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Immanence and Transcendence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless."

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1933

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References

page 77 note 1 This treatise, however, does not claim to be metaphysics.

page 79 note 1 Those who profess to make much of “the religious experience” and of its deliverances really only consider it qua experience the object of which is supreme value, just as we are doing. Experiences the objects of which are demons or devils or a plurality of gods, though they too have a claim to rank in the genus “religious” or “mystical,” are not counted. Dean Inge rejects “Asiatic” and Roman Catholic mysticism (in Christian Mysticism).

page 84 note 1 Absolutism is also, of course, an attempt at the kind of Monism here meant. But in spite of its greater impressiveness, it is more faint-hearted and less persistent than any of the theories alluded to, because it immediately and openly readmits the dualism in even more violent form: Reality and Appearance.