. Unable to go to the length of
Renouvier because that would place chance back of all reality and give us no
explanation of the coherence in our experience and equally unable to deny the
reality of time as an inseparable aspect of human experience Theism holds to
temporal creation, i.e. to absolute causation, or to a changeless cause.

McTaggart tells us that notion of changeless cause outrages reason; Ward

says all agree that God did not cause the world. But the reason for these
statements seems to be that it is then understood to imply the whole of reality,
but Theism does not apply the idea to God at all. If it still be considered absurd
that the temporal world as we know it should have had an absolute beginning we
would only note the alternatives. We can say that there is no changeless and all is
Change, which is the position Pragmatism has openly embraced and Idealism is
tending towards; it leads us back either to absolute origination and the void of
possibility or to an infinite regress which at best gives up all search for system. Or
we can say that there is no change and all is changeless in which case the illusion
of change remains unaccounted for. We may say, thirdly, that there is a
changeless and change but not a causal relation between the two; this implies
that they are in no relation whatever to each other. For it is impossible to extract
the notion of cause, however interpreted, from the notion of change; if you do
you make change a necessary aspect of the changeless which is ex hypothesi
impossible. For these reasons it seems that if as J. Watson you hold to (a) the
existence of an Absolute that is changeless, (b) the reality of change somewhere
(c) a relation between them somehow and you reject the notion of absolute
origination of the whole, temporal creation might receive honorable mention.

Again, it has been said that temporal creation is inconsistent with the
immanence of God. 71 This is true if immanence be possible on the basis of
“essential relatedness” only. But if it is rather true that “essential relatedness”
leads to identity then temporal creation may become one of the conditions of an
immanence of power. Pringle-Pattison has himself very beautifully shown how
God may be thought of as differently present with his power in the various
aspects of His creation, without being identified with them. We maintain
therefore that Theism is philosophically justified in holding to the doctrine of a
temporal creation since the objections to it, however great, cannot compel us to
deny it in trade for a system that can never be a system. The only complete
alternative to temporal creation,—since all agree that time is however abstract or
71
Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God.
low or subjective an aspect, still an inseparable aspect of some types of
experience,—is the absolute origination of the whole or the eternity of a process.
It seems impossible for Idealism to accept either or these if it still wishes to
remain distinct from Pragmatism.

It is, I believe, a mute confession of failure on the part of Idealism, that it is

seeking for actual solutions of the problems between the Infinite and the finite
along mathematical lines. The attempt is made to prove that we are actually
experience infinity. 72 But an infinity that we actually experience would again have
to be related to the infinity of an Absolute who is timeless. Royce’s self-
representative system must lead in the end to an infinite regress. 73 J. S.
Mackenzie makes an admirable attempt to bring the conceptions of time and
eternity together. 74 He thinks the form of time may be infinite but not the events
of it. On this basis Mackenzie would seek to do justice to the aspect of change in
experience and also give the Absolute his due. The problem of an infinity of time
preceding the world is not important since “the question is not with regard to
what is abstractly conceivable but as to what did take place. As one is not added
to zero but simply steps forth so the first event may simply step forth.” On this we
need only remark that if the absolute beginning of which Mackenzie speaks
applies to “the world of time events that we as human beings apprehend,” he has
not brought this world into intelligible connection with the Absolute since it
could then not simply step forth while if his stepping forth applies to the whole
of reality then the same difficulties of infinite regress or void stare us in the face
again.

Thus we see that in the process of Idealistic thought the Absolute is slowly
losing out. Already on the non-temporal and purely logical level He is first made
the correlative and then the subordinate. Having now discussed the emphasis
that time has recently received at the hand of Idealists we see this process of
lowering of the Absolute still more strikingly. The moral consciousness as
historically developed can without question as to its credentials change the
notion of Absolute at will, for the Absolute has become its Ideal. Now it is our
contention that if all this is done willingly it is well but then it becomes
increasingly more difficult to distinguish Idealism from Pragmatism. Reality is
then a moving whole that has originated absolutely or that has infinitely
progressed, and possibility is regarded as prior to actuality. Yet it does not seem
that Idealism wants to go in this direction. Bosanquet continues to tell us, and he

72
B. Russel, J. Royce etc., basing their work on Cantor, Dedekind, etc.
73
World and Individual 1 Supplementary Essay.
74
Hastings, E. R. E., Article on “Eternity.”
is not alone in this, that if any of our experiences of rationality or progress or
purpose is to have intelligible meaning if there be a system of reality. 75 But
system seems now to be sought in a developing whole. To make that an
intelligible conception is the task Idealism must face and its continued opposition
to the infinite regress has not been entirely misplaced the task seems not very
promising of results.

If then the rationality and coherence of human experience needs an Absolute

as the Idealist has always maintained against Pragmatism because absolute
origination of the whole of reality and infinite regress are unacceptable, the
Absolute of Christian Theism would appear philosophically the most tenable
since it involves as a conception no greater logical difficulties than the Absolute
of Idealism while it does not do violence to our experience of time. Idealism has
emphasized the fact that rationality is a genuine element in our experience too
much ignored by Pragmatism; the latter in turn has emphasized the reality of
change and time: Theism has sought to do justice to both of these elements in
the notion of its God as Absolute with its concomitant of temporal creation.1

75
Cf. Meeting of Extremes.
1
Van Til, C., & Sigward, E. H. (1997). The works of Cornelius Van Til, 1895-1987
(electronic ed.). New York: Labels Army Co.