a cosmic epoch about to arise. God’s “real being apart from
the universe” means, in such a view, a vantage apart from our
current universe, not apart from all universes. Not every
theologian agrees with those who think to compliment God
by affirming divine freedom to have simply no creatures. The
objection to this once-popular view is that since any creatures
are better than none (that being as such is primarily good and
only secondarily bad is a classical doctrine), God would be
making the worst possible choice by not creating at all. Free-
dom to do this seems nonsensical when affirmed of God.
In what sense is God in the universe? The suggestion
in Webster’s, attributed to “idealists,” is that the divine pres-
ence is “like that of a conscious self in the world of that self.”
Or, attributed to “realists,” it is like “that of a self in its or-
ganism and its behavior.” The latter suggestion makes Plato
a realist, for it was he who in the West first thought of God
as the World Soul, whose body is the entire cosmos of nondi-
vine things and persons. This proposal (in the Timaeus) was,
however, seldom followed until recent times, and was reject-
ed by Whitehead. In this I take Whitehead to have been mis-
taken. The relation of mind to body in human (and other)
animals is the relation of mind to physical reality, to “mat-
ter,” that we most directly and surely know. If our thoughts
do not influence our behavior, then we know nothing of any
influence of mind or spirit on the physical world. David
Hume pointed this out in his Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion through the character Cleanthes.
REALISTIC IDEALISM. The idealist view referred to above is
less obviously intelligible. Does our mere contemplation of
the world make us immanent in that world? When we re-
member past experiences, does that put our present con-
sciousness back into those experiences? If I think of someone
in Hong Kong, does that put me in Hong Kong? The form
of idealism referred to by Webster’s definition is no longer
widely held. It is the data of an awareness that are in the
awareness, not vice versa. If this realistic principle—accepted
by the theistic metaphysicians Charles S. Peirce and White-
head, who in some respects are properly called idealists—is
sound, then it is the creatures’ awareness of God, not God’s
awareness of them, that constitutes the divine presence in the
universe. And if God is universally present, then the creatures
universally are, however inadequately, aware of God, who is
the universal object as well as the universal subject. This im-
plies, as Peirce and Whitehead held, as did Henri Bergson
and some other recent theists, that every creature has some
form of awareness, even if it be nothing more than some
mode of feeling. For those of this persuasion, dualism and
materialism are both inconsistent with a well-thought-out
theism.
Unfortunately, the term idealism is still often applied to
the now antiquated doctrine presupposed by the editors of
Webster’s. Few changes of opinion are more definite or im-
portant than the shift, in this century, in the way the rela-
tions of mind or experience to its data are conceived. Indeed,
the alternative to idealism is no longer realism but the choice
between dualism and materialism. A “realistic idealism”
makes perfectly good sense. And Plato was both realist and
idealist, except insofar as, like all ancient Greeks, he was un-
able to escape dualism and materialism entirely. No one in
the West knew how to conceive mind, or awareness, as a uni-
versal property of creatures until Leibniz, the true founder
of realistic idealism, made his distinction between dynamic
singulars and aggregates or groups of singulars. (The singu-
lars he called monads, but this term tends to connote some
further doctrines peculiar to Leibniz that are no longer ac-
cepted, even by those strongly influenced by Leibniz, so far
as the problem of mind and matter is concerned.) In Asia,
where Leibniz has not as yet had much influence, there seems
to be no comparably well-articulated doctrine of realistic ide-
alism that can be called theistic.
The distinction between dynamic singulars—all of
which are sentient—and their groups or aggregates depends,
for Leibniz, on the primitive form of the atomic theory then
entertained by physicists and also upon the discovery by
Leeuwenhoek of the realm of microscopic animals. With a
stroke of genius, Leibniz generalized this and held that larger
animals consist of smaller animals (in a generalized sense),
thus anticipating the cell theory established much later. Leib-
niz may well have realized the philosophical meaning of
Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries better than some philosophers do
now. He made a realistic idealism at last possible and thereby
freed theism from one of its greatest difficulties, enabling it
to give a positive explanation of the divine ubiquity.
GOD’S DUALLY TRANSCENDENT LOVE. Whitehead’s theory
of prehension (or “feeling of feeling”), applied to God and
all creatures, makes God the universally prehending and uni-
versally prehended subject, feeling all and felt by all. Hence
God is in all and all is in God. Since creaturely prehensions
are those of subjects in principle inferior to God, they feel
God inadequately, whereas God, in principle superior to all,
feels the creatures and their mostly unintellectual feelings
with ideal adequacy. Although each creature contains God
and God contains each creature, the divine containing is un-
qualified, but the creaturely containing is more or less drasti-
cally qualified. Thus, for theism, God is present “in various
degrees” in the parts of the universe, but the creatures are
wholly present to God. As Berdiaev urges, the most pertinent
question is not “Is God in the world?” but rather “Is the
world in God?” The Pauline saying, that in God “we live and
move and have our being,” can be taken literally without
necessarily implying pantheism.
To say that God feels the feelings of all creatures is to
contradict the doctrine of classical theism that God is impas-
sible, wholly unaffected by others. Anselm said that God was
not compassionate, although the effects of the divine being
were as if God were compassionate. What this amounts to,
for some of us, is that the New Testament saying “God is
love” is untrue, yet the effects of God’s nature upon us are
what they would be if God loved us. We here confront a deep
divergence between that theism pervasive in Scholasticism9282 TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE