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The tendency to sentimentalize nature has, in our time, largely taken the place of the old tendency to demonize and spiritize it. It is anthropomorphism in another form, less fraught with evil to us, but equally in the way of a clear understanding of the life about us.
But the figure is transparent, and the 'anthropomorphism' so plain that no mistakes can arise in its interpretation. The prayer is 'for Thy servants the children of Israel, in which designation, as the next clauses show, the relation established by God, and not the conduct of men, is pleaded as a reason for an answer.
To be sure, personification and anthropomorphism have frequently been decried as a degradation of the spiritual; but art, in so far as its task is to bring before direct contemplation the spiritual in sensuous form, must advance to such anthropomorphism, for only in its body can mind appear in an adequately sensuous fashion.
With daring anthropomorphism, the prophet puts into God's mouth a longing for the enemies to measure their strength against His, a warrior's eagerness for the fight. But at once this martial tone gives place to the tender invitation of the text, and the infinite divine willingness to be reconciled to the enemy speaks wooingly and offers conditions of peace.
A king, for example, who put his finances in such good order that no malversation was ever committed, would thus display more hatred for the wrong done by factionaries than if, after having suffered them to batten on the blood of the people, he had them hanged. It is always the same song, it is anthropomorphism pure and simple.
Nevertheless, if the order of the world can tell us nothing as to the existence of God, it reveals a thing no less precious perhaps, and which will serve us as a landmark in our inquiries, namely, that all beings, all essences, all phenomena are bound together by a totality of laws resulting from their properties, a totality which in the third chapter I have named FATALITY or NECESSITY. Whether or not there exists then an infinite intelligence, embracing the whole system of these laws, the whole field of fatalism; whether or not to this infinite intelligence is united in profound penetration a superior will, eternally determined by the totality of the cosmic laws and consequently infinitely powerful and free; whether or not, finally, these three things, fatality, intelligence, will, are contemporary in the universe, adequate to each other and identical, it is clear that so far we find nothing repugnant to these positions; but it is precisely this hypothesis, this anthropomorphism, which is yet to be demonstrated.
Charlotte was sadly out of spirits. "Do you mean to say it's all lies?" asked Charlotte, bluntly. Miss Smedley deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connection at all. "These stories had their origin, my dear," she explained, "in a mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature.
But Mr. Darwin is not guilty of arguing against metaphysical ideas on physical grounds only, for he employs very distinctly metaphysical ones; namely, his conceptions of the nature and attributes of the First Cause. But what conceptions does he offer us? Nothing but that low anthropomorphism which, unfortunately, he so often seems to treat as the necessary result of Theism.
Some, among whom I count myself, think that the battle will for ever remain a drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the day.
If so God is similar to man, corporeal like him, and swayed by passions. This seemed to the Muʿtazila an unworthy conception of God. To vindicate his spirituality the anthropomorphic passages in the Koran must be understood metaphorically. The other more difficult question was in what sense can attributes be ascribed to God at all? It is not here a question of anthropomorphism.
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