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PHILOSOPHIES ANCIENT AND MODERN
RATIONALISM
* * * * *
RELIGIONS: ANCIENT AND MODERN
+Animism.+ By EDWARD CLODD, author of _The Story of Creation_.
+Pantheism.+ By JAMES ALLANSON PICTON, author of _The Religion of the
Universe_.
+The Religions of Ancient China.+ By Professor GILES, LL.D., Professor
of Chinese in the University of Cambridge.
+The Religion of Ancient Greece.+ By JANE HARRISON, Lecturer at Newnham
College, Cambridge, author of _Prolegomena to Study of Greek Religion_.
+Islam.+ By the Rt. Hon. AMEER ALI SYED, of the Judicial Committee of
His Majesty's Privy Council, author of _The Spirit of Islam and Ethics
of Islam_.
+Magic and Fetishism.+ By Dr. A. C. HADDON, F.R.S., Lecturer on
Ethnology at Cambridge University.
+The Religion of Ancient Egypt.+ By Professor W. M. FLINDERS PETRIE,
F.R.S.
+The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria.+ By THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES, late
of the British Museum.
+Early Buddhism.+ By Professor RHYS DAVIDS, LL.D., late Secretary of The
Royal Asiatic Society.
+Hinduism.+ By Dr. L. D. BARNETT, of the Department of Oriental Printed
Books and MSS., British Museum.
+Scandinavian Religion.+ By WILLIAM A. CRAIGIE, Joint Editor of the
_Oxford English Dictionary_.
+Celtic Religion.+ By Professor ANWYL, Professor of Welsh at University
College, Aberystwyth.
+The Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland.+ By CHARLES SQUIRE,
author of _The Mythology of the British Islands_.
+Judaism.+ By ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, Lecturer in Talmudic Literature in
Cambridge University, author of _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_.
+The Religion of Ancient Rome.+ By CYRIL BAILEY, M.A.
+Shinto, The Ancient Religion of Japan.+ By W. G. ASTON, C.M.G.
+The Religion of Ancient Mexico and Peru.+ By LEWIS SPENCE, M.A.
+Early Christianity.+ By S. B. BLACK, Professor at M'Gill University.
+The Psychological Origin and Nature of Religion.+ By Professor J. H.
LEUBA.
+The Religion of Ancient Palestine.+ By STANLEY A. COOK.
+Manicheeism.+ By F. C. CONYBEARE. (_Shortly._)
PHILOSOPHIES
+Early Greek Philosophy.+ By A. W. BENN, author of _The Philosophy of
Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century_.
+Stoicism.+ By Professor ST. GEORGE STOCK, author of _Deductive Logic_,
editor of the _Apology of Plato_, etc.
+Plato.+ By Professor A. E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews University, author of
_The Problem of Conduct_.
+Scholasticism.+ By Father RICKABY, S.J.
+Hobbes.+ By Professor A. E. TAYLOR.
+Locke.+ By Professor ALEXANDER, of Owens College.
+Comte and Mill.+ By T. WHITTAKER, author of _The Neoplatonists,
Apollonius of Tyana and other Essays_.
+Herbert Spencer.+ By W. H. HUDSON, author of _An Introduction to
Spencer's Philosophy_.
+Schopenhauer.+ By T. WHITTAKER.
+Berkeley.+ By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER, D.C.L., LL.D.
+Swedenborg.+ By Dr. SEWALL.
+Nietzsche: His Life and Works.+ By ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.
+Bergson.+ By JOSEPH SOLOMON.
+Rationalism.+ By J. M. ROBERTSON.
+Lucretius and the Atomists.+ By EDWARD CLODD.
* * * * *
RATIONALISM
By J. M. ROBERTSON
AUTHOR OF 'A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT' 'LETTERS ON REASONING,' ETC.
LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1912
CONTENTS
PAGE
Sec. 1. THE TERM 1
Sec. 2. THE PRACTICAL POSITION 7
Sec. 3. THE RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 12
Sec. 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE 20
Sec. 5. THE SKEPTICAL RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 27
Sec. 6. THE MEANING OF REASON 37
Sec. 7. THE TEST OF TRUTH 47
Sec. 8. ULTIMATE PROBLEMS 62
Sec. 9. IDEALS 76
RATIONALISM
Sec. 1. THE TERM
The names 'rationalist' and 'rationalism' have been used in so many
senses within the past three hundred years that they cannot be said to
stand quite definitely for any type or school of philosophic thought.
