3.

WALSH
PHILOSOPHY
COLLECTION

PRESENTED to the

LIBRARIES of the

UNIVERSITY o/TORONTO
JOHN M. \V.\TKINS
THE ESSEX HALL LECTURE
T
\i* ^
:

THE
'

I f!

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF
PLOTINUS AND SOME MODERN
PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION

BY

W. R. INGE, D.D.

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

THL-LIND5LYPRL33
PRINTED BY ELSOM AND CO.
MARKET PLACE, HULL
 PUBLISHER'S NOTE
IN establishing the Essex Hall Lecture the
British and Foreign Unitarian Association had
no intention of making it a manifesto of a
denomination or sect, but simply desired that
it should be the free utterance of the lecturer

on some religious subject of general interest.

The first lecture was delivered in 1893 by
the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, who discoursed
'
on The Development of Theology as illustrated
in English Poetry from 1780 to 1830.' The '

Relation of Jesus to his Age and our own,' by Dr.

v
J. Estlin Carpenter The Idea and Reality of
;

Revelation/ by Professor H. H. Wendt The '

Immortality of the Soul in the Poems of Tennyson

and Browning,' by Sir Henry Jones Religion
;
'

and Life,' by Professor Rudolf Eucken Heresy, ;

'

its Ancient Wrongs and Modern

Rights,' by the
Rev. Alexander Gordon these are a few of the
subjects and lecturers in past years.
The lecture by the Dean of St. Paul's on The '

Religious Philosophy of Plotinus and some modern

'

Philosophies of Religion aroused widespread

interest on the occasion of its delivery at Essex

Hall, 3 June, 1914, and its publication has been

eagerly looked for by many people.

LONDON, 30 June, 1914.

THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF
PLOTINUS AND SOME MODERN
PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION.
TN an age when knowledge is so much
-* a danger
specialized that there is

lest its votaries, like the builders of the

Tower of Babel, lose contact with each

other by not understanding each other's
language, we are apt to underestimate
the interdependence of the various

branches of intellectual activity. We

read histories of philosophy, and of

scientific progress, and we are left to

suppose that these studies go on their

way quite unaffected by the fluctuations

of social and political movements. Poli-

8 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

tical history, in the same way, takes

little account of philosophical theory
and scientific investigation. But even
in natural science, and still more in

philosophy, ethics, and religion, men

only see what they have eyes to see.

The wish is often father to the thought,

even with persons of rare intellectual

honesty. We pay close attention to

what interests us ;
we follow paths
which promise to lead us whither we
wish to go. The desire to reach accept-
able conclusions is apparent in meta-
physics, unmistakable in ethics, and
almost barefaced in systematic theology.
Even naturalists are but children of

their age. The theory of progress first

arose in France in the generation before

the Revolution. It was the creed of

the Encyclopaedists and Physiocrats, of

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 9

Rousseau and of the Revolution itself.

It is expressed for history by Cordorcet,

for biology by Lamarck. When it

crossed England, it characteristic-

to

ally took the form of faith in boundless

industrial expansion. Its litanies were

trade statistics, its goal the world- wide

supremacy of British commerce. It

may be studied to advantage in the

smug and self-complacent philosophy of

Macaulay's English History. Darwin's
doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest is

no less closely connected with the domi-

nant social and political tendencies of
'
his day. Just as La carriere ouverte
'
aux talents is pure Lamarckism, so
' '
The devil take the hindmost is pure
Darwinism. Determinism in philo-

sophy and Calvinism in religion are

naturally in favour chiefly with those
10 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

who are fairly well content with the

world as it is, and who hold the comfort-
able theory that progress, being a law

of nature, may be left to take care of

itself. The English mind had turned
with horror from the results of un-
checked emotion and sentiment, as seen
in the French Revolution, and the
Romanticists were not strong enough to
stem the tide of hard rationalism, often

passing into materialism.

Now we see a counter-revolt against

Darwinism, against determinism, against

intellectualism, in full blast. The root
of all these new movements, whether
they call themselves neo-Lamarckism,

Vitalism, Activism, Voluntarism, Prag-

matism, or what not, is the new faith in

the almost unlimited power of purposive

effort, to ameliorate human conditions.

