the God in which science also may, nay, must, believe. Not humanity in
its empirical reality, but the ideal world developed within the human
realm of things—the spirit of humanity. This is the only true object
of worship. Before it we are humiliated, and by it we feel ourselves
exalted. From it we receive all the good that life bestows upon us; it
gives us light and peace and lucid thought. And what higher, nobler thing
can a life produce than the feeling that it has not been unworthy of this
great ancestry, that it has helped to keep alive this holy fire, that it
has helped, perhaps, to fan by its own life this living flame to greater
heights?
Here is the true source of the ideas of accountability and of salvation.
We are not responsible to a being outside and above us, but to our own
selves and to humanity, from which we have received the best that it had
to give, and for which we must return what we ourselves have produced.
This consciousness of being thrown utterly on the resources of one’s own
self, on one’s own powers, was first created in the human mind by science
and the technical arts, (as that most venerable and most sacred of all
myths, the legend of Prometheus, so profoundly indicates,) and this
consciousness will, by the progress of knowledge and power, be made more
and more the dominating one of humanity. This is not a consciousness of
omnipotence; it does not exclude the subjection of man to the inexorable
laws of the universe; but it demands the enlistment of all the powers
of the race: for nature does not give us more than we wrest from her by
arduous toil.
And as humanity is accountable only to itself, so do the means of its
salvation lie only in itself. Not in any one individual, but in the
spirit in it which ever works onward and upward. Yet this spirit is
not an unpersonal existence; it must be possessed again and ever again
by living men. And no one can serve humanity or augment its spiritual
treasures or reincarnate in himself its holiest possessions without first
having and feeling within himself the blessing of what he has done.
And thus the profoundest significance of human life on earth may be
formulated and embraced in that saying of the poet which was throughout
conceived in the spirit of our times, and would have been wholly
incomprehensible to the mind of those who gave us our faith—in the words:
“_Erlösung dem Erlöser._”
F. JODL.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] _Wesen des Christenthums._ First edition. 1841. Pp. 288-289.
[60] Translation published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1891.
THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE.
Are religion and science indeed as contrary as they are often represented
to be, and is the proposition to reconcile them a hopeless and futile
undertaking? Professor Jodl, in his article “Religion and Modern
Science,” (pp. 329-351 of this number,) says:
“That civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups
which no longer understand each other, which do not speak the
same language, and which live in totally different worlds of
thought and sentiment.”
There are those who cling to the old religions and those who supplant it
by a new idealism. Between both, he adds:
“A third class stands which plays the part of a mediator.”
Professor Jodl does not approve of reconciling the historical forms of
religion with science. He rightly says:
“The ‘pure doctrine of Christ,’ the genuine, primitive form of
Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism.”
We heartily agree with him in his remarks concerning the part which the
miraculous and supernatural play in the Gospels:
“These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes
of thought of the synoptic writers that it is impossible to
separate them therefrom without doing violence to the internal
connection of their doctrines.”
We also concur upon the whole with Professor Jodl in his criticism of
the methods of Speculative Theology. No compromising with traditional
errors, no covering or extenuating of the results of historical criticism
is allowable merely for the love of tradition and for the preservation of
errors that have become dear to a large number of people.
We do not condemn the work of any mediator; on the contrary, we rather
encourage it. We observe with pleasure in the latest phases of the
religious evolution of Speculative Theology the prevalence of a more
modern spirit, and we follow with a keen interest also the progress of
biblical critique in its truly valuable labors: but we do not expect that
either the one or the other will accomplish any regeneration of religion.
Professor Jodl knows very well that the editors of _The Monist_ and
_The Open Court_ have not undertaken any work of compromising between
the errors of the past and the ideal of the future. Our idea of a
reconciliation between religion and science is of a different nature. We
are not blind to the errors of the old religions, and we do not mean to
gloss them over, or to make old-fashioned views acceptable by presenting
them in a new garment. We do not even stop to bury the dead, for we
have better things to do than to trouble with problems that have been
definitely settled. We keep our hands to the plough to accomplish the
work needed to-day.
While we are not blind to the errors of the old religions, we recognise
at the same time that they contain in the language of parables some great
truths which will remain forever. These truths constitute the backbone of
religion, and we regard it as a very important duty of ours to preserve
them. These truths must be preserved, not because they were believed in
by our fathers, nor from any respect for tradition, nor from any regard
for our sentiments, but simply because they are truths, because they can
be proved to be true according to the methods of scientific inquiry.
