SOURCE: "The Religious Philosophy of Samuel Alexander," in The Journal of Religion, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, April, 1947, pp. 102-13.

[In the following essay, McCreary explicates Alexander's theological views, which posit the existence of God through the principle of emergence, or, the development of nature to successively higher levels.]

Alexander is a representative of that movement of thought which may be termed Anglo-American realism; in his Space, Time, and Deity, he has offered the most complete metaphysical and religious system so far given by that group.¹ Much, if not most, of his work is occupied with mind—mind as in the order of realities which begins with mere events in space and time and ends with God. These data are for Alexander at once the most simple and the most complex in the universe. The present study is limited to his view of deity, treating space and time only with such sufficiency as will supply context for his religious thought. Alexander seeks to show what can be known on this subject and known consistently with the whole scheme of things we know and, also, with that sentiment of worship which is directed to God.

I. ALEXANDER'S CONCEPTION OF DEITY

1. DEITY AND GOD

Primarily, God may be defined as the object of the religious emotion or of worship. On the other hand, from the metaphysical approach, God may be defined as the being, if any, which possesses deity or the divine quality. The two approaches are complementary; but, whatever approach be adopted, in either case God is defined indirectly. There are no proofs of God's existence and nature. All pretended proofs introduce conceptions which are a priori in the bad sense of that phrase, in which it means not something experienced which is pervasive of all things but something supplied by the mind; in other words, such proofs desert the scientific interpretation of things along the lines indicated by experience itself, and they do this by a limited use of analogy. (Thus, in the famous ontological argument, nothing more is proved than that the totality of things is real, which is a bare tautology.)

Alexander thinks of deity as being the next higher empirical quality than mind. Out of the all-embracing stuff of space-time, the universe exhibits an emergence in time of successive levels of finite existence, each with its characteristic empirical quality. The highest of these empirical qualities known to us is mind or consciousness; deity is the next higher empirical quality to the highest we know—at any level of existence there is a next higher empirical quality which stands towards the lower quality as deity stands toward mind.

Time is, for Alexander, an element in the stuff of which the universe and all its parts are made and has no special relation to mind, which is but the last complexity of time that is known to us in finite existence. Bare time, in Alexander's hypothesis, whose verification he has been following in the previous stages of his thought, is now to find completion by the conception of God—bare time, as the soul of its space, performs toward it the office of soul as to its equivalent body or brain. And this elementary mind which is time becomes in the course of existence so complicated and refined in its internal groupings that there arise finite beings whose soul is materiality, or color, or life, or, in the end, what is familiar as mind.

There is a nisus in space-time, which, as it has borne its creatures forward through matter and life to mind, will bear them forward to some higher level of existence. Time itself, however, compels us to think of a later birth of time. We must ask how finite deities are related to the infinite God, for they themselves are finite gods.

Deity is thus the next empirical quality to mind which the universe is engaged in bringing forth. But our human altars are still raised to the unknown God. If we could know what deity is, how it feels to be divine, we should first have to become as gods.

But an attempt must be made; hence we ask: What is the being which possesses deity? Alexander finds that deity is not spirit or mind, for that, in principle, would commit us to making of God a being not higher in kind than minds. God's distinctive character is rather something new, or deity. God is the universe possessing deity. In the religious emotion we have the direct experience of something higher than ourselves which we call God, which is not presented through the ways of sense, as such, but through this emotion. The emotion is our going out, or endeavor, or striving toward this object. According to Alexander, speculation enables us to say wherein the divine quality consists and that it is an empirical quality, the next in the series which the very nature of time compels us to postulate, though we cannot tell what it is like.

What conception of God is required if we think of the universe as space-time engendering within itself in the course of time the empirical qualities of which deity is the one next ahead of mind? The answer is: God is the whole world as possessing the quality of deity. As such, the being of the whole world is the "body" and deity is the "mind." But, thus, the possessor of deity is not actual but ideal. As an actual existent, God is the infinite world with its nisus toward deity, or, as Alexander employs the phrase of Leibniz, as big, or in travail, with deity.

But Alexander does not identify God with space-time. On the one hand, he finds the totality of the world, which in the end is spatiotemporal; on the other, he finds the quality of deity engendered, or rather being engendered, within that whole. These two features are united in the conception of the world as a whole expressing itself in the character of deity, and it is this and not bare spacetime which for speculation is the ideal conception of God.