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION II

Inspired by it, biologists began to notice

what looked like spontaneous adapta-
tions of living creatures to their environ-

ment, and welcomed signs of a wild and

playful exuberance in the creative forces
of nature ; philosophers began to in-
terpret reality in terms not of substance
or idea, but of life and activity ;
some
exalted the freedom of the will till it

seemed as if, for them, even the laws

of nature were malleable to human
desires ;
others disparaged intellectual

concepts as mere counters, and talked of

4 '
the will-world as the only real world ;

others maintained that the mind con-

structs its pictures of an external world

purely for its own convenience, and that

only that can be called true which is

proved to be a good working hypothesis.

'
The gates of the future are open.' So
12 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

Bergson has said, with his usual felicity

in epigram. That what our genera-

is

tion wishes to believe in politics and

social reform ;
and it has welcomed with

open arms the French, or rather Jewish

philosopher, who has told us exactly
what we wanted to hear. Our de-
light was increased when we were told

that the intellect is only one, and not

the best, line of progress ; that some-

thing called instinct, which at any rate is

not an intellectual process, often pro-

vides a short cut to the point which we
want Thinking is hard work
to reach. ;

what a joy to hear that it is mostly

waste of time !

There are other factors also, besides

those which I have mentioned, which

add strength to the revolt against what
is now called intellectualism. Democ-
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 13

racy finds very half-hearted support

from science and philosophy. If we can

lump together all students who do not

think with one finger on the popular
'

pulse under the derisive name of intel-

lectuals,' we any rate discover

shall at

that they are few and weak, and is not

this much the same, for all good demo-

crats, as proving that they are wrong ?

Then too there are the conservative

forces of religious orthodoxy, which were
half-silenced but not at all convinced

during the heyday of materialistic

science. Supernaturalism, which was

'

long ago called Faith's dearest child,'

can lift up her head again under the

shelter of the new philosophy. Not only
is but the primi-
free-will rehabilitated,

tive spiritism of the savage can come

forth unabashed from its lurking-places

14 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

in the minds of the half -educated.

Ghosts once more walk abroad, and

are patronized by the highly respect-
able gentlemen and ladies who study
'

psychical research.' The medicine-

man reappears as a
'

faith-healer,' and
'
makes a good income. Christian Sci-
'
ence churches, and hotels at Lourdes,
do a roaring trade. Priests of the baser

sort are overjoyed at the unexpected

boom in their earliest line of business.

' '
The pride of the intellectuals has
indeed received a blow. They have
learned that the ingrained mental habits
of fiftythousand years are not to be

destroyed by the labours of a few uni-

versity professors.
If this revolt of the natural barbarian
in civilized man takes form as a philo-

sophical system, that system will have

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 15

to be a form of dualism. Already in

Lotze we had a sharp distinction be-
tween persons and things ;
while others
have separated will and intellect dual-

istically. In Kant the rift was still

within the reason. If the practical and

the theoretical reason could come into
contact with each other, the problem
would be solved. But in his successors,

war has been declared against the

theoretical or speculative reason itself.

Herbert Spencer already saw the danger,

'
and protested against it. Let those
who can, believe that there is eternal
war between our intellectual faculties

and our moral obligations. I for one can

admit no such radical vice in the constitu-
tion of things.' But Herbert Spencer
* '
is out of fashion. Practical reason

is no longer for our contemporaries what

l6 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

it was for Kant. It is almost an equiva-

lent for irrational will. And since will

can hardly exist in an atmosphere where

' '
reason is excluded, practical reason
has suffered a still further degradation,

and confounded with hysterical senti-

is

ment. Our extreme dislike of the

eighteenth century, and our tendency to

vilify this period and all its works, are
very symptomatic. The eighteenth cen-

tury believed in reason, and disliked

moods of excitement.

The position of physical science in the

midst of this strange movement is very
curious. Such philosophies as those of
William James and Bergson might seem
to be absolutely destructive of the
natural sciences. A '
wild universe,'
which administers shocks even to its

Creator (as William James suggests)

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION IJ

would be the despair of biologist,

physicist, and historian alike. And

Bergson's theory of time, if I under-
stand it rightly, introduces an incalcul-
able and confusing element into every
scientific calculation except pure mathe-

matics. A few men of science have taken

fright and lost their tempers over the
new philosophy ; but science as a whole

simply ignores it, except that vitalistic

theories in biology now receive a respect-
ful attention which they would not
have won thirty years ago. In all other

ways, science is
entirely untroubled by
the new dualism, and will remain un-
troubled by it, as long as its own results

continue to confirm itsworking hypo-

theses. In fact, the whole movement
which I have described seems to me
rather superficial. It is popular with
18 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

certain classes, for reasons which are

fairly obvious ;
but in a general way,
unless we have some prejudice to defend,
we assume, as our fathers did, that
nature is uniform and continuous.
It remains to speak of the results of
the new movement in religion. During
the tyranny of the mechanical theory,