For Bacon, a 'rationalist' or _rationalis_ was a physician with _a
priori_ views of disease and bodily function; and the Aristotelian
humanists of the Helmstadt school were named _rationalistas_ about the
same period by their opponents. A little later some Continental scholars
applied the name to the Socinians and deists; and later still it
designated, in Britain, types of Christian thinkers who sought to give a
relatively reasoned form to articles of the current creed which had
generally been propounded as mysteries to be taken on faith. The claim
to apply 'reason' in such matters was by many orthodox persons regarded
as in itself impious, while others derided the adoption of the title of
'rationalist' or 'reasonist' by professing Christians as an unwarranted
pretence of superior reasonableness. Used in ethics, the label
'rationalism' served in the earlier part of the eighteenth century to
stigmatise, as lacking in evangelical faith, those Christians who sought
to make their moral philosophy quadrate with that of 'natural religion.'
Later in the century, though in England we find the status of 'rational'
claimed for orthodox belief in miracles and prophecies as the only valid
evidence for Christianity,[1] rationalism became the recognised name for
the critical methods of the liberal German theologians who sought to
reduce the supernatural episodes of the Scriptures to the status of
natural events misunderstood; and several professed histories of modern
'rationalism' have accordingly dealt mainly or wholly with the
developments of Biblical criticism in Germany.
New connotations, however, began to accrue to the terms in virtue of the
philosophical procedure of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, though his
_Religion within the Bounds of Simple [blossen] Reason_ went far to
countenance the current usage; and when Hegel subsequently proceeded to
identify (at times) reason with the cosmic process, there were set up
implications which still give various technical significances to
'rationalism' in some academic circles. In the brilliant work of
Professor William James on _Pragmatism_, for instance, the term is
represented as connoting, in contrast to the thinking of 'tough-minded'
empiricists, that of a type or school of 'tender-minded' people who are
collectively--
'Rationalistic (going by "principles")
Intellectualistic
Idealistic
Optimistic
Religious
Free-willist
Monistic
Dogmatical.'
Yet it is safe to say that in Britain, for a generation back, the name
has carried to the general mind only two or three of the connotations in
Professor James's list, and much more nearly coincides with his contrary
list characterising 'the tough-minded':--
'Empiricist (going by "facts")
Sensationalistic
Materialistic
Pessimistic
Irreligious
Fatalistic
Pluralistic
Skeptical'
--though here again the item 'pluralistic' does not chime with the
common conception, and 'pessimistic' is hardly less open to challenge.
'Intellectualistic' appears to be aimed at Hegelians, but would be
understood by many as describing the tendency to set up 'reason' against
'authority'; and Professor James's 'rationalists,' who would appear to
include thinkers like his colleague Professor Royce, would not be so
described in England by many university men, clergymen, or journalists.
The name 'rationalist,' in short, has come to mean for most people in
this country very much what 'freethinker' used to mean for those who did
not employ it as a mere term of abuse. It stands, that is to say, for
one who rejects the claims of 'revelation,' the idea of a personal God,
the belief in personal immortality, and in general the conceptions
logically accruing to the practices of prayer and worship.
Perhaps the best name for such persons would be 'naturalist,' which was
already in use with some such force in the time of Bodin and Montaigne.
Kant, it may be remembered, distinguished between 'rationalists,' as
thinkers who did not deny the possibility of a revelation, and
'naturalists' who did. But though 'natural_ism_,' has latterly been
recognised by many as a highly convenient term for the view of things
which rejects 'supernaturalism,' and will be so used in the present
discussion, the correlative 'natural_ist_' has never, so to speak, been
naturalised in English. For one thing, it has been specialised in
ordinary language in the sense of 'student of nature,' or rather of what
has come to be specially known as 'natural history'--in particular, the
life of birds, insects, fishes, and animals. And, further, the term
'naturalism,' like every other general label for a way of thinking, is
liable to divagations and misunderstandings. Some thinkers (known to the
present writer only through the accounts given of them by others) appear
to formulate as a philosophic principle the doctrine that the best way
to regulate our lives is to find out how the broad processes of 'Nature'
is tending, and to conform to it alike our ideals and our practice. The
notion is that if, say, Nature appears to be making for the
extermination of backward races, we should try to help the process
forward. It is doubtful whether more than a very small number of
instructed men have ever entertained such a principle. It is certainly
not the expression of the philosophy of those ancients who sought to
'live according to Nature'; and it would certainly not have been
assented to by such modern 'naturalists' as Spencer and Huxley and
Mill. But if the principle is current at all, it makes the name of
'naturalist' as ambiguous philosophically as 'rationalist' can be.[2]
And similar drawbacks attach to another set of terms which have much to
recommend them--'positive,' 'positivist,' and 'positivism.' They stand
theoretically for (1) the provable, (2) the attitude of the seeker for
intelligible proof in all things, (3) the conviction that the rights of
reason are ultimate and indefeasible. But here again, to say nothing of
the equivoque of 'positive,' we are met by a claim of pre-emption, the
claim of Comte to associate the 'ism' specifically with his system,
theoretic and practical. And for the majority of men with positivist
proclivities, the gist of the 'practical application' of Comte is
incompatible with the positive spirit. Positivism with a capital P is
thereby made for them, as it was for Littre, something alien to
positivism as the free scientific spirit would seek to shape it. And a
wrangle over the ownership of the word would be a waste of time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See _A Full Answer to a late View of the Internal Evidence of the
Christian Religion, in a Dialogue between a Rational Christian and his
Friend_. London, 1777. The orthodox writer deals severely with some
lines of Christian apologetics which have since had vogue.
