false. Very well then, that infinite thought must somehow have had all that in it from the beginning. If a man doubts it, let him answer our previous dif¬ ficulties. Let him show us how he can make an error save through the presence of an actual inclu¬ sive thought for which the error always was error and never became such at all. If he can do that, let him try. We should willingly accept the result if he could show it to us. But he cannot. We have rambled over those barren hills already too long. Save for Thought there is no truth, no error. Save for inclusive Thought, there is no truth, no error, in separate thoughts. Separate thoughts as such cannot then know or have the distinction be¬ tween their own truth and their own falsity in them¬ selves, and apart from the inclusive thought. There is then nothing of truth or of error to be found in the world of separate thoughts as such. All the thoughts are therefore in the last analysis actually true or false, only for the all-including Thought, the Infinite.
We could have reached the same result had we set out from the problem, What is Truth f We chose not to do so because our skepticism had the placid answer ready: “No matter what truth is, for very likely there is little or no truth at all to be had. Why trouble one’s mind to define what a fairy or a brownie is?” “Very well, then,” we said to our skepticism, “ if that is thy play, we know a move that thou thinkest not of. W e will not ask thee of truth, if thou thinkest there is none. We will ask thee of error, wherein thou revelest.” And our skepticism very cheerfully, if somewhat incoherently, answers, that, “ if there be little or no truth here below, there is at least any amount of error, which as skeptics we have all been detecting ever since we first went to school.” “We thank thee for that word, oh friend, but now, what is an error? ” Blessed be Socrates for that question. Upon that rock philosophy can, if it wants, build we know not yet how much.
It is enough for the moment to sum up the truth that we have found. It is this: “ All reality must be 'present to the Unity of the Infinite Thought.” There is no chance of escape. For all reality is re¬ ality because true judgments can be made about it. And all reality, for the same reason, can be the ob¬ ject of false judgments. Therefore, since the false and the true judgments are all true or false as pres¬ ent to the infinite thought, along with their objects, no reality can escape. You and I and all of us, all good, all evil, all truth, all falsehood, all things ac¬ tual and possible, exist as they exist, and are known for what they are, in and to the absolute thought; are therefore all judged as to their real character at this everlasting throne of judgment.
This we have found to be true, because we tried to doubt everything. We shall try to expound in the coming chapter the religious value of the concep¬ tion. W e can however at once see this in it: The Infinite Thought must, knowing all truth, include also a knowledge of all wills, and of their conflict. For him all this conflict, and all the other facts of the moral world, take place. He then must know the outcome of the conflict, that Moral Insight of our first book. In him then we have the J udge of our ideals, and the Judge of our conduct. He must know the exact value of the Good Will, which for him, like all other possible truth, must be an actually re¬ alized Fact. And so we cannot pause with a simply theoretical idealism. Our doctrine is practical too. W e have found not only an infinite Seer of physical facts, but an infinite Seer of the Good as well as of the Evil. He knows what we have and what we lack. In looking for goodness we are in no wise looking for what the real world does not contain.
This, we say, we have found as a truth, because we tried to doubt everything. We have taken the wings of the morning, and we have fled; but be¬ hold, we are in the midst of the Spirit. Truly the words that some people have thought so fantastic ought henceforth to be put in the text-books as com¬ monplaces of logical analysis: — “ They reckon ill that leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings, I am the doubter and the doubt.” — Everything finite we can doubt, but not the Infinite. That eludes even our skepticism. The world-build¬ ers, and the theodicies that were to justify them, we could well doubt. The apologetic devices wearied us. All the ontologies of the realistic schools were just pictures, that we could accept or reject as we chose by means of postulates. We tried to escape them all. We forsook all those gods that were yet no gods; but here we have found something that abides, and waxes not old, something in which there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. No power it is to be resisted, no plan-maker to be foiled by fallen angels, nothing finite, nothing striving, seeking, losing, altering, growing weary; the A 11-Enf older it is, and we know its name. Not Heart, nor Love, though these also are in it and of it; Thought it is, and all things are for Thought, and in it we live and move.