religion was in the painful position of

being driven from pillar to post. Its

dogmas had been formed to suit the

hypothesis of supranaturalistic dualism

or occasional intervention, and during
the so-called Ages of Faith it was re-

garded as certain that the world consists

*
of two Orders,' the natural and the
supernatural. Miracles were believed to
be frequent ;
and the obscene super-
natural in witchcraft was as much in
* :

evidence as the mystical phenomena

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION

which stamped the approval of heaven

upon the macerations and devotions of

the cloister. In Roman Catholic the-

ology, a line is still drawn between

natural and supernatural phenomena,
and between natural and supernatural
virtues. Lecky, in his History of Ra-
tionalism, has shown how the domain of

the supernatural began to shrink with

the beginning of the modern period, and

how, in the countries which have enjoyed

the most advanced civilization, rational-
ism has gradually captured one strong-
hold of supernaturalism after another,
till the defenders of the older world-view
were driven to take refuge in the gaps
still unfilled by science, gaps which were

filling so rapidly that those who hid in

them began to find themselves in a very

tight place. For most religious persons,

20 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

the new attacks upon scientific deter-

minism were very welcome, and I think

justifiably so. But in the Modernist
movement Christian apologetics took
another turn, which promised a com-

plete deliverance from the attacks of

science and criticism. The movement

began in the Latin countries, where
controversies on the most serious issues

are conducted with a fearless logic which

few in England or Germany care to

apply to them. The Modernists declare

that their philosophical theory was
forced upon them by the results of their

historical criticism. This criticism led

them to see in organized Christianity a

which owed quite

syncretistic religion
as much to the beliefs and practices

of the European peoples among whom

it won its chief triumphs, as to the
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 21

teaching of its Founder. In dealing

with the life and teaching of the his-

torical Christ, they brushed aside all

that the piety of German scholars had

done to bring his life and teaching into
connexion with modern problems and
ideals. They stripped the figure of

Christ of all that Christians have loved

to see in him, and left us only an

enthusiastic peasant, obsessed with the

Messianic expectations which were com-

mon at the time in Palestine. Thus it
'
became necessary to distinguish comme
deux Christs,' the one the historical
prophet, who had few claims on the
reverence of posterity, and the other the

object of the Church's worship, a non-

historical dying and rising Saviour-God.
It was this latter idea of Christ which,

in the opinion of this school, formed

22 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

the centre of the Christian religion,

and it was something of a historical

accident that it attached itself to

' '
the name of a Messiah who shared
the fate of other Messiahs in the first

century of our era. This theory of

Christian origins is, I think, untenable
in this harsh form ;
but with necessary

qualifications it is a theory which is likely

to commend itself to many who do not
believe in the Christian revelation. But
the Modernists were not in this posi-
tion. They were, or wished to be, loyal
Catholics ; many of them were, and
wished to remain, priests of the Roman
Catholic Church. How were they to
reconcile their love for the Catholic

cultus and discipline with their ex-

tremely subversive opinions in historical

criticism ? How could they worship a
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 23

Christ whose historical career was what

they believed it to have been ? Christ-

ianity after all a religion based on

is

events which are supposed to be his-

torical. It always felt itself to be a

religion of a different type from the other

religions of the Empire, in which the
worship, through sacraments and dra-
matic representations, of a dying and

rising God, was quite familiar. The

Catholic Church would never come to

any terms with these religions. It was

therefore necessary for the Modernists

to maintain that in accepting the

Church's creeds, which ascribe the attri-

butes of Deity to Jesus Christ, they were
somehow speaking the truth. Thus the
' '
two Christs are affirmed by two kinds
of truth. Historical criticism deals with

truths of fact, while religion deals with

24 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

truths of faith. The former are

'

theo-
' '
retical truths, the latter are
'

practical
truths. And the philosophy of prag-
matism lies ready to hand, offering to
prove that practical truths are much
more important, and much more true,
than theoretical truths. Thus the ques-
tion whether an event ever
happened is,
atany rate for religion, almost frivolous.
The only important question is,What
belief has the value of truth for me ?

Lex orandi, lex credendi. All the terms

of religion belong to the
sphere of faith.
'

The historian,' says Loisy,

'
does not
need to remove God from history, for
he never encounters Him there.'
Here is indeed a radical dualism,
which can only escape from the charge
'
of cutting the world in two with a
'
hatchet by reducing the world of
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 25

* '
brute fact to an unsubstantial shadow.
It is, I think, hardly worth taking
seriously. It is the desperate expedient
of men who wish to remain Catholics

after they have ceased to be Christians.

