From Speculative Philosophy there is a natural transition to the Philosophy of Religion. So I will consider next Professor Stace's essay.
I will begin with his remark that the really important conflict between science and religion is that the general spirit of science, as expressed in what he calls "the philosophy of naturalism," conflicts with any sort of religious view. We must either abandon naturalism or abandon religion or find some way of reconciling the two.
The "philosophy of naturalism," as I understand it, holds inter alia that all consciousness (and a fortiori personality) is completely and one-sidedly dependent on the fulfilment of certain physico-chemical, physiological, and anatomical conditions. Every particular experience depends one-sidedly on a particular occurrence in a certain brain or nervous system, and each person's dispositions, character, personality, knowledge, and skills depend one-sidedly on the particular minute structure and organisation of his brain and nervous system.
Now, on the one hand, everything to which we attach value or disvalue seems to reside in or to relate to persons, who experience sensations, thoughts, desires, emotions, etc., and have elaborately organised cognitive, conative, and emotional dispositions. On the other hand, the physico-chemical, physiological, and anatomical conditions of consciousness in general and of organised personality in particular seem to be highly specialised, narrowly localised in time and space, extremely delicate and unstable, and altogether at the mercy of that part of nature which is organised at a lower level of complexity.
Any such view is plainly incompatible with what most people in the West and many in the East have understood by religion. For Christians Jews, and Mohammedans, at any rate, the following propositions, taken quite literally, are essential. (1) The specifically moral values and disvalues, which inhere in human persons and express themselves in their volitions, emotions, thoughts, and actions, are not just transitory byproducts of conditions to which no kind of intrinsic value or disvalue can significantly be assigned and which cannot significantly be said to have any preference for the one over the other. On the contrary, there is in every human being an essential factor which is existentially independent of his body and is destined to endure endlessly, though it may always need to be connected with an appropriate organism of some kind in order to constitute a full personality.
(2) Again, it is held that an essential part of the total environment in which human beings live falls outside the range of sense-perception and the ken of natural science. It contains non-human spiritual beings good and evil, who are either bodiless or embodied in organisms composed of a kind of matter with which natural science has not hitherto been concerned. This non-human and non-material environment is so organised that a human being who makes morally wrong choices and entertains morally evil thoughts, desires, and emotions during the life of his present body, will inevitably suffer after his death, not only moral degradation, but also unhappiness, pain, and misfortune. And a similar proposition is held to be true, mutatis mutandis, of those who make morally right decisions and entertain morally good thoughts, desires, and emotions.
It seems to me certain that this much is held quite literally, in outline, by nearly all sincere Christians and by many other religious persons. Moreover, it is not held only by simple and ignorant men, though the wisest of those who hold it are the most ready to admit that we know very little of the details and can speak of them only in metaphors and analogies drawn from our present experience. The most usual and he most intelligible analogy is that of a society of spiritual beings, with one supreme spirit in complete control of their environment and standing to them in the relation of a wise, just, and loving father or king. This is certainly an essential part of what religion means for ordinary religious persons, and of what it has meant for such men as Aquinas, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, James, and Ward. I can see no good reason for ignoring this, and confining the connotation of the word to what it may have meant and may still mean for Hindu philosophers and mystics of one particular school and for some few Christian and Mohammedan mystics of dubious orthodoxy.
Now there is no doubt that religion, in this sense, is in head-on collision with the philosophy of naturalism, as I have described it above. It is to religion in this sense that the results of psychical research might possibly be relevant, in view of this collision. I will now explain what this possible relevance might be.
I do not need to be told that the temporary survival of bodily death, or even the endless duration of a human personality, if it could be empirically established, would not entail theism and would be compatible with a wholly non-religious view of the world. It would, e.g., be consistent with the view that each of us will persist endlessly as a sequence of embodied persons, more or less like oneself and one's neighbours as we now are, living on earth or on other planets much as we now do. Plainly that, in itself, is completely irrelevant to religion. I am sure that I have never been under the least illusion on that point.