Our philosopher admits, however, that the description of God as the whole universe, as possessing deity, or as in travail with deity is full of figurative language. Belief in God is an act of experience; but it is not an act of sight, for neither deity nor even the world as tending to deity is revealed to sense. Belief in God is an act of speculative and religious faith. So we find Alexander saying that the body of God is the whole universe and there is no body outside his and that God's deity is lodged in a portion of his body and represents that body. Since his body is infinite, his deity is infinite. God includes the whole universe, but his deity, though infinite, belongs to, or is lodged in, only a portion of that universe. (This is a physiological representation, like the representation on the brain of the different portions of the body which send nerve messages to the brain.) Not only is God infinite in extent and duration, but his deity is also infinite in both respects. God's body, being the whole of space-time, is omnipresent and eternal; but his deity, though not everywhere, is yet infinite in its extension and, though his time is only a portion of infinite time, his deity is—in virtue of what corresponds in deity to memory and expectation in ourselves—infinite in both directions.

Comparing us with God, Alexander remarks that we are finitely infinite. Our minds are infinite in the same way as God's deity. Our minds represent our bodies; deity represents God's body. Hence deity, unlike mind, is infinitely infinite.

But, while Alexander has been presenting an ideal conception of God for philosophy, he now makes a qualification of the greatest importance: God is actual. And only in the sense of travail, in the sense of straining toward deity, can there be an infinite actual God. Yet there is no actual infinite being with the quality of deity; there is, however, an actual infinite—the whole universe—with a nisus to deity, and this is the God of the religious consciousness (though that consciousness habitually forecasts the divinity of its object as actually realized in an individual form). God as an actual existent is always becoming deity but never attains it; he is the ideal God in embryo. The ideal, when fulfilled, ceases to be God, and yet it gives shape and character to our conception of the actual God and always tends to usurp its place in our fancy.

In the relation of God's deity to the matrix which is space-time, we are not to think of the latter as something which grows bigger in extent with the lapse of time; its space is always full and it grows older through internal rearrangements in which new orders of empirical finites are engendered. No matter, therefore, what quality the deity of God may be, his body is always simply the whole space-time.²

In contrast to the absolute spirit of idealism, which holds that finites, though real, are not real in their own right but are real appearances of the one absolute—a doctrine from which, for Alexander, the God of religion does not escape, he being in turn a real appearance but not ultimately real—our author brings what he considers a selfconsistent truth; space-time itself, in his view, is the only absolute. He does not feel, as idealism asserts,³ that there is contradiction in finitude or in the categories that describe and are constitutive of it. The measure of what is self-consistent is the nature of space-time itself.

We have already seen how the realization of such a quality (or spirit) means the appearance in the world of finite deities, so that infinite deity is but an ideal. But while, on the one hand, deity, i.e., God's mind, does not belong to the absolute; in God's body, on the other hand—which body is the whole of space-time and is absolute—the finîtes are not submerged and not transformed; they are constitutive portions of the absolute. Neither is God spirit, nor, far less, is the whole—or absolute, which includes spirit—itself spirit; nor is it deity; but it includes deity.

The well-attested fact that the lower life subserves, in the course of time, the higher is perverted in absolute idealism (according to Alexander) into the erroneous doctrine that there is a something higher (an absolute) in which all lower life is submerged and transformed, and this absolute is spirit, which is not even the highest empirical quality. Dowered with this empirical quality, the absolute claims to be above the empirical but would be itself empirical. This result is, to Alexander's mind, the inevitable outcome of taking the measure of consistency and contradiction from our thoughts (as in Bradley and Bosanquet) instead of from things themselves, and of pronouncing space and time to be contradictory; whereas it is only obedience to the nature of the one "mother" and "nurse" of all becoming which determines consistency and freedom from contradiction.