Incidentally, they have done Catholicism
the fatal disservice of explaining it,by
showing how large an element of what
the despised intellectualist would call
' '
make-believe is retained for its prag-
matic value, and is notwithstanding
presented as belonging to the order of
historical fact. Such a method is effec-

tive and innocuous so long as it is quite

naive and unconscious but no ; longer.
' '
If the two kinds of truth are kept

wholly apart, their pragmatical value

is gone. If they are deliberately allowed
to exchange values, moral sincerity is

fatally compromised.
26 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

Such seems to me to be the position

to-day. The stiff determinism of nine-
teenth century science has been really
undermined. The mechanical theory of
the nineteenth century was not sufficient
to explain the phenomena of life. It

was a working hypothesis for investi-

gating the laws of inorganic matter ;

and
Christian apologists were quite justified

in protesting against its application to

beings endowed with conscious or self-

conscious life. So much heavy artillery

has been turned upon the crude meta-

physics of naturalism that it is hardly

necessary to recapitulate the arguments.
The mechanical explanation of life and
mind is a hypothesis which does not
account for observed facts ;
it attempts
to explain everything by what it grew
out of, whereas the truer method is that
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 27

of Aristotle, to discover the nature

(<t>v<ri<s)
of everything in its state of

completed development ;
it ignores
time and denies change since every
process of evolution or involution is

theoretically reversible ;
it attempts to
describe the world as containing exist-

ence without valuation, thereby setting

up an abstract view of reality as ultimate

truth and nevertheless fails egregi-
ously to eliminate values from its pur-
view ;
it takes the world as an inde-

pendent, objectively existing system,

and ignores the part played by the
perceiving mind. All these and other

objections are familiar to all of us, and

most of them are unanswerable.

And yet we cannot accept dualism.

In a world divided against itself, science

and rational ethics would be alike im-

28 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

possible, and our strongest philosophical

instinct revolts against it. We seem to
be threatened with an impasse, such as
has befallen philosophy more than once
before in its long history. The ma-
terialist philosophy, unsatisfactory as it

was, presented a clear-cut scheme which

professed to explain everything. We
seem to be in danger of being driven

back upon illogical eclecticism, or

scepticism.
Can we get any help from the philo-

sophical mystics ? It is my belief that

we They at least think that they

can.

have found what we want to find. They

are absolutists that is to say, they
believe that a knowledge of ultimate

reality is possible to man ; they are

monists their whole quest is for the

One in whom all contradictions are

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 29

reconciled ;
their faith is not only
thought out but lived out their highest
achievement is a beatific vision seen in
direct experience ; they are deeply re-

ligious, and their devotion is blended

with their speculation, so that the

'
'
intellectual love of God is no mere
phrase for them. And finally, the

strange uniformity of their system in

widely different ages and countries seems
to indicate that this type of thought and
belief is less influenced by temporary
currents than most others. Let us then
sketch very briefly the kind of way in

which a disciple of Plotinus, whom we

may take as by far the greatest thinker
of this school, would deal with some of

the questions which are agitating the

minds of our generation.

It may be taken as certain that neither

30 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

idealism in the modern sense (the doc-

trine that all reality is mental) nor the

opposite theory of naive realism, which

makes mind only an epiphenomenon,
ought to satisfy us. For the philo-
sophical mystic reality is spiritual it

is constituted by the unity in duality

of the perceiving spirit and the spiritual

'
world which it perceives. Thus heaven '

is
something much
for this philosophy

more than the place where God lives.

It is the outer side of his life and being
the whole content of his mind and

entirely inseparable from it. It is not

a place but an order of being the only
mode of being which is fully and com-
pletely real. This spiritual world con-
tains every thought in the mind of God,
every purpose in his will. Every person
has there a distinct, though not exactly
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 31

a separate existence. All values are

there preserved inviolable. We may

say with Plotinus that nothing which
truly is, can ever perish. This perfect

spiritual world is not static and im-

mobile, like a marble statue. It is not

*

faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly

null.' It is essentially life and activity.
And though we cannot allow that there
is any development in the life and
mind of God himself, he enjoys a higher
kind of activity, in which change and
stationariness, movement and rest, are

