CHAPTER XII.

THE LAST CHAPTER.

The year 1880 saw the last of the long struggle in Northampton and the

beginning of that in the House of Commons. For twelve years my father

fought prejudice and misrepresentation in Northampton, for six years

longer he had to fight prejudice and misrepresentation in the House of

Commons. But the shorter fight was the harder one; it was carried on

incessantly, without the slightest intermission. It was a terrible six

years. The litigation alone is something appalling; in that time eight

suits were begun and ended.

First there was the libel suit against Edgcumbe, which dragged on for

more than a year, and ended in nothing.

Second came Clarke _v._ Bradlaugh. This was an action for penalties

against Mr Bradlaugh for having sat and voted without taking the oath.

Commenced in July 1880, it came before the judges six times, and was

ultimately decided in favour of Mr Bradlaugh in April 1883.

Third--Bradlaugh _v._ Newdegate. An action for maintenance brought by

Mr Bradlaugh against Mr Newdegate, and decided in favour of the former

in April 1883.

Fourth--The Queen (Sir Henry Tyler) _v._ Bradlaugh, Foote, and Ramsey.

An action for blasphemy, decided in Mr Bradlaugh's favour in April

1883.[44]

[Footnote 44: In the case against Foote and Ramsey the jury disagreed.

The prosecution then entered a _nolle prosequi_.]

Fifth--Bradlaugh _v._ Erskine. An action against the

Deputy-Sergeant-at-Arms for assault, in removing Mr Bradlaugh from the

lobby of the House of Commons on August 3, 1881.[45] Commenced in

April 1882, this suit was decided against Mr Bradlaugh in January 1883.

In March the Government enforced their claim for costs against him.

[Footnote 45: Mr Bradlaugh applied for a summons against Inspector

Denning, but this application was refused.]

Sixth--Gurney _v._ Bradlaugh. A suit entered upon by Mr Gurney of

Northampton, to try the validity of the conduct of the majority of the

House in preventing Mr Bradlaugh from taking the oath and his seat in

the House. Mr Justice Mathew discharged the jury, refusing to hear the

case on the ground that it was a collusive action.

Seventh--Bradlaugh _v._ Gossett. In July 1883 Mr Bradlaugh applied for

an injunction to restrain the Sergeant-at-Arms from using physical

force to prevent him from entering the House. Decided against Mr

Bradlaugh in the February of the following year.

Eighth--Attorney-General _v._ Bradlaugh. An action for penalties

against Mr Bradlaugh for having sat and voted without having subscribed

the oath. This case was heard at bar, and judgment given for the

Attorney-General. This was appealed against, and the matter settled in

October 1880; Mr Bradlaugh paid his own costs, but nothing further.[46]

[Footnote 46: These proceedings--except the libel case, which has been

already noticed--will be found fully dealt with by Mr J. M. Robertson

in Part II., in his account of Mr Bradlaugh's Parliamentary struggle.]

All these lawsuits, each involving the discussion of points of the

greatest intricacy, and in which my father's brain was pitted against

those of some of the greatest lawyers in England, would have been

enough to tax the powers of any ordinary man, even if he had had

no other struggles. But in these six years there were many other

struggles; there were six elections, most of which were carried on

under extremely harassing conditions. It was one constant battle within

the walls of the House and without, and in the blind fury of their rage

his antagonists spared neither my father nor any one whose name was

associated with his. Sir Henry Tyler proceeded against Mr Foote and Mr

Ramsay for blasphemy, only because along with them he hoped to be able

to drag Mr Bradlaugh down. Sir Henry Tyler tried to deprive my sister

and myself, as well as Mrs Besant and Dr Aveling, of our right to teach

under the Science and Art Department, only because he hoped to wound

Mr Bradlaugh by an attack upon his daughters[47] and his friends. The

Somerville Club (at the instigation of Miss Eliza Orme) refused to

accept the daughters of Charles Bradlaugh as members.[48] University

College would not permit my sister Alice--a woman of stainless honour

and of the highest character--and Mrs Besant to study botany within

its walls;[49] the National Liberal Club, having actually invited Mr

Bradlaugh to become a member, insulted him by refusing to elect him.[50]

[Footnote 47: This attack upon Mr Bradlaugh through his daughters,

insignificant and inoffensive though we were, was no new idea. In 1877

an attempt was made to introduce female students into the classes of

the City of London College. At my father's suggestion my sister and

I, who at that time took little interest in the matter, joined Mr

Levy's Class on Political Economy. I went up for the examination at

the end of the term, and, to my surprise and my father's delight, I

took a second-class certificate. But the City of London College were

divided upon the subject of the admission of female students, and,

after much acrimonious discussion, Mr Armytage Bakewell, a member of

the Council, carried his intolerance so far as to turn the dispute upon

the admission of my sister and myself. He wrote to the _City Press_

that "though the ostensible subject of controversy has been whether

females should attend the young men's classes or not, there was well

known to be a wider divergence," and that was "best indicated by the

fact that Mr Bradlaugh's daughters attended Mr Levy's classes." It is

only just to the City of London College to add that the Council, while

repudiating any responsibility for Mr Bakewell's conduct, expressed

"their regret that any allusion had been made to Mr Bradlaugh's

daughters" in the letter alluded to. The City of London College decided

against the further admission of women, and within a few days of their

decision had to listen to Lord Houghton's congratulations upon their

liberality in admitting women when he presented me with my certificate!

He had not been informed that the College had just come to the contrary

resolution.]

[Footnote 48: March 1883.]

[Footnote 49: May 1883.]

[Footnote 50: 1884. Five years later the National Liberal Club

spontaneously elected Mr Bradlaugh, without his knowledge, a member

paying his first year's subscription.]

The country was flooded with literature making the most infamous

charges against him, and in the name of religion men went from town

to town to preach against him. Even Cardinal Manning, a prince of the

greatest Church in Christendom, was not too exalted to stoop to cast

his stone at the despised Atheist. Within the precincts of the great

Commons House itself he had to sit in silence, with no right of reply,

whilst he heard his character assailed, and those who worked with him

basely slandered. Within those same historic walls he was set upon and

terribly ill-used by officials, ordered to their work by gentlemen

claiming to represent the nation. I was at Westminster on the day which

witnessed this strange example of the boasted "English love of fair

play." I tremble as I recall it.

We went to Westminster by train, my sister and I, with Mrs Besant and

some friends of hers. The sight which met our eyes as we came out of

the station was one not to be readily forgotten; immense masses of

orderly men and women kept easily within certain limits by a thin

line of police. There was a quick recognition of us as we passed

along by friends from all parts of the country, who gave us grave and

serious greeting. At the gates of Palace Yard we were challenged by

the police, but allowed to pass on presenting our petition, and going

on to Westminster Hall we found it occupied by little groups of men

from all corners of England.[51] These groups grew and grew, until the

great hall seemed full, and voices were heard on all sides crying,

"Petition," "Petition." At the head of the steps near the door leading

to the lobby we took up our position. By-and-by an agonising rumour

flew through the Hall, "They are killing him; they are killing him!"

and swift on the heels of this came the angry cry, again and again

repeated, "To the House!" and with this, the surging forward of the

crowd. So few police had been spared to guard this entrance that they

would have been absolutely powerless to resist these men--not London

"roughs," but the pick of the London clubs, and, more formidable still,

men from many a Midland town, and from many a North country pit and

factory, whose hearts were bound up in my father, and who had come to

London that day to petition for justice. The police command, "Keep

back!" fell upon deaf ears. My sister and I involuntarily put ourselves

in front of the doors, facing the crowd. Mrs Besant sprang forward,

and in a few impassioned words she begged them to consider what Mr

Bradlaugh's wishes would be. The effect was instantaneous. The foremost

fell back, and kept others back till all were self-controlled once

more; but the white, set faces told of the struggle in their hearts.

"But we _can't_ stay here and know he is being murdered, and do nothing

to help him," said one in a choking voice. Some terrible minutes

passed, but there was no further attempt to pass through the doors.

By-and-by a message reached us from my father that he was gone to

Stonecutter Street, and that we were to join him there. At Stonecutter

Street we found him quite calm and self-possessed, but his coat hanging

in rents, his ashen face and still quivering flesh telling the tale of

the struggle he had just passed through.

[Footnote 51: Seven persons were allowed to enter with each petition.]

In a few days he fell very ill. The small muscles of both arms were

ruptured; erysipelas supervened, and the left arm was very bad indeed,

needing constant attention by day and night. All day long from early

morning to the small hours of the next day there were people calling,

some friendly and some very much otherwise, besides press men and

persons on business. My father had no rest, and one day the physician

said, "You will never get well, Mr Bradlaugh, if you don't get out of

this room."

"You wish me to go away?" asked my father.

"Yes."

"When?"

"At once."

"I will go to-day," was the characteristic reply.

I packed up the necessary baggage, a fly was ordered to take us to

the station, and at Mrs Besant's suggestion it was decided to go to

Eastbourne. I was nursing my father, so I went with him, while for a

day or so my sister remained behind to attend to things at home. Mrs

Besant accompanied us. On the way to the station my father, who was

feeling very ill and very depressed, said he did not care to go to

Eastbourne--it was too fashionable; so I took the map from the railway

guide and called over the names of places on the South Coast until he

stopped me at Worthing, and then we turned about to go to there instead

of to Eastbourne. My father had both arms in slings, and at the station

Mrs Besant and I had to walk one each side of him to protect them from

the impertinent and the unfeeling who crowded round to stare at him.

Arrived at Worthing, we got into a cab, asking the driver if he could

recommend us to a quiet hotel; he looked compassionately at the only

too evidently sick man, and said he thought West Worthing would suit

us best. Whilst he was getting the luggage, a clergyman whom we had

seen inside the station came out, and walking up to the open cab stared

rudely at my father, and as he turned away said loudly, for us to hear,

"That's Bradlaugh; I hope they'll make it warm for him yet."

West Worthing did suit us, as the cabman surmised; my father's health

daily improved, and indeed there is little doubt that his timely

removal to this quiet spot saved his life for the time. After a few

days my sister joined us, and we all felt the better for the change, as

much from the momentary respite as from the fresh air and sea breeze.

* * * * *

The expenses of the litigation and the various elections were enormous,

both directly and indirectly. Although eventually Mr Newdegate had to

bear the whole of the costs in the suit which he brought against Mr

Bradlaugh, yet the latter had to find several hundred pounds--about

£725 in all--to pay into court at different times. These sums were

ultimately repaid to him, but liabilities had to be incurred to

produce them at the required moments. The shorthand notes in the three

days' appeal from the trial at bar alone cost him £50. In the case of

Bradlaugh _v._ Erskine, in which the House of Commons defended its

officer, the Government made Mr Bradlaugh pay the costs, under the

circumstances a very harsh and unusual proceeding. Very little time

was allowed to elapse before the claim was insisted upon, and to find

the money my father had to choose between more borrowing and selling

his library. Yet if the motion carried unanimously and "amid cheers"

on the 27th January 1891 means anything, it is an acknowledgment that

the House was in the wrong when it instructed its officer to prevent Mr

Bradlaugh by force from obeying the law. It was not merely the direct

cost, however; there were the indirect penalties also. For instance, in

February 1885, after the appeal from the trial at bar (which, with its

subsequent proceedings alone covered thirteen days), my father spoke

of the worry and uncertainty which had "for months arrested nearly

all my means of earning money." People were always subscribing in an

endeavour to pay for him the expenses they knew of, and many were the

sacrifices some of them made in their eager desire to help. One old

Yorkshire miner, who had been sorely troubled that times were so hard

with him that he could spare nothing, one day came triumphantly to his

friend saying, "I have made it all right; I will go without the half

pint for a week, and send it to the lad."[52] Many cut down their usual

allowance of tobacco, and some went altogether without. One poor man

sent his silver watch, the only thing of value which he possessed;

some people in London, touched at hearing of this sacrifice, offered

to join together to buy him a gold one in acknowledgment of it, but

he would not hear of it. Several times I have known a cabman refuse

to take his fare.[53] Many poor people sent their small subscriptions

weekly or monthly. But my father always worried about these funds;

he could not bear the thought of his poor friends denying themselves

their little luxuries, or even perhaps their necessaries, and he

always promptly closed a fund when it had been open some fixed time or

directly the specific sum was reached.