What is religion? Religion consists of all those ideas which regulate
our conduct. In the savage these ideas are very crude and superstitious,
and often self-contradictory. The higher a man rises, the clearer, the
more scientific and consistent do these ideas become, until they develop
into a systematic world-conception. Every scientific idea that changes
our world-conception will change also our religion and with it our rules
of conduct. Thus, for example, the idea of evolution has become to us an
eminently religious idea.
In order to indicate that the criterion of truth for religion is the very
same thing as the criterion of truth for science, we have proposed to
call the religion we advocate, “The Religion of Science.” (For details
see the editorial of Vol. VII, No. 1, of _The Open Court_.)
Our procedure appears to many as an annihilation of religion in favor of
science. But it is not. And why not?
We have learned many truths first from religion, long before science
could ever think of proving them. In several respects science took the
lead, and religion remained at a long distance behind, awkwardly, very
slowly, and unwillingly limping onward on the road of progress. Instances
are, the acceptance of the Copernican system and of the evolution theory.
But in other respects religion took the lead, and science was unable to
follow its ingenious flight. As instances of this we cite such moral
truths as the love of enemies, which were not preached by scientists
as scientific truths, but by religious teachers, by Confucius, Buddha,
and Christ. There are scientists even to-day who regard what we would
call “moral truths” as maxims that are contrary to the established views
of science. Professor Huxley, for instance, is very emphatic in his
declaration that the facts of nature do not teach morality.[61]
This leads us to a point in which we disagree with Professor Jodl. He
speaks of the illusion “of mingling together in the idea of God two
wholly distinct ideas—the ideas namely of nature and of an ethical
ideal”—an illusion to which “even strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza
fell victims.”
Professor Jodl’s position reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s “Essay on
Nature,” in which he exposes the old doctrine _naturam sequi_ in all its
absurd meanings and carefully avoids a discussion of the only rational
conception of the precept. Thus his tirades appear most convincing, and
to be sure they are quite correct—so far as they go. Says Mill:
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or
imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every-day
performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by
human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives....
“Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them
to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes
them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them
with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick
or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other
hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a
Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed.”
Mill must indeed have felt the need of beginning these sentences with the
words “In sober truth”; otherwise he might be suspected of humor.
Similarly comical is Mill’s proposition to regard every voluntary action
of man as a direct infringement upon nature. Man’s reason in that case
would be the most unnatural phenomenon in the world, and the term
“nature” would be confined to the lowest realms of existence exclusively.
If the usage of reason were indeed an infringement upon nature, man’s
appearance upon earth would mark the beginning of a supernatural realm;
and Professor Jodl seems to accept this consequence when he says:
“It is not _of_ nature, it is _above_ nature.”
If man’s rationality and his ethics were not born of nature, if their
conditions were not founded in the very existence of nature, if they were
not the natural product of evolution, then indeed I see no escape from a
dualistic world-conception, in which a supernatural God introduces the
spark of divinity which appears in the soul of man from spheres beyond.
We have devoted to these vagaries of John Stuart Mill an elaborate
discussion in another place and do not feel the need of repeating our
arguments in this connection.[62]
We agree with Professor Jodl that no rationalising of old dogmas will
help us in the establishment of “a new idealism, formed in harmony
with the spirit of science.” We must build our religion anew (as every
generation had to build its religion anew) out of the best materials
which are furnished by the maturest and most reliable knowledge of
to-day. Says Professor Jodl:
“Through _us_ something has come into the world that before
us did not exist—something that the most exuberant creative
magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could never
replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his
weaker fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine,
but thy will be done; I will give up my desires that thou also
mayst be glad”; the day upon which man first lifted up his head
and said, “Let us make the world _good_ in the likeness of the
picture that has become living in us, just as it should be”;
this is the great and sanctified day in the history of our race
on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born.”
Certainly the origin of man on earth, and again the evolution of the
moral man, is something quite new, which before did not exist. But did
humanity originate out of nothing, as sometimes the imaginations of
a poet are supposed to be created, or is there a prototype in whose
image man has been created? Man’s reason, his ethics, and his humanity
are something that did not exist before, but there is a feature in
existence which makes it possible that rational and moral beings develop.