2. DEITY AND THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT

When we ask how we come by the cognition of God, we must answer that (as with love and hate, and appetite and aversion) it is because the world itself provokes in us a specific response which makes us aware of God, and this specific reaction is what has been described by Alexander as the outgoing to something in the world with which we are in communion. (We must note carefully the phrase "something in the world"; for Alexander holds that the world, space-time, does not itself arouse the religious sentiment.) W. James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience drew from his data the doctrine that in religion "the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come."⁴ Adopting this general idea, Alexander regards us as parts of spacetime which throw out, as it were, feelers toward the rest of it so that we are thus accessible to its influences. The body of the universe affects our body, and the ultimate response in consciousness is this emotion. Like hungry appetite it is a conation whose object, God, is to it as food is to hunger. The religious conation which sets us in search of God is our groping-out to the reality which is God. It is the world in its nisus forward that grips the finite conative complex which is fitted to it. It excites religion in us, and we, in turn, feel the need of it.

The religious emotion or appetite has no specific organ through which it works. It depends upon the whole makeup or constitution of the mind and body and is the response of it to the whole of reality in its nisus toward a new quality. In that forward movement, due to the onward sweep of time, our minds are caught, and our religious response is at once the mark that we are involved in that nisus and that our minds contribute in their part toward it. This may be concealed from the cognitive mind; it is higher than mind. It makes itself felt in the religious sense, which discovers the world it sees to be clothed with divinity. The world is not merely what it is for the intellect alone; its nisus toward what is higher enters into its constitution, and, as impregnated with this tendency, it affects the mind by ways other than cognition, though interpretable in the ways of cognition. The whole world with its real tendency to deity stirs in us from the depths of our nature a vague endeavor or desire which shadows forth its object. Then intellect comes into play and discovers in detail the characters of this object and finds at last what it truly is, the tendency of the world forward toward a new quality.

James had called this of which Alexander now speaks an "unseen" or "mystical" world; but Alexander demurs from calling it the former or even the latter. For him it is partly seen and partly the object of thought; but it is its new quality, which is something higher than we know, that cannot be seen or understood, though its presence in reality is forced upon us both in philosophical conception and in the feeling which it evokes in us of itself.

This religious feeling itself suggests the notion of God which, when elaborated by reflection, is discovered to be that of the world big with deity. The world which works upon our religious sensibility and suggestibility is the actual world, but that actual world contains the seed of its future, though what future forms it will assume is hidden from us, except in so far as we can forecast it in spatiotemporal terms. As to the assurance of God, it may be said that we are assured of other minds through social emotion and of deity through a different response, the religious emotion. Each of them is specific to the object it discovers. But faith in other minds may be called practical assurance; faith in God we may be content to describe simply as faith. We are sure of one another's minds because we are social beings; but the social instinct or tendency is satisfied only by reciprocal actions on the part of others. There is no such reciprocal action from God, in Alexander's opinion. If we speak, as we must, in terms of God's response to us, there is no direct experience of that response except through our own feeling that devotion to God or worship carries with it its own satisfaction. The universe does not answer our prayers by overt external actions, as our fellows respond to our social approaches to them, except in the strength and sustainment which in its tendency to deity it gives to our minds. (Here Alexander comes as close as he ever does to mystical theology.) In both cases it is intercourse with the object which discovers it to us, but religious intercourse is different from social intercourse and is only called such by metaphor. In this respect our faith in God is nearer to simple sensation than our assurance of other minds. The assurance of God we cannot call surer than our assurance of other minds; both are equally sure but the former is simpler. Moreover, being infinite, God has higher and deeper attachments in the nature of things—as Berkeley recognized.

Even without the practical revelation of God, we can arrive, according to Alexander, at the postulate of a world tending to deity, though we could not discover it to be worshipful. The religious criteria of the conception of God are that he should be greater than man, a "universal" or all-inclusive being, different in quality from man, and, finally, responsive to man, so that he offers us, in W. James's language, "a solution of our uneasiness," whether that uneasiness is derived from our feebleness and finitude or from the more intimate sense of our shortcomings or even sin. This God would be worthy of man's trust.

Thus, the religious consciousness attests the philosophical conception that God's deity is the issue in time of a tendency or nisus in the world of which our minds and everything else of the nature of mind are the proximate highest outcome—an issue which is dependent on the nature of things lower than itself.

Further, as being the whole universe, God is creative, but the distinctive character of deity is not creative but created. As representing the whole of space-time, he is creative, because time is the moving principle that brings out the constant redistribution in the matrix which is equivalent to the birth of finite forms. Even then, it is, properly speaking, space-time itself which is the creator and not God. The body of God includes all the finites which have hitherto been evolved in the lapse of time, and what God is creative of is not these finites but the next empirical quality of deity. It is only when we look back and identify God's body with its previous stages and ultimately with space-time itself that we can speak of him as creator. God himself, i.e., the universe as tending to deity, is creative only of deity. On the other hand, deity owes its being to the pre-existing finites with their empirical qualities and is their outcome. God then, like all things in the universe—for space-time itself is not in the universe, whereas God, since his deity is a part of the universe, is in it—is in the strictest sense not a creator but a creature. Needless to say, he is not a creature of imagination or of thought but an infinite creature of the universe of space-time. When we think of God as that to which all things owe their existence, we are reversing the order of fact and are regarding the universe of spacetime, which itself created all things, in the light of its highest empirical quality, which is not first but last in the order of generation. The notion of a creator-God is, for Alexander, a hybrid blending of the creative space-time with the created deity.

Hence God's body is space-time itself; his deity is located in an infinite portion of space-time, and it is, in fact, essentially in process and caught in the general movement of time

The contrast of Alexander's system with that of Spinoza is clarifying. For Spinoza, infinite space is an attribute of God and extension is part of God's constitution; but the other attribute which our minds can know of God is not time but thought. Hence since time is not an essential part of God's constitution, no satisfactory account can be given of how finite things come into existence. We understand why they are resolved into God but not how they issue from him. God is the reason or ground of finite things; but causality, in the proper sense, which requires time, subsists only in the concatenation of finite things with one another, not in their relation to God. Now, if in this scheme we substitute time for mind, the world of finites arises out of the mere restlessness of space-time. Mind then becomes nothing but a finite of a particular empirical rank. It is true also that the God, or substance, which is space-time, ceases to be the object of worship—that is, ceases as such, with mere attributes of space and time, to be God. He needs the empirical quality of deity. The extent of such modifications shows how a great speculative system like Spinoza's is disturbed by the alteration of a single item. (Alexander suggests, too, that we consider two illustrations. In the doctrine of the Platonic Timaeus let us introduce time into the space of which things are made by the creator; or, taking Kant's conception of the pure manifold of intuition, let us consider what changes are made in it if space and time cease to be contributions of the mind and forms of sense and are viewed as a priori constituents of things.)

3. THE RELATION OF DEITY AND VALUE

Religion as a sentiment is thus the outgoing of the whole universe in its process toward the quality of deity; and, just as space is apprehended by intuition, sensible qualities by sensation, universale by thought, and values by appreciation, so God is apprehended cognitively through the religious emotion by the assurance we call religious faith.⁵

The approach to God may be made in various ways: through the phenomena of nature, through the pursuit of truth, through art, or through morality. All our experiences may in their various degrees be schoolmasters to teach us the reality of God. In its primitive form it is the religious sense of awe which is felt in the presence of natural powers.⁶ The universe in its nisus toward deity acts on the mind in a manner more closely allied to the affections produced by purely physical conditions than to the feeling of goodness or beauty.

Originally, religion and morality are not distinguished from one another but are differentiated later.⁷ However, the relation of religion and morality is always of the closest. (The late J. Royce maintained that the explicit recognition of a religious community was Paul's distinctive contribution to the religious thought known as Christianity.)⁸ But, though religion and morality begin with union, and religion always involves conduct, the sentiment of religion and the sense of moral value are, in Alexander's view, distinct; they are distinct in far greater degree than philosophy is distinct from physics which was separated out of philosophy. The religious emotion, Alexander holds, is as unique and self-sufficient as hungry appetite or love. For him it constitutes a sentiment which arises from a brute or crude conation of human nature. Were it not for this sentiment for deity, we should never arrive at religion from thinking of the problems that arise in our moral life.⁹ But a passion for deity being present, it seizes on moral and other values, treating them as conditions of the enjoyment of itself and offering a solution of the problems which they present. This brute instinct or tendency impels us toward the being in front of us, the quality of deity.

This deity is not a value but a quality. Deity belongs to the order of perfection rather than of value. God is for us the highest being in the universe. When God is considered in terms of value, the old problems of good and evil, etc., are forcefully felt; but, if the whole universe is, as in Alexander's conception, the body of God, this difficulty does not arise, for good and evil are present there together. Yet he hastens to say that deity is on the side of goodness. Deity is a type of perfection transcending human goodness or truth or beauty, and any lower form of valuable life; and it is different in its quality. To call God himself good is, if we think of his deity, a wholly inadequate designation, only legitimate because we use human terms and because we mean by it that God is the highest perfection. But if we are thinking of God as the whole world with a soul of deity, he is neither good nor evil, for in his body he includes both. Yet, though as deity God is beyond good and evil, his deity is on the side of goodness.

