CHAPTER VI

TYPE VI-SOCIAL OR SOCIOLOGICAL THEISM

§ 1. Philosophers

IN the Introduction the varieties of employment of Consensus, or the reference to the collective consciousness of mankind, were stated as (1) confirmatory of the experience of the individual by the Empirical Schools, of the reasonings of the individual by the Rational Schools; (2) as itself contributing a fact of widespread extent, needing interpretation, and yielding material for an inferential argument; these on the one side: and (3) as a substitute for the individual consciousness, or with at least a large share of legitimate authority along with the individual's private judgment.

I am not aware that any English Theists of note have taken up the position of making Collective consciousness the principal source of belief: all that can be done, therefore, in this chapter is to offer some observations on the general attitude to it, and to give a few instances of its treatment by those who have made the social factor prominent, although not giving it the chief place.

The acceptance of Rationalism by the main body of English theologians and philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accounts for the prevalent use of Consensus in the purely Confirmatory sense. Locke, indeed, who had opposed it as being a prop to the theory of Innate Ideas, finds his own Rationalism so completely satisfactory that he has no need of this confirmation; in this he is followed by Mozley (Miracles, Lect. IV.). But the bulk of writers of the Demonstrative type lay considerable stress upon its corroborative assistance. Deists delighted to appeal to the record of ages; Cudworth, Barrow, and Stillingfleet set forth the testimony with more than ample voluminousness.

The

The Intuitionalists found it still more incumbent upon them to resort to it as a way of reaching a Universality which Intuitions did not themselves provide. Herbert of Cherbury regarded 'universality,' in this sense, as one of the six marks of the common notions' implanted in man by nature, amongst them being the notion of the Deity; and it was precisely this employment of Consensus which prejudiced Locke against it altogether. In the eighteenth century Theism shared with Philosophy generally the resort to Common Sense which was made by so many of the Scottish School that it provides them with one of their titles. They employed it, as Herbert had done, to support their doctrine of Intuitions. The appeal to Common Sense enabled them to oppose Hume by meeting him on his own ground. He asserted that custom was the source of belief. "Well," they said, "but the evidence of custom is on our side, not on yours: custom, you say, gives causation without 'power'; we appeal to the common sense of mankind that by a 'cause' men mean that which has a 'power' to do what it does; you say that your own experience does not provide you with a notion of a Deity, but general custom is against you, for the experience of the greater part of mankind does include that notion." It is in a similar vein that a Scottish Intuitionalist of the present day, Professor Knight, gives 'persistence in history' as one of the tests of an Intuition, and claims that it is there to testify to the Intuition of God.

Amongst Empiricists Mill's attenuated Theism was purely a product of his own private reasonings: he disdained the assistance of his fellow-mortals. "To a thinker," he says, "the argument from other people's opinions has little weight; it is but second-hand evidence."1 Mill's is either the rankest Individualism possible, or else a veiled reliance on thinking, equivalent to the most confident Rationalism.

The few English followers of Comte not only take the position of making Humanity the Subject of religious belief, but they proceed to set it up as also the Object of religion; thereby attempting an entirely new departure in the idea of religion, for self-admiration has been universally regarded as the very antithesis to the religious attitude: and this surely is equally the case whether the worshipper be a single person or a corporate body.

1 Three Essays, p. 156.

ARNOLD, MATTHEW: Literature and Dogma, 1873; God and the Bible, 1875.

Matthew Arnold comes as near as any one to the position of Social Theism. He is looking for a religion for humanity, and he looks to historical beliefs to see what men seem most to have felt the need of, and therefore what they have believed in.

This is the gist of his appeal to 'culture': it is opposed on the one hand to the idiosyncrasies of personal taste, and on the other to the arrogant claims of mere intellect. The man of wide reading in the past and varied intercourse with his fellows in the present will represent the Social mind: as an index to it, his opinions are worth more than those of philosophers, or of metaphysicians rather. So much is he opposed to these that he would rather appeal to the masses than to them: and finds "Messrs. Moody and Sankey masters in the philosophy of history compared with Professor Clifford.” It is, indeed, inconsistent in him, as the pleader for wide reading of the best thoughts of humanity, to set himself to belittle the efforts of the greatest thinkers of mankind. But he does so, except for a few favoured ones, for he names as the greatest thinkers Anselm, Descartes, Locke, and Clarke, with Fénelon—a curious list. However, he is quite sincere, for he evidently thought that letters' had been a real source of human happiness, but that no one had ever 'enjoyed' the reasonings of metaphysicians,' implying that, in his view, the schools of Athens, the lecture-rooms of the Schoolmen, the classrooms of Kant and Hamilton were filled by dull reluctant minds depressed with joyless toil. We must leave him to settle this with such men of culture as Socrates and Cicero, who thought that such arguments as Causality and Design, which Arnold would leave to the lecture-room, were well within the thinking powers of every plain man, and well within the circle of his interests, too.

