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Space, Time and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow V2
1920. Volume 2 of a 2 volume set. A philosophical study of space, time and God. Contents Book III: The Clue to Quality; The Order of Empirical Qualities; The Empirical Problems; Mind and Knowing; Mind and its Acts; The Ways of Apprehending Categories and Qualities; Appearances; Illusion and Ideas; Value; Freedom. Contents Book IV: Deity and God; Deity and the Religious Sentiment; and Deity and Value. Volume 1 ISBN 0766187012.
- GenresPhilosophy
450 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2010
28 people want to read
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Samuel Alexander
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Samuel Alexander OM (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. Two key concepts for Alexander are those of an "emergent quality" and the idea of emergent evolution.
Samuel Alexander OM (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. Two key concepts for Alexander are those of an "emergent quality" and the idea of emergent evolution.
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June 4, 2024
THE SECOND/CONCLUDING VOLUME OF A CLASSIC OF IDEALIST METAPHYSICS
Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher; he was also the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. This book was first published in 1920. [NOTE: the page numbers below refer to a 144-page edition.]
He states, “The mental process and its neural process are one and the same existence, not two existences. As mental, it is in my language enjoyed by the experient; as neural it is contemplated by an outsider or may be contemplated in thought by the experient himself. There can therefore be no parallelism between the series of mental and the and series of neural or physiological events, such as is postulated by the strict theory of so-called psychophysical parallelism.” (Pg. 3)
He notes, “Darwinism is sometimes thought to be indifferent to Darwinian value. It is the fact the history of how values come into existence in the world of life. How the successful organism itself comes into being is a matter of controversy on which the layman is not free to enter… The doctrine of natural selection explains not how types are generated, but how they come to have value… The doctrine of natural selection gives us thus the natural history of values in the world of life, and we now see that it supplies equally that history in the world of mind.” (Pg. 104)
He explains, “In a universe so described… what place can be assigned to God? Primarily God must be defined as the object of the religious emotion or of worship… The passion for God is no less a real appetite of our nature, but what if it creates the very object which satisfies it?... On the other hand from the metaphysical approach, God must be defined as the being, if any, which possesses deity or the divine quality… The two methods of approach are therefore complementary… [in] either case God is defined indirectly. Religion is not the sentiment which is directed upon God; but God is that upon which the religious sentiment is directed. The datum of experience is that sentiment, and what God is known only by examining its deliverances… No one now is convinced by the traditional arguments for God’s existence… The only one… which at all persuades is the argument from design… The easy conception of a designing mind was foisted upon nature as a whole, without considering whether it could be used under conditions, which required it to be infinite and to create its own material.” (Pg. 114-115)
He states, “Deity is thus the next highest empirical quality to mind, which the universe is engaged in bringing to birth. That the universe is pregnant with such a quality we are speculatively assured. What that quality is we cannot know; for we can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God… Its nature we cannot penetrate. We can represent it to ourselves only by analogy.” (Pg. 116) He continues, “We cannot tell what is the nature of deity, of our deity, but we can be certain that it is not mind, or if we use the term spirit as equivalent to mind… deity is not spirit, but something different from it in kind. God, the being which possesses deity, must be ALSO spirit, for according to analogy, deity presupposes spirit… But though God must be spiritual in the same way as he must be living and material and spatio-temporal, his deity is not spirit… for philosophy, God’s deity is not different from spirit in degree but in kind, as a novelty in the series of empirical qualities.” (Pg. 117)
He observes, “Belief in God, though an act of experience, is not an act of sight, for neither deity nor even the world as tending to deity not even the world as tending to deity is revealed to sense, but of speculative and religious faith.” (Pg. 118) He continues, “God is not the only infinite. We have, in the first place, the infinite Space-Time itself which is a priori, and besides this we have infinites which are generated within Space-Time and are empirical… God is no exception … for though his body is the whole universe, his deity … is lodged in an infinite portion only of this whole infinitude.” (Pg. 121-122)