Where psychical research might conceivably be relevant is here. It might establish facts about human cognition and about the effects of human volition which are extremely difficult or impossible to reconcile with the epiphenomenalist view of consciousness in general and of human personality in particular. That might happen as a result of experiments and observations which have no direct bearing on the question of human survival of bodily death, e.g., those concerned with alleged cases of clairvoyance, of telepathy, or of telekinesis. I do not suggest that this is the only way to attack the philosophy of naturalism. I think that it can be shown, on purely logical and epistemological grounds, to be an incoherent doctrine based on shaky foundations. But such arguments are difficult to follow, and there is little agreement among experts as to their validity. On the other hand, the philosophy of naturalism is supported psychologically by the immense prestige which the methods of natural science now enjoy, and for many persons it could be undermined only by counter-instances established by the same methods.
Now it is undoubtedly true that there have been deeply religious men who explicitly rejected the religious ideas and beliefs which I have outlined above. I do not know enough in detail about Hindu philosophy or religion to venture to speak about it. Instead, I shall take as my example Spinoza, a man brought up in a religious and philosophical tradition with which we are all more or less familiar.
I have studied Spinoza's Ethics carefully, and have striven to understand it in order to explain it to my pupils. What I think I understand of the first four books is enough to convince me that he was a great and a very honest thinker, of an extremely "tough-minded" sort, and the last man in the world to indulge in edifying verbal mystifications. But, when I come to the dividing line in Book V, where he says: "It is now time for me to pass to those things which concern the duration of the mind without relation to the body," I begin to be lost. I am sure that the language used in the latter part of Book V is sincerely meant, not only to express a deep religious conviction, but also to justify it rationally to others. But I am quite unable to grasp what Spinoza has in mind when he talks of "the Third Kind of Knowledge," "human immortality," and "the intellectual love of God." And when, after the account of the human mind and the human body in the previous books, he says in Book V: Sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse, I am left gasping. Either he is expressing in appropriate language an experience, of which I have never had a glimmering; or he is expressing an experience, which I have had, in language so inappropriate that I cannot recognize and identify his reference. Naturally the former alternative is much the more likely.
However that may be, the following things seem certain. Spinoza must have thought it intelligible to talk of a person's mind existing out of relation to his present body, at any rate as that body is known to the person himself by organic sensation and to others by external sense-perception and its elaboration by natural science. He must have held that a person's mind, out of that relation, exists timelessly (and therefore neither for a short time nor a long one nor sempiternally). He must have regarded this as an essential doctrine of religion. And he asserts explicitly that the doctrine of the unending duration of the human mind is an attempt to express its timeless existence in temporal terms suited to the needs and intellectual limitations of the vulgar. He argues that there can be no coherent thought answering to the phrase "unending duration." But he is no less certain that there is a clear positive idea answering to the phrase "eternity" or "timeless existence,-- and that it can be grasped by any intelligent person, of philosophical training and aptitude, who will take enough trouble.
I do not know whether Spinoza had mystical experiences or not. If he did, he never (so far as I am aware) mentioned the fact, and he certainly never appeals to such experiences in himself or in others. I think he would have regarded any such appeal by a philosopher in a philosophical work as a breach of the rules of the game, -- an unsportsmanlike attempt to hit his readers below (or above) the intellect.
Now to this kind of religion the results of psychical research would be irrelevant. The utmost that psychical research could do would be to produce overwhelming evidence for believing that an essential element in a person persists after the death of his body and continues to have experiences, to initiate actions, and so on. It moves in the same sphere, viz., that of succession and duration, as that in which the philosophy of naturalism moves. But, when Spinoza alleges that a person's mind has an existence independent of his body, and that that existence is eternal, he is plainly intending to assert something which falls outside that sphere of temporality which is common to the orthodox scientist and the psychical researcher. The difficulty is to attach a meaning to what he asserts, to understand his reasons for holding it, and to see how it can be reconciled with the kind of facts with which both orthodox science and psychical research are concerned.
On the far side of Spinoza comes the kind of extreme monistic mysticism which Professor Stace seems to regard as the only form of religion which an intelligent and instructed person nowadays need seriously consider. It certainly enjoys all and more than all the advantages, ascribed by Oscar Wilde to the writings of contemporary liberal theologians, of "leaving the unbeliever with nothing to disbelieve in." Evidently it would be futile for me to write at length about an experience which I have never had, and of which I learn from Professor Stace that the only significant statement which can be made is that no statement about it could possibly be significant.
I will content myself therefore with a few platitudinous comments on one typical sentence, viz., that there is for a mystic "no distinction between himself and his experience on the one hand and God on the other hand, because he and his experience are simply identical with God."
Now, if we try to get down to brass tacks, I suppose that what this comes to is roughly the following. When Mr. Chatterji, who has had a mystical experience and returned to normal consciousness, tries to recollect it and to describe it to himself and to his friend Mr. Mukerji, he notes that while having it there seemed to him to be no distinction between
Now, if I were in a position to interrogate Mr. Chatterji before he "passed out" again, I should raise the following questions. (1) When you say that there seemed at the time to be no distinction between yourself your mystical experience, and God, do you mean that you then considered the question whether there was or was not a distinction, and that you noticed on inspection that there was not? Or do you mean only that the question of identity or difference did not present itself to you at the time, and that the experience was so absorbing that you did not notice that there was any distinction, and probably would not have done so even if there had been one?
(2) Your mystical experiences, like your other experiences, begin at certain moments, last for so long, and then cease. There are innumerable other experiences, going on simultaneously or successively in yourself or in other men or animals. If you say that this experience of yours is identical with God, and mean that statement to be taken literally, then God is identical with it. If so, God must have any characteristic that belongs to it, and so must begin when it begins, end when it ends, and be one among innumerable other items simultaneous or successive. Obviously that is not what you believe.
(3) When you speak of "identity" in this context, do you mean identity in the strict sense in which it occurs, e.g., when we say that the 49th word, reading from the left and downwards on a certain page of a certain book, is identical with the 476th word, reading from the right and upwards on the same page? Or are you using the expression only to assert and to emphasize a specially intimate relationship between several diverse entities, which are commonly but mistakenly thought to be existentially independent of each other and only externally interrelated?
(4) As regards your recollection that the experience seemed at the time to be a-peculiarly clear and illuminating one, I would remind you (for what, if anything it may be worth) that this feature has often been noted by persons in the experiences which they have had when going into or coming out of the anaesthesia produced by nitrous oxide and certain other narcotics.
Let us now leave Mr. Chatterji "alone with the Alone," and turn to some other matters which are more susceptible of rational discussion.
Professor Stace asserts, on grounds which are independent of any reference to mystical experience, that all arguments for the existence of God must be futile. The reason alleged is this. "Existence," as predicated of God, does not mean the same as "existence" when predicated of a particular thing, e.g., the Albert Memorial, or of a class of such things e.g., cows. In the latter sense "to exist" means to be a part of the universe; in the former application it cannot mean that. Now arguments from "certain observed facts about the world" could prove existence only in the sense of being a part of the universe. On this I would make the following comments.
(1) The point about the ambiguity of "existence," as applied to God (or to the universe) and to finite individuals or classes of such, has not escaped the notice of such men as Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza. They have explicitly insisted on it. Yet, in full consciousness of it, they have not hesitated to deploy arguments for the existence of God. This suggests that the case may not be so simple as one might think on reading Professor Stace's remarks.
(2) When Professor Stace speaks of arguments starting from "certain observed facts about the world," this seems to apply primarily to the Teleological Argument. This argues from certain concrete characteristics, especially in living organisms and their environment, which may be described as "internal teleology and external adaptation," to the existence of an intelligent designer and controller of nature. (As Professor Stace rightly points out, it is an argument to design, not from design.) Then, again, it makes use of the notion of causation, in the sense in which that occurs in ordinary life and in natural science. I think it would be generally agreed that such an argument, if valid, could establish only the existence of a certain very powerful and (in some ways) very intelligent inhabitant of the world, and that is not what the higher religions understand by "God."
(3) But it is not at all obvious that this applies to such an argument as the Cosmological Argument in its various forms. What this sets out from is the contingency, not only of each particular thing and event in nature, but also of the whole causal network, in which the existence of each thing and the occurrence of each event is "explained" only by reference to things which existed and events which happened before it, and in which the "explanation" is only in terms of causal laws which have no trace of necessity. It argues, from this extremely general modal feature of the whole order of nature, that the latter cannot be self-subsistent. And it infers from this that the whole order of nature must stand in a relation of one-sided dependence (quite different from the relation of cause-and-effect, which connects finite things and events within nature) to something else, whose existence is intrinsically necessary.
I think that this line of argument is open to serious criticism, and I have stated my objections to it in my writings. But it must be criticised on its own grounds. I am quite sure that Professor Stace's general objection, quoted above, to all arguments for the existence of God, is irrelevant to it.