CHAPTER V. Some Metaphysical Implications of Ethics and Religion

SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision for the gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic interests. § 2. But we cannot assume that ethical and religious postulates are necessarily true in the forms in which our practical interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while morality would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence between virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a genuine fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. § 4. But this does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical ideals. § 5. In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the temporal order can be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6. This leads to the Problem of Evil. “God” cannot be a finite being within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain evil and imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus not the already existing realisation of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears when we identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute evil can be seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be true that religious feeling, to be practically efficient, may need to imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic form. § 8. The existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine” personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be defended against the criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify God with the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only establish the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its force depends purely upon empirical considerations of evidence 381