Should there be sentient beings on other planets, and we have little
reason to doubt it, we can be sure that they also will develop rational
minds, and that they also will learn, perhaps as we did, through many
bitter experiences, the same truths which constitute our main maxims of
morality,[63] including such precepts as the love of enemies. And why are
we sure that on other planets not only reason, but also the fundamental
rules of ethics will be the same as with us here on earth? Simply because
we know that there is a certain feature in reality which creates rational
beings and moral beings as naturally as it creates rocks and seas on the
surface of planets. Man’s reason and also man’s morality are not original
inventions of his, but the result of many experiences which he had to
learn. And the world in which he lives is such that he can acquire reason
and morality, and if a being should acquire a wrong kind of reason or a
wrong kind of morality, it will by and by be blotted out of existence.
Accordingly there is a prototype of reason and of morality, and this
prototype of the humanity of man is exactly that which in the language of
the old religions has received the name “God.”
We must make a distinction between ideals and dreams. Those creations
of our fancy which are woven without any regard to reality are dreams.
They have no value beyond whiling away a leisure hour or pleasing our
imagination. But those creations of our mind which construct realisable
formations such as machines or clocks or higher conditions of human
society, are not mere dreams, they are ideals. What, then, is the
difference between a dream and an ideal? A dream is a useless ebullition
of an idle brain composed of ideas to which there is no correspondent
reality; but an ideal is a potent factor in the living presence to shape
the future: it is a combination of ideas which are correct descriptions
of actual realities. The moral aspirations of mankind are not empty
dreams, they are true and veritable ideals. There are certain qualities
in nature which make their realisation possible and these qualities
constitute the Divinity of nature.
Professor Jodl speaks of the origin of morality as of the birth of God on
earth. Truly that is the meaning of Christianity. But this birth of God
into the world of human evolution as “the Son of Man” is possible only
because of the existence of the God in nature whom Christian mythology so
beautifully calls God the Father. The appearance of the Son of Man upon
earth, the birth of morality, is a revelation of the divinity of nature.
True enough, as Professor Jodl says, that we ourselves won the best and
highest we have by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed
discipline. As Prometheus says:
“_Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,_
_Heilig glühend Herz!_”
That, too, is part of the divinity of nature, that every creature has
to work out its very being itself, and that man must search for the way
of salvation with great anxiety, under bitter tribulations and through
extreme afflictions. But he cannot invent a new way of salvation, he has
to find it, and there is but one that is the right one. The nature of
morality is such as it is, and no other morality could be invented to
replace it. And this feature of existence which makes morality quite a
determined thing is a real presence in the world, it is an actual quality
of the universe.
Some of our liberal friends, foremost among them Professor Haeckel, deny
the existence of a personal God and then proceed to declare that the God
of science is nothing but matter and energy. We agree with Professor
Haeckel in his rejection of anthropotheism; God is no supernatural being
nor is he a huge world-ego. But we cannot accept his view of God as being
only matter and energy. The idea of God is and always has been a moral
idea. Thus we have come to regard all those features of nature as divine
which condition the origin and existence of morality and we define God
as the authority of moral conduct. This authority is not a person, not
a sentient being, let alone a sentimental philanthropist; but it is,
nevertheless, a reality, and, indeed, a stern reality.
Such is the God of science. God is that quality of existence through
which we originated as feeling, thinking, and aspiring beings. He is the
prototype of the human soul, and the condition under which develop man’s
reason and morality. Obedience to him is indispensable for a continued
existence, for further progress and a higher evolution of the human
soul. That these features of reality can by a great number of keen and
fearless modern thinkers be supposed to be a non-entity is difficult
to understand. This negation of the reality of qualities of existence
which are not individual things but intrinsically inherent in all the
individual things, it appears to us, is an old heirloom of nominalism.
The nominalistic philosophy represented by Roscellinus was suppressed
at the council at Soissons 1092, only to rise more powerfully in the
fourteenth century in William of Occam, and finally to exterminate
realism with all its rubbish of errors together with the truth contained
in these errors. Kant marks in many respects the culmination of the
victorious movement of nominalism. With all the benefits modern thought
derived from the philosophical work of nominalism, a reaction is needed
against its purely negative spirit. There is a truth in the old realism
which cannot be neglected with impunity.[64]
God (viz., the name of God) is, as Kant said, a noumenon, a thing of
thought, an abstraction. God is not a thing, a concrete object, or an
individual person. All the views of God which regard him as an individual
being of some kind, or as a person only of infinite dimensions, are,
closely considered, pagan notions which belittle God. But the name of
God as a noumenon, a thought, an abstract idea, has a meaning. Abstract
ideas are not nonentities, they represent some real features, some actual
qualities, or properties, or relations; otherwise they would not be
ideas, but unmeaning sounds.