[Footnote 52: _National Reformer_, April 27, 1884.]

[Footnote 53: I have lately heard a touching story of a cabman who

drove Mr Bradlaugh several times. He greatly admired my father, but

was too shy to speak to him. Every time he took a fare from him he

gave it away to some charitable object. He said he could not spend Mr

Bradlaugh's money on himself, he felt that "he must do some good with

it."]

* * * * *

A constant accusation brought against Mr Bradlaugh was that of living

in aristocratic style,[54] and of having a most enormous income.[55]

As a matter of fact, he had no income other than what he earned from

day to day, and his habits and mode of life at Circus Road were of the

simplest possible kind. His bedroom was very small, about 10 feet by 9

feet, with just room for his bedstead, chest of drawers, wash-stand,

and a couple of chairs. His library, on the first floor after 1880,

was a very large room with five windows to it; but spacious as it was,

it was by no means too large for his books. The room was shelved all

round to the very edges of the windows, except just over the fireplace;

and there were also three sets of movable shelves on the floor of the

room. The furniture was quite simple--just a desk, writing-tables,

cane-seated chairs, my father's two old oaken arm-chairs from

Tottenham, and an easy chair, which was bought specially for him one

time when he was not well. There was no other "easy" chair in the

house, and only one small sofa--really a bedroom lounge--which my

sister bought for me one morning when I was ailing. I doubt whether

the whole of my father's furniture would have fetched five-and-twenty

pounds at a sale. Our meals we had downstairs in a very dark basement

room under our landlord's music shop, and here the blue books were also

stored.

[Footnote 54: The _Plymouth and Exeter Gazette_ (April 1878) reproved

Mr Bradlaugh for the glaring inconsistency of his practice with his

democratic principles, "by living in the most aristocratic style."]

[Footnote 55: The _Leeds Daily News_ (July 1883) said his income was

£12,000 a year.]

My father's habits were as simple as his surroundings. He was an early

riser, and at whatever time he got home at night he was in his study

soon after seven in the morning, Even when he was not home from the

House of Commons till four o'clock in the morning, it was seldom he lay

in bed after eight. He had a cup of tea as soon as he was down, and

he worked at his desk until breakfast-time, which he liked punctually

at eight. If he was more than usually busy or worried, he asked for

his breakfast to be brought to his study, and he would take it as he

worked; but my sister and I always affected to be vexed if he did

this, because we liked to get him away from his work and into another

room for his meals. About the middle of 1877 his ever-increasing

correspondence obliged him to have regular clerical assistance, and his

secretary came at nine. He was in to callers until ten or half-past.

This was the time he saw people who wanted to consult him on legal or

private matters: he listened patiently to their troubles, and often

gave them most helpful advice how to get out of them. All sorts of

difficulties were confided to him--family troubles, dissensions between

husband and wife, between employer and employed; great troubles and

small were brought to him, and those who brought them were sure of a

sympathetic and patient listener, and a confidant to whom they could

unreservedly open their hearts.

If Mr Bradlaugh did not have to attend a Committee of the House he

would have his dinner (or "lunch," as it was indifferently called)

at half-past twelve, and this was followed by a cup of tea in his

library; if he were in all day, he had his afternoon tea (just a cup

of tea and a crust of bread and butter) at four, and his supper about

seven or half-past seven. At his dinner and supper he drank hock or

burgundy.[56] Often after supper there would be a little pleasant chat,

sometimes a game of chess, and, more rarely, whist with a dummy. If

my father was too tired or too worried for any of these, he would go

to bed as early as half-past eight or nine, lie and read for a while,

and then sleep soundly until morning. Of course it was not often he

could do this, for his evenings were usually spent in lecturing or at

the House of Commons.[57] The only time during the session which he

could rely upon for seeing callers, answering letters,[58] and earning

his living, was from seven A.M. until the time he left for

the House. Saturday evening and Sundays were generally employed in

lecturing. Until 1884 his holidays were of the rarest and the shortest.

In that year he first went fishing at Loch Long. At the suggestion

of some Scotch friends, a cottage was taken for a month that summer

at Portincaple, a lovely and secluded spot just opposite Loch Goil.

My sister and I and a Scotch lady, Miss Lees, stayed the whole time;

different friends came and went, and my father spent a week fishing.

The cottage belonged to Finlay M'Nab, fisherman and ferryman, and had

belonged to his father and grandfather before him. On nearly all Mr

Bradlaugh's fishing expeditions Finlay M'Nab was his boatman. They

would go off just after breakfast, or sometimes even earlier, get

dinner at Carrick Castle or Ardentinny, and come home at sunset with

a big bag of fish. After 1884 we went to Portincaple several summers

in succession, and then Mr Bradlaugh took to going there in the Easter

and Whitsun recess, and for a few days after Parliament rose. On these

occasions he went alone, but Mrs M'Nab attended to all his comforts

indoors as though he were at home, and outdoors her husband looked

after the bait and the boat--except on Sundays; then, my father had to

content himself with the dangerous amusement of fishing from the rocks,

whilst Finlay looked wistfully on.

[Footnote 56: He was frequently charged with drinking expensive wines,

but the hock he had straight from Bensheim at a cost of 1s. 3d. per

bottle (including carriage and duty); the burgundy came direct from

Beaune, and cost a trifle more.]

[Footnote 57: During the time he was not allowed to take his seat he

attended the House constantly, sitting under the gallery in a seat

technically outside the House.]

[Footnote 58: One year he calculated that he had written 1200 letters

of advice in the twelvemonth--this, of course, in addition to general

correspondence.]

Mr Bradlaugh was a very even-tempered man, and those who waited on him

usually served him eagerly. He never found fault unnecessarily, and

provided an attempt was well meant, it mattered little, as far as his

behaviour went, if the result was not equal to the intention. He was

most generous and tender-hearted, except to those who had wantonly

taken advantage of the confidence he reposed in them to deceive him.

Such persons called him hard and unrelenting, for even if he forgave

them they never again held quite the same place in his esteem. Some

critics have said he was a man of unrestrained passions; others have

said he was absolutely passionless. Neither is right. He was a man of

very strong feelings, but he had an iron will. At a critical moment in

his life, when he was greatly tempted to follow a certain course, a

friend urged upon him that if he did he would injure the work he had

at heart. My father replied by stretching out his arm, and closing

his fingers over an imagined object. "I have not a passion," he said,

"that I could not crush as easily as an egg within my hand if it were

necessary for the good of the cause I love." And he was true to his

word.

* * * * *

In 1877 when Mr Bradlaugh severed his business connection with Mr C.

Watts, he started, as I have said, a publishing business in connection

with Mrs Annie Besant, under the style of the Freethought Publishing

Company. The business premises were at Stonecutter Street, E.C., and

here, with small premises, a small staff, and a small rent, the Company

did fairly well. In 1882, however, my father was induced against his

better judgment to lease a shop at the corner of Fleet Street and

Bouverie Street (now occupied by the Black and White Company). Here

the premises were large and the rent heavy. To make matters worse,

about a couple of years later, owing to the financial difficulties of

his landlord, he was reluctantly obliged to take up the remainder of

the lease of the whole building, and thus he became saddled with the

rent and taxes--amounting to more than seven hundred per annum--and

the responsibility of a great house in the city. In order to raise the

capital required to meet these expenses, Mr Bradlaugh with Mrs Besant

issued debenture stock to the amount of four or five thousand pounds,

the interest on which was paid with unfailing regularity until my

father's death.

But as he had feared, the business at Fleet Street did not thrive

sufficiently to support so large an establishment; the greater part of

it had always been, and was then, a postal business, hence it could

be carried on as well in a little shop in a side street as in a large

corner shop in such a thoroughfare. The details of the managership of

the publishing department were in the hands of Mrs Besant and my sister

Alice, but as both were without the least experience in business, my

father was the final referee on all matters, and it was he of course

who had to provide for quarter-day with its heavy rent, taxes, and

debenture interest.

In 1884, unable to let the upper portion of the building, Mr Bradlaugh

decided to utilise it himself by setting up a printing-office, and

doing his own printing. This department was put under the control of

Mr Bonner, to whom I was then engaged to be married. As my husband

was already familiar with the management of a printing-office, Mr

Bradlaugh's only trouble with this branch of his business was in

finding the money, and this was not a great anxiety, as it paid for

itself from the very first. It is true the profits were never great,

for the prejudice against giving work to any establishment connected

with the name of Bradlaugh at first limited the work almost to the

printing of his own publications. My father was very glad to be saved

responsibility, even in this small matter for, as he often said, he

had never intended to become a publisher, and he had never intended

to become a printer; he had so many things on his hands that he had

time neither for one nor the other; he had, in fact, no inclination

for commercial pursuits: they had always been forced upon him by

circumstances.

* * * * *

When it was known that I was going to attempt some story of my father's

life, there were many things I was told that I must not fail to

mention. Amongst others, one friend said: "You must not fail to notice

that Mr Bradlaugh was an essentially grateful man; he never forgot the

smallest favour or the smallest kindness that was shown him." That

is absolutely true; he could forget most injuries, "his heart was as

great as the world," but it was not large enough "to hold the memory

of a wrong;" a kindness he never forgot.[59] When John Bright pledged

himself in the House of Commons for my father, the latter was greatly

affected, and speaking to us in private about it was quite overcome.

He had disagreed often with John Bright, and had sometimes spoken his

disagreement with the utmost frankness; later on they were opposed upon

the subject of Home Rule, but after the day when that lion-hearted

old man so unexpectedly and so courageously spoke on his behalf,

Mr Bradlaugh never mentioned his name save with the most profound

respect and gratitude. And yet this trait of gratitude, so strong in

himself, he never seemed to expect in others; or at least he seldom

showed surprise at its absence. He once helped to Baltimore a Russian

prisoner, escaped from Siberia, who had come to him with letters from

Continental friends. The months rolled by, and nothing further was

heard of the man. A great deal had been done for him, and one day I

expressed myself very strongly on his ingratitude. My father stopped me

by quietly saying that I must learn to do a right thing just because

it was right, and not because I expected gratitude or any other reward

for what I did. I felt the rebuke keenly, but I had nothing to say, for

I instantly realised that he preached to me no more than he himself

practised.

[Footnote 59: The following extracts, taken at hazard from New Year's

addresses to his friends in the _National Reformer_, will show how

grateful he was to them for their help and what support he found in

their love and trust:--

"Women and men, I have great need of your strength to make me strong,

of your courage to make me brave. I am in a breach where I must fall

fighting or go through. I will not turn, but I could not win if I had

to fight alone" (1st January 1882).

"1883 has freed me from some troubles and cleared me of some peril,

but it leaves me in 1884 a legacy of unfinished fighting. I thank the

friends of the dead year, without whose help I, too, must have been

nearly as dead as the old year itself.... I have had more kindnesses

shown me than my deservings warrant, more love than I have yet earned,

and I open the gate of 1884 most hopefully because I know how many

hundred kindly hearts there are to cheer me if my uphill road should

prove even harder to climb than in the years of yesterday" (6th January

1884).

"The present greeting is first to our old friends; some poor folk who

early in 1860 took No. 1 [of the _National Reformer_], and have through

good and ill report kept steadily with us through the more than a

quarter of a century struggle for existence" (3rd January 1886).]