transcended. The life of Spirit and

of spirits, for in that world we retain
our individuality is eternal ;
but this

eternity is not an endless series of

moments, snipped off at one end but

not at the other ;
it is a mode of exist-

ence, of which indestructibility is one

32 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

of the attributes. It is wholly above

time and place, which belong, not to
the world of Spirit, but to what Plotinus
calls the world of Soul, which is created

by Spirit. For although Spirit is per-

fect in itself, and needs nothing outside

itself for its own fullness of life, it is in

its nature creative. By an inner neces-

sity of its nature, it must produce a

world after its likeness. God is thus
the Author of Nature, in the same
sense, nearly, in which a man might
be said to be the author of his own

photograph. This is indeed the sense in

which many early Christian theologians
used the phrase. God is immanent in

the world, not in the sense that he lives

his own life and by means of the
in

visible universe, but because the uni-

verse derives its being from him, reflects
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 33

his thoughts and purposes, exhibits

everywhere footprints of His Wisdom,

Goodness, and Beauty, and in various
degrees of conscious desire, strives to
be reunited with him. It is not at all

difficult to bring this philosophical

world-view into correspondence with
the Logos-theology of Greek Christianity,
which indeed in its later phases, as

developed by Basil and the two Gregorys,

owed a great deal to Plotinus. It is im-

portant to recognize that this philo-

sophy draws no hard lines across the

field of existence ;
those who have called
it dualistic have misunderstood it from

top to bottom. There is no barrier

between Soul and Spirit the spiritual
world is the true home of spirits, a home
to which they all hope to return one day.
'
God '
sent the souls down in order to
34 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

guide and give rational and moral form

to what is below Soul; for Soul re-

sembles the higher principle in being

irresistibly impelled to create to create

'

image of its own Creator.

after the See
that thou make all things according to
the pattern showed thee in the mount,'
is the command given by the Divine

Spirit to each human soul.

One great advantage which this philo-

sophy has over many others is that it

recognizes that what we loosely regard

* '
as the world known to science is no
simple self-existing cosmos, independent
of us who perceive it, nor yet a mere

subjective creation of our minds, but

is an unstable projection of the average

psychic life a conglomerate of the

forms which the soul has impressed
'

upon that nebulous abstraction Matter.'

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 35

Matter in Plotinus is not material ;

it

is not the name of ponderable and ex-

tended stuff. It is that which hypo-

thetically would be left if we could

abstract from objects all that gives them
form and meaning all, in fact, which
makes them possible objects of thought.
The world of science is demonstrably not
the objects perceived by the senses ; it

is rather a system of laws which the Soul

both makes and finds for the real-

idealism of his doctrine of God deter-

mines our philosopher's view of soul-life

also. The laws which the scientist
thinks that he finds in Nature are the
work of his own mind, which notwith-

standing finds itself in those objects

which are its own image, and more
remotely the image of its own Author.
Soul and its world are real, though on
36 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

the lower confines of reality. This

world resembles the spiritual world as
far as it can but in it reality is polarized
;

and split up ;
the very conditions of
soul-life forbid it to be as perfect as its

archetype. In our world, every idea

of God appears as a purpose in process

of realization. Our world consists of a

vast complex of such purposes, all finite,

with a beginning, middle, and end, inter-

lacing with each other, wheels within

wheels, and only to be recognized as
divine ideas when they are gathered up
in their full development and comple-
tion. Time is the form of purpose, and
accordingly all our experience is set in

the framework of Time. Space too is a

necessary condition of our experience ;

though Plotinus, rightly I think, gives

Space a lower position than Time. Ideas
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 37

of space are the clearest, but the poorest,

of our ideas. The reality of our world
then consists in its power of expressing,

under the form of processes in Space and

Time, the ideas and purposes of the
Divine mind. The truest view of the
world is that which sees in it a system
of law not, however, in the limited
sense in which naturalists talk of natural

law, but as a system of harmonious

values, which may be classified under
three heads the Good, the True, and

the Beautiful. Our world as it really is,

is the sphere in which these three divine

attributes are exhibited under the form

of purposes in process of realization. A

deep and subtle network of sympathies
pervades the whole system and there- ;

fore it is that the Soul must never be

wrapped up in itself. The isolated, im-
38 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

penetrable self is a dangerous delusion ;

it has no existence. The Soul can only

save itself by losing itself by forgetting
' ' '
the distinction between I and Not-
'
I ; by reaching out in all directions

after fuller experience, wider activity,

richer affections. There is no natural

limit to its expansion ;
the Soul is

potentially all-embracing. In knowing

its world it comes to know itself, and in

knowing itself it knows its world the ;

two processes are interdependent and

really one. The Soul creates in know-
ing, and knows by creating it stamps ;

itself on Matter, and is reflected in

Matter. But the Soul itself, and its

world, are wholly dependent on that

great spiritual world of eternal existence
and eternal activity, which are the

object of the Soul's worship, the source

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 39

from which it flowed, and the goal to

which it strives to return.