[2] The somewhat awkward term 'naturalistic,' which is sometimes useful,
is hereinafter used in relation to the sense above given for
'naturalism.'
Sec. 2. THE PRACTICAL POSITION
The usages being so, most of us who can answer to the term 'rationalist'
may reasonably let its general force be decided for us by the stream of
tendency in ordinary speech; and, recognising the existence of other
applications, one may usefully seek to give a philosophic account of
what its adoption seems to involve. That is to say, the present treatise
does not undertake to present, much less to justify, all the views which
have ever been described as 'rationalistic,' but merely to present
current rationalism in the broad sense indicated, as on the one hand an
outcome of tendencies seen at work in the earlier movements so named,
and on the other hand as apparently committing its representatives to a
certain body or class of conclusions. For there is this capital element
in common for all the stirrings known by the name of rationalism, that
they stand for 'private judgment' as against mere tradition or mere
authority. Early 'rationalists' might indeed seek to put a
quasi-rational form upon tradition, and to give reasons for recognising
authority. But in their day and degree they had their active part in the
evolution of the critical faculty, inasmuch as they outwent the line of
mere acquiescence; and views which to-day form part of uncritically
accepted creeds were once products of innovating (however fallacious)
reasoning. There is no _saltum mortale_ in the evolution of thought. The
very opponents of the rationalist often claim to be more rational than
he, and must at least use his methods up to a certain point. This is
done even by the quasi-skeptical school, of whom some claim to
subordinate reason to some species of insight which they either omit to
discriminate intelligibly from the process of judgment, or do not admit
to need its sanction.
'Rationalism,' then, is to be understood relatively. To be significant
to-day, accordingly, it should stand first and last for the habit and
tendency to challenge the doctrines which claim 'religious' or
sacrosanct authority--to seek by reflection a defensible theory of
things rather than accept enrolment under traditional creeds which
demand allegiance on supernaturalist grounds.
Of such thinkers the number is daily increasing. There are now,
probably, tens of thousands of more or less instructed men and women in
this country who would call themselves rationalists in the broad sense
above specified as now generally current. They are all, probably,
Darwinians or evolutionists, mostly 'monists' in Spencer's way,
'determinists' in the philosophic sense of that term if they have worked
at the 'free-will' problem at all, and non-believers in personal
immortality. Very few, at least, bracket the term 'rationalist' with
'spiritualist' in describing themselves: the two tendencies nearly
always divide sharply, though it cannot be said that in strict logic
they are mutually exclusive. Of most, the philosophic attitude
approximates broadly to that of Spencer, though many recognise and avow
the inexpertness of Spencer's metaphysic. Only a few, probably, if any,
could properly be termed 'skeptics' in the strict philosophic sense of
doubters of all inferences. That is a mental attitude more often
professed by defenders of 'revelation,' as Pascal and Huet, who seek to
make the judgment despair of itself in preparation for an act of assent
which is already discredited by such despair. Yet it belongs to the
rationalistic attitude to be ready, in consistency, to analyse all one's
own convictions and listen candidly to all negations of them. A belief
in the possibility of rational certitude is implicit in every process of
sincere criticism; but the discrimination or gradation of certitudes is
the task of rational philosophy.
As we shall see, quasi-rational certitude as regards the process of
evolution is challenged from two points of view by professed believers
in the reality of that process. One school argues that scientific
conclusions are all uncertain because the ultimate assumptions of
science are unverifiable, and that, accordingly, religious assumptions,
being neither more nor less rational than others, may 'reasonably'
stand. Others argue that the process of judgment or reasoning which is
held to establish scientific truth is not adequate to any theory of
interpretation; and that, accordingly, some species of divination--which
in the terms of the case eludes judgment--is to be relied on. Such
thinkers ostensibly profess to 'reason' to the effect that reasoning is
invalid. Against them, those who claim to hold by reason as the totality
of judgment may fitly call themselves by the name 'rationalist.'