* * * * *

It is remarkable how quickly Mr Bradlaugh made his personality felt

when once he was allowed to sit quietly in Parliament. Some persons had

sneeringly said that he would "soon find his level," or that he would

"soon sink into obscurity," but he rapidly proved that he at least did

not regard the House of Commons merely as "the best club in England."

His patience in mastering details, his perseverance and persistence in

what he undertook, and the work he accomplished, were all so notable

that he had sat in the House barely one year when the possibility of a

seat for him in the next Radical ministry began to be discussed.[60]

His constant attendance at the House and at Committees--and he was

rarely absent--interfered greatly with his lecturing in the provinces

during the session, although almost every available evening was

utilised for London and suburban lectures, many of which were given

away.[61] In consequence of this he was driven more and more to rely

upon his pen as a means of earning money. It was always easier to

him to speak than to write upon a subject. His style was terse and

direct; his thoughts and his words came so fast that a verbatim report

of an hour's speech filled several newspaper columns. His gestures,

his expression, the modulation of his voice, pointed and explained

his spoken words. But it nearly always irked him to write long upon

a subject; his letters were for the most part models of brevity, and

he tended to make his articles brief also. If a magazine editor asked

him to write an article of six thousand words, and he had said all he

wanted to say at that moment in four or five thousand, he hated to add

to it, and often, indeed, he would not.

[Footnote 60: _Bognor Observer_, February 1887.]

[Footnote 61: One at the Shoreditch Town Hall in May 1884, on behalf of

the Hackney United Radical Club, realised as much as £40. The hall was

packed in every corner, and hundreds were unable to gain admittance.]

By incessant labour my father earned a fair income, but he could not

keep pace with his heavy expenses, and the burden of his debts each

year weighed upon him more and more heavily. He would sigh regretfully

that he was not so young as he used to be, and these things troubled

him more than formerly. At the end of August 1888, writing his "Rough

Notes" in the _National Reformer_, he said: "Many folks write me as

though now Parliament stood adjourned, I could be easily taking holiday

and rest. I wish this were possible, but in truth I have to work very

hard to reduce my debts and live. I shall, I hope, have four and a half

days' fishing in Loch Long from mid-day on Monday, September 3rd, to

the morning of Saturday the 8th, but this short holiday is more than

counterbalanced by the heavy lecturing work of the recess. This week,

for example, I address seven meetings; next week eight. Many write to

me to give lectures in aid of branches, clubs, and associations, and I

do help very often, but surely it is not necessary for me to constantly

repeat that my only means are those I earn from day to day by tongue

and pen. My great trouble now is lest I should be unable to earn enough

to meet my many heavy obligations, in which case I should be most

reluctantly obliged to relinquish my Parliamentary career."

This "Note" had a most unexpected result; it was reproduced with

generous comments in the press, and a committee was formed to raise a

fund to clear off the balance of £1500 of debt still remaining from the

six years' Parliamentary struggle. This fund was only open one month,

until October 1st;[62] and in that short time £2490 was subscribed

in sums varying from 1d. to £200. Now at last my father seemed to be

getting into smooth waters; the only financial burdens left upon him

were in connection with his business, and these he hoped to gradually

lighten. But within a few weeks he had to face a new trouble. On the

16th November my sister Alice was taken very ill with typhoid fever at

Circus Road; for the sake of greater quiet, we moved her to my rooms at

19 Avenue Road, where, meningitis having supervened, she died on 2nd

December. She expressly asked that in the case of her death she should

be cremated, and we were most anxious to carry out her wishes, but the

Woking Crematorium was then undergoing structural alterations, and it

was not possible to do so. This short and unexpected illness, with

its fatal termination, was a great shock to Mr Bradlaugh, and I went

to him at Circus Road the next morning as soon as I could get away. I

found him terribly depressed, working in his room in a bad atmosphere,

with the gas alight and all the blinds down. Knowing how he ordinarily

shrank from any outward display of his feelings, and especially how

much he disliked mere form, I said, "Why, how is this? Why have you

pulled all the blinds down?" He said brokenly, "They [the servants]

did it; I thought it might be your wish." I put out the gas, drew up

the blinds, and opened a window for a few moments to let in a little

fresh air. He was himself out of health, and I did not like to see him

sitting there in that close and heated atmosphere. I asked if he was

going to the House? No; he did not think he should, he replied. I urged

him to go, believing it was the best thing he could do. He did go, but

he could not stay long; somehow an announcement of my sister's death

had got into the papers, and Members sympathised with him in his sorrow

in such kindly fashion that he was obliged to come away lest he should

break down. A night or two later he made his speech in reply to Mr

Broadhurst on the Employers' Liability Bill, and if his words had in

them somewhat more of acerbity than usual, I often think that it was in

a measure due to the biting pain of his own grief.

[Footnote 62: Mr Bradlaugh asked for it to be closed on 26th September.]

On the 5th my sister was buried at the Brookwood Necropolis, where

already some members of our family lay. Many who had known her, and

whose lives had been helped by hers, begged that there might be a

public funeral; but my father shrank from exposing his sorrow even to

the most sympathetic of friends, and we quietly and silently laid her

in her last resting-place, where, alas! she was so soon to be joined

by her stricken father. Her death was not allowed to pass without the

Christian commonplaces as to "the miserable barrenness of the sceptic's

theories" in the presence of domestic calamities; and Mr Bradlaugh

asked what would be thought of him if at a similar hour he should

obtrude upon some Christian some mocking word upon the horrors of the

theory that "many are called and few are chosen"?

My husband and I now went to live at Circus Road, and as my father was

suddenly without a secretary, I filled the post while he was seeking a

fresh one. I had given up the class teaching, in which I had been for

many years associated with my sister, having thus a certain amount of

leisure, and finding I could manage all that was wanted, I begged him

to let me continue his work. I liked to feel I was helping him, if only

in the mechanical way of writing at his dictation.

During the later years of his life, Mr Bradlaugh was often out of

health and suffered a great deal, especially in the arm so badly

injured on the 3rd August 1881. The strain--mental as well as

physical--of the six years 1880-85 had been tremendous.[63] But a week

at Loch Long with Finlay M'Nab and his rod and line seemed to restore

him to health again; we never thought of anything serious, he appeared

so big and strong. In October 1889, however, he fell ill--so ill that

for some time it seemed doubtful whether he would recover, but thanks

to the skill of his old physician Dr Ramskill, and the assiduous care

of his friend and colleague on the Vaccination Commission, Dr W. J.

Collins, he gradually struggled back to life once more. It was thought

that his health would be greatly benefited by a voyage to India, and

therefore he decided to attend the Fifth National Congress in Bombay.

Mr M'Ewan, M.P., who was then enjoying a holiday abroad, sent Mr

Bradlaugh a cheque for £200 so that money difficulties should not

hinder him from following the doctor's advice; and with the cheque, Mr

M'Ewan sent a most delicately worded letter, which touched the sick man

to the heart.

[Footnote 63: This I think has been recognised by most people. In

December 1884 the _Weekly Dispatch_ spoke of the "great strain" put

upon Mr Bradlaugh, "under which a man less vigorous in mind and body

would long ere this have broken down."]

The shadows of death lay very close to him, and he had a hard fight

back to the light again, but he longed ardently to live. There was so

much that he had put his hand to, which the position he had now won

in the House would enable him to do with comparative ease. As he lay

in his bed in his study[64] he turned over and over in his mind plans

by which he might economise his strength in the future. It was quite

clear that he must do less lecturing, and must depend more and more

on his pen. He resolved to try and sell the remainder of the Fleet

Street lease, and to give up his publishing business; he also planned

to gradually pay off the debenture-holders, and when it was free from

all money entanglements, to hand over the printing plant to my husband

to carry on the business in his own name and on his own responsibility.

One thing he felt he could do immediately. After he had been lying very

quiet for some time, he startled me one day by suddenly saying that

he had determined to resign the Presidency of the National Secular

Society, and he bade me get pen and paper, and take his instructions

for a letter to the Secretary. I tried to argue the matter with him and

begged him to reflect upon it, to do nothing hastily, and reminded him

that people would say if he resigned then, in his illness, that he had

recanted. His face, which all along had been set and stern, darkened

as I said this. People must think what they choose, he said, he could

no longer do everything; something must go; the Presidency entailed a

great deal of work, and he must give it up. I tried to say something

more, but he stopped me, saying sharply that he had made up his mind.

I was disconcerted by the tone and manner, so unusual from him to me,

and left the room a moment to recover my equanimity. I was back almost

immediately, and went to the desk to get the note-book to take down the

letter to Mr Forder (the Secretary). I heard my name spoken gently,

and turning, saw my father holding out his hand to me. I went to the

bedside. "Now, my daughter," he said affectionately, "I want you to

tell me what you were going to say just now." He listened patiently

whilst I urged upon him that, although he was strong enough to

despise the misrepresentation that would surely follow the abrupt and

unexplained announcement of his resignation, it was hardly fair to his

friends who would have to bear taunt and sneer, and would be unable to

quote a word out of his mouth in reply. He replied that the reason for

his immediate resignation was that he could not be a President in name

only, and, without himself taking part in the work, be held responsible

for the sayings and doings of others--with whom he might or might

not agree--on behalf of the Society. He thought, however, he might

leave his formal resignation until his return from India, although he

would at once intimate his intention. He added with a tender smile,

"I promise you that I will make a statement which shall not leave any

one in doubt as to my opinions." The religious question troubled him

so little that he had not even thought about it until I spoke of the

possibility of misconstruction. The severity and sternness of his

demeanour in making the announcement of his resolve was due solely to

the pain it had cost him to give up an office he valued so highly, and

which he had hoped to retain until the laws relating to Blasphemy were

erased from the Statute Book.

[Footnote 64: The doctors would not allow Mr Bradlaugh to remain

in his bedroom; one of them told him indignantly--albeit with some

exaggeration--that he would have better accommodation in the workhouse!]

It was generously offered to pay my passage to Brindisi so that I might

care for my father during the first days of his journey, but my own

health did not permit me to accept so delightful an offer. He seemed

really too ill to go alone, and the memory of his face, so haggard and

so grey, as I last saw it at the vessel's side, was an abiding pain. He

sent back a pencilled note by the pilot, and a letter from every port,

to tell how he was gaining strength each day. On board the steamer

every one was kind to him. At Bombay every one was more than kind;

all seemed to vie with each other in showing him attentions--Indians

and English residents alike. A house and attendants were put at the

disposal of himself and Sir William Wedderburn, President of the

Congress, and the latter made things easy for the invalid by many a

courteous act. Although it had been announced that Mr Bradlaugh could

not stay long enough in Bombay to receive addresses, yet a large number

were presented to him, of which about twenty were in caskets or cases

of worked silver, carved sandal wood, inlaid ivory, and other beautiful

specimens of native work. The duty alone on these amounted to about

£19, and was paid by the Congress Committee.

Mr Bradlaugh's interest in Indian affairs, and his comprehension of

the needs of the people, were recognised both at home and in India.

In India he was joyfully called the "Member for India," and at home

his views on Indian matters were listened to with growing respect.

Lord Dufferin sought an interview, and afterwards had considerable

correspondence with him, and before Lord Harris set out for Bombay

he also made a point of seeing the acknowledged representative in

Parliament of the Indian people.

Mr Bradlaugh returned from Bombay at the end of January (1890), much

better in health than we had dared to hope, and we now quite believed

that with care he would become thoroughly strong again. The birth of

my little son in the April of this year prevented me from attending

to my father's correspondence, and at my request, my place was filled

by a friend of mine and of my sister's, Mrs Mary Reed. My father soon

grew very fond of my little boy, and would now and then put aside his

writing and take him on his knee, protesting that he had never before

left his work to nurse a baby, and sometimes wondering whether, when

the boy grew up, he would go fishing with him.

