SOURCE: "Samuel Alexander's Theism," in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XL, No. 2, January, 1942, pp. 146-55.

[In the following essay, Laird examines Alexander's views on the nature and existence of God.]

Alexander was, quite certainly, a theist in his own Alexandrian way, a way that was never insincere. Indeed his "nisus theory of deity," to judge for instance from Mr Brightman's Philosophy of Religion (1940), seems by now to have taken its place as one of the accepted types of text-book theism. It has almost achieved respectability, like an eccentric old friend whose ways have become too familiar to startle.

A letter of Alexander's which came to me recently in rather an odd way, since it was sent me by the purchaser of a pamphlet into which it had been gummed, gives a more personal statement than was usual with its author.

"I never was negative in respect of that subject [this letter runs] and never was even agnostic. I date from the agnostic time, but never subscribed to the prevailing belief (or want of belief). I daresay I may have expressed myself coldly (or, being younger, even scornfully) towards what I now call the elements of 'nonsense' in positive religions (I say nowadays [in private] that in spite of its manifest insufficiency I stick to Judaism because it contains less nonsense than the other religions known to me). But I think I have always been firm on the central point."

I mean to make this letter (dated 31.8.31) in some sort the text of the present essay, for I want to include in its scope some account of the continuity of Alexander's views, and of the kind of thing that he accounted "nonsense."

Among Alexander's private papers there is one, professionally typed, on which he wrote in pencil "Read at Oxford about 1885?? to a society, James Bryce in the chair. First paper I wrote, I think." Its title was "Finger-posts to Religion," and the substance of it was roughly as follows: The highroad to religion is "what for want of a better name may be called the religious consciousness." It is the sense of absolute dependence, Max Müller's sense of infinity, or the like. But there are also "finger-posts on the paths of science and conduct which point the way to religion," and it was these little things with a big message that Alexander attempted to discuss. What he said was not perhaps very thrilling. "A great intelligible world" was, as one might say, paulo-post-scientific; and he admitted that he did not have enough metaphysics to pass confidently from a single intelligible to a single intelligent universe. Similarly there were finger-posts from ethical science. From progress in conduct, and from the expanding moral world that progress creates

"we go on to think of the whole world as completely used up for practical ends, no out of the way corner left which is not intelligible and turned into conduct, and we think of such an ideal of conduct, to which we strive to approximate and which, because it is the fulfilment of what we ought to be, draws us towards itself by a natural affection."

On the other hand, he admitted (and, I think, without much regret) that the ethical finger-posts to theism were a good deal more ambiguous than the intellectual. God's goodness, if that word could be used at all, would have to be different in kind from human goodness.

About this time Alexander kept a sort of Commonplace Book. One passage in it, the only one which recorded his thoughts on theism, seems to me to be so significant that I ought to quote it almost in full, although it is rather prolix. Here it is:

"To whom is the responsibility due? (1) Plainly to myself as representing the good character; as such it is conscience. (2) To the ideal as realised objectivity in God. This is the notion represented by the Last Judgement. Conscience seems to me (1 Nov. 1885) always to include this reference to myself as a tribunal of morality and so to be different from the moral sense. . . .

"What is the connection between conscience as responsibility to my own self and Duty to God?

"I might say conscience implies the existence in me of the Moral Law which is divine. But this is only a half-solution. For God is not exhausted by what happens at any moment to be the Moral Law. In what sense can God be called moral? Not as you or I because he chooses the better, because he has the affections of sense and uses the material thus afforded his will. (This seems to me the false half-suppressed postulate of a continuous future life beginning where the earthly leaves off.) Nor again as being a law of pure Reason: for this blinks the plain fact that morality as we know it is conditioned by nature (this against Kant). In what sense, then? We have to remark:

"(1) In every moral act we do right absolutely—'are pleasing in the sight of God'—are so far recognised by Him as one with Himself.