This philosophy is a form of Abso-

lutism, in that it makes the ultimate
reality something which Spirit is not
free to construct for itself, and which is

not contingent on human needs or

desires. knowable and unchange-

It is a

able system of values and existences,

which is itself the source of all that

happens in space and time. The Abso-

lute is not to be identified with the

Spiritual World here the philosophy of

mysticism parts company with Hegel

and Bosanquet and others who up to this
point have strong affinities with it. The
Spiritual World cannot be the Absolute,
because in it the subject-object relation,

though harmonized, is not transcended.

The whole world of existence is per-
40 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

meated with and indeed constituted by

this duality in unity. We can form no
notions of anything whatsoever without

leaving the Absolute standpoint. Omnis

determinatio est negatio. And yet our
theory of the relations of subject and
object necessarily implies an Absolute in
which this distinction is transcended.

Only this Absolute must be, as Plotinus

'

says, beyond existence.' This does

not mean non-existent. It only means
that the forms of our thought which deal
with finite existences are demonstrably
inadequate to conceive or describe the
Absolute. We are justified in speaking

of it as the Source of all Being ;

and we
are justified in regarding it as the
ineffable Unity towards which the mind
turns as the resolution of all contra-

dictions, the ineffable Goodness towards

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 4!

which the moral will turns as the final

victory over all evil and imperfection,

the ineffable Beauty which satisfies the

love-longings of the Soul. Even in

heaven, we may say, the beatified Spirit

is able to look upwards, to love, and to

aspire. In the human soul, which is a

microcosm, having affinities with every

grade of existence from top to bottom,

there an unknowable, super-existential
is

element, by which we may at rare

moments enter into immediate rela-

tions with the Absolute, the Godhead.

It is an experience which is wholly in-

describable. We may attempt to de-

scribe it by negatives it is not thought,
not will, not feeling, and so on. But in

so saying the mystic means, it is the goal

of thought, of will, and of feeling a

state in which our faculties, in gaining
42 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

all for which they exist, transcend the

conditions of their own activities. How-
ever, this vision of the One is no neces-
sary part of the spiritual life. The
Absolute is the necessary background
of this philosophy ;
but it need not be
an object of experience, which indeed,
strictly speaking, it hardly can be. The
mystical state, which is not confined to
this vision, but in a sense awaits us at

every step above our empirical selves,

does not add anything to our knowledge.
It rather enables us to feel and see what
we already know but knowledge
; is not
true knowledge until it is seen and felt

until, that is to say, we have made our-

selves one with it and with its object.

Now how does this philosophy affect

the question of the uniformity of Nature ?
All Nature is the work of creative Spirit,
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 43

acting freely. There is no question of

external compulsion. The regularity
which we observe in Nature is what we
should expect to find, if our hypothesis
is true. For order and limitation are,

Plotinus tells us, divine attributes. If

God seems do nothing, it is because

to

he does everything. The observed uni-

formity of Nature in no way supports

the theory of mechanical determinism.
It does not oblige us to reduce intelli-

gence to mechanism. These two things

are sharply contrasted ;
and our theory
denies mechanism throughout. In a
machine, all movements are transac-
tions between one part and another part;
they take place in accordance with
constant laws ;
and in such transactions

there no unity, nor anything new.

is

For Plotinus, the view of Nature as a

44 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

mechanism is an abstraction, useful for

certain purposes, but by no means the

' '
final truth. The laws of which it

speaks are the imprint of Soul ; they do

not belong to Matter. And we cannot

express the truth, even about external

Nature, in merely quantitative categor-
ies, which is what the mechanical theory
attempts to do. Much less do quantita-
tive categories suffice to account for

the operations of life and spirit. In the

higher forms of existence, intelligence

operates with far more apparent freedom.
We are here in a region where mechanical
laws do not apply. There is no fixed

quantity of spiritual energy in the world.