He explains, “For theism, God is an individual being distinct from the finite beings which make up the world; whether as in the popular theistic belief he is regarded as their creator … For pantheism… God is a pervading presence… Theism, any how is at least what I describe.” (Pg. 130) He goes on, “God is thus immanent in a different respect from that in which he is transcendent. The phrase ‘immanent theism’ seems to me to cover so much obscurity of thinking that I prefer to avoid it altogether. Theism and pantheism… are two extremes of thought about the divine… They represent the two essential characters which God shares with all other [beings] and with Space-Time itself… God is immanent in respect of his body, but transcendent in respect of his deity.” (Pg. 133)
He says, “Religion is faith in deity, or in God with the quality of deity; and deity… is seen to be in the line of value. But the religious sense … needs to be described as it is actually experienced, not as it is reflected about… Reflection shows it to be the outcome of our values; but at the same time to be in the line of all value whatever, whether human value or living value or natural value.” (Pg. 140)
He says, “Wish for a future life is not on the same footing as the sentiment of religion; for there the object of the sentiment could be traced in the actual experienced world in its solicitation of the mind. But the future life cannot be known from experience unless the continued existence of our minds after death can be established experimentally... Pending the experimental evidence I cannot but think that not only must we acquiesce in what we know and find our account therein as we well can do, but also we are bound to scrutinize the evidence presented to us with more than ordinary rigor, and not rather to accept it with more than ordinary welcome because it happens to accord with a wish… should the extension of mind beyond the limits of the bodily life be verified… the larger part of the present speculation will have to be seriously modified or abandoned.” (Pg. 142)
He concludes, “Space and Time have no reality apart from each other, but are aspects or attributes of one reality, Space-Time or Motion. This is the stuff of which all existents are composed… Any portion of it… possesses certain fundamental features which therefore belong to every existent generated within the universe of Space-Time… Besides these fundamental features, things possess quality which is the empirical feature of things. Qualities form a hierarchy, the quality of each level of existence being identical with a certain complexity or collocation of elements on the next lower level… Mind and body do not exemplify, therefore, a relation which holds universally. Accordingly Time is the mind of Space and any quality the mind of its body… mind and any other quality are the different distinctive complexities of Time which exist as qualities… minds enter into various relations … with other things and with one another. These account for the familiar features of mental life: knowing, freedom, values, and the like. In the hierarchy of qualities the next higher quality to the highest attained is deity. God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence.” (Pg. 144)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying speculative metaphysics.
Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher; he was also the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. This book was first published in 1920. [NOTE: the page numbers below refer to a 144-page edition.]
He states, “The mental process and its neural process are one and the same existence, not two existences. As mental, it is in my language enjoyed by the experient; as neural it is contemplated by an outsider or may be contemplated in thought by the experient himself. There can therefore be no parallelism between the series of mental and the and series of neural or physiological events, such as is postulated by the strict theory of so-called psychophysical parallelism.” (Pg. 3)
He notes, “Darwinism is sometimes thought to be indifferent to Darwinian value. It is the fact the history of how values come into existence in the world of life. How the successful organism itself comes into being is a matter of controversy on which the layman is not free to enter… The doctrine of natural selection explains not how types are generated, but how they come to have value… The doctrine of natural selection gives us thus the natural history of values in the world of life, and we now see that it supplies equally that history in the world of mind.” (Pg. 104)
He explains, “In a universe so described… what place can be assigned to God? Primarily God must be defined as the object of the religious emotion or of worship… The passion for God is no less a real appetite of our nature, but what if it creates the very object which satisfies it?... On the other hand from the metaphysical approach, God must be defined as the being, if any, which possesses deity or the divine quality… The two methods of approach are therefore complementary… [in] either case God is defined indirectly. Religion is not the sentiment which is directed upon God; but God is that upon which the religious sentiment is directed. The datum of experience is that sentiment, and what God is known only by examining its deliverances… No one now is convinced by the traditional arguments for God’s existence… The only one… which at all persuades is the argument from design… The easy conception of a designing mind was foisted upon nature as a whole, without considering whether it could be used under conditions, which required it to be infinite and to create its own material.” (Pg. 114-115)
