Systematic Theology (Vol. 1-3). Augustus Hopkins Strong
the Unthinkable and the Unmentionable!” Ralph Waldo Emerson was a subjective idealist; but, when called to inspect a farmer's load of wood, he said to his company: “Excuse me a moment, my friends; we have to attend to these matters, just as if they were real.” See Mivart, On Truth, 71–141.
2. Its definition of mind as a “series of feelings aware of itself” contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of mind, we have direct knowledge of a spiritual substance of which these phenomena are manifestations, which retains its identity independently of our consciousness, and which, in its knowing, instead of being the passive recipient of impressions from without, always acts from within by a power of its own.
James, Psychology, 1:226—“It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought, or this thought, or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think,’ and ‘I feel.’ ” Professor James is compelled to say this, even though he begins his Psychology without insisting upon the existence of a soul. Hamilton's Reid, 443—“Shall I think that thought can stand by itself? or that ideas can feel pleasure or pain?” R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge, 44—“We say ‘my notions and my passions,’ and when we use these phrases we imply that our central self is felt to be something different from the notions or passions which belong to it or characterize it for a time.” Lichtenberg: “We should say, ‘It thinks;’ just as we say, ‘It lightens,’ or ‘It rains.’ In saying ‘Cogito,’ the philosopher goes too far if he translates it, ‘I think.’ ” Are the faculties, then, an army without a general, or an engine without a driver? In that case we should not havesensations—we should only be sensations.
Professor C. A. Strong: “I have knowledge of other minds. This non-empirical knowledge—transcendent knowledge of things-in-themselves, derived neither from experience nor reasoning, and assuming that like consequents (intelligent movements) must have like antecedents (thoughts and feelings), and also assuming instinctively that something exists outside of my own mind—this refutes the post-Kantian phenomenalism. Perception and memory also involve transcendence. In both I transcend the bounds of experience, as truly as in my knowledge of other minds. In memory I recognize a past, as distinguished from the present. In perception I cognize a possibility of other experiences like the present, and this alone gives the sense of permanence and reality. Perception and memory refute phenomenalism. Things-in-themselves must be assumed in order to fill the gaps between individual minds, and to give coherence and intelligibility to the universe, and so to avoid pluralism. If matter can influence and even extinguish our minds, it must have some force of its own, some existence in itself. If consciousness is an evolutionary product, it must have arisen from simpler mental facts. But these simpler mental facts are only another name for things-in-themselves. A deep prerational instinct compels us to recognize them, for they cannot be logically demonstrated. We must assume them in order to give continuity and intelligibility to our conceptions of the universe.” See, on Bain's Cerebral Psychology, Martineau's Essays, 1:265. On the physiological method of mental philosophy, see Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1871:1; Bowen, in Princeton Rev., March, 1878:423–450; Murray, Psychology, 279–287.
3. In so far as this theory regards mind as the obverse side of matter, or as a later and higher development from matter, the mere reference of both mind and matter to an underlying force does not save the theory from any of the difficulties of pure materialism already mentioned; since in this case, equally with that, force is regarded as purely physical, and the priority of spirit is denied.
Herbert Spencer, Psychology, quoted by Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, 2:80—“Mind and nervous action are the subjective and objective faces of the same thing. Yet we remain utterly incapable of seeing, or even of imagining, how the two are related. Mind still continues to us a something without kinship to other things.” Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, quoted by Talbot, Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871:5—“All that I know of matter and mind in themselves is that the former is an external centre of force, and the latter an internal centre of force.” New Englander, Sept. 1883:636—“If the atom be a mere centre of force and not a real thing in itself, then the atom is a supersensual essence, an immaterial being. To make immaterial matter the source of conscious mind is to make matter as wonderful as an immortal soul or a personal Creator.” See New Englander, July, 1875:532–535; Martineau, Study, 102–130, and Relig. and Mod. Materialism, 25—“If it takes mind to construe the universe, how can the negation of mind constitute it?”
David J. Hill, in his Genetic Philosophy, 200, 201, seems to deny that thought precedes force, or that force precedes thought: “Objects, or things in the external world, may be elements of a thought-process in a cosmic subject, without themselves being conscious. … A true analysis and a rational genesis require the equal recognition of both the objective and the subjective elements of experience, without priority in time, separation in space or disruption of being. So far as our minds can penetrate reality, as disclosed in the activities of thought, we are everywhere confronted with a Dynamic Reason.” In Dr. Hill's account of the genesis of the universe, however, the unconscious comes first, and from it the conscious seems to be derived. Consciousness of the object is only the obverse side of the object of consciousness. This is, as Martineau, Study, 1:341, remarks, “to take the sea on board the boat.” We greatly prefer the view of Lotze, 2:641—“Things are acts of the Infinite wrought within minds alone, or states which the Infinite experiences nowhere but in minds. … Things and events are the sum of those actions which the highest Principle performs in all spirits so uniformly and coherently, that to these spirits there must seem to be a world of substantial and efficient things existing in space outside themselves.” The data from which we draw our inferences as to the nature of the external world being mental and spiritual, it is more rational to attribute to that world a spiritual reality than a kind of reality of which our experience knows nothing. See also Schurman, Belief in God, 208, 225.
4. In so far as this theory holds the underlying force of which matter and mind are manifestations to be in any sense intelligent or voluntary, it renders necessary the assumption that there is an intelligent and voluntary Being who exerts this force. Sensations and ideas, moreover, are explicable only as manifestations of Mind.
Many recent Christian thinkers, as Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 13–15, 29–36, 42–52, would define mind as a function of matter, matter as a function of force, force as a function of will, and therefore as the power of an omnipresent and personal God. All force, except that of man's free will, is the will of God. So Herschel, Lectures, 460; Argyll, Reign of Law, 121–127; Wallace on Nat. Selection, 363–371; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 121, 145, 265; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 146–162. These writers are led to their conclusion in large part by the considerations that nothing dead can be a proper cause; that will is the only cause of which we have immediate knowledge; that the forces of nature are intelligible only when they are regarded as exertions of will. Matter, therefore, is simply centres of force—the regular and, as it were, automatic expression of God's mind and will. Second causes in nature are only secondary activities of the great First Cause.
This view is held also by Bowne, in his Metaphysics. He regards only personality as real. Matter is phenomenal, although it is an activity of the divine will outside of us. Bowne's phenomenalism is therefore an objective idealism, greatly preferable to that of Berkeley who held to God's energizing indeed, but only within the soul. This idealism of Bowne is not pantheism, for it holds that, while there are no second causes in nature, man is a second cause, with a personality distinct from that of God, and lifted above nature by his powers of free will. Royce, however, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in his The World and the Individual, makes man's consciousness a part or aspect of a universal consciousness, and so, instead of making God come to consciousness in man, makes man come to consciousness in God. While this scheme seems, in one view, to save God's personality, it may be doubted whether it equally guarantees man's personality or leaves room for man's freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt. Bowne, Philos. Theism, 175—“ ‘Universal reason’ is a class-term which denotes no possible existence, and which has reality only in the specific existences from which it is abstracted.” Bowne claims that the impersonal finite has only such otherness as a thought or act has to its subject. There is no substantial