The Philosophical Bases of Theism by Hicks George Dawes;

Author:Hicks, George Dawes; [Hicks, G. Dawes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

So, too, is it in reference to our relationship to God, and His relationship to us. God may know a finite soul through and through, and feel towards it solicitude and love; a finite soul may know Him in whom it believes, and feel towards Him reverence and love. Yet, if God be an existent conscious subject, His consciousness must be in Him; must be His consciousness, and cannot be the consciousness of any other subject whatsoever. In other words, God’s consciousness, as belonging to God, cannot be in me or in any other person; that would be possible only if my existence and God’s existence were one and the same. It has, indeed, often been urged that we should be cautious in assigning to the divine Being a subjectivity similar to our own. And no doubt we should be. All the same, if we are to think of God as really existing, subjectivity, existence for self, analogous to our own self-existence, though immeasurably transcending it, is an essential factor in the conception.

5. It follows, therefore, that in religious experience we do not apprehend the mind of God in a way similar to the way in which, through introspection, we apprehend our own mind. But that is true also in respect to our knowledge of one another. There has been a considerable amount of discussion recently concerning the manner in which we become aware of other selves. The older view that the existence of a mind other than our own becomes known to us originally through inference by analogy from what each of us finds to be true in his own case in regard to bodily expressions and movements it is now generally agreed is untenable. And there has been a tendency of late to base such knowledge upon an assumed direct relation between two selves, in addition to the perception each has of the other’s bodily presence.1 I am by no means convinced by the arguments advanced in support of this theory, but I do not propose to enter here into a detailed discussion of it. It will be sufficient to emphasize two or three points that are relevant to our present inquiry. In the first place, whatsoever be the nature of the mutual rapport which is thus assumed to subsist between persons, it certainly cannot be maintained that through its means we are directly apprehensive of the mental states or processes taking place in another mind. If that were the case, the science of psychology would be in a far more advanced stage of completeness than any of the natural sciences! In the second place, whatsoever be the nature of the knowledge we possess of other selves, it is clear that such knowledge is never obtained in isolation, but only through and in connexion with knowledge of the bodily appearances and bodily activities of those other persons. And, in the third place, I need scarcely reiterate that we are not justified in taking the terms ‘direct’ or ‘immediate’

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