We can acquire more of it without

abstracting a corresponding amount

from some one else. The good things
of the Spirit are increased by sharing.
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 45

Nor are spirits forbidden to penetrate

each other by any material laws. Love

laughs at metaphysical, no less than at

physical barriers. Quantitative cate-

gories, in a word, fail where value comes

in and value cannot be kept out. It is
;

not a question of freedom versus deter-

minism. Psychical facts may be as

orderly as physical. And if they are

not orderly, they may still be deter-
mined by some higher power, just as
the orderly sequences of inanimate
Nature may be determined by some

higher power. But psychical facts can-

not be explained in terms of physical

attraction and repulsion, of weight and
velocity. It is something if we can get
this admitted. Mr. Bosanquet indeed
thinks that all phenomena, including
psychical, are theoretically capable of a
46 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

mechanical explanation. But the me-

chanical system would have to be very

seriously modified in order to account

for psychical phenomena ;
and I should

dispute the assertion that the mechani-

cal theory can explain anything. It can
note invariable sequence ;
but causality,
which implies creative action, is a

category which it is debarred from using.

Vitalism, then, to my mind, asserts

intelligence as against mechanism ;
and
so far it is
right. When it seeks to carry
war into the enemy's country, and
brings confusion into the orderly field
of science, it is wrong. The votary of

human freedom has no need to postulate

'
a wild universe, with W. James
'

nor ;

would his position be helped in any way

by doing so. The world is free, because
its Creator is free ;
it is orderly, because
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 47

his method of ruling it is not habitual

inattention varied by ebullitions of

spasmodic interest.

What really happens is that the higher

forms of life exhibit higher grades of

value, and approach more nearly to the

life of God (or Spirit) himself. A new
organ, consciousness, has been evolved
gradually for this purpose. Conscious-
ness perhaps belongs to a state of un-

stable equilibrium, when the mind has

to adjust itself to new conditions, and
to form new habits. It is for conscious-

ness that finite foci of life exist. I am

disposed to agree with Plotinus, in

opposition to most modern philosophers,

in refusing to attribute a central and
absolute value to consciousness, or to
'
what modern philosophers call self-

consciousness.' Strictly, there can be

48 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

no such thing as self-consciousness until

we rise quite above the empirical self.
In the ordinary soul-life, the mind and
its object are never the same when we
try to think about ourselves. And, as
Plotinus observes, we do most things
'

badly when we are self-conscious. Self-

'
consciousness makes us at once pain-

fully aware of a not-self, and incapable

of attending properly to it.

Consciousness is only one of the gifts

which the soul acquires during its ascent.

It receives an illumination which trans-

forms itself and its environment to-

gether. Soul, in the terminology of

Plotinus, is irradiated by Spirit, and
becomes Spirit. This is, of course, not
' '
a merely intellectual gain. I agree
with Mr. Bosanquet (i. 348) that the

presence of adequate ideas which

are
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 49

inoperative in moral matters is greatly

exaggerated. Ideas which are part of

the main structure of the mind must'be
operative, as a light cannot help shining.
The highest goodness, as Plotinus saw
clearly, is of this spontaneous order.
It is those who set God always before

them who help their brother-man most

effectually.
And here at last we come to Eucken,

whom I have not yet named, although

there is not much that I have said about
Plotinus that does not apply to him.
The '
New Birth
'
is the central doctrine

of Eucken's philosophy. He is never

tired of insisting that salvation consists

in a definite transition from the com-

mon experience of life to a new and
higher sphere, which he calls the life

of Spirit. The doubt which I have

50 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

frequently feltabout Eucken's philo-

sophy is whether he does not contrast

the two lives too dualist ically. Some-
times he seems anxious to smash his

neighbour Haeckel's universe as well

as to buildup his own. I do not forget
that the same sharp contrasts occur in
some of the best Christian philosophy,

e.g., in that which underlies the Fourth

Gospel. But while ethics may be

frankly dualistic, since morality lives
in the radical antithesis between good
and evil, metaphysics must beware of
being persuaded by ethics to draw the
world in silhouette. Admission into the

spiritual life is after all a matter of

degree, and I am jealous of the rich

spiritual treasure which resides in the

study and knowledge of Nature and

its laws.
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 51

But I find that Mr. Tudor Jones,

'
whose Interpretation of Eucken's

Philosophy
'

pleases me better than any

other books about the great teacher of

Jena, does not understand Eucken to

maintain this sharp severance between
the higher and the lower life. He
brings Eucken very near to Plotinus.
'
Eucken would insist (he says) that
the mental and spiritual are present
from the very beginning, and bring
to a mental focus the impressions of

the senses. In the interpretation of

Eucken's philosophy several writers

have missed the author's meaning here.