CHAPTER XII.
If thou betake thyself to the ever-living and abiding Truth, the de¬ sertion or death of a friend shall not make thee sad. — Imitation of Christ.
Cum contra sapiens, quatenus ut talis consideratur, vix animo movetur, sed sui et Dei et rerum aeterna quadam necessitate conscius, nunquam esse desinit, sed semper vera animi acquiescentia potitur. — Spinoza, Ethica.
We are in a new world of Divine Life. The dark world of the powers has passed away from our thought. Here is the Eternal, for which all these powers exist, in which they dwell. Here we are in the presence of the Ideal Judge who knows all Good and Evil. From the other side the world as we ap¬ proached it had seemed so restless, so disheartening, so deaf. The world of our postulates was a brighter one only because we determined to make it so. But there was something lonesome in the thought that the postulates got, as answer from the real world, only their own echo, and not always that. Their world was rather their own creation than an exter¬ nal something that gave them independent support. Sometimes there seemed to be nothing solid that could echo back anything at all. Now we seem to look upon a truth that satisfies indeed no selfish longings of ours, no whims of theological tradition, no demands of our personal narrow lives. We shall not learn in this way who is first in the kingdom of heaven, nor how the dead are raised, nor any answer to any other special demand of any set of men. We learn, however, this at least: All truth is known to One Thought, and that Infinite. What does that imply? Let us see.
I.
I.
Our argument is somewhat near to the thought that partially satisfied St. Augustine when he found it in his Plato. That there should be a truth at all implies, we have seen, that there should be an Infi¬ nite Truth, known to an Infinite Thought; or, in other words, that all is for thought, and without thought is nothing that is. We also are a part of this infinite thought. We know not yet more of the nature of this thought, save that it must be eternal, all-embracing, and One. What then shall we be able further to say about it?
To answer would be to expound a system of phi¬ losophy. But we must limit ourselves here to the necessary. And so, for the first, we shall try to point out what this ideal and infinite life of thought that we have found as the eternal truth of things cannot be expected to accomplish for the purposes of our religion, and then to consider what we may nevertheless dare to hope from it.
It cannot be expected to furnish us an a priori knowledge of any fact of experience, of any particu¬ lar law of nature, of the destiny of any one finite be¬ ing. All that remains just as dark as it was before- We neither rejoice in this result, nor lament it. No¬ body who wanders into the ideal world may expect to find it ordered for his individual advantage; nor need he try to find there good investments for his money. The Infinite does not wait for his individ¬ ual approval; although morally speaking he may do well to get the approval of the Infinite. The Infi¬ nite was not elected to office by his vote, and he may not impeach it for disregard of his humble pe¬ titions for good things, nor threaten it with want of confidence because it does not secure passage for his private bills. In so far as to say this is to condemn the Real, we unhesitatingly do so. But then, as we saw in our ethical discussion, the moral insight is not so much concerned with private bills, as with certain greater matters. If the moral insight wants relig¬ ious support, possibly the failure of all these per¬ sonal concerns of ours to find any hint of response from the Absolute, may not render impossible the ethical undertakings of the human spirit. If as in¬ dividuals we must hear the dreadful words from the spirit of nature: Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir; still it is possible that with a higher insight, looking upon this same spirit in its eternal and inmost nature, we may yet come with full reason at last to say: JErhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles, warum ich bat. For there are demands and demands. Man, as lover, demands suc¬ cess in love, and the course of the world may thwart him; as toiler, he demands for himself personal im¬ mortality, and the course of the world mqy care naught for his individual life; as bereaved, as mourner over his dead, he may demand for his loved ones also this immortality, and the course of the world may leave the fate of all his loved ones mys¬ terious forever; as lover of mankind, he may de¬ mand an infinite future of blessed progress for his race, and the law of the dissipation of energy may give him the only discoverable physical answer to his demand; as just man, he may cry aloud that evil shall cease from among men, and the wicked may still laugh in triumph unpunished. And yet for all this he may find some higher compensation. Agnos¬ tic as he will remain about all the powers of this world, about the outcome of all finite processes, he will take comfort in the assurance that an Infinite Reason is above all and through all, embracing everything, judging everything, infallible, perfect. To this Thought he may look up, saying: “ Thou All-Knowing One seest us, what we are, and how we strive. Thou knowest our frame, and rememberest that we are as dust. In thy perfection is our Ideal. That thou art, is enough for our moral comfort. That thou knowest our evil and our good, that gives us our support in our little striving for the good.
