an adherent of the dogma of ” emergence,” a worshipper of the God that we create as we go along.* God is a useful fiction, a creature of the human mind, not the ultimate ground of reality. This relativism, however, ill accords with the absolutism of his theory of knowledge.
It is difficult to see how we can attain to a meta¬
biological plane of consciousness and activity if there is no corresponding metabiological stage of being. For metabiological activity implies metaphysical being, no less than biological activity involves physical being. We must either accept the reality and autonomy of spiritual being or abandon the possibility of spiritual knowledge. It is true that the intuition of unity of which Mr. Murry speaks does not necessarily involve the belief in the transcendent personal God of Christian doctrine. It has more affinity with the monism of the Vedanta, or still more with that of Taoism.
But it does necessitate, no less than Taoism, the idea of an eternal transcendental principle which is the source and not the product of the cosmic process.
It may be objected that Mr. Murry’s philosophy has in fact arisen directly from his spiritual * It is true that he does not term this concept God.
Unlike Professor Alexander, he reserves that tide to the transcendent God of the old religions.
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CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
experience, and, consequently, that it cannot be inconsistent with it. But this is not exactly the case. Certainly Mr. Murry’s theory of the existence of metabiological values and of a higher form of knowledge than the purely rational springs directly from his experience.
But this is not so with regard to his denial of the transcendent and the supernatural. That was due not to his mysticism, but to his adherence to the dogmas of scientific naturalism, and he has interpreted his experience to accord with these preconceived ideas.
He himself points out that his first reaction to his experience was purely religious—a conviction of spiritual reality and spiritual regeneration—and that his mature philosophy is not so much a logical consequence of his mystical experience as the means by which he succeeded in ” disintoxicating ” himself from it. It is conditioned throughout by his fundamental hostility to any form of supernaturalism—by his conviction that the introduction of the category of the supernatural involves ” mental and spiritual suicide.” *
* This dogmatic acceptance of naturalism has entered so deeply into Mr. Murry’s mind that the very idea of the supernatural is rejected with a kind of sacred horror as a blasphemous impiety. He writes : ” To introduce, or to be prepared to introduce, the category of the supernatural into my thinking would be mental and spiritual suicide.
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HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
This prejudice has been firmly implanted in the modern mind by two centuries of dogmatic naturalism, but it is difficult to understand its rational justification in the present instance.
From the point of view of scientific mechanism there is certainly no room for the supernatural, but on that assumption Mr. Murry’s category of the metabiological must also be excluded.
The anti-supernaturalist view rests fundamentally on the hypothesis of a universe in which quality and value have no meaning and where everything is reducible to matter and energy. If we once admit the possibility of a mode of spiritual consciousness or being which transcends the biological, there seems no reason to regard the human mind as its only field of manifestation.
It is no less reasonable to suppose that the metabiological plane is the point at which a higher order of being has inserted itself into the life of humanity than to suppose that it is a completely new order which has ” emerged “
from below. Even in the sensible world we have an example of the way in which a higher A world which at a certain point … ceased to belong to the natural order is no world for me, a man of the twentieth century, to contemplate or live in ; it would be a cheap and vulgar world from which it would be my duty as a man to escape immediately.”— God, p. 112.
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