"(2) The system of moral duty is changing; man enters into a new order of moral relations as the 'moral law' alters, i.e. God's self-recognition in us grows; only its growth is not the same as the growth of our self-consciousness which is dependent (in a way to be considered) on sensuous affections, but goes on wholly in self-consciousness regarded as occupied wholly with itself. This, I think, is why we never can predict a new morality; when it comes it is a new fact; it is so much more of God revealed to us; and to God it is also so much more of Himself revealed. Only we must not use the word 'more' as if it meant that God went through a process in time; for, as we have seen, God is never imperfect, and even in imperfect morality is still absolutely God. It is only when God is regarded as the actual recovery of Himself from the Nature in which he was lost that we can speak of Him as gradually self-revealed. In every such recognition of God the whole of Him is present. The logical understanding may detect in the Idea of Him moral ideas which mean to pass one into the next by a logical necessity; but each superior idea containing the power in the process by which sense is rightly used is absorbed with the act in which selfconsciousness recognises its own nature in the individual man. It is thus that God is all-present in each of his acts; in the very simplest the most complex can behold its own reflection. Everything, then, is transparent to God; God then is supremely moral because all moral law in self-recognition of spirit. That is less for man than for God; for man it seems as far as he can go, but in God this moral law is seen in connection with all other things and their activities. It is the latent process of the human mind and the undiscovered invitations which Nature is yet to offer to him which determines a change of the Moral Law; but in God this moral law is already absorbed in the completed whole of processless activity which, as conditioned by bodily and mental powers, is to reappear as the neverending struggle after higher and higher law. Therefore it is that God is wholly moral and yet we invest him in successive ages with different moral attributes."

There are certain faint echoes of this passage in Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, published in 1889, especially in the section on conscience; but the book, being a manifesto in support of evolutionary ethics, could have nothing to do with "a completed whole of processless activity." Ethics might be "near" metaphysics (p. 78), but all its standards were standards of adjustment and were moving standards. The moral life was a pursuit of the better, and of the bettering of the better, but never of the completed best. (Hence Green's "eternal self consciousness reproducing itself"—plainly the concern of the passage I have quoted—was not an ethical conception. Indeed Alexander ended his book by suggesting that religion was beyond morality, and that an all-too-moral religion was a religion misunderstood.)

He said the same thing to the end of his life about "values," holding that all values were human at their best and never divine. In most other ways, however, his philosophy, including his theism, made an immense stride between 1889 and 1920 when Space, Time and Deity, his next substantial book, appeared. What he believed himself to have accomplished is perfectly plain. As he thought, he had reached the point where he could establish a cosmic or metaphysical evolutionism instead of a merely scientific or ethical evolutionism. In other words, "processless activity," perfection in that sense, even if it was divine, could be seen to be a metaphysical impossibility, and the boundaries between science and metaphysics, or between moral science and theology, had to be drawn in a different place and on a different plan. God, if there were a God, would have to be an evolving God. For he would have to be genuine and not a myth, and all that is not evolving must be mythical.

I shall now attempt a brief discussion of the theism in Space, Time and Deity, with occasional references to subsequent essays and addresses of Alexander's. There was no substantial change in his later accounts of theism, but sometimes his later statements are neater or sharper or at any rate more conveniently quotable than those in Space, Time and Deity. [Hereafter cited as S.T.D.]

Abstractly put, the argument is as follows: We have (a) a general religious sentiment or emotion, a need of our being which demands its proper food as hunger does. As philosophers, however, our more pressing and our more professional business is (b) with the question whether common experience and/or the sciences have room for anything that could satisfy (or partially satisfy) this religious hunger, and, if they have room for such a thing, whether they actually house it. As a matter of method the second question should be tackled first. Answered, it should enable us to say whether the first is "verified" of the second.

In Alexander's exposition, "deity," "the quality of deity" "actual deity" (or "God"), "the nisus towards deity" and other such phrases are used in a way that often strains the attention if it is not downright misleading. Sentences like "Even God himself does not as actual God possess deity attained but only the nisus towards it" (S.T.D., ii. 418) or "God is, if we may use such language, the power which makes for deity" (ii. 428) are instances. I shall therefore allow myself, quite frequently, to use other words.

