GIFFORD LECTURE THE FOURTH. Anaxagoras, the νοῦς – Aristotle - Understanding - Pythagoreans Pantheism Lord Gifford - Baghavad Gita – The νοῦς το Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - Grote, Schwegler, Zeller - The world a life - Berkeley, Cudworth, Plato, Zorzi - Subject and object-Nature and thought - Externality and intervality-Bruno-Universal and particular-Spinoza-Physical theories-Space and time-Hodgson, Carlyle, Berkeley, Reid, Leibnitz, Kant-But for an eye and an ear, the world utterly dark, utterly silent. RETURNING to Anaxagoras, it is still a question how we are to decide him to have regarded his principle of the νοῦς, whether as a power immanent, that is, dwelling in matter, or as a power transcendent, that is, outside of and above matter. It really seems to me difficult, however, to give any other interpretation than the latter to the words of Diogenes Laertius at all events. As though actually quoting from the very work of Anaxagoras, Diogenes says, παντα χρήματα ἦν ὁμοῦ, all things were together, εἶτα νοῦς ἐλθὼν αὐτὰ διεκόσμησε, then νοῦς coming, orderly disposed them. We seem to see here one thing lying by itself apart, and another, at some certain moment of time, coming, moving towards it, and adding itself to it. But that being so, νοῦς is not immanent in matter, but transcendent over it. Aristotle, near the beginning of the eighth book of the Physics, makes the distinction between the two positions, what was first and what came second, even stronger. His words are, "Anaxagoras says that all things being together, and having remained so at rest an endless time, νοῦς set motion into them and separated them." That, plainly, is to the effect that the movement was set into things from without, and not developed in them from within; that voûs, namely, was a transcendent, not an immanent principle. The Germans seem to incline, on the whole, however, to adopt the mere immanence of the νοῦς. To some of them the fault of theology is its rigorous separation of the opposites. In the relation of God and the world they would wish to see, not a fixed inconceivable sunderedness, but a living transition. Others would wish us to see in the voûs, not reason, but understanding. What they mean by understanding is what some time ago I endeavoured to figure under the word λόγος. You see that inexplicable thing a reel in a bottle; suppose now it were all explained to you, every step in the idea that generated it clear before your eyes, then that λόγος (for the explanation would be a λόγος), -then that λόγος would be the Verstand, the understanding of the reel in the bottle. This reel would no longer be a mere piece of inexplicable matter; it would now be impregnated with the notion, so that all its parts were held together by it, and, as it were, one in it. Now that is what the νοῦς is held by some to be in relation to the world. The world were an unintelligible externality and material chaos, did not the understanding enter into it as a connecting and explaining tissue. So it is that even the Pythagoreans, too, explain the world; it is a congeries of externalities; but into that congeries of externalities, mere disjunct atoms, proportion enters; and that proportion gives them subsistence, connection, meaning, and unity. In this way it will be intelligible what is meant by an understanding being sunk into the things of the universe. To certain Germans, then, voûs is such understanding-an immanent ideal bond, not a fashioning creator apart from, and independent of it. This, in general, and on its own account, is a point of view necessary for us to know, even with reference to our general subject of Natural Theology. I mean that the doctrine of the immanence of the vous involves what is called pantheism. This is the more interesting to us here inasmuch as some of the expressions in which Lord Gifford characterizes his idea of God may seen to have in them a pantheistic echo. As, for example, these, that God is the Infinite, the All, the One, and the Sole Substance, the Sole Being, the Sole Reality, and the Sole Existence. Some of these expressions no doubt, even as pantheistic, suggest criticism. Reality and existence, it may be said, for instance, are both doubtful words. An iron nail or a brass button is, as we generally speak, a reality; but God's reality must be a much other reality than the reality of such as these. Existence, too, at least in certain philosophical works, has been pretty well exclusively used in identically the same sense as reality in the case of either nail or button. A brass button is an existence, and an iron nail is an existence, the word existence being here taken in its strictly etymological sense as a compound from the Latin words ex and stare. Whatever finitely stands out to sense, as an actual object seen of eye or touched of hand, etc., is an existence; it stands up and out. But existence in no such sense as that, plainly, can be predicated of God. God is not an object for eye, or ear, or touch, or any sense. We cannot see God as we see a statue or a house, or hear Him as we hear the blowing of the wind or the dashing of the wave. In a word, God is to be thought as infinite, not finite, as immaterial and not material, as a spirit and not as a body. In the sense alluded to, then, He may not exist; but He will still be. The soul of a man will be granted to be let us conceive its nature to be, how we may. Even the crudest judge of character has not his idea of a man as such and such a body merely. There really is an entity that is logically distinguishable from the body, and is, on its side, as much a one, or more a one, than, on the other side, the body itself. An ego is a unity, and a unity of the whole of its infinite contents, take it how you may. Logically, then, an ego is an entity on its own account-an integer, self-contained and self-complete teres, totum, ac rotundum. An ego, of course, makes itself known only through and by means of its body, but, with whatever difference, it is precisely so with God; it is the very contention of these lectures that God makes Himself known through His body, which is the visible world without and the intelligible world within. As for Lord Gifford's term, substance, again, it reminds at once of Spinoza; substance is the God of Spinoza, and Spinoza, as we know, is the archpantheist. The word All, again, is certainly a word in pantheistic parlance, and may, as the others may, be so used by Lord Gifford. Even pantheistically, however, we may stop to say, it is a very objectionable word; for, even so, it is at once too much and too little. Too much! All, in its use by Lord Gifford, God as the All, cannot mean stars and planets, sun, moon, earth, air, seas, and continents, minerals, plants, animals, men, collectively, that is, as so many individual objects in a ring, a mere outside aggregate, there materially in space, and now materially in time. Etymologically, no doubt, such a description of an All as God, or of God as an All, may seem but a necessary inference from the very word pantheism; but it is difficult to believe that any pantheist, Oriental or Occidental, religious or philosophical, ever thought of his God as any such clumsy miscellaneousness. In some of the books of the Bhaghavad Gita, as the seventh, the ninth, and the tenth, Krishna, indeed, may be heard exclaiming to Arjoon: "I am sunshine, and I am rain; I am the radiant sun, the moon, the book of hymns, Meru among the mountains; I am the lion, the vowel A," etc. etc. No doubt, however, these are but as so much spray from the overflow of the Oriental phantasy. Hardly ever is it the case, indeed, that they occur in that bare categorical form. More commonly the phrasing itself shows that the term is but a trope: "I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, sweet-smelling savour in the earth. I am the sacrifice, I am the worship, I am the spices, I am the invocation, I am the provisions, I am the fire, I am the victim," etc. etc. In such form as that it is quite evident that there is no thought of an assemblage of mere outer objects as constituting the All that is to be conceived as God. But if such expressions as are in question, and so taken, are too much, they are, as evidently, all too little. No such names, and no such names even if they were multiplied a thousandfold, can exhaust the infinity in unity, and the unity in infinity, of God. That, too, is a way of the Orientals, that they would seek by mere numberless namings to ascend to the infinite that is God; but, again, the Orientals themselves confess, even in the numberlessness of their namings, the impotence of the numberlessness itself. The visible is but an accident and fringe of the invisible; no myriad namings of the seen can reach the unseen. To certain Germans, then, almost, we may say, to the German philosophical historians generally, the immanence of the voῦs is the established doctrine. With νοῦς, they say, there certainly comes in, and for the first time in acknowledged history, the principle of an understanding, and the principle of an understanding that is self-determinative; but still we are not to think of the voûs in nature as of a mind and thinking consciousness in the way we find it in ourselves. Noῦς is to be conceived of |