Given such a general attitude, then, to what philosophic form is it
justifiably to be reduced? Those who have longest meditated the question
will perhaps be the least quick to give a precise and confident answer.
If training in the scrupulous use of reason sets up any mental habit in
face of large problems, it is the habit of tentative approach; and the
rationalist of to-day should be a much less readily self-satisfied
thinker than the former claimants to the name. Professor James, indeed,
is able to reconcile an ostensible certainty of rightness of method and
result with much experience in investigation. 'A pragmatist,' he tells
us, 'turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate
habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction
and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from fixed principles, closed
systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.' One is delighted to hear
it; but it is perhaps the course of prudence for most of us to doubt our
power of getting entirely clear of inveterate habits.[3] Scrutiny of
philosophic literature fails to reveal any one who entirely succeeded in
it, even slowly. A constant concern for revision, then, would seem to be
forced upon the professed rationalist, who knows how often the appeal to
reason has yielded mere modifications of error, one unjustifiable
credence ousting another. 'Knows,' one says, because the error is
provable to the satisfaction of the judgment which seeks certainty.
Such negative knowledge is the promise of positive.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] 'Pragmatism' soon becomes 'she' in Professor James's hands. Mr.
Schiller seems to prefer 'it'; but he too makes much play with
pragmatism as an entity. Whatever be the amount of 'abstraction'
involved, the verbal method savours of very old-established
malpractices.
Sec. 3. THE RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE
It is fitting, then, at the very outset to make a critical scrutiny of
the implications of our term. Rationalism, broadly, implies the habitual
resort to reason, to reflection, to judgment. The rationalist, in
effect, says, 'That which I find to be incredible I must disbelieve,
whatever prestige may attach to its assertion; that which I find to be
doubtful or inconceivable I will so describe. Finding the practice of
prayer to be incompatible not only with any sincere belief in natural
law, but with the professed religious beliefs of the more educated of
those who resort to it, I will not pray. Seeing all religions to be but
halting manipulations of the guesses and intuitions of savages, to be
still as uncritically credulous in their affirmations as they are blind
in their denials, and to be thus mere loose modifications of older
beliefs felt to be astray, I will go behind them all for my own theory
of things, getting all the help I can alike from those who have reasoned
most loyally on the deeper problems involved, and from those who have
striven most circumspectly to understand the process of causation in
the universe.'
So far, the procedure is one of rejecting demonstrably fallacious
beliefs in regard to the general order of things, substantially on the
lines on which tested and testable conclusions have been substituted for
old delusions in what we term 'the sciences.' At every step the
rationalist is assailed, just as were and are the reformers of the
sciences; first by angry epithets, then by bad arguments as to
'evidence,' then by cooler attempts to demonstrate that his method will
lead to moral harm, whether or not to present or future punishment at
the hands of an angry God. In particular he is assured that on his
principles there can be no restraint upon men's evil proclivities; and
that even the most thoughtful man runs endless dangers of wrong-doing
when he substitutes his private judgment for the 'categorical
imperative' embodied either in religious codes or in the current body of
morality.[4] To such representations the critical answer is that
undoubtedly the application of reason to moral issues incurs the risks
of fallacy which beset all reasoning in science so-called; but that, on
the other hand, every one of those risks attaches at least equally to
all acceptance of 'authoritative' teaching. Galileo could not well err
worse than ancient Semites or Christian priests in matters scientific;
and Clifford could not conceivably div agate more dangerously in morals
than did the plotters and agents of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Even if we put out of the account the overwhelming record of undenied
wickedness wrought in the name of God and faith, there never has been,
and there is no prospect of our ever seeing, unanimity of moral opinion
among even the most disciplined types of religious believers in
'authority.' Even in the Catholic Church it would be difficult to find
any two men of judicial habit of mind who agree in all points as to what
is 'right.'