He states, “Deity is thus the next highest empirical quality to mind, which the universe is engaged in bringing to birth. That the universe is pregnant with such a quality we are speculatively assured. What that quality is we cannot know; for we can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God… Its nature we cannot penetrate. We can represent it to ourselves only by analogy.” (Pg. 116) He continues, “We cannot tell what is the nature of deity, of our deity, but we can be certain that it is not mind, or if we use the term spirit as equivalent to mind… deity is not spirit, but something different from it in kind. God, the being which possesses deity, must be ALSO spirit, for according to analogy, deity presupposes spirit… But though God must be spiritual in the same way as he must be living and material and spatio-temporal, his deity is not spirit… for philosophy, God’s deity is not different from spirit in degree but in kind, as a novelty in the series of empirical qualities.” (Pg. 117)
He observes, “Belief in God, though an act of experience, is not an act of sight, for neither deity nor even the world as tending to deity not even the world as tending to deity is revealed to sense, but of speculative and religious faith.” (Pg. 118) He continues, “God is not the only infinite. We have, in the first place, the infinite Space-Time itself which is a priori, and besides this we have infinites which are generated within Space-Time and are empirical… God is no exception … for though his body is the whole universe, his deity … is lodged in an infinite portion only of this whole infinitude.” (Pg. 121-122)
He explains, “For theism, God is an individual being distinct from the finite beings which make up the world; whether as in the popular theistic belief he is regarded as their creator … For pantheism… God is a pervading presence… Theism, any how is at least what I describe.” (Pg. 130) He goes on, “God is thus immanent in a different respect from that in which he is transcendent. The phrase ‘immanent theism’ seems to me to cover so much obscurity of thinking that I prefer to avoid it altogether. Theism and pantheism… are two extremes of thought about the divine… They represent the two essential characters which God shares with all other [beings] and with Space-Time itself… God is immanent in respect of his body, but transcendent in respect of his deity.” (Pg. 133)
He says, “Religion is faith in deity, or in God with the quality of deity; and deity… is seen to be in the line of value. But the religious sense … needs to be described as it is actually experienced, not as it is reflected about… Reflection shows it to be the outcome of our values; but at the same time to be in the line of all value whatever, whether human value or living value or natural value.” (Pg. 140)
He says, “Wish for a future life is not on the same footing as the sentiment of religion; for there the object of the sentiment could be traced in the actual experienced world in its solicitation of the mind. But the future life cannot be known from experience unless the continued existence of our minds after death can be established experimentally... Pending the experimental evidence I cannot but think that not only must we acquiesce in what we know and find our account therein as we well can do, but also we are bound to scrutinize the evidence presented to us with more than ordinary rigor, and not rather to accept it with more than ordinary welcome because it happens to accord with a wish… should the extension of mind beyond the limits of the bodily life be verified… the larger part of the present speculation will have to be seriously modified or abandoned.” (Pg. 142)
He concludes, “Space and Time have no reality apart from each other, but are aspects or attributes of one reality, Space-Time or Motion. This is the stuff of which all existents are composed… Any portion of it… possesses certain fundamental features which therefore belong to every existent generated within the universe of Space-Time… Besides these fundamental features, things possess quality which is the empirical feature of things. Qualities form a hierarchy, the quality of each level of existence being identical with a certain complexity or collocation of elements on the next lower level… Mind and body do not exemplify, therefore, a relation which holds universally. Accordingly Time is the mind of Space and any quality the mind of its body… mind and any other quality are the different distinctive complexities of Time which exist as qualities… minds enter into various relations … with other things and with one another. These account for the familiar features of mental life: knowing, freedom, values, and the like. In the hierarchy of qualities the next higher quality to the highest attained is deity. God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence.” (Pg. 144)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying speculative metaphysics.
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