'I,'he said,'will call no being good,who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures;and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him,to hell Iwill go.'(115)Mansel is amazed at this 'extraordinary outburst of rhetoric';he will not 'pause to comment on its temper and good taste';but he suggests a parallel.(116)It is that of an 'inexperienced son'taking moral advice from an 'experienced father,'or believing that the elder man is acting rightly though his motives are not fully intelligible to the younger.This,as Mill replies,(117)assumes that the father is 'good'in the human sense,although with more wisdom or knowledge.To make the parallel close we should have to suppose a son who only knows that it is an equal chance whether his father exists or not,and is told by somebody who is equally ignorant that the father desires him to cut a man's throat and appropriate his wife.If the morality of God be absolutely inscrutable,we must fall back upon the conclusion that we are entitled to criticise not the moral contents but the external evidences of a religion.(118)Mansel tries to compromise.We may argue from the morality of religion within limits;the argument may prove that a religion cannot be divine;but not that it is divine.For that we must go to 'external facts.'(119)Our knowledge of God,he still asserts,is derivable from our 'moral and intellectual consciousness';from the 'constitution and course of nature'and from revelation.These generally agree.When they appear to differ,we must not settle a priori which is to give way.(120)Mr Herbert Spencer,as Manal thinks,went wrong because he took only the 'negative position'of Hamilton's philosophy,and did not see,for example,that the belief 'in a personal God is imperatively demanded by the facts of our moral and emotional consciousness.'(121)Mansel was trying to escape from his own logic under the shelter of 'vague generalities.'Mr Herbert Spencer,I think,was perfectly right in holding that when our Deity is the 'Unknowable,'he cannot be made to take sides even in a moral controversy and certainly not identified with the anthropomorphic deities of popular mythology.
The Hamilton-Mansel controversy has become a weariness to the flesh.The interest which it still possesses is only in the illustration of the conflict between different lines of development.The position of Hamilton and his disciple means a desperate attempt to escape from a pressing dilemma.Kant's theology represents the deistic rationalism of the eighteenth century.The metaphysical argument necessarily tends to some form of pantheism,such as that of which Spinoza is the most complete representative.Carry out the logic and God is identified with Nature,and is not a being who can be conceived as interfering with the laws of Nature.The growth of science had made it essential to widen the theological conceptions,and to invest the supreme ruler with attributes commensurate with the new universe,which had been growing both in vastness and regularity.The result of attempting to fulfil that condition was inconsistent with the common-sense theology of the Scottish philosophy,which tried,by help of 'intuitions,'to preserve a 'personal deity,'a being still individual and therefore conceivable as interfering;and which,finding the metaphysical argument dangerous,was inclined to fall back upon the merely empirical argument of Paley.I have shown,at fully sufficient length,how by substituting an antinomy for a paralogism,Hamilton manages verbally to evade this difficulty;and by extending the sphere of belief beyond the sphere of reason,justifies belief in a God who is at once unknowable and yet may be an object of worship.
Mansel's audacious extension of this to the historical and mythological creeds,and the consequent identification of Jehovah with the Absolute and Infinite,can only be regarded as a logical curiosity.The only results were,on the one hand,Mr Herbert Spencer's agnosticism,and on the other,perhaps,some impulse to the speculation of the rising generation.Hamilton and Mansel did something,by their denunciations of German mysticism and ontology,to call attention to the doctrines attacked.The Germans might after all give the right clue;and it might be possible,by substituting a new dialectic for the old logic,to regard the universe as still woven out of reason,and to preserve a theological or at least an idealist mode of conception.With that,however,I have no concern.
VII.MILL ON THEOLOGY
Hamilton's theory at least recognised the inevitable failure of the empirical or Paley theology which virtually makes theology a department of science.Mill,as a thorough empiricist,might have been expected to abandon theology along with all transcendentalism and ontology.In fact,however,his position was different.I have already pointed out that at one part of his argument he appears to be defending orthodox views of theology as against Mansel.This argument might appear to be merely ad hominem,as intended to show the absurdity of Mansel's doctrine of inconceivability;not to deny the inconceivability itself.