Space-time itself, by virtue of its own nisus, elaborates without forethought a "hierarchy of ministration" which, if it were produced by mind, would imply a past and allwise forethought or providence. Deity is the distinctive quality of the higher type of perfection in this hierarchical line of forms. (Alexander practically repeats the position of Aristotle in his scala universi. The "how" of the hierarchy—not to speak of its "why"—Alexander finds insoluble.)

If it can be said in disagreement to Alexander's view concerning the good and evil problem that, after all, evil exists and, since the world is the body of God, evil cannot be dismissed from the nature of God, Alexander is prepared to assert that he is not declaring that evil does not exist in God—on the contrary, it is maintained to exist there—but he is only declaring that God's deity is on the side of good and not on the side of evil. The reason for this difficult conception is necessarily seen in that God is infinite, whereas the beings in the struggle out of which the distinction between good and bad and all other values is born are finite. As a healthy body, to go further, puts away from itself its disused or dead parts, so there is a space "outside" into which the excrements (of evil) can be discharged and maintain an independent existence. But, since God is infinite, there is no extrusion possible beyond his limits; there is no space outside him.

Deity in the universe as a whole is like life in a healthy body. All values are conserved in God's deity. Hence, religion is not primarily faith in the conservation of values but faith in deity—or in God with the quality of deity—and deity is seen to be in the line of value. But, since the religious sense is something more primitive and crude, it needs to be described as it actually is experienced, not as it is reflected about. In its essence religious sentiment is not a matter of value or appreciation. It is a crude recognition by, and on the part of, a mind that there is something with a distinctive quality above its own distinctive quality of mind. It is like the apprehension of color or life, except that we cannot say what the new quality is really like, for it is not revealed to sense or thought. Alexander, despite the condemnation this statement would bring from both empiricist and idealist philosophies of religion, asserts that we are only sure that the new quality is there—at least potentially.

Thus, as to the relation of deity and value: deity is the outcome of the onward sweep of all that is persistent and counts in the economy of the world. Human values are but the apex of all movement. (For deity is, even for reflection, not merely the conservation of what is precious to us but of what is precious to itself everywhere.) Value means, in its simplest terms, that the individual or type, any function of which is valuable, is not self-dependent but in its independence belongs to the whole spacetime of which it is a complex. Every being has value or unvalue as part of the whole space-time; it has the nisus to a higher form in so far as it contributes to the general nisus of the world. Here, again, in Alexander the Aristotelian point of view emerges, which is seen in more detailed analysis in recent times in the work of A. N. Whitehead.¹⁰ Men of transcendent gifts of perfection are thus in their degree examples of this nisus. (The ordinary theism, therefore, with its postulates concerning human intermediaries between us and God, conceives God as endowed with deity actually attained, and it acts consistently in believing the intermediator to be more than man, i.e., human and divine at once; it purchases consistency, however, at the cost of interposing the conception of a miraculous person in the world.)¹¹

Value is, in the sense above indicated, conserved in deity; but we must recognize withal that not in deity but in God unvalues also are contained, not merely badness and ugliness and error, but, in the end, all impermanent forms of finite existence. The evil is a reality and has its finite existence, but by being resolved into the infinite whole out of which it sprang it undergoes alteration into value. Here the Hegelian trend in Alexander merges with the view exemplified in Royce and in more elaborate form in Whitehead. Perishing in the form of evil, ugliness, and wickedness, these finite realities are used up in a changed form for the purposes of deity. There is here, according to Alexander, a kind of purgation whereby God "unmakes to remake."¹² Deity is then neither good nor evil nor a value but a new perfection in which, so long as it is infinite and ideal, there is no distinction of values. But God, considered as his body, contains both evil and good, though as a whole he is neither, since terms of value belong only to finites.