The advent of the baby and all his paraphernalia made us feel more

crowded for space than ever, and as the music publishers had a room on

the first floor which they used as a stock-room, my husband arranged

to rent this, and we furnished it as a sitting-room. We made it

look as pretty as we could, and it was ready for us at the end of

September. On my father's birthday (the 26th) I persuaded him to take

us to the theatre, and we went to the Lyceum to see _Ravenswood_. On

coming home we had supper in the bright new room instead of the dark

place underground, and many were my father's jokes about the unwonted

splendour of his surroundings. Alas! it seemed that that room was

furnished only for him to die in three months later.

The winter of 1890 set in early and severely. In November it began to

snow, and snow and fog continued well into the new year. With the cold

weather my father began to feel ill again. He thought of going to Paris

to spend the New Year, but he could not afford it. I was sorry he could

not go, for he always came back the better for a few days in Paris. He

was a welcome visitor to the French capital; he had never been made

to feel himself an outcast from society there. Coming home with him

one fearfully foggy night in December[65] from a lecture he had been

delivering at the Hall of Science on behalf of a testimonial to Mr

Forder, the Secretary of the National Secular Society, the conversation

turned upon the value of his books, and he mentioned two or three which

he thought--erroneously, as it turned out--very valuable. I asked him

if he would not sell them; if he could get a holiday and health with

the money they would fetch, they would be well worth the exchange. "Ah,

my daughter, when I sell my books----" he began, and his unfinished

answer told all the sadness of his thought. Twice he would have had to

sell them if friends had not come to his aid--once, as I have said, to

pay the Government costs in Bradlaugh _v._ Erskine, and next in the

Peters and Kelly case. He loved his books; to part with them seemed

like parting with his heart's blood.

[Footnote 65: Wednesday, 10th December. This was the last lecture

Mr Bradlaugh ever delivered. The subject was "The Evidence for the

Gospels," in criticism of Dr Watkin's Bampton lectures.]

* * * * *

On the 10th January my father went out in the afternoon; it was densely

foggy and bitterly cold. When he returned a few hours later I ran down

to him as usual, and was horrified to see his face--it was the same

face that I had seen in the worst of his sickness of the previous

winter. This was the first attack of the spasms of the heart, although

we did not then know it; it was comparatively slight,[66] and after

a little my father seemed himself again. The improvement, however,

was more apparent than real; in less than a week from that day he

was compelled to keep his bed, and in less than a month he lay in his

grave. He died on the 30th January, firm in the convictions in which he

had lived, and was buried on the 3rd of February, next my sister in the

Brookwood Necropolis. The funeral was a silent one, without speeches

and without display,[67] but people attended it from all parts of

England--one miner even came from Scotland. People of all sorts and all

conditions travelled to this remote spot to show their respect for the

man who had given his life in the service of his fellows.

[Footnote 66: A person writing in the _Swansea Journal_ for 7th

February 1891 said that some time previously Mr Bradlaugh _had told

him_ of his sufferings from _angina pectoris_. This is utterly untrue;

my father never suffered from this complaint, nor until his fatal

illness was he ever conscious that he had anything wrong with his

heart. In a private letter to a friend written on the 14th--almost

the last written with his own hand--he says distinctly, "I have never

suffered from heart or lungs before." The mania for invention is

extraordinary.]

[Footnote 67: This was exactly in accordance with Mr Bradlaugh's

wishes. In a will dated 1884 he said: "I direct that my body shall be

buried as cheaply as possible, and that no speeches be permitted at my

funeral." His last will, which consisted of a few lines only, contained

no directions on this matter.]

* * * * *

At Mr Bradlaugh's death his assets were not nearly sufficient to

meet his liabilities, but amongst these liabilities there was not a

single personal item; they were every one in connection with the Fleet

Street business. Most of the creditors cheerfully agreed to accept a

composition of ten shillings in the pound; of this £1700 was raised

by public subscription, and the remainder was furnished by the sale

of the library,[68] Indian presents,[69] and the lease of 63 Fleet

Street. It was a wonderful testimony to the regard in which my father

was held that people should join together to help in paying his debts

after his death. Four other memorials to him have been projected, of

which three are now complete. The first to be finished was the monument

at Brookwood. It consists of a bronze bust of Mr Bradlaugh, by Mr F.

Verheyden, on a red granite pedestal. It was erected at a cost of

£225; and the money was subscribed absolutely spontaneously, without

a single appeal or one word of request. Then came the statue of Mr

Bradlaugh erected by his constituents in Abington Square, Northampton,

and unveiled on the 25th of June 1894, in the presence of the greatest

crowd ever assembled in that town. Lastly, there is the memorial which

was organised in the House of Commons, and energetically promoted by

the daughters of Richard Cobden, one of our country's noblest men. This

took the form of making some provision for myself, and to that end a

house has been bought with the money subscribed.

[Footnote 68: The library included some 7000 volumes, in addition to

about 3000 Blue Books, and a large number of unbound pamphlets. The

books were sold by post from the catalogue, and went to all parts of

the world. They realised £550 after all expenses were paid, and about

1000 volumes remained unsold.]

[Footnote 69: Through the generosity of "Edna Lyall," I was able to buy

these for myself.]

There is one other memorial which from its nature is not likely to be

completed for some years. It is a project to build a hall, to be called

the "Bradlaugh Memorial Hall," to be used for the purposes of promoting

the great causes with which Mr Bradlaugh was identified. It took close

upon a hundred years to build a Memorial Hall to Thomas Paine; it

remains to be seen how long it will take to erect one to the memory of

Charles Bradlaugh.

PART II.

BY

JOHN M. ROBERTSON.

CHAPTER I.

PHILOSOPHY AND SECULARIST PROPAGANDA.

It may here be well to give a general view of Bradlaugh's teaching on

the great open questions of opinion and action, taking separately the

old provinces of religion and politics. When he came most prominently

before his countrymen he had a very definite repute on both heads,

having spoken on them in nearly every town of any size in the country;

but neither then nor later could it be said that anything like the

majority of the public had a just or accurate idea of his position. The

obstacle was and is partly prejudice, partly incapacity.

§1

To begin with, even the distinct title of "Atheist" may mean any

number of things for any number of persons. Ill-informed and even

some well-informed people commonly describe an Atheist as one who

says "There is no God," and that "Things happen by chance." To say to

such persons--as has been said a thousand times--that for an Atheist

both phrases are meaningless, seems to give no help: we must begin at

the beginning, and show how the dispute arose. And it is useful to

keep in view that Bradlaugh's Atheism, in the evolution of English

Freethought, is only a generation removed from the Deism of Thomas

Paine, which is much the same as the Deism of Voltaire. Deism or

Theism is to-day reckoned a quite "religious" frame of mind; but it

was the frame of mind of men who in their day were hated and vilified

by Christians as much as Bradlaugh in his. Explicit Atheism is only

in our own day become at all a common opinion. The men so described

in former ages, so far as we know (if we set aside the remarkable

developments of the Italian Renaissance), have nearly always been

Deists or Pantheists, of whom the latter of course tend logically to

coalesce with Atheism, but who have in their own names alike professed

to repudiate Atheism. Thus Hobbes and Spinoza, who last century

were constantly called Atheists by Christians, always professed to

have a God-idea; and the Freethinkers who showed head in England in

the first half of the eighteenth century were all professing Deists.

Systematic Atheism began to arise among the more penetrating or more

trained thinkers of the latter half of the century. Thus Hume, after

professing Deism throughout his life, left for posthumous publication

his "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," which amount to the

surrender of all forms of Theism. Of Voltaire in his latter years,

when he strongly attacked the Atheism of Holbach, it was said by the

more high-flying talkers of the Paris drawing-rooms: "Why, he is a

bigot; he is a Deist." But even Voltaire, as Mr Morley has shown, was

somewhat less of a Deist after the earthquake of Lisbon; and "Candide"

is not a good Theistic tract.[70] Diderot, again, reached explicit

Atheism; and his friend Holbach wrote, in the "Système de la Nature,"

the first systematic and straightforward Atheistic treatise of modern

times.[71] In England the movement was less rapid. Bolingbroke went

pretty far towards a Lucretian or Agnostic Theism; and the upper-class

Deism which on his lines held out against the opportunist orthodoxy

of Butler, necessarily tended to make its Deity a very remote and

inaccessible Power. But Freethought, to get any hold on the general

mind in the thickening populations of the latter half of last century

and the first half of this, had to begin again, and more effectively,

on the lines of the first Deists. The incredibility of the sacred

books had to be made clear before more abstract issues could be

settled. In this task Voltaire, the pupil of the English Deists, was

the great performer for all Europe. It was Paine however who first, in

the turmoil of the Revolution, brought home to thousands of English

artizans and other plain men the incredibility of what had so long

passed as divinely-revealed truth. He could do this the better because

of the power and fame of his work in politics, and because of his

constant profession of a devout belief in a beneficent God, on whom

he declared the Bible narratives to be a libel. It probably needed

this element of popular religion to keep up any continuous current of

popular Free-thinking in England throughout the great reaction which

followed on the French Revolution. But the argument of Butler held good

against Paine as against the earlier Deists. If the Bible stories were

irreconcilable with the idea of a "good," omnipotent God, equally so

are the operations of Nature. And though there are many people who can

be led by that argument to believe or make-believe in the Bible (though

it makes no more for the Bible than for the Koran), there were others

who felt bound to take the logical alternative, and decide that the

"good God" of popular half-faith is a dream.

[Footnote 70: This is all that can be pleaded in favour of the

deliberate representation of Voltaire as an Atheist by the late

Archbishop Thomson, at the Church Congress of 1881. But the ignorance

of the upper English clergy in general on such matters is amazing. In

January 1881, Archdeacon (then Canon) Farrar, preaching in Westminster

Abbey, represented Robespierre's Reign of Terror as a "reign of avowed

Atheism;" identified the Deistic cult of the "Supreme Being" with that

of the "goddess of Reason;" and accounted for the fall of Robespierre

by the statement that, "God _awoke once more_, and with one thunderclap

smote the sanhedrim of the insurrection, prostrated the apostate race."

This orator once expressed horror at the thought that Disestablishment

might enable Bradlaugh to speak in St Paul's. Bradlaugh might have

remarked on what the Establishment permitted at Westminster Abbey.]

[Footnote 71: The English translation, in the original issue, is in

parts completely perverted to the language of Theism, whether out

of fear or of Deistic prejudice on the part of the translator. Even

the edition prefaced by Bradlaugh--who did not think of checking the

text--preserves the perversions of the first translator.]

Such progress is a question of time. Atheism in a psychological sense

began with the beginning of physical science. Pure Theism, in its

early form of polytheism, saw in all natural movements and forces the

expression of a personal power or powers, analogous to man; and its

gods were and are simply magnified projections of humanity. Thus the

sun, moon, and planets, the winds, the thunder, the lightning, the

rivers, the fountains, the seas, were all figured as ruled and moved

by personal deities. As soon, however, as astronomy made certain

the perfectly regular movements of the sun and stars, Theism was to

that extent logically limited, and Atheism to that extent logically

possible. Astronomy was strictly godless in so far as it showed the

universe to move by undeviating law. Of course this perception is but

a small part of human consciousness and daily life; and the habit of

theising, so to speak, easily overrode the habit of atheising. But

every advance in exact knowledge of Nature, and in the capacity for

exact thought, tended to encourage the atheistic view, and to discredit

the theistic. Hence the spread of Atheism and Agnosticism among the

Greeks in their progressive and scientific period. It needed the

constant reform and modification of theistic doctrine, and later the

complete arrest of all scientific thought, to keep the theistic view of

things in power and place. And there had to be a revival of science and

exact thinking before there could again be talk of Atheism.

It follows, however, that all early Atheism, so-called, was only the

rejection of theistic ideas from some part of the business of life.

