Nineteenth-Century Developments

During the nineteenth century a new movement appeared in English thought. Sir William Hamilton held that God was the absolute, the unconditioned, the cause of all (Philosophy of the Unconditioned, in Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1829). But since all thinking is to condition, and to condition the unconditioned is self-contradictory, God is both unknown and unknowable. Following in the same path H. L. Alansel (Limits of Religious Thought, London, 1867) found here the secret by which to maintain the mysteries of the faith of the church in the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and other beliefs. Revelation was therefore required to supplement men's ignorance and to communicate what-human intelligence was unable to discover. Hence the dogmas concerning God which had been found repugnant or opaque to reason were philosophically reinstated and became once more authoritative for faith. In his System of Synthetic Philosophy Herbert Spencer (First Principles, London, 1860-62) maintains on the one hand an ultimate reality which is the postulate of theism, the absolute datum of consciousness, and on the other hand by reason of the limitations of knowledge a total human incapacity to assign any attributes to this utterly inscrutable power. In accordance with his doctrine of evolution he holds that this ultimate reality is an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed, the same which wells up in the human consciousness. He is neither materialistic nor atheistic. This reality is not personal according to the human type, but may be super-personal. Religion is the feeling of awe in relation to this inscrutable and mysterious power. With an aim not unlike that of Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of religion, agnosticism, evolution, and history, by substituting for the traditional personal God the " Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Side by side with this movement appeared another led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, based upon a spiritual philosophy, which found in the moral nature a revelation of God (Aids to Reflexion, London, 1825). This has borne fruit in many directions: in the great poets, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning; in preachers like Cardinal Newman, Dean Stanley, John Tulloch, Frederick William Robertson, and Charles Kingsley; in philosophical writers, as John Frederic Denison Maurice and James Martineau. The idea of God is taken out of dogma and the category of the schools and set in relation to life, the quickening source of ideals and of all individual and social advance. Religious thought in America has fully shared in these later tendencies in Great Britain, as may be seen by reference to John Fiske, Idea of God (Boston, 1886), unfolding the implications of Spencer's thought, and, reflecting the spirit of Coleridge, William Ellery Channing, Works (6 vols., Boston, 1848), W. G. T. Stead, " Introductory Essay " to Coleridge's Works (New York, 1884), and Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, and Sermons (in Centenary edition of his Works, New York, 1903). An idea of God based on idealism, represented in Great Britain by John Caird, Philosophy of Religion (London, 1881), Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (ib. 1893), in Canada by John Watson, God's Message to the Human Soul (New York, 1907), has received impressive statement by Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (ib., 1897), and The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1899-1901). God is a being who possesses all logical possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. This includes omnipotence, self-consciousness, self-possession, goodness, perfection, peace. Thus this being possesses absolute thought and absolute experience, both completely organized. The absolute experience is related to human experience as an organic whole to its integral fragments. This idea of God which centers in omniscience does not intend to obscure either the ethical qualities or the proper personality of the absolute.

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