Not worthless would we be in thy sight; not of the vile, the base, the devilish party in the warfare of this world. Thou that judgest shalt say that we, even in our poor individual lives, are better than naught. Thou shalt know that in our weakness and blindness, in our pain and sorrow, in our little days, in our dark world, ignorant as to the future, con¬ fused with many doubts, beset with endless tempta¬ tions, full of dread, of hesitation, of sloth, we yet sought, such as we were, to he in our own fashion like thee; to know the truth as thou knowest it, to be full of higher life as thou art full, to be above strife as thou art above it, to be of one Spirit as thou art One, to be perfect as thou art perfect. This thou shalt see in us, and this record shall be eternal, like our knowledge. In thee what we vaguely aim to conceive is clear light. In thee the peace that we strive to find is experienced. And when we try to do right, we know that thou seest both our striving and our successes and our failures. And herein we have comfort. We perish, but thou endurest. Ours is not thy eternity. But in thy eternity we would be remembered, not as rebels against' the good, but as doers of the good; not as blots on the face of this part of thy infinite reality, but as healthy leaves that flourished for a time on the branches of the eternal tree of life, and that have fallen, though not into forgetfulness. For to thee nothing is forgotten.”
This thought, of the Judge that never ceases to think of us and of all things, never changes, never mistakes, and that knows the Good simply because that Good is an element of the Truth — perhaps this can sustain us when all else fails. Nothing but this may be certain; but this, if it be not all that some people have sought, may be a help to us. This Re¬ ligion may have no such hot little fires on its altars as we at first longed for; but then it is a very old objection to the stars to say that they bake us no bread, and only glitter up there in the dark to be looked at. Yet even the stars are worth something to us.
II.
But if we leave these limitations of our view, and pass to its positive religious value, our first sense is one of joy and freedom to find that our long sought ideal of a perfect unity of life is here attained. Let us look away for a moment from our finite existence, with its doubts and its problems, to the conception of that infinite life. In that life is all truth, fully present in the unity of one eternal moment. The world is no mass of separate facts, stuck one to an¬ other in an external way, but, for the infinite, each fact is what it is only by reason of its place in the infinite unity. The world of life is then what we desired it to be, an organic total; and the individ¬ ual selves are drops in this ocean of the absolute truth.
Thus then, seen in the light of this our result, the human tasks that we sketched in our ethical discussion find their place in the objective world. Now, and in fact for the first time, we can see what we were really trying to accomplish through our ideal. W e were trying in a practical way to real¬ ize what we now perceive to be the fullness of the life of God. So that the one highest activity, in which all human activities were to join, is known to us now as the progressive realization by men of the eternal life of an Infinite Spirit. So whereas we formerly had to say to men: Devote yourselves to art, to science, to the state, or to any like work that does tend to organize your lives into one life, we may now substitute one absolute expression for all those accidental expressions, and may say: Devote yourselves to losing your lives in the divine life. For all these special aims that we have mentioned are but means of accomplishing the knowledge of the fullness of the truth. And Truth is God.
