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Mansel's Agnosticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Timothy Fitzgerald
Timothy Fitzgerald
Affiliation:
Aichi Gakuin University, Japan.
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Extract

Nobody is likely to claim that the name of Henry Longueville Mansel is an important one in contemporary Anglican theology. During the 130 years since he gave his Bampton Lectures in 1858 his work has been only sporadically reviewed. But he deserves more than this. As the title of his lecture – The Limits of Religious Thought – suggests, Mansel was partly responsible for bringing the philosophy of Kant into British religious thinking; and the problems he faced in trying to make a concept of regulative truth consistent with orthodox Anglican doctrine make his intellectual dilemma of unusual interest to the modern reader.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 525 - 541
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Cupitt, Don, ‘Mansel's Theory of Regulative Truth’. Journal of Theological Studies XVIII, (April, 1967), 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other articles by Cupitt, on Mansel, are ‘What was Mansel Trying to Do?’, JTS XXII, (Oct. 1971), 544–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Mansel and Maurice on our Knowledge of God’, Theology, LXXIII, (July 1970), 301–11Google Scholar. Abbreviations used in footnotes: LPK, A Lecture on the Philosophy of Kant (Oxford, 1856)Google Scholar; Limits, The Limits of Religious Thought, Bampton Lectures, 1858; 4th edn. (London, 1859)Google Scholar; Phil. Cond., Philosophy of the Conditioned (London and N.Y., 1866)Google Scholar; CPR, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith. 1st publ. 1929, reprinted by Macmillan, 1980.

2 Cupitt (1971).

3 A reference to Sir William Hamilton, author of an influential agnostic essay ‘The Philosophy of the Unconditioned’, Edinburgh Review, 1829.

4 Bevan, E., Symbolism and Belief (1962; 1st publ. 1938), p. 283Google Scholar. Spencer, H., First Principles, 5th edn, London & Edinburgh, 1887, p. xiii.Google Scholar See also Fitzgerald, T., ‘Herbert Spencer's Agnosticism’, Religious studies, XXIII, (Dec. 1987), 477–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Cupitt (1967), 107.

6 Dockrill, D. W., ‘The Limits of Thought and Regulative Truths’, XXI JTS, (Oct. 1970), 370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Hepburn, R. W., ‘Agnosticism’, article in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar.

8 Cupitt (1967), 107.

9 Bevan (1962), p. 291.

10 Dockrill (1970), 381–7. I agree with Dockrill's conclusion that Mansel failed ‘to provide an acceptable account of what it means to believe that of which we can form no concept’ (p. 386 footnote). But I would emphasize that Mansel adopted Hamilton's theory of negative knowledge which was supposed to be an improvement on Kant. Mansel seemed to accept the Kantian position on the antinomies of reason – viz that they are insoluble – in his Bampton Lectures (The Limits of Religious Thought, 4th edn. p. viii) but in fact he follows Hamilton and claims that one of the inconceivable opposites must be true. I have discussed the relation between Hamilton, Mansel and Kant, in detail in my Ph.D. Thesis Philosophical Issues in Agnosticism since Hume and Kant (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Note Kant's distinction between a dialectic and an analytic opposition, which might have been specially written in anticipation of Hamilton and Mansel. (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, A504/5 – B532/3.)

11 There is a problem in the interpretation of Kant concerning the meaning of noumenal as the ‘transcendental ground of appearances’ (see CPR A695/6 – B723/4). The noumenal in the latter sense must be what we fictionalize as God. See Strawson, , The Bounds of Sense (1975), p. 211Google Scholar. But a confusion arises with the idea of ‘things-in-themselves’ or noumena, a concept which sounds like a misapplication of those very categories of the understanding which Kant had confined to phenomena, and the creation of a third kind of reality intermediate between God and the phenomenal world of appearances.

12 The concepts which Reason tries and fails to establish in Kant's demonstration of the antinomies include God, the Soul, a Necessary Being, a First Cause of the World, the ultimate constituents of matter, the finitude or infinitetude of the world.

13 Cupitt (1971), 544/7.

14 Cupitt (1967), 110. I recognize that Cupitt also emphasizes Mansel's criticism of Kant, but on the different grounds that the 2nd Critique undid the good work of the 1st Critique. My point is that Mansel (following Hamilton) undid the good work of the 1st Critique, in order to do what he falsely accuses Kant of doing!

15 Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866), pp. 67/8.

16 Lecture on the Philosophy of Kant (1956), p. 6.

17 Limits, p. xliii, Preface to 4th edn.

18 Limits, p. xliii.

19 Limits, p. viii.

20 LPK, p. 24.

21 LPK, pp. 18–24.

22 LPK, pp. 15/16. Kant attempted to distinguish two different senses of externality, empirical and transcendental (CPR A373). His discussion is full of ambiguities (some of which he acknowledges) but Mansel, influenced by some form of empiricism or realism, seems to be unaware of the change of meaning in his own writing.

23 Limits, p. 81.

24 Phil. Cond. pp. 31ff. Limits, throughout.

25 Limits, p. 36.

26 Limits, p. 82.

27 See Kant's criticism of Rational Psychology, CPR, A382 etc. Also his third antinomy where freedom in general is set against causality.

28 Limits, p. 30.

29 Limits, p. 63.

30 Limits, p. 63.

31 Limits, p. 62/3.

32 LPK, p. 28.

33 CPR, A639/B667.

34 CPR, A687/8–B725/6.

35 CPR, A695/6–B723/4.

36 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, intro. L. W. Beck (1950), pp. 105–9Google Scholar.

37 Cupitt (1970), p. 306.

38 Limits, p. 63.

39 CPR, A504/5–B532/3. See also Cassirer, H. W., Kant's First Critique (1954), p. 270Google Scholar for a discussion of this issue.

40 Limits, p. 85.

41 Limits, p. 173; Phil. Cond. p. 41.

42 Phil. Cond. pp. 17–18.

43 Limits, p. 260.

44 Phil. Cond. p. 20.

45 Limits, p. 170.

46 Limits, p. 75.

47 Limits, p. 79.

48 Limits, p. 80.

49 Bevan (1962), p. 291.

50 Limits, p. 172.

51 Limits, p. 26.

52 Cupitt (1967), 115. See also Dockrill (1970), 379/80.

53 Limits, p. 152.

54 Limits, p. 158.

55 Limits, p. 167.

56 Matthews, W. R., The Religious Philosophy of Dean Mansel (1956), p. 17Google Scholar.

57 Bevan (1962), 290.

58 For instance, Limits, pp. 84, 98.

59 Limits, p. 158.

60 Maurice, F. D., What Is Revelation? (1859)Google Scholar. See also Matthews (1956), pp. 15–16; and Cupitt (1970), passim. Mill made a scathing attack on Mansel on this issue, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1872, 4th edn.), p. 112Google Scholar.

61 Braithwaite, R. B., An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (1955)Google Scholar. One might also consider the attempt by Basil Mitchell to establish the rationality of Christian theism in his The Justification of Religious Belief (1973). Put very generally, Mitchell argues that it is possible to argue a cumulative case for the rationality of theism on the grounds that it makes best interpretative sense of all the available evidence.

62 Limits, p. 74.

63 Limits, p. 75.

64 Limits, pp. 158/9.

65 I am grateful to Professor Stewart R. Sutherland for his expert and careful supervision during the period of research on which this article is based. Obviously any fault with the arguments are entirely the author's.