The Christians were "Atheists" for the Pagan multitude, because they

rejected the only God-ideas which the Pagan multitude harboured. In the

same way the Christians who later scouted the worship of images of God

(as Persians and Jews had done long before) were Atheists for those

Christians who could only conceive of an imaged God. Prejudice has its

own logic. When again medical men rested more and more on inductive

method and rational (even if mistaken) procedure, and less and less on

sorcery and invocation, they were naturally called Atheists, because

they excluded "God" from an important and perilous province of action.

Logically, the more a man is a Theist, the more of "God's" intervention

he sees in life. No man is a Theist in all things; but in the ages of

ignorance men were theistic in most matters. The kingdom of God, in

a practical sense, is a sphere in which man is confessedly ignorant

or impotent. "God's will" is the name for the forces which man cannot

control, and does not understand. It covers a storm, a pestilence, a

good or bad harvest, a stroke of luck, but not an indigestion, or the

breaking of coal when struck by a hammer. Thus it is that every new

advance of science, every new explanation of a body of facts in terms

of law and innate tendency, is at first denounced as Atheistic. After

the physicians came the physicists. The great Kepler, in keeping with

his idealistic method, was so steeped in Theism as to fancy that the

planets were kept up to time by guiding angels. Newton, however, was

flatly accused of Atheism for explaining the universe in terms of

the law of gravitation. He had driven God out of the world, it was

said; and so far as his physics went, it was true. Yet he himself

was an ardent Theist; and he even sought to make good his Theism by

the theory that "matter" was first without gravitation, and that God

added the attribute. With or without this safeguard, however, Newton's

generalisation was sufficiently abstract to leave popular religion

intact; and practical Theism even assimilated and gained by his

science. It was not till geologists began to explain the formation of

the earth in terms of law and tendency that the great shock came. God

had hitherto been generally conceived as shaping the earth, were it

only because there was no other explanation at hand; and, above all,

geology clashed with Genesis. Hence a much more serious resistance,

and a much more general imputation of Atheism; though the first

geologists were mostly Deists, and believers in the special creation

of animal life. The next and the most serious shock was that given by

Darwinism, which removed "the divine idea" from biology. Over this came

the loudest outcry of all; and the odium would have been overwhelming

were it not for the number of naturalists who took up the new doctrine

as a matter of special science. "God" is now for scientific people

practically removed from the sphere of all the "natural" sciences; and

the results attained in this connection by educated people are slowly

being attained by the ill-educated; the mass of the clergy having

gradually assimilated the conclusions of biology as their predecessors

did those of geology and physics.

The inevitable next step is the reduction to scientific order of the

lore of human affairs. This step was taken in a large part by Buckle,

somewhat out of the due order of time, just before Darwin issued the

"Origin of Species;" and Buckle has had on the whole more of religious

enmity than even Darwin, though, significantly enough, he expressly

insisted on Theism while Darwin kept it vaguely in the background.

Buckle's Theism so plainly leaves his Deity nothing to do in human

affairs that his belief, however fervid, could avail nothing to

propitiate the class whose function is to explain history in terms of

divine interference. Buckle, a professed Theist, is for all practical

purposes in the position of an Atheist, save in respect of his personal

and emotional belief in a future state. A God who in no way comes in

contact with men, for good or for ill, is too thin a conception to

count for much.

Atheism, then, is only a development of a process of thought that began

ages ago under Polytheism. It has been reached in the past by isolated

thinkers; there seem to have been Atheists at the time of composition

of parts of the Vedas; and each one of the great steps of scientific

generalisation has been anticipated by men who were not able to bring

the idea home to their own age. It is the giving the step its name

that creates the greatest shock. And when a reformer does not even

wait to have his position named for him, does not merely undermine

Theism by a new scientific treatment of a province of fact, but goes

to the logical root of the matter and declares that the latest Theism

is at bottom no more true than the oldest, though stripped of certain

crudities--then it is that the maximum of odium is evoked. The Atheist,

in reality, does but carry negation a step further than does the Theist

himself. As Bradlaugh used to point out, the modern Theist denies the

existence of any type of "God" save his own. Whatever he may see fit

to argue about the folly of denying the possibilities of the unknown,

he is quite confident that there is in the universe no Being even

remotely resembling the fabled Zeus, or Moloch, or Osiris, or Venus, or

Huitzlipochtli. He is sure that these are only imaginary existences.

Similarly, he begins in these days to be sure that the conception of

Jahweh is as purely a dream as that of Bacchus--the mere projection of

man's own image (however magnified or even idealised) on the background

of nescience. Nay, the latter-day Theist begins to repudiate the

conceptions of the "Deists" of last century: he will have no "Great

Artificer," no "Overruling Providence." The latest treatises expressly

reject the arguments of the earlier for proving the "existence of God."

Thus the Theist himself "denies the existence" of a thousand Gods.[72]

The Atheist, as Mr Bradlaugh put it, merely denies a thousand and

one.[73] He argues that the most advanced Theism (as distinguished

from mere Pantheism) is only a modified form of the oldest; merely a

civilised fancy instead of an uncivilised; it is always a male person

in the image of man, with passions, emotions, limitations, qualities;

loving, hating, planning, punishing, rewarding; always the "magnified

non-natural man" of the primeval worshipper: a conception flatly and

absurdly opposed to the first philosophic requirements of the very

doctrine which embodies it. The God of Theism must always be the

analogue of the Theist. Hume, passing out of Theism, concluded that the

"Power" of the universe could only have a faint and remote analogy to

human personality. Further reasoning forces the conclusion that it can

have no conceivable analogy.

[Footnote 72: This fact is entirely ignored by Professor Flint in his

defence of the old plea of Foster and Chalmers against Mr Holyoake in

"Anti-Theistic Theories," App. ii.]

[Footnote 73: John Mill, after stating that his father held that

"concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known,"

remarks that "Dogmatic Atheism he looked upon as absurd; as most

of those whom the world has considered Atheists have always done"

("Autobiography," p. 39). It is difficult to guess what is here meant

by "dogmatic Atheism;" but certainly no statement made above is more

"dogmatic" than the proposition cited from Mill, senior. It clearly

involves rejection of all Theism.]

This very conclusion has actually been reached by many professed

Theists and professed Christians. Professor Max Müller has collected

instances in his lectures on "Anthropological Religion." But those

thinkers, like Dr Müller himself, have always in practice relapsed

into the personal conception which they philosophically affect to

repudiate. As Dr Müller puts it, the abstract Theism which allows to

Deity no human attributes whatever is too "cold" for popularity; and Dr

Müller is not ashamed, after smoothing the way with a trivial fallacy,

to recur to the doctrine and terminology of the multitude, giving the

Deity male sex because "we" cannot think of "Him" otherwise than as

male. The Atheist simply stands honestly to the conclusions which such

Theists have avowedly come to and then feebly let go.

This is so obvious to steady-minded people that in all philosophic ages

there have been some who, shunning the name rather than the reality of

Atheism, have formulated the doctrine and name of Pantheism. Between

_logical_ Pantheism and Atheism, however, it cannot be too strongly

affirmed, there is no difference save in name. An Atheist believes

in a "going" and infinite universe, the totality of which he cannot

pretend to understand; and which he flatly refuses to pretend to

explain by the primitive hypothesis of a personal "Spirit." He calls

the universe "infinite" by way of avowing that he cannot conceive of

its coming to an end, in extension or in duration. This recognition of

endlessness represents for him the limit of thought: and he declines

to proceed to give further attributes to that, the very naming of

which leads him to the verge of the capacities of rational speech. He

declines to give to the going universe the name of "God," because that

name has always been associated by nearly all men with the primitive

conception of a Personal Being, and it is a mere verbal stratagem to

make it identical with Universe. So irresistible is the effect of the

immemorial association of the name that it serves to carry nearly every

professing Pantheist back chronically into mere Theism and Deism, even

if he so formulates his Pantheism to begin with as to make it answer

to the name. A logically consistent Pantheist, using the name, would

be hard to find. Hence the necessity, on all grounds, of repudiating

Pantheism as distinctly as Theism. The only consistent course is to use

the privative "_a_," and stand to the term which means "without Theos,

without God-idea."

§2.

This preamble, it is to be hoped, may make it easier to appreciate

the technicalities of Bradlaugh's doctrine. He was not the untrained

Atheist of the theistic imagination, who may be confounded with a

quotation from Kant by one of the personages of Mrs Ward's religious

vaudevilles. He knew that Kant, reduced to plain language, gives the

whole answer to Kant. Beginning as a boy to defend his Theism in

debate, he saw it demolished by one of those born debaters who are

found every now and then among the working class, men far superior in

native power and intellectual sincerity to those cultured acceptors

of other men obscurities who look down on them.[74] But he did

not trust to "mother-wit," his own or another's. He read all the

philosophic literature he could lay hands on; in particular he became

a close student of Spinoza. A clergyman of my acquaintance maintains

that to the end he was a Spinozist. It would be less misleading to

say that he employed much of the method of Spinoza to establish the

Atheism to which Spinoza's doctrine practically leads,[75] while

always scrupulously recognising that Spinoza formulated Pantheism and

professed only to modify the God-idea. Here are Bradlaugh's own words:--

[Footnote 74: One of the most capable metaphysicians I have personally

known was an inferior stone-mason.]

[Footnote 75: It was not merely the orthodoxy of past ages that saw

virtual Atheism in the position of Spinoza. Jacobi expressly and

constantly maintained that Spinozism and Atheism came to the same

thing. A God who is not outside the world, he argued, is as good as no

God. At the same time, he admitted that the understanding had no escape

from the logical demonstration of the impossibility of a personal God;

and that the Theist must throw himself "overhead into the depths of

faith." See Pünjer's "History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion,"

Eng. tr., p. 632.]

"The logic of Spinoza was directed to the demonstration of one

substance with infinite attributes, for which one substance with

infinite attributes he had as equivalent the name of 'God.' Some who

have since followed Spinoza, have agreed in his one substance, but

have denied the possibility of infinite attributes. Attributes or

qualities, they urge, are attributes of the finite or conditioned,

and you cannot have attributes of substance except as attributes of

its modes. You have in this distinction the division line between

Spinozism and Atheism. Spinoza recognises infinite intelligence; but

Atheism cannot conceive intelligence except in relation, as quality

of the conditioned, and not as the essence of the absolute. Spinoza,

however, denied the doctrine of freewill, as with him all phenomena

are of God; so he rejects the ordinary notions of good and evil."[76]

[Footnote 76: Pamphlet on "Heresy: its Utility and Morality. A Plea and

a Justification," 3rd. ed. p. 35.]

The position here taken up is frequently met by an outcry against

the "denial of intelligence" to the highest power in the universe.

The protest is pure irrelevance. Atheism "denies intelligence" to an

infinite existence simply as it denies it whiskers and dyspepsia.

The point is that intelligence cannot be conceived save as a finite

attribute; every process of intelligence implying limitation and

ignorance.[77] Infinitude must transcend the state of "intelligence."

The "intelligence" of "omniscience" is a chimæra. And when the Atheist

is accused of making himself the highest thing in the universe, the

plain answer is that it is precisely the Theist, and nobody else, who

does so. That is to say, the Theist makes his own mind and personality

the type and analogue of an Infinite and Eternal Power. The Atheist

admits that he can form no conception whatever of Infinite and Eternal

Power. The Theist rushes in where the Atheist declines to tread. And

nothing is more remarkable in the modern history of religion than the

retreat of all theistic argument to some form of the sub-rational

position so laboriously formulated by Kant--that the God-idea is

established, not by any form of reasonable inference from knowledge,

but by the moral needs and constitution of human nature. That doctrine

is not only the formal bankruptcy of all philosophy, logical and

psychological, but is the stultification of every religious system

which adopts it, inasmuch as it is equally valid for each against

all the rest, besides being finally annihilated by the simple fact

of persistent scientific Atheism, which proves that human nature

does _not_ need the sustenance of a God-idea, whether in ethics, in

politics, or in natural science. The only resource of neo-Kantism

against the Atheist is the _argumentum ad hominem_ of imputing to him

"atrophy" of the "spiritual" sense; an argument which--not to employ

a simple _tu quoque_--may be sufficiently met either by the answer

that the "spiritual sense" which maintains Theism is merely the carnal

and self-excited appetite for mental opium, and that the Hindu and

the devout Catholic have it in a much higher degree than the mere

Theist; or by the reminder that even if there were special intellectual

defect behind Atheism, it is, on the Theistic hypothesis, a defect

foreordained by Theos, and is as much part of human nature as the

docility of the Theist.