In this problem of value we commit a theoretical fault, in Alexander's view, by emancipating God from time. Instead of asking why evil exists, we should know that God's deity sustains our goodness and discards our evil; thus the question is reversed. We should really see that God is helpless to prevent evil, for his deity is the outgrowth of good, and God does not foresee the evil or the good, but, in so far as he is equivalent to the whole world, he is himself the theater of the contest between value and unvalue. No theoretic consideration sustains the belief in a God who precedes his universe. Thus, for example, design is the effect of time, successive forms making use of their predecessors and perishing if they cannot. (This is an adumbration of Whitehead's concrescent process.) Evil is, again, like discord; discord and the passage in which it occurs are alike music. There is no resolution of discord (which is evil) on the level on which both good and evil exist. Resolution is effected on the higher level. The evil remains done, but by perishing in its evil form it may subserve deity. The discord remains a discord, but it does not enter into the higher quality, as such, as an ingredient. In this view Alexander (and Whitehead, cf. his Preface to Process and Reality) exemplifies certain phases of absolute idealism.¹³

The attempt at the betterment of things which we make is of course at once implicated. This attempt is implanted in us by the space-time out of which we are precipitated and secures the deity to which the world is tending. The conservation of value is attained in fact but not through the persistence of one valuable individual; rather this is done through the conservation of his ideal. The persistence of our human effort as a whole, however, is doing the work of preparing deity "in God's good time"—and place.

As to the question of pain suffered by God, pain exists in God's body as moral evil itself, but in God's deity there is no pain, nor anything corresponding to it; there is, according to Alexander, no pleasure there either. For pain and pleasure belong to the organic order, especially in the case of ourselves. Yet, following Aristotle, Alexander would say that God, not his deity, enjoys continuous pleasure.

In sum, deity is a quality different from spirit, while it owes its existence to the travail of the world which has reached the level of spirit. Deity is subject, so long as it is the infinite deity of God, to no distinction of evil or good or of any other values. It depends on values and is in the line of what is good but is itself a perfection not contrasted with imperfection. Values are conserved by the beings which think in their language. Alexander disagrees with Matthew Arnold's statement that there is a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness; he says that, if the power which makes for righteousness is not ourselves, there is no other power which makes for righteousness. God is the power, however, that makes for deity. It is because we ourselves make for righteousness that we have faith in this further nisus of the universe and are sustained by that sentiment so as to derive help from it in doing righteousness. Our minds and the values they create do not end the series of empirical values. Our virtue is only part of the presupposition on which depends the emergence of the next higher quality to mind which we call deity.

II. SUMMARY, EVALUATION, AND CRITIQUE OF ALEXANDER'S POSITION

Alexander's work constitutes a courageous, a generally definite, and quite original theology or philosophy of religion. His view of deity is unique. It is defined in terms of the principle of emergence, according to which nature rises to successively higher and superimposed levels.¹⁴ Although the human mind is thus far pre-eminent, the principle of emergence implies higher levels beyond, which will be related to the human mind as this, in turn, is related to body. Deity is this prospective superiority viewed from below, and God is the supreme eminence or infinite being, viewed with reverent expectancy by man.

Surveying his work, we note that space and time have no reality apart from each other but are aspects or attributes of one reality, space-time or motion.¹⁵ This is the stuff of all existents, that of which they are composed; and it breaks up of itself into these complexes within the one all-embracing stuff. Any portion of it—any space-time—possesses certain fundamental features which therefore belong to every existent generated within the universe of space-time. These fundamental pervasive features of things are the categories. Besides these features things possess quality (not a category) which is an empirical feature of things. Qualities form a hierarchy, the quality of each level of existence being identical with a certain complexity¹⁶ or collocation of elements on the next lower level. The quality performs to its equivalent lower existence the office which mind performs to its neural basis. Mind and body do but exemplify, therefore, the relation which holds universally. Accordingly, time is the mind of space, and any quality is the mind of its object; or, speaking more accurately, mind and any other quality are the different distinctive complexities of time which exist as qualities. As existents within space-time, minds enter into various relations of a perfectly general character with other things and with one another. (This is the mark at once attesting Alexander's realistic and generally antiidealistic position.) This accounts for the familiar features of mental life: knowing, freedom, values, etc. In the hierarchy of qualities the next higher quality to the highest is deity. God is the whole universe engaged in the process toward the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in which we are drawn toward God and are caught in the movement of the world to this higher level. This last conception is in accord with the closing sentences of H. Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,¹⁷ in which he views the universe as a machine for the creating of finite gods.

