AS Epitomes
Henry Longueville Mansel: The Conception Of The Infinite
Abstract
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Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 February, 2008
Henry Longueville Mansel
H L Mansel (1820-71) was born at Cosgrove in Northamptonshire, where his father was rector. He went to Merchant Taylors School and St John’s College, Oxford, taking a double first in 1843 and becoming tutor of his college. He was appointed Waynflete Professor of Philosophy in 1859, succeeded A P Stanley as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1867, and the following year became Dean of St Paul’s. His publications included The Philosophy of the Conditioned and The Gnostic Heresies.Mansel followed Sir William Hamilton in holding a philosophy of “natural realism”. To be conscious at all one must have knowledge not only of self but of the external world. In fact, for Mansel, knowledge of the external world can be reduced to a consciousness of the self extended, and all we can really know is conditioned by the human mind. We know that we exist, and we are aware of the interaction between ourselves and the external world. Beyond that we can be certain of nothing. But the fact that Mansel became Dean of St Paul’s shortly before he died shows that his philosophy was not purely agnostic. It left room for faith, and indeed regarded faith as the only means of approach to God. His attitude to religion is developed in his Bampton lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought, which ran through five editions between 1858 and 1867. His knowledge of the self implied free will and a sense of moral obligation.
Impossibility of Conceiving the Infinite
The conception of consciousness necessarily implies distinction between one object and another. To be conscious, we must be conscious of something, and that something can only be known, as that which it is, by being distinguished from that which it is not. But distinction is necessarily limitation, for, if one object is to be distinguished from another, it must possess some form of existence which the other has not, or it must not possess some form which the other has.
Yet the Infinite cannot be distinguished, as such, from the Finite by the absence of any quality which the Finite possesses, for such absence would be a limitation. Nor can it be distinguished by the presence of an attribute which the Finite has not, for, as no finite part can be a constituent of an infinite whole, this differential characteristic must itself be infinite, and must at the same time have nothing in common with the Finite.
We are thus thrown back upon our former impossibility, for this second infinite will be distinguished from the Finite by the absence of qualities which the latter possesses. A consciousness of the Infinite as such thus necessarily involves a self contradiction, for it implies the recognition, by limitation and difference, of that which can only be given as unlimited and indifferent. That man can be conscious of the Infinite is thus a supposition which, in the very terms in which it is expressed, annihilates itself.
Consciousness is essentially a limitation, for it is the determination of the mind to one actual out of many possible modifications. But the Infinite, if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially every thing and actually nothing, for if there is any thing in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited, and if there is any thing in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing.
But again, it must also be conceived as actually every thing and potentially nothing, for an unrealized potentiality is likewise a limitation. If the Infinite can be that which it is not, it is by that possibility marked out as incomplete, and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually every thing, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be distinguished from any thing else, and discerned as an object of consciousness.
Impossibility of Consciousness in God
This contradiction, which is utterly inexplicable on the supposition that the Infinite is a positive object of human thought, is at once accounted for when it is regarded as the mere negation of thought. If all thought is limitation—if whatever we conceive is, by the very act of conception, regarded as finite—the Infinite, from a human point of view, is merely a name for the absence of those conditions under which thought is possible. To speak of a conception of the Infinite is, therefore, at once to affirm those conditions and to deny them. The contradiction, which we discover in such a misconception, is only one which we have ourselves placed there, by tacitly assuming the conceivability of the inconceivable.
The condition of consciousness is distinction, and the condition of distinction is limitation. We can have no consciousness of being in general which is not some being in particular. A thing, in consciousness, is one thing out of many. In assuming the possibility of an infinite object of consciousness, I assume, therefore, that it is at the same time limited and unlimited—actually something, without which it could not be an object of consciousness, and actually nothing, without which it could not be infinite.
Rationalism is thus only consistent with itself when it refuses to attribute consciousness to God. Consciousness, in the only form in which we can conceive it, implies limitation and change—the perception of one object out of many, and a comparison of that object with others. To be always conscious of the same object is, humanly speaking, not to be conscious at all, and, beyond its human manifestation, we can have no conception of what consciousness is.
Impossibility of the Existence of God
Viewed on the side of the object of consciousness, the same principle will carry us further still. Existence itself, that so called highest category of thought, is only conceivable in the form of existence modified in some particular manner. Strip off its modification, and the apparent paradox of the German philosopher becomes literally true—pure being is pure nothing. We have no conception of existence which is not existence in some particular manner, and if we abstract from the manner, we have nothing left to constitute the existence.
