IN THE FORM OF EDUCATION AND RELIGION 9 



VI. Theism 



When the social mind had reached this insight of the transcendence 

 of the great First Cause we see that it lost the world of things and 

 events and had annulled one of the two poles of experience which 

 it was attempting to explain. And it had left in its thought only 

 a great negative abstraction, pure being or pure naught, with no 

 positive distinctions, not even consciousness nor the moral idea of 

 ethics, goodness, and righteousness or mercy and justice. It was 

 obliged to deny the creation altogether and conceive the world as 

 a vast dream, a maya. 



Asia's chief thought is this idea of transcendence of the one First 

 Cause, above the world and above creation and creative activity. 

 But in the Old Testament we have the last word of Asia; it reveals 

 an insight which reacts against the thought of this abstract oneness 

 as transcendental Being and sets in its place the idea, of a creator. 



God as creator makes the world, but does not lose his sovereignty 

 by this act. He also retains consciousness, inward distinction; he 

 is personal, having intellect and will and also feeling. 



The pantheistic idea which conceived God only as the transcendent 

 One followed its thought out to the denial of all creative activity 

 and even to the denial of all inward distinction of subject and object. 

 It ended its search for a First Cause (following out the causal line 

 which it began with) by denying causality altogether and finding 

 only a quiet, empty being devoid of finitude within itself and annihilat- 

 ing objective finitude altogether. Hence its search ended with the 

 denial of true being to the world and to man. 



But this self-contradiction was corrected by the Israelitic people, 

 who felt an inward necessity --a logical necessity of conceiving 

 the First Cause as active, both as intellect making internal distinctions 

 of subject and object, and also as a free will creating a world of finite 

 reality in which it could reveal itself as goodness. The essence of 

 goodness, in the Old Testament sense of the idea, consists in impart- 

 ing true being to that which has it not. God creates real beings. 

 Goodness not only makes others but gives them rights; that is to 

 say, gives them claims on its consideration. 



While Orientalism with the single idea of transcendence or sover- 

 eignty arrived at the idea of a One without the many, and at a con- 

 sequent destruction of what it set out to explain, theism found a 

 First Cause that could explain the world as created by an ethical 

 being, a personal One that possessed what we call " character," 

 namely, a fixed self-determination of will, of which the two 

 elements were goodness and righteousness. This doctrine conceived 

 ethics as a fundamental element in the character of the Absolute, 

 a primordial form of being belonging to the First Cause. 