Nor is the rationalist's position a whit more open to utilitarian
criticism (for his religious opponents, it will be observed, are
narrowly utilitarian even in professing to combat _his_ utilitarianism)
when he is challenged upon his acceptance of 'the voice of conscience,'
otherwise the 'categorical imperative.' The Kantian argument on that
head is a fallacy of shifting terms. Mental hesitation as to obeying the
sense of 'ought' is the proof of the vacillation of the perception of
'oughtness.' When I feel, first, that I 'ought' to forgive a peculator,
and then that I 'ought' to give him up to 'justice'; or, alternatively,
that I ought to rise earlier, and, again, that I may as well enjoy more
sleep, I have reduced the 'categorical imperative' to the last term in a
calculation. And exactly the same thing is done by the believer who is
perplexed as to the 'voice of God.' Religious history and biography are
full of avowals, on the one hand, of the murderous clash of convictions
alike resting on 'revelation' of all kinds, and, on the other hand, of
the agonies of zealots 'wrestling in prayer' to know what is really the
divine will.[5] Cromwell's life illustrates both orders of dilemma, with
a sufficiency of resultant moral evil to arrest propaganda on the side
of faith. And the philosopher of the 'categorical imperative' miscarries
as instructively as does the soldier of divine will. Kant, on the one
hand, vetoes even the telling of a lie to a would-be murderer to put him
astray, and, on the other hand, commends to 'enlightened' clergymen the
systematic preaching of their religion in a double sense, because
_populus vult decipi_. The 'categorical imperative,' as propounded by
him, is a form of self-deception.
When, again, the psychic facts are critically faced and the 'categorical
imperative' is rationally recognised as either the sum of the persisting
moral judgments or the mere verbalism that we ought to do what we feel
we ought to do, the rationalist is still at no disadvantage, utilitarian
or other. It is not there that his tether tightens. Religious morality,
as finally ratified by the more thoughtful among religious men, is but
the endorsement of 'natural' morality. There is not one social
commandment, as distinguished from religious or ritualist dogma, that
did not emerge as a prescription of the natural moral sense, primitive
or otherwise--a supererogatory proof that the religious prescriptions
are from the same source. All surviving religious ethic is to-day
actually accredited as such, precisely because--and only in so far
as--it conforms to natural judgment. Without resort to that tribunal,
the religionist could not discriminate between the sanction of the sixth
commandment and the law of the levirate, which he has cancelled.
The religious sanction, therefore, is logically null, in terms of the
religious man's own mental processes.[6] There is left him, to discredit
the rationalist, only the threat that the God whom he terms infinitely
good will or may punish the unbeliever for not believing on the strength
of a Bible packed with incredible narrative and indefensible doctrine.
The anti-rationalist position is thus reduced to 'Pascal's wager'--at
once the most childish and, from the standpoint of other and nobler
religious thought, the most irreligious argument ever advanced by a
competent intelligence on the side of faith. Pascal's thesis is that if
the unbeliever is wrong, he runs a frightful risk of future torment;
whereas, if he should after all be right, he will be no worse off after
death for having believed. So the 'belief' required of him is a simple
mindless and faithless conformity to a conditional threat. To such moral
perversity can religion persuade.
To Pascal's wager there have been many retorts. Mill declared that if a
God should doom him to hell for having been unable to believe in such a
God, 'to hell he would go'--glad, by implication, not to be in heaven.
Mansel's sole answer was a puerile attempt at a pious sneer. Clifford,
in effect, denounced the Pascalian appeal for what it was, a base appeal
to fear.[7] But it is unnecessary to resort to such logical
supererogation. There are two obvious and decisive rebuttals to Pascal's
doctrine on purely logical ground. Firstly, his thesis is available to
the Moslem or the polytheist no less than to the Christian; and when put
from either of these sides it leaves the Christian running the very risk
with which he menaces the unbeliever. He may have chosen the wrong God.
Secondly, the hypothetical Good God, if in any intelligible sense worthy
of the name, would conceivably be as likely to send Pascal to hell for
dishonouring him as to send the honest atheist there for refusing to
make-believe. The pietist has dishonoured himself to no purpose.
The _a posteriori_ argument for religious conformity has thus come to
nothing; and the process of argument has revealed the
religio-utilitarian champion of morality as traitor to that cause. There
is left him, indeed, the plea that religious fears and sanctions are
good for the ill-disposed believer, who ought, therefore, not to be
disillusioned. As regards the simple dogma of deity, the position has
the emphatic support of Voltaire. But Voltaire declined to use the
favourite menaces of faith, as do many religionists of to-day; and if
those menaces are to be rationally vindicated, there must first be
raised the question whether they could not be improved upon for the
purpose professed. Leaving that task to those who affect them, the
rationalist may claim to be justified in acting on the maxim that
honesty is the best policy in the intellectual as in the commercial
life. There has been no such historical harvest of moral betterment from
the religion of fear as could induce him of all men to employ it as a
moral prophylactic.