[Footnote 77: It is unnecessary here to put the further argument that

if we infer intelligence behind the universe by human analogy, we

are bound in consistency to infer organism for the intelligence. Dr

Martineau in his "Modern Materialism," takes refuge from this argument

in declamation, treating the demand for consistency as if it had been a

substantive plea.]

All the psychological line of argument, as put by Kant and his

adaptors, is fully and patiently met by Bradlaugh in his section of the

"Freethinker's Text-Book," which deals in turn with all the main pleas

of orthodoxy. At the close of the examination of Kant he writes, with

great caution and moderation:--

"We do not feel sure that we have either fairly stated Kant's position

or efficiently replied to as much as we have stated. In condensing

within the limits of this Text-Book the views of a writer so involved

in his expressions as is Immanuel Kant, we may have failed both in

exposition and answer, but have the consolation that we at any rate

place before our readers the sources of completer knowledge."

But the modest deprecation was unnecessary, the main theses of Kant

having really been sufficiently stated and met; and the Text-Book goes

on to cite and answer the arguments of an able neo-Kantian Theist, who

had confessedly found Kant unsatisfying, but who offered in his turn

only the vague emotional plea as against Kant's moral plea, backing

it up with the old paralogism of the "spiritual sense." That is the

best that modern Theism can say for itself; and the argument will

never convince anybody who had needed convincing.[78] It is further

repudiated by the orthodox Theism which claims to stand on revelation,

and which in turn is dismissed as ill-founded by more philosophic

Theism.

[Footnote 78: See an examination of the positions of Knight, Davidson,

and Kaftan, in the _Free Review_, August, 1894.]

The orthodox Theism is in this country represented by Professor

Flint, who when challenged by Bradlaugh to defend his position

philosophically, took the line of answering that, "for a person

possessed of a typically English intellect, Mr Bradlaugh shows,

in dealing with Theism, a curious predilection for metaphysical

conundrums,"[79] and proceeded to meet the said "conundrums" in the

spirit of a joker dealing with a joke. The argument, "Unless it be

nonsense to affirm infinity and Mr Bradlaugh added to it, why should

it be nonsense to affirm infinity and the universe added to it?" is a

sample of the reasoning with which Dr Flint satisfies the pious, in

answer to the Atheistic doctrine that human beings are only forms of

the infinite existence. Another of the Professor's expedients is to say

that God has reason but does not reason. "No intelligent man thinks or

speaks of God as reasoning;" which is a severe attack, from a Scotch

Professor of Divinity, on the author of Isaiah i. 18. But more than

passing notice is here due to one of the Professor's remarks[80]:--

"There is an impression in some quarters that Atheism is advocated

in a weak and unskilful manner by the chiefs of Secularism. It is an

impression which I do not share. Most of the writers who are striving

to diffuse Atheism in literary circles are not to be compared in

intellectual strength with either Mr Holyoake or Mr Bradlaugh."

[Footnote 79: "Anti-Theistic Theories," 4th ed. p. 517.]

[Footnote 80: _Id._, pp. 518, 519.]

Such a testimony, from such a source, counts for rather more than the

arguments emanating thence.

As to the assertion, again, that Atheists say "there is no God"--an

assertion made with surprising frequency by professed Agnostics--it

was constantly met by Bradlaugh with the answer that the phrase has no

meaning.

"The initial difficulty is in defining the word 'God.' It is equally

impossible to intelligently affirm or deny any proposition unless

there is at least an understanding, on the part of the affirmer or

denier, of the meaning of every word used in the proposition. To me

the word 'God' standing alone is a word without meaning."[81]

[Footnote 81: Pamphlet, "Is there a God?" p. 1.]

It would have been more exact to say that it has too many meanings to

stand for any one in particular. Once defined, the alleged existence

can be rationally denied, as may the existence of a race of centaurs,

half men half horses, or of dragons who breathe fire, or of a being

answering to the description of Neptune, driving a chariot on the sea,

or of Apollo, driving the sun. All definitions of God which affirm

personality or human attributes are open to immediate stultification

by argument. "I have never yet heard," wrote Bradlaugh, "a definition

of God from any living man, nor have I read a definition by dead or

living man, that was not self-contradictory.... But the moment you tell

me you mean the God of the Bible, or the God of the Koran, or the God

of any particular Church, I am prepared to tell you that I deny that

God."[82] The person who says we have no right to deny the existence

of his imagined God until we have been all through the universe, has

on his own showing no right to deny the existence of such Gods as

are described in the stories of Saturn and Thor. The most paralytic

Agnosticism, however, like the most devout Theism, seems content to be

as sure that these are imaginary existences, as that Julius Cæesar was

never in America.

[Footnote 82: Second reply to Bishop Magee, p. 35.]

The relation of Atheism to Agnosticism is thus wholly misconceived by

most people who differentiate them. That is to say, the logical form

of Agnosticism--by which is not meant the self-styled Agnosticism

which resorts to the use of the name "God"--comes to the same thing as

Atheism, since it argues that the current God-idea is a mere reflex

of humanity, like those which preceded it. Bradlaugh sometimes grew

impatient (and small wonder) with people who wrote to him to point

out that Atheism was wrong, and Agnosticism right. They never took

the trouble to try to understand what he meant by Atheism; and it

must with regret be said that more competent Agnostics often make

the same omission. The simple-minded Agnostic who candidly remarks,

"I do not say there is no God, but I haven't seen any evidence for

one," is kept in countenance by the more learned Agnosticism which

excludes from its learning the literature of modern Atheism. Bradlaugh

had seen the new name readily adopted by men who not only shunned the

old but helped to heap on it an ignorant odium. He had seen Atheism

strangely misrepresented by Mr Spencer in "First Principles;"[83]

he pointed out that a mere avowal of ignorance is not worth making,

and that Agnosticism is not a philosophy at all, unless it says, not

merely, "I do not know of the thing you assert," but "you do not know

either"--which are just the statements of Atheism. He might have

added that while "Atheist," though a term much abused by Theists, is

a good word, and a real doctrine-name, "Agnostic" is a bad word, and

in itself no doctrine-name at all, since it says "Don't know," without

hinting what it is that is not known. The present writer has heard a

Christian Evidence lecturer, a Master of Arts, delight a Christian

audience by saying that the nearest English equivalent to "Agnostic" is

"Ignoramus." His strategy was characteristic of his cause, but he was

dialectically within his rights.

[Footnote 83: Mr Spencer (p. 31) represents the "Atheistic theory" as

professing to "conceive" an infinite and eternal universe, and thereby

to "explain" it, when the very essence of Atheism is to insist (as does

Mr Spencer) that infinity is only the negation of conceptions, and that

an infinite universe cannot be "explained."]

The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the

word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant

calumny that it is expedient to use a new term which, though in some

respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time have a recognised

meaning. The case, so stated, is reasonable; but there is the _per

contra_ that, whatever the motive with which the name is used, it is

now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of doctrine, varying

loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheist escapes

that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from half-hearted and

half-minded patronage.

§3.

Another obstinate misunderstanding arises over the word "Materialism."

Bradlaugh did not willingly or often resort to that name. He seems

to have preferred the more philosophic term "Monist," or the useful

word "Naturist," which latter, however, he did not seek to force into

common use.[84] But he was of course a "Materialist" in the sense

in which alone the word is used by those who so name themselves--a

sense sufficiently different from those put upon it by most of the

writers who assail them, rationalists and supernaturalists alike. The

former assailants, of course, do the more harm. Philosophy has in

England suffered peculiarly from the tendency of professed thinkers

to dissociate themselves anxiously from certain doctrine-names that

are ill spoken of, and to join in the vulgar outcry against them,

rather than try judicially to estimate their significance and value.

Of such bourgeois prudence we have examples in some of our leading

modern philosophers. And there is the other trouble that some men with

great powers of a certain sort lack the capacity to see or grasp all

the parts of a broad problem at once or in relation, and must needs

cramply lift and handle only one at a time. Rationalists of this kind

do immense harm to the cause of rationalism, as pietists of the same

stamp do to the cause of their creed, by elevating a small or verbal

difference into a sectarian issue, and representing other rationalists

as opposed to them when there is no fundamental difference in the

case. When this want of sense of proportion in an able man goes with

intellectual vacillation or discontinuity, it works the maximum of

frustration. We have a prominent instance in Professor Huxley, who

has given countenance to contradictory conclusions on half-a-dozen

main questions. He has gratuitously encouraged the enforced use of the

Bible in public schools, and he has wearied Freethinkers by tediously

strategic combats on worn-out topics with those who hold the very

beliefs that the Bible sets up in minds which reverence it. On the

question of Materialism he has reinforced reaction by contemptuous

language towards men whose teaching is identical with his own so

far as that is sound; and on the other hand he has obstructed the

spread of logical Materialism by stating crudely and without verbal

circumspection a strictly materialistic doctrine.[85] What is worse,

he has written on Materialism as did Lewes--without treating the term

historically; and he has at times condemned Materialists in general

without specifying any one man's teaching in detail. Another writer

in the same category, of whom better things might be expected, is

Professor Karl Pearson. That gentleman, after the fashion of Professor

Huxley, has at one time pooh-poohed the criticism of theology as an

attack on a ruin, and at another has furiously cannonaded the bones

of a dead theologian. And recently he has gone out of his way, in his

"Grammar of Science" so-called, to asperse Materialism, while teaching

practically nothing else of a positive nature. Mr Pearson's account

of the Materialism of Büchner and Bradlaugh, superciliously given in

a footnote, is in the circumstances the worst misrepresentation of

the matter now before the public. He speaks of "the Materialist" and

"modern Materialists" as substituting force for the will or spirit

of the Spiritists as a "cause" of motion, and goes on to confuse the

already much-confused question of "necessity" by playing the bull in

that philosophic china-shop.

[Footnote 84: "Naturalist" seems first to have been used in this sense

by Holbach.]

[Footnote 85: "What we call the operations of the mind are functions of

the brain and the _materials of consciousness_ are products of cerebral

activity" ("Hume," p. 80). Mr Huxley goes on, "It is hardly necessary

to point out that the doctrine just laid down is what is commonly

called Materialism."]

"The idea of enforcement," he writes, "of some necessity in the order

of a sequence, remains deeply rooted in men's minds, as a fossil from

the spiritualistic explanation of will as the cause of motion. This

idea is preserved in association with the scientific description

of motion; and in the Materialist's notion of force as that which

_necessitates_ certain changes or sequences of motion, we have the

ghost of the old Spiritualism. The force of the Materialist is the

will of the old Spiritualist separated from consciousness. Both carry

us into the region beyond our sense-impressions; both are therefore

_metaphysical_; but perhaps the inference of the old Spiritualist was,

if illegitimate, less absurdly so than that of the modern Materialist,

_for the Spiritualist did not infer will to exist beyond the sphere of

consciousness with which he had always found will associated_."

