The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ Objectification in- volves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story. The nature of evil is that the charac- ters of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step towards another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil, and the process of its evasion. It means the discarding the element of obstruc- tiveness in fact. No element in fact is ineffectual: thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony. The trivi- ality in some initial reconstruction of order expresses the fact that actualities are being produced, which, trivial in their own proper character of immediate ‘ends,’ are proper ‘means’ for the emergence of a world at once lucid, and intrinsically of immediate worth.
The evil of the world is that those elements which
are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in
themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements
518 Process and Reality
with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon
vivid immediacy the obligation that it fade into night.
‘He giveth his beloved—sleep.’
In our cosmological construction we are, therefore left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, free- dom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation. They embody the interpretation of the cosmological problem in terms of a fundamental metaphysical doctrine as to the quality of creative origination, namely, concep- tual appetition and physical realization. This topic con- stitutes the last chapter of Cosmology,
God and the World
So long as the temporal world is conceived as a self- sufficient completion of the creative act, explicable by its derivation from an ultimate principle which is at once eminently real and the unmoved mover, from this conclu- sion there is no escape: the best that we can say of the turmoil is, ‘For so he giveth his beloved—sleep.’ This is the message of religions of the Buddhistic type, and in some sense it is true. In this final discussion we have to ask, whether metaphysical principles impose the belief that it is the whole truth. The complexity of the world must be reflected in the answer. It is childish to enter upon thought with the simple-minded question, What is the world made of? The task of reason is to fathom the deeper depths of the many-sidedness of things. We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
The notion of God as the ‘unmoved mover’ is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is con- cerned. The notion of God as ‘eminently real’ is a favourite doctrine of Christian theology. The combina- tion of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, emi- nently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism.
When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar
conquered; and the received text of Western theology
was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and
the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing
520 Process and Reality
one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean
vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncer-
tainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has
assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the
Jews that they cherished a misconception about their
Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of
God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman
imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto
God the attributes which belonged exclusively to
Caesar.
In the great formative period of theistic philosophy,
which ended with the rise of Mahometanism, after a con-
tinuance coeval with civilization, three strains of thought
emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respec-
tively fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler,
God in the image of a personification of moral energy,
God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle.
Hume’s Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of
explaining the system of the world.
The three schools of thought can be associated respec- tively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets, and Aristotle. But Aristotle was antedated by Indian, and Buddhistic, thought; the Hebrew prophets can be paralleled in traces of earlier thought; Mahometanism and the divine Caesars merely represent the most natural, obvious, theistic idolatrous symbolism, at all epochs and places.
The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various
stages of combination of these three diverse ways of
entertaining the problem. There is, however, in the
Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion
which does not fit very well with any of the three main
strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling
Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover.
It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which
slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds pur-
pose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this
world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is
God and the World 521
a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the
future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate
present.
Apart from any reference to existing religions as they
are, or as they ought to be, we must investigate dispas-
sionately what the metaphysical principles, here devel-
oped, require on these points, as to the nature of God.
There is nothing here in the nature of proof. There is
merely the confrontation of the theoretic system with
a certain rendering of the facts. But the unsystematized
report upon the facts is itself highly controversial, and
the system is confessedly inadequate. The deductions
from it in this particular sphere of thought cannot be
looked upon as more than suggestions as to how the
problem is transformed in the light of that system.
What follows is merely an attempt to add another speaker
to that masterpiece, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Nat-
ural Religion. Any cogency of argument entirely depends
upon elucidation of somewhat exceptional elements in
our conscious experience—those elements which may
roughly be classed together as religious and moral
intuitions.
In the first place, God is not to be treated as an excep- tion to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.
Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all cre- ation. But, as primordial, so far is he from ‘eminent reality,’ that in this abstraction he is ‘deficiently actual’ —and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms.
Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and con-
522 Progess Vandorwtadtig Y
sider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fulness of feeling, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of con- ceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the rele- vance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, un- trammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The pri- mordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.
His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and estab-
lishes the categoreal conditions. The conceptual feelings,
which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their
subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their sub-
jective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms
are valuations determining the relative relevance of
eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.
He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, con- stitutes him the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim. A quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics * expresses some analogies to, and some differences from, this line of thought: “And since that which is moved and mover is intermediate, there is a mover which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational desire. But desire is conse-
* Cf. Metaphysics 1072, trans. by Professor W. D. Ross. My atten-
tion was called to the appositeness of this particular quotation by Mr. F. J. Carson.
God and the World 523
quent on opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting point. And thought is moved by the object of thought, and one side of the list of opposites is in itself the object of thought; ...” Aris- totle had not made the distinction between conceptual feelings and the intellectual feelings which alone involve consciousness. But if ‘conceptual feeling,’ with its sub- jective form of valuation, be substituted for ‘thought,’ ‘thinking,’ and ‘opinion,’ in the above quotation, the agreement is exact.
There is another side to the nature of God which can-
not be omitted. Throughout this exposition of the
philosophy of organism we have been considering the
primary action of God on the world. From this point
of view, he is the principle of concretion—the principle
whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a
situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity. Thus, so
far, the primordial side of the nature of God has alone
been relevant.
But God, as well as being primordial, is also conse- quent. He is the beginning and the end. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of all mem- bers. He is the presupposed actuality of conceptual operation, in unison of becoming with every other crea- tive act. Thus by reason of the relativity of all things, there is a reaction of the world on God. The completion of God’s nature into a fulness of physical feeling is de- rived from the objectification of the world in God. He shares with every new. creation its actual world; and the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world. This prehension into God of each creature is directed with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his all-inclusive primordial valuation. God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative
524 Process and Reality
nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.
Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of
God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a conse-
quent nature. The consequent nature of God is con-
scious; and it is the realization of the actual world in
the unity of his nature, and through the transformation
of his wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the
consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical
feelings upon his primordial concepts.
One side of God’s nature is constituted by his concep- tual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no actuality which it presupposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions. This side of his nature is free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious. The other side originates with physical experience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, conse- quent, ‘everlasting,’ fully actual, and conscious. His necessary goodness expresses the determination of his consequent nature.