Now this precept is no barren abstraction. It means to take hold of every act of life, however humble and simple. “ Where art thou, O man? ” our ideal says to us. “ Art thou not in God? To whom dost thou speak? With whom dost thou walk? What life is this in whose midst thou livest? What are all these things that thou seemest to touch? Whose is all this beauty that thou enjoyest in art, this unity that thou seekest to produce in thy state, this truth that thou pursuest in thy thought? All this is in God and of God. Thou hast never seen, or heard, or touched, or handled, or loved anything but God. Know this truth, and thy life must be transformed to thee in all its significance. Serve the whole God, not the irrationally separate part that thy delusions have made thee suppose to be an independent thing. Live out thy life in its full meaning; for behold, it is God’s life.”
So, as it seems, the best that we could have wished from the purely moral side is attained. The Di¬ vine Thought it is that actually accomplishes what we imperfectly sought to attain, when we defined for ourselves Duty. In the Divine Thought is per¬ fectly and finally realized the Moral Insight and the Universal Will of our ethical discussion. And this insight and will are not realized as bv some Power, that then should set about to accomplish their fulfillment externally. But in the infinite, where all is eternally complete, the insight is both present and fulfilled; the universal will gets what it seeks. There is no lack there, nor hesitation, nor striving, nor doubt, nor weariness; but all is eternally per¬ fect triumph.
Now this, though it sounds mystical enough to our untrained common sense, is no mere poetry of thought. It is the direct philosophical outcome of what we have found by a purely logical process. The driest thought, the simplest fragment of ration¬ ality, involves this absolute, infinite, and perfect thought. And this it involves because it involves the possibility of error, and because, as separate from the infinite, this possibility of error in a single thought becomes unintelligible and contradictory. We did all that we could to escape this conclusion. We wandered in the thickets of confusion and contra¬ diction, until there was no chance of finding there a further pathway. And then we turned to see, and behold, God was in this place, though we had known it not. The genuine God that we thus found was no incomplete, struggling God, whom we might pity in his conflict with evil, but the all-embracing thought, in which the truth is eternally finished. And this God it is that we now see as the complete realization of our own ideal, as of all worthy ideals.
For consider if you will this element in our con¬ ception of this Thought. Can this infinite know it¬ self as imperfect, or as not possessing some object that it knows to be good? This is impossible, and doubly so. Not only does the conception of an Infinite, in which and for which are all things, wholly exclude the possibility of any good thing beyond the Infinite itself, but also in still another way does the same truth appear. For if you suppose that this infinite thought desires some perfection G that it has not, then either it is right in supposing this per* fection to be truly desirable, or it is wrong. In either case the previous argument of Chapter XI. shows us that the truth or the falsity of this judg¬ ment of desire about G must exist as known truth or falsity for a higher thought, which, including the thought that desires, and itself actually having this desired good thing, compares the desired object with the conception of the thought that desires it, and judges of them both. Above the desire, then, must in every case exist the satisfaction of the desire in a higher thought. So that for the Infinite there can be no unsatisfied desire. Unsatisfied desire exists only in the finite beings, not in the inclusive Infinite.
The world then, as a whole, is and must be ab¬ solutely good, since the infinite thought must know what is desirable, and knowing it, must have present in itself the true objects of desire. The existence of any amount of pain or of other evil, of crime or of baseness in the world as we see it, is, thus viewed, no evidence against the absolute goodness of things, rather a guaranty thereof. For all evil viewed ex¬ ternally is just an evidence to us finite beings that there exists something desirable, which we have not, and which we just now cannot get. However stub¬ born this evil is for us, that has naught to dp with the perfection of the Infinite. For the infinite did not make this evil, but the evil, together with the making of it, which indeed was also in its separate¬ ness evil, — all this is a phenomenon for the infinite thought, which, in knowing this evil, merely knows the absolute desirableness of that which it also pos¬ sesses, namely, the absolutely good.