The cardinal conception is what Alexander in a late essay called "the historicity of things." In other words, whatever is, is in process and is also in progress. That for him is essential, indeed quintessential, in all metaphysics. It elaborates the invincibility of the hyphen in "Space-Time" on which hyphen all Alexander's philosophy hung. "The restlessness of Time" is one of Alexander's descriptive phrases, but he was careful, indeed sedulous, to repeat that "restlessness" was not enough for historicity, i.e. for cosmic metaphysical evolution. The restlessness assumed a determinate direction. It was and became a progressive nisus, and the form that this nisus had taken was open to observation in common life and in the sciences. Space-Time had configured itself into materiality, certain material constellations had plunged into life, certain vital constellations had blossomed into neural patterns that "carry" what human beings call their "minds." This cosmic and metaphysical evolution is of the "emergent" type. In other words each stage is novel in kind, and is never deducible from the earlier stage, although it grows out of it. We may call this "the emergent ladder of the nisus" to indicate that there are distinct and decisive steps in the evolution, each such step being different in kind from its predecessor (being "emergent") and intelligible après coup but never in advance.

Obviously the ladder is an ambitious doctrine. If we accept the premiss (which I personally am unable to reject) that process belongs to the marrow of all existence, including God's, we might boggle at the further premiss that the process must be progress, and again at the gloss that such progress is quite clearly and specifically along the emergent ladder of the nisus. If Space-Time in its early career was a fluid sub-material magma the emergence of materiality would seem to be a universal cosmic step. But what of "life"? According to many (e.g. according to Sir Charles Sherrington in his recent Man on His Nature) "life" does not differ in kind from non-living chemical configurations. There is no such distinct rung on the ladder, and "mind" so far from being a new level in a biological constellation is something known, not by sense-observation, but in another way. (Alexander would have accepted a part of this in another side of his theory, but that other side as good as drops out of his theism.) Again a critic might be disposed to say that even if the ladder had been exemplified in the existence of this planet, it was only a planetary and not a cosmic ladder, and, for that matter, probably episodic even in a planetary way. The emergent ladder of the nisus might be quite a little ladder, and something of a cosmic curiosity instead of being that with which the entire universe was and had always been in travail.

Alexander would say (as I understand him) that the ladder is a faithful description of historicity as such, no more and no less. I find it difficult to believe that any metaphysical doctrine of invincible progress is not much more hazardous than a doctrine of invincible metaphysical process, not to speak of a progress as specific as Alexander's emergent ladder. Still, the conception, whether hazardous or not, is certainly possible, and, if it held, it would hold of everything that there was including whatever gods there were or were to be.

A second part of the theory should have an easier journey, for plainly we have to distinguish between the progressive nisus and the progress actually accomplished at any given time. The point in human experience is quite familiar. It is Hobbes's point in his criticism of the summum bonum of the ancients. According to Hobbes "there is no satisfaction but in proceeding" and "to have no desires is to be dead." In other words, a complete good would be a good that had stopped. And that, in a living being, could not occur. If one appetition is stilled, another takes its place. Similarly, in the metaphysical way, we should have to say that the progressiveness of things, if invincible, could never be completed. If it were completed, time would be dead and existence would collapse into complete non-entity.

Here, however, I am moving a little too fast, for I have not explained the specific place of deity in this historicity. According to Alexander (S.T.D., ii. 417) the sense of deity was "the sense of a new quality above man to which the whole world tends," that is, it was the next emergent rung in the ladder immediately above "mind." A certain progress in morals, æsthetics or science, say, would have nothing divine in it, and neither would an advance from man to superman if the superman did not differ in kind from man. Deity was the name for the rung in the ladder immediately above mind, and could not be less distinct from mind than mind was distinct from vegetative insentient existence.

Such a conception, in very many ways, may seem to be a most generous type of theism. It might extort a certain reluctant approval from M. Maritain and even from Herr Barth, for these authors, in very different ways, agree in insisting that the divine is altogether above the human, in kind as well as in degree, and is falsified if it is philosophised into an objective ideal of "perfect" knowledge like unto (although magnifying) all human knowledge (and similarly of the other human "values"). True, according to Alexander, what is asserted is necessarily an unknown God, an unknown "quality of deity." That, however, is scarcely a theological objection, and if it were an objection, an Alexandrian (although not, I think, Alexander himself) might say that the hiddenness of the emergent "God" was a consequence of another metaphysical principle which might be less certain than the ladder of emergent historicity. The principle in question is that any being "enjoys" (or experiences) itself, and knows itself in that way, and that any being except the lowest "contemplates" (or observes) what is lower than itself, but that no being can either enjoy or contemplate what is higher than itself, at any rate in the respects in which it is higher. This principle which seems largely to be a generalisation from the circumstance that we observe the bodies but not the minds of our fellows might appear to be rather shaky.

