Objections to the Doctrine of Regulative Knowledge.
1. The first remark on this doctrine of reoulative knowledge is, that it is self-contradictory. Regulative truth is truth designed to accomplish a given end. Design, however, is the intelligent and voluntary adaptation of means to an end ; and the intelligent adap- tation of means to an end, is a personal act. Unless, therefore, God be really a person, there can be no such thing as regulative knowledge. Mr. Mansel says, we cannot know what God is in Himself, " but only how He wills that we should think of Him." Here " will " is attributed to God ; and the personal pronouns are used, and must be used in the very statement of the doctrine. That is, we must assume that God is really (and not merely in our subjective apprehensions) a person, in order to believe in regula- tive knowledge, which form of knowledge supposes that He is not, or may not be a person. This is a contradiction.
2. Regulative knowledge is, from the nature of the case, power- less, unless its subjects regard it as well founded. Some parents educate their children in the use of fictions and fairy tales ; but belief in the truth of these is essential to their effect. So long as the world believed in ghosts and witches, the belief had power. As soon as men were satisfied that there were no such real exist- ences, their power was gone. Had the philosophers convinced the Greeks that their gods were not real persons, there would have been an end to their mythology. And if Hamilton and his disci- ples can convince the world that the Infinite cannot be a person, the regulative influence of Theism is gone. Men cannot be influ- enced by representations which they know are not conformed to the truth.
3. This theory is highly derogatory to God. It supposes Him to propose to influence his creatui'es by false representations ; re- vealing Himself as Father, Governor, and Judge, when there is no objective truth to answer to these representations. And worse than this, as remarked above, it supposes Him to have so constituted our nature as to force us to believe v/hat is not true. We are con- strained by the laws of our rational and moral being to think of God as having a nature like our own, and yet we are told it is blasphemy so to regard Him. The theory supposes a conflict between reason and conscience, — between our rational and moral nature. The latter forcing us to believe that God is a person, and the fornfier declaring personality and deity to be contradictory ideas. We do not forget that Mr. Mansel says that the incogitable may be real,
356 PART I. — THEOLOGY. [Ch. IV. — Can God be knoww?
that the contradiction is in our own minds, and not necessarily in the nature of things. But this amounts to nothing ; for he says continually that the Absolute cannot be a person, cannot be a cause, cannot be conscious, cannot either know or be known. He says, "A thing — an object — an attribute — a person — or any other terni signifying one out of many possible objects of consciousness, is by that very relation necessarily declared to be finite." ^ That is, if God be a person. He is of necessity finite. Here the person- ality of God is said not only to be incogitable, or inconceivable, but impossible. And this is the real doctrine of his book. It must be so. It is intuitively true that the whole cannot be a part of itself; and if the Infinite be " the All," then it cannot be one out of many. If men adopt the principles of pantheists, they cannot consistently avoid their conclusions. Hamilton teaches not merely that God may not be w4iat we think Him to be, but that He can- not so be ; that we are ignorant what He is ; that He is to us an unknown God. If God, by the laws of our reason, thus forces us to deny his personality, and by the laws of our moral nature makes it not only a duty, but a necessity to believe in his personality, then our nature is chaotic. Man, in that case, is not the noble creature that was formed in the image of God.
4. This doctrine of regulative knowledge destroj^s the authority of the Scriptures. If all that the Bible teaches concerning the na- ture of God and concerning his relation to the world, reveals no objective truth, gives us no knowledge of what God really is, then what it teaches concerning the person, offices, and work of Christ, may all be unreal, and there may be no such person and no such Saviour.
C. Objections to the whole Theory.
1. The first and most obvious fallacy in the theory of Hamilton and Mansel, as it appears to us, lies in their definition of the Abso- lute and Infinite, or in the language of Hamilton, the Uncondi- tioned. By the Absolute they mean that which exists in and of itself, and out of all relation. The Infinite is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived or is possible ; which includes all actual and all possible modes of being. Mansel subscribes to the dictum of Hegel that the Absolute must include all modes of being, good as well as evil. In like manner the Infinite must be All. For if any other being exists, the Infinite must of necessity be limited, and, therefore, is no longer infinite.
These definitions determine everything. If the Absolute be that
Limits of Religious Thought, p. 107.