We have used here an argument that could not be used in our study of the “ World of Doubt.” When we there thought evil to be possible for the world as a whole, we conceived that a being who knew all the world would yet desire something better. But what would this imply? It implies that this being would desire a state of things different from the existing one, and would do so believing that state to be better than the existing one. But would he truly know this desired state to be better, or would he only hope so? Who truly knows the value of a state save the one that possesses it? Knowledge is of the present. Therefore this being would not really know the bet¬ ter state, unless it were already actual for him. But in that case he would include not only the present world, but the perfect world, and his total state could not be one of discontent. So the other alter¬ native remains. Our supposed being would only hope the desired state to be better than what was real already for him. But would his hope be a true one? If so, then it could only be true in case this perfection is already realized in a higher thought. For the Infinite then the question, “ Is there any¬ thing better than what exists? ” must be nonsense. For him the actual and the possible fall together in one truth; and this one truth cannot be evil.
On another side, our conception gives us religious support. The imperfection of the purely moral view lay in part in the fact that there was an inner incom¬ pleteness about the very definition of our ideal, as well as a doubt about its attainability. This inner incompleteness must however be removed in and for the Infinite Mind. In dealing with the work of life, we came to a point where we said, thus far we can see our way, but beyond that our ideal remains in¬ complete. We must have faith, so we implied, that if we attained so much of the ideal social condi¬ tion, the way from that point onward would become clear. But now we see why the way would of neces¬ sity become clear to one whose knowledge of life were broad enough and deep enough. For in the Infinite that includes all life, that rests above all finite strife in the absolute attainment of the ideal, there can be no incompleteness, no torso of an ideal, but a perfect knowledge of what is most excellent. Those faint foreshadowings of a perfect life that art and science and social work show to us, must be for the Infinite no faint foreshadowings, but absolute certainty and perfect clearness. Hence by our re¬ ligious doctrine we get not merely the assurance that such ideals as we have are realized for the Infinite; but, better than this, we get our first full assurance that our incomplete ideals have an actual completion as ideals. For we thus get our first full assurance that there is in the highest sense any definite ideal at all. Pessimism, as we have seen, implies eithei doubt about what the ideal state is, or unavoidable lack of that state. And the Infinite can be no Pes¬ simist in either sense.
The religious comfort that a man can get from contemplating all this truth is indeed very different from the consolation of the separate individual as such that many people want their religion to give them. And this very fact furnishes us a good test of moral sincerity. The religious comfort that we find is no comfort save to the truly religious spirit in us. It says to us: “ You that have declared your willingness to serve moral ideals because they are such, does this help you to know, not of a goodly place where you personally and individually shall live without tears forever as a reward for your ser¬ vices, but of an eternal Judge that respects in no whit your person, before whom and in whom you are quite open and perfectly known, who now and for all eternity sees your good and your evil, and esti¬ mates you with absolute justice? This blaze of in¬ finite light in which you stand, does it cheer you? If it does, then you are glad to learn that above all your struggles there is the eternal Victory, amid all your doubts there is the eternal Insight, and that your highest triumph, your highest conception, is just an atom of the infinite truth that all the time is there. But if all this is true of you, then you do love the ideal for its own sake. Then it is not your tri¬ umph that you seek, but the triumph of the Highest.
And so it is that you rejoice to learn how this that is best in the world not only will triumph, but always has triumphed, since, as you now learn, for God the highest good is thus a matter of direct experience.”
The writer remembers well, how some years since, while all this doctrine seemed to him shrouded in doubt, he heard a very thoughtful and pious friend maintain that the greatest comfort to be got from a belief in God is the sense that however much the world may misjudge us, however much even our best and closest friends may misunderstand us, there is one perfect all-knowing Thought that comprehends us far better than we comprehend ourselves. Good¬ ness is, in that thought, estimated at its full worth. Nothing is hidden from the Judge. And what we are, He knoweth it altogether. The present view seems to the author to meet the conditions that his friend here had in mind. Theism as a doctrine that there is a big power that fights and beats down other powers in the service of the good, is open to all the objections before suggested. This warrior, why does he not win? This slayer of evil things, this binder of Satan, who boasts that all things will yet be put under his feet, — has he not had all eternity in which to put all things under his feet, and has he done it yet? He may be indeed good, but some¬ how disaster seems to pursue him. Religious com¬ fort in contemplating him you can have if you be¬ lieve in him, but always you feel that this comfort is shadowed by the old doubt; is he after all what we want him to be, the victorious ruler of the world? But if we leave the eternally doubtful contemplation of the world as a heap of powers, and come to the deeper truth of the world as Thought, then these doubts must disappear.