On the other hand, Alexander's doctrine seems to be crammed, if not even to be choked, with several serious difficulties. I shall now examine some of them.

(1) Most theologians would say that God, whatever else he may be, must as any rate be ultimate if he exists at all. According to Alexander the progressive historicity of things would be ultimate, the last word in any metaphysics, but God or deity, that is, the achievement of the next stage above "mind" in the ladder of emergence would not be ultimate at all. On the contrary, as soon as this level arose, there would be a straining after the next level, the level above mere deity. For every Jove there would be a Prometheus. On the whole the conclusion here would seem to be that the nisus was more worshipful in the long run than the particular emergent stage that we call deity, but, no doubt, there may be a certain ingratitude in complaining of a "deity" that ex hypothesi is incommensurably higher than the best that is human.

(2) We may raise the question (although Alexander in S.T.D., ii. 365, called it "trivial and scholastic") whether there has been the actual emergence of deity, i.e. whether the rung in the emergent ladder immediately above mind has ever been reached anywhere. Alexander says quite simply, that we don't know. But discussion is possible.

If it be assumed that minds have emerged rather late in the cosmic process, and not merely rather late in the history of this planet; if it be further assumed that the stage next above mind, that is, the stage of "deity," can only be reached through the stage of mind, then Alexander's "Ignoramus" might be an answer as good as it was simple. In other words if there were angels (and Alexander, half playfully, sometimes speaks of "angels" instead of "deity" when he is describing the next stage) and if we encountered them, we should necessarily encounter them unawares. That would be a consequence of Alexander's restriction of human awareness to "enjoyment" and "contemplation (of the lower)." By the same principle we couldn't be angels unawares. But there is nothing to forbid the belief that there may be plenty of angels now, and plenty of Jovian gods above angels, and plenty of Promethean gods above Jovian gods.

Such speculation is indeed "trivial and scholastic," but there is a more serious point. Alexander's metaphysics of the historicity of things is constructed on the principle that we do know that Space-Time came first in a non-material condition, that materiality supervened upon it universally, that sporadic, vitality, and, later, a still more circumscribed mentality supervened in the same way, and that the cosmos could have no room for "angels" or for "gods" until it had evolved through all these stages. I would suggest that we don't know anything of the kind, and have quite insufficient reasons for inferring it from the highly conjectural evidence that we may have concerning the origin of human minds on this planet. Let there be a hierarchy of levels of existence with the angelic or divine incommensurably above the human and mental. Let it also be granted that in a small corner of the universe, viz. in this planet, minds turned up rather late. What right have we to infer that superhuman levels may not have been established æons before life appeared on this planet? Since Alexander's conception of the historicity of things implies progress as well as process, we should have to say, I suppose, that deity could not be coeternal with the world, or at any rate that some high level of existence (perhaps a level much higher than mere deity) could not come first. But if process and not progress is all that Alexander has proved (and I do not think he proved more), then divine process, or a process still higher, might very well be co-eternal with the universe. That is what many people believe who believe in God's "eternity" and also in, the "redemption" of the human race. Credible or not the conception implies no inconsistency.

(3) Alexander's repeated statements that actual "deity" would have to be finite may be rather too confident. In a way it was a consequence of his system, for he held that "deity" was an "empirical" (i.e. a scattered) quality and not a "categorical" (i.e. an all-pervasive) quality. Here, however, one may wonder whether, as so often, the system may not have manufactured difficulties which, without it, would not exist.

Certainly the most obvious interpretation of Alexandrian historicity would suggest the finitude of "deity." Only a smallish part of the living human body, namely the roofbrain, is fitted to "carry" mind. We should therefore naturally suppose that only a smallish portion of our minds would become able to "carry" deity. Alexander, however, recoiled from this particular way of looking at the story. The inference, he said, would be no better than if seaweed thinking (per impossibile) of the emergence of mind should conclude that it must be seaweed that would become mental. We should therefore, he said, be immensely more cautious in our inferences of this order.