He makes the broad appeal to mankind again when he employs his favourite method of interpretation by Philology: and there, by manipulation of historical etymologies, arrives at what he thinks were men's religious ideas: and so he comes to his famous definition: by God' men mean Something not themselves which helps or 'makes for' righteousness. Like Spencer, he has pruned without remorse, and with the same result, the personality element has to go: men do not need that. So that, strangely for a man who dislikes Metaphysics, he chooses as the supreme idea a combination of abstractions! That good

ness is provided for in the world is surely a very abstract thought: and that the provider is 'something' of which all that can be predicated is that it is not the thinker or anything personal is, if possible, more abstract still. Descartes and Locke were surely more concrete than this.. Arnold's writings have tended to discourage the pursuit of truth in Religion, to foster the idea that a number of misguided men have diverted great energies from beneficial purposes into the lost labour of thinking, and thus he has been a hindrance to that culture which he really desired to advance. Counterbalancing this has been

his untiring insistance on good conduct, and his word for Theism as at least the belief in a Power over the world which is on the side of virtue. He probably thought that the Zeitgeist, the Social authority to which he appealed, was against thinking as a source of belief in any sphere except the sciences: and this made him all the more eager to fix nobility of conduct and elevation of moral temper on a permanent basis. When he is dealing with Metaphysics or even with plain thought he seems to be wandering. Some think that his religious writings were all waste of energy that ought to have been devoted to poetry and literary criticism. This was not his own opinion: his advocacy of Moral idealism, with Ethical Theism as its consequence, he himself considered to be a worthy service to his age.

As to the problem of Infinity, Matthew Arnold, though no metaphysician, knows the solution: all that can be said in favour of an Absolute Infinite he knows to be wrong: the unlimited is all that is meant, like a myriagon, an indefinite multiplication, that is all. And though no metaphysician he can see through the Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological proofs, estimate their value and reject them. But though the term Cause has found no favour, he finds himself obliged to admit Power, and later on, though he has dismissed Infinity, he admits Eternity: and these two terms-whatever their significance are elevated into the definition; the 'Something' becomes an 'Eternal Power.'

So that in his definition we have four points explicit : Eternity, Power, not ourselves, and making for Righteousness. This, though complex, he is not afraid of saying can be known by a single act of mind: men know it so, they have an Intuition of it.

The main point, however, is the Righteousness, and Arnold's voice is notable because he is heard among those who insist that the moral order of the world and the moral sentiment in man directly suggest an Eternal Righteousness. He commends in the Cambridge Platonists their 'extraordinarily simple, profound, and just conception of religion as a temper, a behaviour,' and as such he is enthusiastic for it, himself. And it is the fact of this protest which gave character to what he had to say. His books were widely read, and in their day had some influence on English culture. The fact, however, remains that while appreciation of his literary criticism and of his poetry has increased since his personality was removed, there seems no sign of an influence beyond his immediate contemporaries issuing from his Natural theology, which is nearly as abstract as Mr. Spencer's, but not quite, for Righteousness is more concrete than Unknowability, after all.

KIDD, B.: Social Evolution, 1894

This book is by an independent student of contemporary science and of history who seems to have been so much surprised by finding religious belief a real influence that he set about seeking to account for it as a factor in evolution. As the function which he is led to ascribe to it is of the Social kind, he may be taken as an example of Social Theism.

In morality and in religion it is the social character which is before Mr. Kidd's mind: not the individual, but the individual in relation to society, to the race, is the subject of moral action: he is in search of beliefs which have a place in the process of history, in the development of men and of societies or

nations.

It came to him as a distinct surprise that Intellect as a source of belief had been much less influential than he had supposed. His inference was that religious belief having a manifest superiority over intellect as a controlling and impelling force must have some more vital function to discharge; no merely subjective fancy, much less any invention of interested persons or classes, could have wielded the influence which history discloses; even verified Scientific knowledge seemed less valued by humanity and of less account in determining human life. That function he considers he has found in ethics taken in its wide sense as covering social life, and it is this: There is a