The naturalistic theology Alexander offers is not without fascination for religious speculation. He has given it seriously yet not dogmatically, but rather in the casual spirit in which Whitehead has presented his similar cosmology in Process and Reality. It savors of something of that "overbelief" in which W. James so often and so deliberately indulged. Specifically, his comprehensive and systematic work has provided religious thought with an intellectual foundation for a naturalistic theism such as is embraced by F. R. Tennant in England and H. N. Wieman in the United States. On this view God is known in human life and in nature at large as that complex of interactions on which we depend and to whose essential structure men must conform if the maximum possible value is to be realized in human experience. Obviously, the details of this essential structure cannot be demonstrated in advance. God, as a principle of progressive integration making for the greatest human good, is, in Whitehead's phrase, "the lure for feeling in each emergent occasion, the eternal guide of desire."¹⁸ God for us, then, is the whole universe as pregnant with and straining toward the quality of deity. What this quality is we cannot know, because it lies beyond our present experience; but we can know its relation to the quality of mind out of which it will emerge, since that is the same as the relation with which we are already familiar in the emergence of life out of matter and mind out of life.

Now, since the universe with its nisus toward deity is also the God of religious consciousness and worship, on Alexander's view, we can and should participate in the effort of God to bring deity into existence. Like James, Alexander believes that we should be fellow-workers with God. Thus, the religious sentiment which is directed to God is active as well as worshipful; it unites with the object of its adoration in the creation of value. This statement requires the comment further that, although in some respects Alexander's view of God is pantheistic—since it regards God as in a sense comprising the whole existing universe—yet Alexander is right in his insistence that his view is theistic, at least to the extent that it recognizes us to be finite individuals who have our independent consciousness and that we are distinct from God even when in communion with him in religious experience. Thus, God is immanent in the sense that he is present everywhere and he is transcendent in his forward reach to the attainment of deity. We cannot hold deity responsible for the evil now in the world because deity does not yet exist. We are to some extent responsible for what deity will be, i.e., for what good there will be in the world in the future. God and we, in unison, can make the world better and effect the emergence of deity.

¹ The Anglo-American realists include (admitting, of course, their individual divergencies) Russell, Moore, Santayana, Whitehead; mention may be made too of the exponents of "the New Realism"—particularly Perry and Holt.

² Alexander discovers no true world-soul but only a soul of space-time and a nisus in the world to deity.

³ Cf. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: Macmillan Co., 1902), passim.

⁴ W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902), p. 515.

⁵ It is the problem of the philosophy of religion to state in significative terms the cognitive meaning of religious emotion or faith. The difficulty of so doing is not sufficiently recognized by Alexander, who would be criticized, especially by logical empiricists, for so simple a statement of the problem.

⁶ Cf. J. Oman, The Natural and the Supernatural (New York: Macmillan Co., 1931). It appears that Alexander at times is wont to grant that the world of space-time arouses the religious sentiment; his real view is that it does not. Precisely it is the world as tending toward deity that arouses this sentiment.

⁷ As the special sciences were singled out of early Greek science, which was synonymous with philosophy.

⁸The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913).

⁹ For the view which Alexander denies, cf. W. G. de Burgh, From Morality to Religion (London: MacDonald & Evans, 1938).

¹⁰Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929).

¹¹ For the Christian view cf. E. Brunner, The Mediator (London: Lutterworth Press, 1934).

¹² One might ask how, since on Alexander's view spacetime acts without forethought; and why not indeed the reverse—of good altered into evil? Whitehead's principle of concretion, or God, indicates the presence in the universe of an actual entity capable of selection; in this way he makes Alexander's contention more defensible.

¹³ For the most aggressive alternative view cf. W. James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909).

¹⁴ A view which is elaborated by Lloyd Morgan (see his Emergent Evolution [London: Williams & Norgate, 1923] and other works) and which led him to acknowledge Alexander as one of his masters.

¹⁵ Motion is a synonym for space-time in Alexander's cosmology.

¹⁶ Morgan (op. cit., pp. 18-19) speaks of it as a new mode of relatedness.

¹⁷ New York: H. Holt & Co., 1935.

¹⁸ Whitehead, op. cit., pp. 521 ff.; see also the same author's Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan Co., 1926), pp. 88-99.