That movement of spirit to spirit, and a revelation of God to man. We might almost say that this alone is the meaning of the work of Hegel-that in this alone he is in earnest -that, in philosophy and in religion, as struggling to this, he would present himself almost literally on every page. He complains that recent theology speaks rather of religion than of God; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the whole interest was to know God. What is now only a matter of subjective information was then objectively lived. The true relation is that of spirit to spirit. The finite spirit, in separating itself from the mundane, or in gathering up the whole mundane into its essential reality and truth, rises into unity and community with the infinite spirit, and knower and known are one. In that one intensity, where difference is at once identity and identity at once difference, man is conscious of himself in God, God is conscious of Himself in man. really is what the ontological proof is to Hegel. Spirit gives testimony of itself to spirit; and this testimony is the true inner nature of spirit. "God," says Hegel, "is essentially self-consciousness;" and it is only when man has realized himself into union with God, only then also has he realized his true free will. Readers of the history of philosophy know that Hegel is by no means singular in these views: they are common and current in the Middle Ages from Augustine to Tauler. Meister Eckhart alone has passage after passage which, in intensity and ecstasy, leaves nothing for Hegel. "The eye," he cries, "with which God sees me, is the eye with which I see Him; my eye and His eye are one; in righteousness, I am cradled in God, and He in me. If God were not, I were not; if I were not, He were not; but there is no need to know this; for these are things easy to be misunderstood, and which are only to be comprehended in the spirit." As to this of misunderstanding, Hegel, too, says, MIDDLE AGES-ECKHART-HEGEL-SMITII. 321 at least in effect: If you speak such things in the terms of the understanding, you will look in vain to find them again: If you make an ordinary generalization of such doctrine, and describe it in common words as the tenet of the knowing of Man in God and of God in Man, you have shut yourself out from it; you are on the outside, and have closed the door on yourself. These things are only in the inmost being of a man to be struggled and worked up to. Another ready objection is-pantheism. But if there is an assertion of God in the relation, there is also no denial of man. My own objection is that it at least seems to trench on a degradation of God: the very wickedest and least considerable of human beings may represent himself as a sort of reservoir from which at any moment he can draw on God, have God on tap. Of course, it may be answered that, in the relation, take it as it is, there is no room for any moment of compulsion -it is not a case of mere ancient theurgy, black art, magic; the divine approach will come at its own good time-free; and not any one human being that so tempers himself is then either wickedest or least considerable. Nay, in humanity, is it so certain that the least and the greatest, the best and the worst, have any such mighty difference between them? May not even the least and the worst cry, And we then-are not we, too, made in the image of God? With all this that concerns a living ontological proof, these external manœuvres and contrivances of Kant are strangely in contrast. To him it is quite clear that as he can reasonably think a hundred dollars not to exist, he can equally think God not to exist, but to be a mere idea of our own respondent to our own human desire for order. Adam Smith, in reply to the Doctrine of Utility, was surprised if "we have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers." What, then, should be our surprise if, in Kant's reclamation for order, we have no other reason for the production of a God than that we have for the production of a chest of drawers convenience, namely ! God is but an illusion or delusion caused by the false light of sense misleading our judgment. This light Kant calls the "transcendental shine," and he is very proud of it. He is wonderfully contented with what he thinks his discovery of these three false lights of the Ideas. But if any one will just look for himself, his wonder will be -where they come from? When we reason from the contingency of all things, as it were, to the linch-pin of all things-when we reason from design to a designereven when we reason from a certain notion to the existence of the object of that notion-in a word, in reasoning towards God, whether from existence to idea or from idea to existence, we think we have been only reasoning; but, no, says Kant, you have been only led by a natural ignis fatuus, which you cannot turn your back upon, even when you know it. This system of Kant is but a Twelfth Night cake of his own manufacture, wonderfully be-decked and be-dizzened, be-queened and be-kinged, be-flagged and be-turreted; but, for all that, it is no more than a thing of sugar and crumb of bread. Nay, even for the quantity of the bread and the quality of the sugar that are in it, we cannot but thank Kant, naming him even therefor, the ehrliche Kant, the plain, honest, honourable Kant. GIFFORD LECTURE THE SEVENTEENΤΗ. The three degrees, positive, comparative, superlative in negation of the proofs, or Hume, Kant, Darwin-The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, chapter viii. of the first volume-Darwin one of the best of men-Design-Uniforınity and law-Darwin's own words-He himself always gentle-But resolute to winConcessiveness - Religious sentiment - Disbelief - JokesNatural selection being, materialism is true, and ideas are only derivative - The theory - A species what - Sterility-What suggested natural selection to Darwin-Bakewell's achievements as a breeder-Darwin will substitute nature for Bakewell, to the production, not of new breeds, but, absolutely, of new species-His lever to this, change by natural accident and chance: such necessarily proving either advantageous, disadvantageous, or indifferent-Advantage securing in the struggle for life survival of the fittest, disadvantage entailing death and destruction, indifference being out of count-The woodpecker, the misletoe-But mere variation the very fulcrum-Variation must be, and consequences to the organism must be: hence the whole But never design, only a mechanical pullulation of differences by chance that simply prove advantageous or disadvantageous, etc. -Conditions-Mr. Huxley - Effect of the announcements of Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles LyellMr. Darwin insists on his originality — His difficulties in winning his way-Even those who agree with him, as Lyell, Hooker, and others, he demurs to their expressions: they fail to understand-Mr. Darwin's own qualms-"What makes a tuft of feathers come on a cock's head, or moss on a moss-rose?"That the question-Still spontaneous variation both universal and constant. IN regard to the negative on the question of the proofs for the being of a God, having now passed through what we name the positive and comparative degrees of it as found respectively in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, we have reached at length the similarly conditioned superlative degree in so far as it is represented, on the whole, that is, by the views of the celebrated Charles Darwin. In chapter viii. of the first volume of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, a chapter which bears to inform us in regard to the religious views of Mr. Darwin, and which is actually entitled "Religion," I think we shall easily find abundant evidence to prove that this distinguished naturalist, especially in the latter part of his life, came greatly to doubt of the existence of a God at all. I should not find it difficult in this reference, then, to paint a picture which should exhibit the original of it in a form and colouring still very odious to the great majority of the English-speaking populations anywhere. His absolute want of sympathy at last with all in nature and in art which we are in the habit of regarding as appealing to what is highest, or to what is deepest and divinest in the soul of man-that might be taken advantage of, and, according to ability, worked up into a representation, or misrepresentation, which should actually revolt. But I, for my part, have not the slightest inclination for the daubing it would be only that of any such caricature. I know that, if a man has long accustomed his thoughts exclusively to run in a single, special, and peculiar groove-I know, I say, that then all other grooves become distasteful to him. In many such grooves for many such grooves, he may have been enthusiastic once. He does not value them the less now; but, in the intensity of his devotion to the one, he has ceased to be susceptible of the interest which it surprises, disappoints, disturbs him to find he no longer possesses for the others. This is a state of mind which, in regard of intellectual working, we may expect to meet, after a time, even in the best of men. And Charles |