Thus far he figures as the vindicator of simple veracity against those
who, in the name of morals, would make it of no account. He has still to
meet, indeed, the challenge: What of the ill-disposed among your own way
of thinking? If an unbeliever should see his way to gain by falsehood
or licit fraud, what should deter him? Much satisfaction appears to be
derived by many well-meaning people from the propounding of this
dilemma. They may or may not be gratified by the answer that if a
rationalist should not be, by training and bias, spontaneously averse to
lying and cheating, or generally unwilling to do otherwise than he would
be done by, or sensitive enough to the blame of his fellows to fear it,
there is indeed no more security for his veracity or honesty than for
that of a typical Jesuit or a pious company promoter. One can but add
that, seeing that in the terms of the case he began by unprofitably
avowing an unpopular opinion, he is presumably, on the average, rather
less likely to lie for gain than those who confessedly find the sheer
fear of consequences a highly important consideration in their own plan
of life, and who have at the same time the promise from their own code
of plenary pardon for all sins on the simple condition of ultimate
repentance.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Even Professor F. H. Bradley, the ablest of living English
philosophers, is responsible for the proposition that 'to wish to be
better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality'
(_Ethical Studies_, 1876, p. 180). As the book has not been reprinted,
despite much demand, it may be inferred that the author no longer stands
to all its positions.
[5] Thus we are told of the heroic Gordon that he was 'perplexed
perpetually, and perpetually in doubt as to the precise will of God with
him' (W. S. Blunt, _Gordon at Khartoum_, 1911, p. 88).
[6] The logical analysis may be carried further, as by Mr. A. J.
Balfour:--'To assume a special faculty which is to announce ultimate
moral laws can add nothing to their validity, nor will it do so the more
if we suppose its authority supported by such sanctions as remorse or
self-approval. Conscience regarded in this way is not ethically to be
distinguished from any external authority, as, for instance, the Deity,
or the laws of the land' (_A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, 1879, p.
345).
[7] The same might be said of Mrs. Browning's minatory picture of the
moment's passage
''Twixt the dying atheist's negative,
And God's face waiting after all'--
round the corner with a flail, belike. Religion cannot be more
dishonoured than by the moral ideals of some of its champions.
Sec. 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE
But we have now clearly imported into the rationalist philosophy a
principle or factor which ostensibly rivals or primes reason. The
rationalist avows a moral bias--an attitude towards his fellows, a moral
'taste,' let us say--which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He
has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds 'revelation'
frequently repellent and the popular 'God' a chimera; even as the
believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to
his moral and speculative bias, and he has been brought up to pretermit
judgment beyond those limits. This bias appears to be partly congenital,
partly acquired; though most men are agreed that many who reveal a given
bias would have presented another had they been differently trained.
Certain forms of congenital bias, that is to say, yield more or less
easily to others, specially fostered or exercised. Whatever be the
respective force of the generative factors, the fact of bias remains;
and there is no escape from the conclusion that it operates in regard to
'intellectual' as well as to 'moral' judgments--to judgments, that is,
of causal interpretation or non-moral discrimination as well as to
judgments upon human action.
The rationalist, in fact, is merely a person who in certain directions
carries the processes of doubt, analysis, and judgment further than do
persons of a different habit of mind. His neighbour, who believes in
'God' or 'the saints' or Mrs. Eddy, may chance to carry those processes
in other directions further than he,--may be more reflective and
experimental and judicious, for instance, in matters of diet,--may even
be an analytical thinker in matters of science to which the so-called
rationalist has given no independent thought. There are well-known
instances of men of science who by analysis widen the bounds of physical
knowledge while accepting, in ways which other men find grotesquely
uncritical, loose propositions on psychic existence. When sounds are
heard from furniture, the rationalist, with his naturalistic bias, looks
for explanations in terms of physics; while the spiritualist, even if he
chance to be a professed physicist, looks for them in terms of
speculative psychics.
Upon a strictly impartial and 'objective' consideration, the two kinds
of bias are seen to be alike forms of craving, desires seeking
satisfaction. Both inquirers seek for 'causes.' But one has the habit of
seeking causes in terms of sequences of known or intelligible processes,
capable of willed repetition; the other yearns to find proof of the
existence of non-material personalities in the cosmos and in his
personal neighbourhood, and, believing in such existence in advance,
either provisionally or rootedly, hopes to bring others to his way of
thinking by a demonstration that certain physical phenomena are not
physically producible. And it must be granted him that herein he is
theoretically at par with the man of science--physical or moral--who,
having spontaneously framed a hypothesis, seeks to find that facts
conform to it. Every man with a hypothesis, broadly speaking, wants to
find that facts are so-and-so.