Some of our abstract ideas are of a very delicate fibre, so that the
coarse mental vision of the average Philistine is unable to see them in
their reality and potency. But it so happens that exactly they are of a
more important, more powerful, and inevitable presence than the simple
generalisations of things that visibly and corporeally surround us.
This, their peculiar nature, makes such ideas mysterious to those who
instinctively feel their reality without being able to point it out and
understand it. And the most subtle, imponderous, and sublimated of all
ideas is the idea of God.
We have defined God as the ultimate authority of conduct, as the
condition of our existence as rational and moral beings, as the
all-power that enforces obedience, etc.; but we cannot in any one of our
definitions exhaust the significance of the idea. We would by no means
exclude from the idea of God anything without which reality would cease
to be real. The qualities of matter and energy constitute that element
in the God-idea which justify the old religions in speaking of him as
omnipotent and everlasting. Thus they ought not to be excluded. But these
qualities alone are insufficient to characterise his being. The sum-total
of matter and energy as such and as such alone does not constitute any
moral authority. Nature in her immeasurable greatness and oppressive
vastness affects us with awe; but, after all, we look down upon her
massive sublimity. Man is more than the biggest heap of crude matter and
unintelligently operating energy. Says Professor Jodl:
“We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude
of her powers of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the
inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which she binds
being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and
the same! But our prototype, our God, she can never be.”
This grandeur of nature is part of her divinity, but it alone does not
constitute the character of God. Yet, observe that throughout nature
there is an imponderable quality present which makes every atom move in
a definite way, so that the whirl of gaseous masses, apparently a chaos,
will be recognised as a cosmic whole developing in a certain way and
describable in what is generally called natural laws. This subtle quality
is the condition of the regularities which are found in all the infinite
varieties and innumerable particularities, and all these regularities
conceived in their systematic unity are called the order of the universe.
Man exists as a thinking being only because the immeasurable universe
of which he is a part possesses this quality of order, and his reason
is closely considered only a copy of it. Man’s reason was shaped into
the image of the cosmic order, and suppose—a supposition which is very
difficult to make and regarded by many as impossible or inconceivable—yet
suppose that the world-order were radically different from what it
actually is, man’s reason would accordingly be different too. Further,
suppose that the whole frame and fundamental interrelations of the
particles of reality were different from what they are, would not
correspondingly the basic rules of conduct be changed too?
The author of this article, in the eyes of the so-called orthodox
Christian, is most certainly an atheist. And if theism means the belief
in a personal or extramundane God he is an atheist indeed. If there is
any opprobrium in the name atheism we are willing to accept it; and
certainly, we do not reject the label of atheism in order to escape any
odium attached to that name. We do reject atheism simply because we
see a great and potent truth in the idea of God which is but too often
disregarded.
With Professor Haeckel and Professor Jodl we reject the conception of
an anthropomorphic Deity. The anthropomorphic idol is doomed before the
tribunal of science. But we see a deeper meaning in the idea of God which
has formed through millenniums the very centre of the greatest religions
on earth. Science has to recognise the reality of an all-presence in
existence which is analogous to that which in a religious language is
called God.
Considering the fact that humanity owes many great truths to religion,
let us not be hasty in condemning the religions of the past as pure
superstition. There are valuable seeds in the chaff. If we discard the
wheat together with the tares, we shall have to rediscover them, for it
is little probable that humanity can for any length of time be satisfied
with beautiful phrases or live in its moral aspirations in a realm of
mere dreams.
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] For a discussion of this point see _Fundamental Problems_, pp.
219-226.
[62] See the article in Nos. 239, 241, and 242 of _The Open Court: Nature
and Morality_. An Examination of the Ethical Views of John Stuart Mill.
I. The Meaning of Basing Ethics Upon Nature. II. The Ethics Taught by
Nature. III. Intelligent Action and Moral Action. IV. The Anthropomorphic
Standpoint of Mill.
[63] I purposely do not say _all_ maxims of conduct, because we can very
well imagine that different conditions may produce some very important
variations in the rules of conduct; but the main foundation of morality
would be the same.
[64] There are two men at present who boldly fly the flag of the old
realism again, both having our full sympathy in their aspirations,
although we cannot agree with many of their teachings. The one is Mr.
Charles S. Peirce, the other Dr. Francis E. Abbot.
THE SUPERSTITION OF NECESSITY.[65]