Von Hugel and accepting the 'givenness' of things in 'The Reality of God' (Gifford Lectures)

 Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,—all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,—does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.

(from ‘The Mystical Element of Religion by Von Hugel 1908)

 Yes there is that and it is a noble inquiry but it contains within it the danger of excessive inwardness that leads to metaphysical idealism and a dwelling on the flux of motivation with its tendency to create moral paralysis.  

Adverting to Aquinas, Von Hugel remarks:

Sensible things” (the realities falling under the cognizance of our senses) “from which human reason derives the origin of its knowledge hold within themselves a certain vestige of the imitation of God” (of similitude to Him); and, further on, he speaks of “the true similitude to God that man can collect from within His works,’’ similitudes which are subjectively there. (From von Hugel’s Gifford Lectures on ‘The Reality of God)

Here in his Gifford lectures on the ‘Reality of God’ never given because of his death Von Hugel is reverting to a metaphysical Realism. He further adds to his nod to Aquinas:

True these genuine likenesses to God, present in God’s works because they are His works, do not take us a long way, leave us with but fragments of what we are very sure is a fuller and full truth, and hence he warns us against “the presumption of comprehension or of demonstration”.

A syncretic heretic like myself can easily discern the analogue to the theory of ‘perceptuality’ which is central to Advaitic doctrine as delivered by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in the 14th.Century. A similar difficulty of demonstration occurs because it is a truth that we realize but cannot know because it is knowing itself. You cannot ‘get round’ i.e. comprehend, that. It is just given.  

Accepting the ‘givenness’ is a life’s work. More anon.