They have conceived of spiritual life as
something entirely different from the
mental life. It is different, but only
as the bud is different from the blossom ;

it means at the religious level a greater

52 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

unfolding of a life which has been present

at every stage in the history of civiliza-

tion and culture.' Mr. Jones goes on

to show how the life of the community,
with the effort and sacrifice which it
'
entails on the individual, calls into

activity a still deeper, reserved energy of

the soul. The soul now recognizes a
value beyond the values of culture and
civilization. The Good, the True, and
the Beautiful appear as the sole realities

by the side of which everything that

preceded, if taken as complete in itself,

appears as a great shadow or illusion.

. . . Life is now viewed as consisting

in a great and constant quest after these

religious ideals. ... A break takes

place with the natural self ;

the mental

life though necessary, is now

of concepts,

seen to be insufficient and life is now ;

 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 53

viewed as having a pearl of great price

before its gaze. Here the Siirb und
werde of Paul and Goethe becomes
necessary. The real education of man
now begins. His
becomes guided
life

and governed by norms whose limits

cannot be discovered, and which have
never been realized in their wholeness
on the face of our earth. What can
these mean ?
They cannot be delusions
or illusions, for they answer too deep a

need of the soul to be reduced to that

level. When the soul concentrates its

deepest attention on these norms or

ideals, they fascinate it, they draw
hidden energies into activity, they give

inklings of immortality. Is it not far

more conceivable that such a vision of

meaning, of beauty, and of enchantment

is a new kind of reality cosmic in its
54 PLOTINUS AND MODERN

'

nature, and eternal in its duration ?

Such, according to his able interpreter,

is the gist of Eucken's message about the

spiritual life. Those who are acquainted

with his own books will admit the
justice of the summary. Are the affirma-

tions of the illuminated soul tragic illu-

sions or cosmic realities ? That is the

question ;
and if we follow Plotinus and
Eucken we shall be in no doubt about
the answer. The higher life has already
been lived by very many. They agree
in what they tell us about it. They
speak that they do know, and testify
that they have seen. Why should we
not receive their witness ?

The great popularity of Eucken's

writings both in Germany and England

shows that our generation is ripe for
this kind of religion. It is a very good
 PHILOSOPHIES OF RELIGION 55

sign, if it is so. For this philosophy of

life has nothing to fear from scientific or

historical criticism. It is broad-based

on personal experience, and buttressed

by sound metaphysics. Its morality is

pure and elevated ;
it cares nothing for

denominational barriers ;
it finds ample
room for science and art, honouring
both ;
and like Christianity, with which
it has so much in common, it gives us a
valuation of the good and evil of life,

and is so a guide to practical wisdom.

'
I will not speak of the religion of the

future,' for there will be as many religions

in the future as in the past ;
but that
this is the true line of progress in religion

as well as in philosophy, I have no

doubt whatever.
 THE ESSEX HALL LECTURES
ONE SHILLING EACH NET
1893. The Development of Theology, as illustrated in
English Poetry from 1780 to 1830, by Stopford
A. Brooke, M.A., LL.D.
1
894. Unitarians and the Future, by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
1895. The Relation of Jesus to his Age and our own,
by J. Estlin Carpenter, M.A., D.D., D.Litt.
1897. The Significance of the Teaching of Jesus, by
Richard Acland Armstrong, B.A.
1899. The Religion of Time and the Religion of Eternity.
Relations between Mediaeval and Modern Thought,
by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A.
1902. Some Thoughts on Christology, by James
Drummond, M.A., LL.D., Litt.D., D.D.
1903. Emerson A Study of his Life and Influence,
:

by the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell, K.C.

1904. The Idea and Reality of Revelation, by Prof. H. H.
Wendt, Ph.D., D.D.
1905. The Immortality of the Soul in the Poems of
Tennyson and Browning, by SirHenry Jones.
1906. The Making of Religion, by Samuel M. Crothers,
D.D., Cambridge, U.S.A.
1908. Dogma and History, by Prof. Dr. Gustav Kruger,
University of Giessen,
1909. The Bearings of the Darwinian Theory of Evolu-
tion on Moral and Religious Progress, by Prof.
F. E. Weiss, D.Sc., F.L.S.
1910. The Story and Significance of the Unitarian Move-
ment, by W. G. Tarrant, B.A.
1911. Religion and Life, by Professor Rudolf Eucken.
1913. Heresy : Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights
its
in theseKingdoms, by Alexander Gordon, M.A.
1914. The Religious Philosophy of Plotinus, and Modern
Philosophies of Religion, by W. R. Inge, D.D.

LINDSEY PRESS, 5, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.

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