GERMANISM." 



145 



Mansel also stirred up the indignation of my old naaster, F. D. 

 Maurice, wLoselectures on EnglishLiterature and Modern History 

 I attended for three years at King's College, London. Mr. Maurice 

 showed unusual warmth in this controversy, doubtless because 

 Dean Mansel had substituted a colourless metaphysical abstrac- 

 tion for the God Whose first attribute is Love, whom Maurice, 

 with all the intensity of his being, had made the centre of his 

 religious belief. To turn the God of the Bible, the Creator and 

 Preserver of the Universe and all that is in it, the All Father, 

 Whose surname is Love, into a mass of negatives, which included 

 sin, crime and folly within their scope, would have been, in my 

 old preceptor's eyes, to have deprived him and all the rest of 

 mankind of the only belief which makes life worth living. 



I will not go through the various phases of Immanuel Kant's 

 metaphysics. Enough has been said already to show what 

 absurdities it includes, and I may touch on one or two which are 

 marked by a slovenliness which is the very opposite of the careful, 

 precise, if very often narrow-minded and one-sided methods which 

 usually characterise German philosophical thought. He regards 

 the primal conception of God as ens originarium and ens summum. 

 He confesses that his definition does not involve a determina- 

 tion of the relation of this Being to other beings, and therefore 

 "leaves us in perfect ignorance as to the existence of a Being 

 of such superlative excellence." And he goes on to say that 

 " the concept of God, in its transcendental sense, is the concept 

 of the highest reality as one, simple, all-sufficient, eternal, et 

 coBtera."* Surely this is a very unsatisfactory way of treating 

 the greatest of all subjects ! On another failure of Kant's 

 metaphysics I have said some severe things in my paper of 1902. 

 His attempt to reduce all speculative ideas to abstract concep- 

 tions is inadmissible. I have already shown how utterly such 

 an attempt fails when applied to the Being of God, Who enfolds 

 so many qualities and so many facts within His all-embracing 

 Personality. I may point out also how both Mind and Matter 

 reject the abstract method of investigation. Apply it to Mind, 

 and you find endless conceptions which are multiform, not simple. 



Himself in another way. O. — Certainly." Some have doubted whether 

 the dialogue is Theodoret's, but at least it shows the same clearness of 

 vision as enabled him to steer his way through the intricacies of the 

 Nestorian and Monophysite controversies. 



* I have quoted from Dr. Max Miiller's Translation, Part 2, pp. 498, 499. 



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