Let us grant that the seaweed would have been naïvely sea-weedly. Nevertheless the inference that only a living body can become mental would be about as plain as any of Alexander's own plain stories. If all such suggestions were dropped, and if we thought of deity as "carried" not by a part of a mind that is "carried" by a brain (let us say, in some rapport between minds) what sort of life-line or what sort of mind-line would be left to cling to? Such a rapport might be between our minds (or the minds of the elect among us) and the minds of Martians and Saturnians. It might be a rapport between our minds and their stars, or more generally, a cosmic rapport that had nothing to do with the finite boundaries of living bodies and of living body-minds. So far as I can see the proof of the finitude of (actual) "deity" rests upon the finitude of the theatre (i.e. of the human body) in which the mental rung of the ladder of historicity invariably emerges from the merely vital rung. If bodily contours be held to be irrelevant, anything in the world may be supposed.

(4) Alexander invariably described the progressive nisus as a nisus of the universe and as in the passage I have already quoted, spoke of deity (S.T.D., ii. 417) as "a new quality above man to which the whole world tends." For him the universe, all the spatiality of Space-Time, was "the body" of God. God's body was not finite although its emergent deity was.

Plainly, however, there can be no difference between the sense in which "the whole world" is straining towards deity, and the sense in which there has been straining towards mentality, that is to say, towards the emergence of my mind or of yours. Accordingly we have to say that even if there is a legitimate sense in which "the whole world" is "the body" of the minds that exist, it is not the usual sense. In the usual sense of language the body of my mind is a watery colloid substance of small dimensions and of very moderate powers. In terms of Alexandrian canons "the whole world" with its universal nisus is only the Urleib and not the Leib of any mind, its remote and not its proximate body. Similarly "the whole world" could only be the remote and not the proximate body of emergent deity, unless, as we saw under (2), deity, while presupposing minds as the rung in the ladder from which it ascends, is regarded as a pervasive and not as a limited actuality.

With these remarks I shall end my exposition of the science and natural theology of Alexander's theism. What remains for consideration is the question with which the theism of Space Time and Deity began, the question, namely, whether the science and the philosophy of deity "verified" and was able to satisfy the natural hunger of the religious sentiment. In general Alexander claimed that it did. Thus he said (S.T.D., ii. 394) that his "speculative conception of God or deity . . . has appeared to be verified by religious experience." [It wouldn't much matter which "verified" which. The essential question is whether they agree.] In at least one passage, however, he said (S.T.D., ii. 381), rather differently, that "speculatively we can arrive at the postulate of a world tending to deity though we could not discover it to be worshipful." (Italics mine.)

One of the clearest accounts Alexander ever gave of this matter was in his admirably simple National Broadcast in the series "Science and Religion" (1930). In brief, what he said on that occasion was that there were two conspiring ways in which "belief in God is removed from being mere guesswork." One of these is our reverence for the mysterious greatness of things, our natural awe in the presence of what Otto called the "numinous." Punning, Alexander avowed himself "an Otto-man." He held, however, that the numinous would be a slender although never a negligible life-line for theism if it were not confirmed by the sciences themselves, and proceeded to argue that the deity to which the sciences pointed was truly something to be worshipped. Such deity was far more worshipful than the "god" of most philosophers. The philosophers worked with conceptions like truth, beauty and goodness, and tried to erect a God or Ideal of Perfection in whom there was no spot or blemish in respect of any of these "values." Of them Alexander said:

"I can be enthusiastic for beauty or truth but I have no worship for them. They excite in me no religious feeling, though in many persons they may supply the place of religion, where no religion is felt. The mystics are right; we worship or love in God, not his goodness, but his godship or deity."

Yet he could not go all the way with the mystics, or with the creeds. The religion of natural devotion tended to be choked with mythology and to become its prey.

That was a gentler way of saying that he repudiated what in the letter I quoted at the beginning of this essay he privately called the "nonsense" of so many religions. But he was also saying that he repudiated the nonsense of traditional philosophical theology, the nonsense of looking for deity in the wrong place and of attempting to adore the mere perfection of human attributes like moral goodness or intellectual insight when these, however much they might be "perfected," remained and had to remain wholly and definitely sub-divine.