This passage, fallacious from its first clause--being but an

empirical attack on empiricism--becomes in the last, with its "for,"

a mere misstatement. The Spiritualist did most emphatically infer

will outside the sphere of consciousness with which he had always

found will associated, since he expressly assumed a consciousness

without organisation--a thing he never met with. It is further quite

unjustifiable to assert that "modern Materialists" carry outside the

sphere of consciousness ideas either of "will" or of "enforcement,"

which they have always found associated with consciousness. Professor

Pearson is confused by words, which are apt to be even for wise men at

times what Hobbes said they were for fools. The task of philosophy is

a perpetual struggle with the mazes of language; and it is worse than

idle to discuss such problems as Mr Pearson here gratuitously raises,

without analysing the terms which commonly contain them. He uses the

word "necessitates" as if there were no ambiguity or obscurity about

its sense; just as he constantly speaks of our not knowing the "why"

of things, without making a single philosophical attempt to analyse

the psychological force of that profoundly important syllable. What

do we mean by "why," apart from matters of volition? It is the old

story of regarding the leaf as "a flat green object which we know all

about already." Professor Pearson goes about to analyse the leaves of

physics, but too often takes for granted the leaves of language. He

has needlessly approached his task in such a fashion that it becomes

much more a matter of psychology and logic than of physical science;

yet his psychology is little better than a hand-to-mouth criticism,

the mere business psychology of a physicist. His distinction between

philosophical and physicist doctrine (pp. 93, 94), to the effect that

one appeals to temperament but the other not, is a sample of amateur

psychology grievous to consider. And while discrediting certain

doctrines in physics, real or imaginary, on the bare ground that they

are metaphysical, he yet rounds the whole of his own doctrine to an

expressly metaphysical account of the nature of scientific knowledge.

There is, of course, no real dividing-line between metaphysics and

sense-knowledge; what the physicists rightly protest against is just

bad metaphysic, spiritist metaphysic. But when a physicist himself

plunges at every page of his book into more or less gratuitous

metaphysic, and yet assumes to dispose of other men's doctrine

(falsified at that) by calling it metaphysical, he goes beyond fallacy

into what has been considerately described, in a factious politician,

as "moral paradox."

As to the charge against the Materialists--whom Mr Pearson in another

passage typifies by Büchner and Bradlaugh--it is practically untrue

on one head, that of force being the "cause" of motion; and quite

inconclusive on another, that of "enforcement" and "necessity." Mr

Pearson is uncandid enough to cite no passage on either head, and I

know not whether the latter is not as inaccurate as the other. Even

if, however, a Materialist should talk of motion as a "necessity" of

matter, it would amount to nothing to impugn him without showing what

he conceives "necessity" to be. The word is a plexus of connotations;

and to identify it out-of-hand with the conceptions of spiritists is

a course more worthy of a theologian than of a man of science. Mr

Pearson's way of talking of "enforcement," as if the word conveyed any

fixed scientific sense whatever, is a commission of the very offence

he unjustly charges on the school of Büchner. But as to the statement

that Büchner and Bradlaugh are wont to speak of force as the "cause"

of motion, it is really not true. Büchner in his typical work, "Force

and Matter," does in one passage write somewhat unguardedly of the

"force inherent in matter"--_i.e._ in the "something" empirically

known "which we call matter"--as being the cause (_Ursache_) of the

activities which are the phenomena of the said matter;[86] but this

momentary verbal laxity is not at all the burden of his treatise. It

is in any case much more pardonable than the gross contradictions

which Mr Pearson quotes from the writings of Professors Thomson and

Tait, collaborators in special physics; it is paralleled by phrases

which he cites from Huxley, Nägeli, Spencer, and Weismann; and it is

much less serious than the inconsistencies and fallacies into which Mr

Pearson himself repeatedly falls. Even while repudiating the notion

above cited as to "cause" (which he does without reference to the

well-known discussions, from Hume onward, as to the force of the term),

he writes (p. 352): "... We still shall not find in 'force,' _as_

either the cause of motion, or the cause of change in motion, _anything

more_ than that routine of perceptions which ... is the scientific

definition of causation." With this account of causation Büchner and

Bradlaugh, and everybody else who has appreciated the effect of Hume's

reasoning, would agree, save in so far as the phrasing falls into the

very crudities of expression which mar Hume's pioneer argument. Mr

Pearson writes that we "sadly need separate terms for the routine of

sense-impressions," yet he never hesitates either to use a general term

loosely or to disparage an unpopular man for doing the same thing. He

says of material particles (p. 327): "All we can scientifically say

is, that the _cause_ of their motion is their relative position; but

this is no explanation of why they move in that position." This use

of "cause" is really looser than Büchner's, and is not "scientific"

at all. The use of "why"--as if we had a clear conception of physical

"why" as distinct from that of "cause"--is mere verbal bungling.

[Footnote 86: Section on "The Value of Matter" (_Werth des Stoffs_),

Eng. tr., p. 68.]

Again, in finally formulating the first general law of motion, Mr

Pearson writes (p. 342): "Every corpuscle, whether of ether or gross

'matter,' _influences the motion_ of the adjacent ether corpuscles."

Here the word "influences" raises (as he elsewhere admits by

implication) the same problem as the word "causes," so that his own

most deliberate phraseology incurs the objection he makes to another

man's incidental expression.

As to essentials, Mr Pearson says what Büchner does. He ostensibly

regards matter as "_that which moves_," confusing the definition,

however, by saying that we can conceive "forms of motion" as _also_

moving. This is really going far to set up a dualistic notion analogous

to that which he imputes to Materialists; and he will probably see on

reflection that his idea needs careful re-statement. The essential

thing is that the scientific conception of matter excludes the idea

of a primary dissociation between force (or life) and matter, and

their union at a point of time by a "spiritual" Creator's volition.

The old dualistic doctrine of _inertia_, which is so re-stated by Mr

Pearson (p. 344) as to entirely alter its meaning, is still commonly

cited as establishing the dualistic or spiritualistic position. The

dualistic doctrine as to matter is put and maintained by the Rev. Mr

Westerby in his debate with Bradlaugh (p. 27) thus: "_Force is always

external to the matter that is moved._" The effect of Mr Pearson's

account of Materialism is to assert that that is virtually the teaching

of Materialists so-called. But it certainly is not. The slipperiness

and elasticity of language are such that a single word may set up

a fallacious implication; and the word "cause" is as slippery and

elastic as any. But the obvious and avowed purpose of Büchner's book

is to repudiate and overthrow the dualistic notion of the universe. He

expressly and repeatedly affirms that matter and motion, matter and

force, are inseparable in thought. "The conception of dead matter,"

he writes, "is a mere abstraction." "The investigation of motion

is the peculiar task of modern science, and her province embraces

everything that can be traced back to motion. Matter in motion or

capable of motion is or must be her first and last word."[87] Further,

Büchner neither prefers to call himself a Materialist nor represents

science as propagandist. "Science," he writes, "is not idealistic, nor

spiritualistic, nor materialistic, but simply natural."[88] As to the

term "Materialist," he remarks that "since the first publication of

this book, the term has become to some extent current, and at every

fitting and unfitting opportunity the designation has been dragged in

neck and heels, _unsuited though it is to the defenders of a philosophy

which regards matter, force, and mind, not as separate entities, but

only as different sides or various phenomenal modes of the same primal

or basic principle_."[89] Similarly Bradlaugh invariably spoke of "one

existence, of which all phenomena are modes," expressly declaring that

we can only know phenomena; which was his way of saying that we can

never "know why" in the sense in which theologians claim to do so. At

no time did he speak of "force" as a separate entity "causing motion."

[Footnote 87: Section on "Motion," _end_.]

[Footnote 88: Section on the "Value of Matter" (_Werth des Stoffs_),

_end_.]

[Footnote 89: Section on the "Value of Matter" (_Werth des Stoffs_),

_end_.]

After speaking of Materialists as habitually calling force the "cause

of motion," Mr Pearson loosely represents Büchner and the followers

of Bradlaugh as finding "mechanical _laws_ inherent in the things

themselves;" and he declares that this materialism "collapses under

the slightest pressure of logical criticism." He has in reality passed

upon it no logical criticism whatever, his frequent lack of lucidity

becoming at this place sheer darkness. What he has said on the point

has been wholly metaphysical; but his metaphysic, ill done as it is,

perfectly justifies the doctrine he finally and irrelevantly contemns.

"In the necessarily limited verifiable correspondence of our perceptual

experience with our conceptual model," he writes (p. 353), "lies the

basis of our mechanical description of the universe." "A shorthand

_résumé_ of our conceptual experience" is repeatedly specified by him

as the gist or purpose of science; but when he wants to discredit

anybody else's doctrine, it suffices him to call it just such a

shorthand _résumé_ or dismiss it as metaphysical. And the arbitrariness

of his verdicts becomes apparent once for all when he writes: "It is

perhaps needless to add that the gifted lady who speaks of secularists

as holding the 'creed of Clifford and Charles Bradlaugh' has failed to

see the irreconcilable divergence between the inventor of 'mind-stuff'

and the follower of Büchner." That is to say, Mr Pearson applauds or

distinguishes Clifford for perhaps the loosest formula ever put forward

in the name of Materialism, but still a formula not contradictory

of Büchner's and Bradlaugh's monism, while disparaging Büchner and

Bradlaugh for their Materialism. It will be clear to a logical reader

that the conception of "mind-stuff" ("shorthand" with a vengeance!)

is only a random materialistic suggestion--not an infrequent thing

with Clifford--but still a suggestion quite reconcilable with

materialistic monism. Büchner writes that "all yet future forms,

including reasoning beings, potentially or in capacity, must have been

contained in that primal world-mist out of which our solar system was

gradually evolved."[90] Bradlaugh always defined his "one existence" as

including "all that is necessary for the happening of all phenomena."

Mr Huxley--whom Mr Pearson does not asperse as a "Materialist"--has

expressed himself in terms almost identical with Büchner's.[91] To

speak of "mind-stuff" as being part of the "primal world-mist" is

merely to suggest a hopeless "conceptual mode" of thought over and

above the most exact "shorthand" to which words can well reduce the

inferences of science as to cosmic history. That Clifford would have

approved of either the tone or the judgment of his successor in the

matter one may take leave to doubt. His "temperament" was different

from that of Mr Pearson, who supplies in his own person the disproof of

his own primitive doctrine that scientific opinions have nothing to do

with temperament.

[Footnote 90: Section on the "Value of Matter" (_Werth des Stoffs_),

_end_.]

[Footnote 91: See his "Critiques and Addresses," p. 306.]

The unpleasing fact is that personal interest and prejudice have

been the main factors in establishing the ill-repute of the term

"Materialist." It arose very much as the term "Freethinker" arose,

by way of broadly marking off a new tendency in active thought. The

Freethinkers, so-called, simply claimed to follow their reason freely,

where religious people were tied down to their traditional creed. The

Materialists simply emphasized the new and spreading conception--at

once Pantheistic and Atheistic--that the laws of things were to be

looked for in the constitution of things, and not in any "spiritual"

volition of a superior being or beings. They opposed the notion of

a primal distinction between matter and the energies and activities

thereof. Spiritism was for them the sum-total of all the guesses

and hallucinations of ignorance; and their contrasted Materialism

was imputed to them as a vileness by the types of mind which found

elevation in the doctrine of blood sacrifice and ritual theophagy.