The rationalist, then, has his bias like another. Though it takes in
part a critical or negative form, it is fundamentally as positive as
another. He has come to crave for coherence and consistency in
narratives, statements, explanations, arguments, propositions, and
systems of thought; even as his 'contrary' or competitor has come to
crave for evidence that something 'supernatural' wields a purposive and
'intelligent' control, mediate or immediate, over all things, using
among others 'supernormal' means. This 'contrary' thinker may or may not
believe in 'spirits' in the ordinary sense, may or may not believe in
the immortality of human minds; but if he is really to be an opponent of
the rationalist bias he is to be classed as having a bias to traditional
or authoritative views of the cosmos, to religious as against
naturalistic explanations of history, to a conception of the human as of
the extra-human processes in terms of a controlling will and purpose. He
too, it is true, must have some craving for coherence and
consistency--else he could not debate and reason at all; but the other
craving in him has primed that.
It is a fallacy, we may note in passing, to suppose that the 'agnostic'
attitude, so-called, is something between the two main forms of bias
here posited. Agnosticism, logically carried out, can differentiate from
other forms of rationalism only in local limitation of belief; and in
practice it is not often found to do even that. The agnostic inevitably
begins in terms of the rationalist bias, in craving for coherence and
consistency of statement; and his most circumspect negations stand for
precaution against inconsistent credulity. But precisely in virtue of
that bias, he is the opponent of the supernaturalist bias. He does not
in effect merely say, 'I do not know': he implicitly says 'You do not
know' to the professor of non-natural knowledge.
Bias, then, being clearly posited, the debate at once turns--as indeed
it usually does even without formal acknowledgment of bias--to a
competition of claims to consistency. All debate presupposes agreement
on something. As antagonists _in_ religion appeal either to God-idea or
to Bible, to probability or to usage, to expediency or to authority, or
to historic evidence for one revelation as against another, so
antagonists upon the fundamentals of religion appeal to accepted laws of
proof, measures of evidence, consistency of reasoning. The most
tenacious of traditionists must put his case in a 'reasoned' form. And
therein, of course, lies the secret of the gradual historic dissolution
of traditional credence in the minds of those who come at all within the
range of the argument. Every act of reasoning--as priesthoods are more
or less clearly aware--is a concession to the rationalist position to
begin with; and only superior skill in fence can ostensibly countervail
the advantage thus given to the disputant who claims that reason must
determine beliefs. Reasoning against the validity of reason is
recognisable as suicidal by all who can reason coherently. If reason be
untrustworthy, what is the value of reasoning to that effect? Either you
go by reason or you do not. If not, you are out of the debate, or you
are grasping your sword by the blade, a course not long to be persisted
in. Even the skeptical defender of religion, following religious
precedent, says, 'Come now, let us reason together.'
Thus we reach the standing anomaly that the defence of faith against
rationalistic criticism alternately takes the courses of pronouncing the
appeal to reason a foolish presumption, and of claiming to reason more
faithfully than the rationalist. The two positions being, to say the
least, incompatible from the point of view of dialectic, we must fight
upon one or the other at a time; and, having briefly dealt with the
former, we may fitly consider at greater length the latter. The more
philosophic assailant of the rationalist, we assume, professes after all
to stand or fall by reasoning. That is to say, he claims to hold his
supernaturalist positions in logical and moral consistency with his
historical positions, his practice as a judge or juror, as a man of
science, as a critic in politics, as a man of honour, as a player of
cricket by the rules of the game. As a matter of fact, however, he at
times goes about the task by way of an undertaking to show, not that his
beliefs are well founded in reason, but that no beliefs are; and that
his beliefs are therefore at least as valid as any one else's. All the
while he is ostensibly appealing to reason, to judgment. That position
in turn must be considered.
Sec. 5. THE SKEPTICAL RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE
The philosophic issue under this head has been usefully cleared for
English readers by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his _Defence of Philosophic
Doubt_; and, in another sense, very usefully for rationalists by the
same writer in his work _The Foundations of Belief_. The gist of the
former treatise is an expansion of the proposition of Hume that all
moral judgments, on analysis, are found to root in a sentiment or bias.