It may seem difficult to dispute the force and the sanity of these comments, but whatever the mythologists may have to say about them, it seems to me that the decried philosophers should not be too readily acquiescent. Some of them would reply, I suppose, that they did worship the "values" (or some of the values) for which Alexander felt enthusiasm only, and never reverence. According to Kant (Practical Reason, Analytic, ch. iii.):

"Fontenelle says I bow before a great man, but my mind does not bow.' I would add, before an humble plain man in whom I perceive uprightness of character in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose it or not. . . . Nay, I may even be conscious of a like degree of uprightness, and yet the respect remains."

It is not everyone, I concede, who has Kant's reverence for the moral law; and Alexander may have been wiser than Kant in this matter. But is it plain that he must have been wiser about it? If all you can say about the "higher" that is "divine" is that it is higher in kind, incommensurably higher than the highest that any man can find or can even conceive in himself, are you really showing force and sanity? Are you so very certain that the numinous which you worship has been enlightened at all by the night-lamps attached to the finger-posts of science and common experience? In short, can you be sure that you are attaching any intelligible meaning to the comparative "higher"?

It seems to me that this question is immensely difficult to answer with any approach to satisfactoriness on Alexandrian principles. Alexander's entire metaphysics of inevitable historicity or progressiveness professes to be based upon what I have called the ladder of emergent evolution. The nature of the ladder is that each emergent rung is a step higher than its immediate predecessor. Consequently an essential, perhaps the essential question is what precisely is meant by "higher." I have found no satisfactory answer in Alexander's pages. In so far as we are left to collect the answer from our experience, we should have to say that "higher" means whatever is common to the superiority of life over matter and of mind over life. But what is it that is common to these? The answer, so far as I can see, would have to be given in terms very similar to Herbert Spencer's "definite coherent heterogeneity." It would be an affair of efficient complexity, somewhat darkened by the reflection that each rung in the ladder differed in kind from its predecessor. Alexander's Spinozistic penchant for the view that virtue is just strength or availing, that goodness is just efficient or harmonious adjustment, that evil is either weakness or excrement is a corroboration so far as it goes.

If so, one can surely ask whether mind is higher than mere vegetative life solely or principally because of its more efficient complexity, and more generally why we should worship efficient complexity if it excels mind and mental values in kind? As it seems to me one might decline to worship efficient complexity with at least as good reason as Alexander had for declining to worship truth or beauty or righteousness, either in man, or in the "omniscience" and other traditional attributes of divinity, portrayed and elaborated by purblind and vain philosophers.

The most explicit statement of Alexander's that I have seen about the ultimate meaning of "higher in kind," occurs in a letter he wrote to Miss Hilda Oakeley in April 1921. I have her permission to publish it here. It runs:

"'Higher' and 'lower' do not mean for me what can be judged beforehand to be higher and lower. My position rather is that the scale of levels is not intrinsically one of value, but of empirical differences which I call 'greater or less perfection' but without having an ideal of perfection (which is, I think, what you suppose). Perfection is an awkward name: I might have said 'difference of kind,' but I mean it in the sense in which one says that one man is a bigger man than another but not better. Now what I am trying to say is that value cannot be judged a priori, but is discovered experimentally, and that within each level the types which have value are those which can establish themselves. For the same reason deity is not a value, but a quality in the order of 'perfection,' but it is in the line of value because from the nature of the case it is the valuable types which by their persistence engender the next higher quality, I mean the quality which succeeds in the scale of qualities. All through, I am proceeding empirically and urging that you must first find out what value means and not use the conception a priori."

I cannot see how anything could be less defensibly a priori than this statement that the "higher" means "the quality which succeeds in the scale of qualities."

A word in conclusion. I had meant this essay to be expository and even semi-biographical rather than critical, but sometimes I have lapsed into criticism if not even into polemics. I am sorry about that. The criticism was wrung from me, not willingly sought. Let me say, then, that for me at least there is a refreshment and an excitement in Alexander's pages that I could not easily put into words. He is rich, and deep and splendid and delicate in almost all that he says about theism. If it were not so I would not have written this essay.