Scientific disinterestedness was bracketed with grossness of life,

and this often by pietists as gross in life as in thought. Every

Spiritist who went a certain way in Materialism was libelled in turn;

but the semi-Materialist could always indemnify himself by libelling

those who went further.[92] Newton's theistic theory of matter is as

absurd a one as any man of science ever framed; but he has earned by

it the tenderness of later theists, while his fame secures the lenity

of later physicists. Thus some guarded rationalists who pounce like

weasels on every slip, real or fancied, of professed Freethinkers,

honey their voices to speak of halfway thinkers whose slips are gross,

open, palpable. They have their social reward. Bradlaugh and Büchner

have taken a different course. Finding the term "Materialism" in itself

unphilosophic, they have still looked to the essential point of its

broad historic significance. It marks on the side of physical science,

from La Mettrie onwards, the repudiation of theological methods; and

though they would not have coined the name for themselves, they have

not repudiated it, but have instead sought to free the doctrine behind

it from the laxities and crudities which belong to all new departures

of thought, and which abound in the writings alike of Idealists and

of some critical pragmatists in a greater degree than in those of the

pioneers they attack. Büchner and Bradlaugh knew that by accepting an

unpopular name they incurred the hostility alike of blockheads, of

zealots, and of the scientists who look anxiously to their status;

but they took their risks. Bradlaugh had constantly to explain that

by "matter"--if he used the term at all, which he preferred not to

do--he meant simply total existence: all that is necessary for the

happening of all phenomena. Yet men still speak of him as saying that

"dead matter" gives rise to life and mind. It will become clear to a

thoughtful reader, after a little reflection, that under Bradlaugh's

definition there is no assertion of the cosmic priority of any one

mode of existence. He merely insisted that there should be an end

of the fantasy of "mind" or "spirit" or "will", calling a tangible

universe into existence--a fantasy into which anti-Materialists are

always relapsing. Philosophically speaking, out-and-out Spiritism[93]

and strict Materialism come to exactly the same thing, since each

predicates a going, infinite universe, with one pervading infinite

energy; an energy which one side chooses to call by the primitive

name of spirit. As Büchner writes: "The whole struggle yet proceeding

between Materialism and Spiritualism, still more that between

Materialism and Idealism, must appear futile and groundless to him

who has once attained to the knowledge of the untenability of the

_dualistic_ theory which always underlies it." In the same way, as we

have seen, strict Pantheism--which is the inevitable end of rational

Theism--comes logically to the same thing as strict Atheism, the only

difference being the verbal one set up by the Pantheist's adherence to

the primitive name of Theos.

[Footnote 92: A refinement on the old simplicity is reached when we

find Mr Huxley sneering at Materialists whose teaching is really

more circumspect than his own, and Mr Harrison in turn execrating in

the name of "religion" the medical materialism of Mr Huxley, where

the latter is simply putting forward as an original speculation a

well-established pathological fact.]

[Footnote 93: This is, of course, a widely different doctrine from what

is commonly known as Spiritualism: the belief in the perpetuity of

human personalities, in a bodily form, without other bodily qualities.]

In this connection it is difficult to deal with the position taken

up by Mrs Besant, the valued friend of Bradlaugh and of the present

writer. Mrs Besant has greatly perplexed her old friends by professing

to repudiate the Materialism she formerly taught, on the score that

it gives "dead matter" as the source of life and mind. They can

only conclude that she has undergone a psychological change which

affects her knowledge of her former positions. We have seen that

Bradlaugh's and Büchner's teaching was fundamentally different from

what she represents materialism to be; and there is no other school

of Materialism in question. The strange thing is that Mrs Besant

herself translated from the German, carefully and well, Büchner's

"Force and Matter" (as also his "Mind in Animals"), in which the

doctrine is flatly contrary to her present account of it. Büchner even

uses unguarded language--as it is very difficult to avoid doing--in

insisting on the perpetual activity of matter. "Matter," he writes, "is

not dead, inanimate, or lifeless, but is in motion everywhere, and is

full of most active life." Bradlaugh more warily pointed to the danger

of giving ambiguity to the term "life," which is properly the name

for the broad classes of the phenomena of plants and animals. But he

never taught or fancied that certain of the mere forms of existence in

themselves originated other forms of existence. By "matter" he did not

mean to specialise rocks any more than protoplasm or ether.

A more defensible argument has been used by Mrs Besant and others

against Materialism: the argument, namely, that it is impossible

to think of a transition from physical action to the phenomenon of

thought. A number of physicists--among them Tyndall--can be quoted

as declaring that there is a "great gulf fixed" between molecular

motion and the state of consciousness. Tyndall once laid it down

that the demand for "logical continuity between molecular forces and

the phenomena of consciousness" is "a rock on which Materialism must

inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy

of the human mind." But this loud-sounding affirmation on analysis

resolves itself into the popular rhetoric to which Tyndall was too

much given. What is meant by a "complete philosophy of the human

mind"? If Materialism asserts that certain constant correlations

remain nevertheless "mysterious," it does not thereby cease to be

a complete philosophy of the human mind. The statement that our

whole knowledge of causation is just a knowledge of correlation is

_part_ of the complete philosophy of the human mind--that is, of the

systematic and exact statement of our tested knowledge. To say that

human faculty is strictly limited is not an avowal of incompleteness

in the philosophy which says it. And as a matter of fact, the

statement as to the "discontinuity" between "molecular forces" and

the "phenomena of consciousness" is a statement which, so far as

it has any meaning, stands to be made of all other correlations of

phenomena. When I strike a match on the box, I evoke the phenomena of

light and heat. In scientific terms, I set up by friction a chemical

action quite "discontinuous" with motion in mass, and this in turn

sets up a wave-motion in the hypothetical ether (of which I can form

no conception) representing light. Materialism no more "splits" on the

one "rock" than on the other.[94] The one special difficulty as to

consciousness is a difficulty that affects all philosophies alike: the

difficulty that it is consciousness that must analyse consciousness.

Neither by predicating "mind-stuff" nor by alleging "soul" is that

difficulty evaded. There still remains the admitted correlation

between brain-and-nerve action and thought; and that correlation is on

all-fours with those of physics so-called. As the case is put by Dr

John Drysdale (after reasonings to an apparently different effect),

"It may be held proved in physiology that for every feeling, every

thought, every volition, a correlative change takes place in the nerve

matter;" and it is scientific to say with him that the phenomena of

mind as a function "require no further explanation" than the conditions

of those changes. When Dr Ferrier writes that "no purely physiological

explanation can _explain_ the phenomena of consciousness," unless

he simply means that there a psychological or logical element (not

Spiritism) must enter into the explanation, he is merely stumbling

in the old way over the word "explain." What is "explanation"? As

Professor Pearson laboriously shows, and as Hume showed long ago,

all that takes place in our explanations of physical phenomena is

recognition of a routine of sense experience. The theological habit

has given men a pseudo-conception of "explanation;" and though they

have learned to dispense with that process in physics, they still

confusedly demand it in biology and psychology. But the very men who

at one time talk of "mystery" and "gulf" between matter and mind, at

other times recognise that the mystery is no more and no less in one

correlation than in another. Thus Tyndall, who elsewhere verbalises

against "Materialism," after describing the development of the human

organism from the egg, writes: "Matter I define as that mysterious

thing by which all that is accomplished." Well, that is "modern

Materialism" or nothing; the Materialism of Büchner and of Bradlaugh.

The mere doctrinal or pragmatic expressions of single physicists

count for nothing. As Bradlaugh put it in his debate with the Rev. Mr

Westerby, it is the cases of Ferrier that count, not his opinions. The

best observer is not the best formulator or thinker; and the art or

science of logical speech is not gratuitously thrown in with either

mathematical or artistic faculty. To turn the data of science into

philosophy is a specialist's work.

[Footnote 94: Tyndall answered to this argument that the flash of light

from the union of oxygen and hydrogen "is an affair of consciousness,

the objective counterpart of which is a vibration. It is a flash only

by our interpretation." But that is no answer at all. Tyndall never

went into the psychological problem fully.]

Any one who desires to obtain in a short time by dint of close

attention a notion of the difficulty and complexity of the argument as

between monism and dualism cannot do better than read the report of

the debate between Bradlaugh and the Rev. Mr Westerby on the notion

of Soul. Mr Westerby, though he wrote some of his papers in advance

instead of meeting his opponent's case, was decidedly the ablest of

the clerics with whom Bradlaugh debated; and in his hands the orthodox

cause suffered as little as might be. The reader may or may not in the

end decide to stand with Bradlaugh, but he will certainly have learned

to see the folly of the cheap journalistic dismissal of an undefined

"Materialism" as "exploded," and the error of the notion that Bradlaugh

was unqualified to handle philosophic and scientific issues, or that he

was a mere public speaker, unskilled in dialectic.

Finally, as to the meaningless expression that "things happen by

chance," he of course never used it. Of any person who puts this phrase

in the mouths of Atheists, it may be said at once that he is unfit

to discuss a philosophical question. He either does not understand

what he discusses, or is wilfully untruthful. The phrase "happens by

chance"--as was long ago recognised by Hume, after he had himself

fallen into the ordinary meaningless use of the term--only means either

"happens without our intending it," or "happens without our being able

to trace the cause." It is significant only for everyday purposes, and

in philosophy can only serve to set up a chimera. All events must be

conceived as having a "cause," in the ordinary sense of the term. The

Atheist certainly avows that he can only trace causation a small way

in the universe; but he does not for a moment suppose that he would be

giving an explanation of any event if he referred it to "Chance." His

doctrine is that the universe and its total energy must be conceived

as infinite and eternal; that in physics the question "Why?" resolves

itself into the question "How?" and that the business of science is

just to give the answer as fully as may be.

§4.

While Bradlaugh was thus an exact thinker and reasoner, he

distinguished himself above all the rationalists of his time by the

energy and persistence with which he sought to bring his philosophy

home to the popular mind. He was fundamentally a reformer, and he

could not consent, as so many do, to keep silence on errors of creed,

so called, and resist merely errors of action. For him, creed was

action, and action creed. He was so thoroughly a man of action that he

must needs act on his conviction in matters of opinion, so called, as

in anything else.

It was no doubt the record and the result of the French Revolution

that moved the majority of political reformers for two generations to

keep their own counsel on religious matters. Paine has been expressly

charged with hindering the cause of democratic politics by identifying

himself also with the cause of Freethinking. To a man like Bradlaugh

such an objection counted for nothing. It was not merely that he saw

how profoundly religion reacts on life, how creed shapes conduct, and

how the current religion must always tend to support old political

doctrine as against new. He took his course instinctively as well

as reasoningly. That a doctrine is false was to him a reason for

exposing it as such; and though as a utilitarian he held that truth

is the best policy, he did not wait for the demonstration before

choosing his course. He had in fact that love of truth for its own

sake which is the inspiration of all scientific progress; but he had

it without restriction, or at least with as little restriction as

can well be. No man can be equally interested in all inquiries; and

none can help thinking some unprofitable; but Bradlaugh was limited

only by his tastes, never by the common opinion that the spread of

truth is inexpedient. He would give facilities for all conscientious

truth-seeking whatever, barring only random disclosures of sensational

facts with no better motive than sensation, or with no likelihood of

edification to balance the likelihood of the reverse. As to the great

themes of belief and discussion in all ages, he simply could not think

that human welfare is promoted by maintaining beliefs known to be

false. He was a democrat in religion as in politics. If truth was good

for him, it must be equally good for the multitude, so far as it was

possible to enlighten them. They must needs be enlightened by language

within reach of their capacity; but while he would make matters plain

for them, he would in no wise consent to garble and conceal what he

held to be the truth. With the many people who either care nothing

whether current beliefs are false or true, or think it desirable that

they should be false, he had no sympathy. It seemed to him that if

anything was worth investigating, the most serious beliefs of the mass

of the human race must be; and the idea that the mass could be helped

or raised by keeping them deluded was to him morally repugnant and

sociologically false. "My object," he writes in his pamphlet on Heresy,

"is to show that the civilisation of the mass is in proportion to the

spread of heresy amongst them; that its effect is seen in an exhibition

of manly dignity and self-reliant effort which is utterly unattainable

amongst a superstitious people." And all acts of prayer and religious

propitiation were to him survivals of superstition.

"My plea is," he went on, "that modern heresy, from Spinoza to

Mill, has given brain-strength and dignity to every one it has

permeated--that the popular propagandists of this heresy, from

Bruno to Carlile, have been the true redeemers and saviours, the

true educators of the people. The redemption is yet only at its

commencement, the education only lately begun, but the change is

traceable already; as witness the power to speak and write, and the

ability to listen and read, which have grown amongst the masses during

the last hundred years."