Philosophy and Religion / Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

Author:Hastings Rashdall [Rashdall, Hastings]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake of clearness, to summarize the position to which I have tried to lead you. I have tried to show that the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought of as having any existence outside, or independently of, Mind. It certainly does not exist merely in any or all of the human and similar minds whose knowledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every reason to believe, a beginning in time. We are bound then to infer the existence of a single Mind or Consciousness, which must be thought of as containing all the elements of our own Consciousness—Reason or Thought, Feeling, and Will—though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects of Consciousness are combined in a manner of which our own minds can give us but a very faint and analogical idea. The world must be thought of as ultimately the thought or experience of this Mind, which we call God. And this Mind must be thought {119} of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a Will. Our own and all other minds, no less than the events of the material Universe, owe their beginning and continuance to this divine Will: in them the thought or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced in various degrees; and to all of them is communicated some portion of that causality or activity of which God is the ultimate source, so that their acts must be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to God. But, though these minds are wholly dependent upon and in intimate connexion with the divine Mind, they cannot be regarded as parts of the divine Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the minds that He wills to exist, together with the world of Nature which exists in and for those minds. Reality is the system or society of spirits and their experience. The character and ultimate purpose of the divine Mind is revealed to us, however inadequately or imperfectly, in the moral consciousness; and the moral ideal which is thus communicated to us makes it reasonable for us to expect, for at least the higher of the dependent or created minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, after physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils must be regarded as necessary incidents in the process by which the divine Will is bringing about the greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. The question whether our material Universe, {120} considered as the object of Mind, has a beginning and will have an end, is one which we have no data for deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded as objective—that is to say, as forming part of the nature and constitution of the real world; but the antinomy involved either in supposing an endless succession or a beginning and end of the time-series is one which our intellectual faculties are, or at least have so far proved, incapable of solving. The element

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