Those who, in their horror of what they call anthropomorphism, or anthropopathy, refuse to represent the Deity under symbols borrowed from the limitations of human consciousness, are bound, in consistency, to deny that God exists, for the conception of existence is as human and as limited as any other. The conclusion which Fichte boldly announces, awful as it is, is but the legitimate consequence of his premises:
The moral order of the universe is itself God. We need no other, and we can comprehend no other.
Impossibility of Consciousness of The Absolute
A second characteristic of consciousness is that it is only possible in the form of a relation. There must be a subject, or person conscious, and an object, or thing of which he is conscious. There can be no consciousness without the union of these two factors, and, in that union, each exists only as it is related to the other. The subject is a subject, only in so far as it is conscious of an object. The object is an object, only in so far as it is apprehended by a subject. The destruction of either is the destruction of consciousness itself.
It is thus manifest that a consciousness of the Absolute is equally self contradictory with that of the Infinite. To be conscious of the Absolute as such, we must know that an object, which is given in relation to our consciousness, is identical with one which exists in its own nature, out of all relation to consciousness. But to know this identity, we must be able to compare the two together, and such a comparison is itself a contradiction.
We are in fact required to compare that of which we are conscious with that of which we are not conscious, the comparison itself being an act of consciousness, and only possible through the consciousness of both its objects. It is thus manifest that, even if we could be conscious of the Absolute, we could not possibly know that it is the Absolute, and, as we can be conscious of an object as such only by knowing it to be what it is, this is equivalent to an admission that we cannot be conscious of the Absolute at all.
As an object of consciousness, every thing is necessarily relative, and what a thing may be out of consciousness no mode of consciousness can tell us. This contradiction, again, admits of the same explanation as the former. Our whole notion of existence is necessarily relative, for it is existence as conceived by us. But existence, as we conceive it, is but a name for the several ways in which objects are presented to our consciousness—a general term, embracing a variety of relations.
The Absolute, on the other hand, is a term expressing no object of thought, but only a denial of the relation by which thought is constituted. To assume absolute existence as an object of thought, is thus to suppose a relation existing when the related terms exist no longer. An object of thought exists, as such, in and through its relation to a thinker, while the Absolute, as such, is independent of all relation. The conception of the Absolute thus implies at the same time the presence and the absence of the relation by which thought is constituted, and our various endeavours to represent it are only so many modified forms of the contradiction involved in our original assumption.
Here, too, the contradiction is one which we ourselves have made. It does not imply that the Absolute cannot exist, but it implies, most certainly, that we cannot conceive it as existing.
Philosophers who are anxious to avoid this conclusion have sometimes attempted to evade it by asserting that we may have in consciousness a partial but not a total knowledge of the Infinite and the Absolute. But here again the supposition refutes itself. To have a partial knowledge of an object is to know a part of it, but not the whole. But the part of the Infinite which is supposed to be known must be itself either infinite or finite. If it is infinite, it presents the same difficulties as before. If it is finite, the point in question is conceded, and our consciousness is allowed to be limited to finite objects.
But in truth it is obvious, on a moment’s reflection, that neither the Absolute nor the Infinite can be represented in the form of a whole composed of parts. Not the Absolute, for the existence of a whole is dependent on the existence of its parts. Not the Infinite, for if any part is infinite, it cannot be distinguished from the whole, and if each part is finite, no number of such parts can constitute the Infinite.
Finiteness of Thought in Time
All human consciousness, as being a change in our mental state, is necessarily subject to the law of time, in its two manifestations of succession and duration. Every object, of whose existence we can be in any way conscious, is necessarily apprehended by us as succeeding in time to some former object of consciousness, and as itself occupying a certain portion of time.
In the former point of view it is manifest, from what has been said before, that whatever succeeds something else, and is distinguished from it, is necessarily apprehended as finite, for distinction is itself a limitation. In the latter point of view, it is no less manifest that whatever is conceived as having a continuous existence in time is equally apprehended as finite. For continuous existence is necessarily conceived as divisible into successive moments. One portion has already gone by, another is yet to come, each successive moment is related to something which has preceded, and to something which is to follow, and out of such relations the entire existence is made up.
The facts, by which such existence is manifested, being continuous in time, have, at any given moment, a further activity still to come, the object so existing must therefore always be regarded as capable of becoming something which it is not yet actually—as having an existence incomplete, and receiving at each instant a further completion. It is manifest therefore, if all objects of human thought exist in time, no such object can be regarded as exhibiting or representing the true nature of an Infinite Being.