Yet to show that this is true, we must dwell upon doubts a little longer, and must compare our present view of the solution of the problem of evil with the views condemned in Chap. YIII.
III.
So far we have come in joyful contemplation of the Divine Truth. But now is there not a serpent in this Eden also? We have been talking of the in¬ finite goodness; but after all, what shall we still say of that finite “ partial evil” of life? We seem to have somehow proved a priori that it must be “ uni¬ versal good.” For, as we have said, in the Infinite Life of our ideal there can be no imperfection. This, we have said, is the demonstration that we missed all through our study of the world of the Powers. Since we approached that world from without, and never felt the pulse of its heart’s blood, we had noth¬ ing but doubt after doubt when we contemplated the evil that seemed to be in it. Our efforts to explain evil seemed hollow and worthless. There might be some deeper truth involved in these efforts; but we knew it not. Well, are we right in declaring that we have altogether overcome our difficulty now? Ap¬ parently we are as far as ever from seeing how the partial evil can be the universal good; we only show, from the conception of the infinite itself, that the partial evil must be the universal good. God must see how; and we know this because we know of God. More than this we seem to be unable to suggest.
But will this do? Have we not forgotten one ter¬ rible consequence of our doctrine? The partial evil is universal good, is it? There is no evil? All apparent imperfection is an illusion of our partial view? So then where is the chance to be in a free way and of our own choice better than we otherwise in truth should be? Is not the arm that is raised to strike down wickedness paralyzed by the very thought that was to give it divine strength? This evil that I fight here in this finite world is a delu¬ sion. So then, why fight it? If I do good works, the world is infinitely good and perfect. If I seem to do evil works, the world is in truth no worse. Seeming good is not better than seeming evil, for if it were, then the seeming evil would be a real defect in God, in whose life is everything. If I have never loved aught but God, even so I have never hated aught but God. It is all alike. God does not need just me. Or rather I may say, in so far as he needs me to complete his infinite truth, he already has me from all eternity. I have nothing to do with the business, save to contemplate in dizzy indolence the whirling misty masses of seeming evil, and to say with a sort of amused reverence that they look very ill and opaque to me, but that of course God sees through them clearly enough somehow. The mist is in truth crystalline water, and he has so quick a sense as to look beyond the drops as easily as if they were in the calm unity of a mountain lake. And so, my religion is simply a contemplation of God’s wisdom, but otherwise an idle amusement.
So says the man who sees only this superficial view of our doctrine. In so far as, standing once more outside of some evil thing, we say: “ That thing yonder looks bad, but God must see it to be good,” we do indeed remain indolent, and our relig¬ ion simply means a sort of stoical indifference to the apparent distinction of good and evil. This is in fact the proper practical attitude of even the most earnest man in the presence of evil that he cannot understand and cannot affect. In such matters we must indeed be content with the passive knowledge. Death and the unavoidable pains of life, the down¬ fall of cherished plans, all the cruelty of fate, we must learn to look at as things to us opaque, but to God, who knows them fully, somehow clear and ra¬ tional. So regarding them, we must aim to get to the stage of stoical indifference about them. They are to us the accidents of existence. We have no business to murmur about them, since we see that God, experiencing them, somehow must experience them as elements in an absolutely perfect life. For God we regard not as the mysterious power who made them, and who then may have been limited to the use of imperfect means, but as the absolute thought that knows them; so that, however inexpli¬ cable they must now be to us, they are in themselves nothing that God vainly wishes to have otherwise, but they are organically joined with the rest of the glorious Whole.