In particular, Mr. Balfour argues that all scientific beliefs so-called,
however immediately proved, rest upon general beliefs which are
'incapable of proof.' It is noteworthy that never through the whole
treatise does Mr. Balfour analyse the concept of 'proof,' though his
main aim is ostensibly to discriminate between proved and unproved
propositions. It may be worth while, then, at this stage, to note the
risks of intellectual confusion in connection with the term proof. The
common conception, implicit in Mr. Balfour's argument, is that
concerning a 'proved' thing either we have, or men of science say we
have, a right of certainty, as it were, which we cannot have concerning
anything not proved or not capable of proof. The simple fact is that the
very idea of proof involves that of uncertainty you seek to prove that
which is not unquestionable. To prove is to _probe_,[8] to test. The
idea of 'demonstration,' which seems commonly to connote special
certainty, carries us no further. It means a 'showing,' a 'letting you
see with your own eyes.' In geometry, it stands for a chain of reasoning
in which every step rests upon previous steps which ultimately rest upon
axioms and definitions agreed upon. There the process is one of
analysis--a showing that a proposition formerly unknown as such is
really contained in or implied by propositions known. Certainty follows.
Yet there is abundant record of 'proofs' or 'tests' which were
fallacious, and of ostensible demonstrations which were flawed--modes of
squaring the circle, for instance. The ultimate in the matter is the
belief arrived at or evoked; and the significant fact for us is, that
beliefs ostensibly so arrived at may be false, because the cited proof
or evidence is erroneous or the demonstration inconsequent.
Certainty, on the other hand, attaches in the highest degree to certain
beliefs that, in the nature of the case, are 'incapable of proof,' that
is, of being tested. No belief is more certain for all men than the
belief that they will all die, though the event, posited as future,
cannot as such be 'tested.' In this case, the connotation of the word
'proof,' nevertheless, is by common consent transferred to the concept
of mortality: the invariable dying of all previous men is allowed to be
'proof,' or decisive evidence, that all living men will die to the last
generation. In regard to some other certainties, the concept of 'proof'
is wholly irrelevant. You cannot 'prove' that you feel a pain, though it
is one of the most certain of all facts for you while it lasts. If,
then, any general scientific or other belief be shown to be 'incapable
of proof,' in this merely negative sense (as distinguished from 'capable
of disproof'), that is no argument against it for any practical or
philosophic purpose. Such a belief is that in the 'uniformity of
nature,' which is held by the same tenure as that in the mortality of
all men. It cannot be 'proved,' either as to the past or the future, in
the sense of being tested, save as regards past particulars, which are
necessarily a small selection from the totality of phenomena. For the
future, in the terms of the case, there can be no proof. Yet no man has
any more doubt as to the rising of the sun to-morrow than as to his own
ultimate death. Concerning this we are quite certain, which we cannot be
as to many things reasonably held to have been 'proved.' Such and such
are our 'certainties.'
What, then, is Mr. Balfour's case against men of 'science,' and those
whom he calls 'the Freethinkers'? It may be put under three heads.
1. They are lax, he thinks, in their conception of proof. As it happens,
he argues against Mill's criticism of the syllogism, which is that there
can be no real inference from the premisses of a syllogism, because in
the major premiss there is already asserted what is afterwards asserted
in the conclusion. Mr. Balfour's reply is, that 'So long as in fact we
do assert the major premiss without first believing the conclusion, so
long will the latter be an inference from the former.' Now, Mill's
express contention is that we never do assert the major premiss without
first believing the conclusion; and the dispute resolves itself into one
as to the proper meaning of 'inference.' Mill is at this point guarding
against erroneous conceptions of proof; his thesis being that the
'proof' of the conclusion is not given in the major, but in the body of
evidence on which that is founded, and which carries the conclusion at
the same time. As the kind of syllogism in question is the old one
about the mortality of Sokrates, Mill here takes as 'proof' the evidence
which all men now reckon sufficient to establish the fact of universal
human mortality, though, as aforesaid, it is not literally a complete
'proof' at all. Mr. Balfour is arguing, if anything relevant to his main
thesis, that a so-called 'inference' which is merely a statement in one
particular of what is believed of all such particulars, is a 'real'
inference, and therefore somehow more valid than inferences not so
drawn. Perhaps he does not mean this: if so, the argument has no bearing
on his main case.
Concerning 'inference,' the proper development of Mill's position would
be that the processes of reasoning properly to be so called are either
hypotheses still to be tested or beliefs held by the tenure of
uncontradicted experience. And inferences of the latter kind are in fact
of the most various degrees of certainty. We 'infer' that we shall all
die, not from the generalisation that all men are mortal, but from the
accepted fact that all men hitherto have been. The major premiss in the
typical syllogism is itself the inference. But we also infer, from a
much narrower experience, that inasmuch as pitchblende, say, has been
found to yield radium in certain very small quantities, other
pitchblende will do so in future. Here the certainty is distinctly less:
few men would wager heavily on it. And we may at once grant to Mr.
Balfour that in this and many other cases 'scientific beliefs' fall far
short of 'certainty,' as that term is established for us by other
beliefs. As Mill put it, inference from particulars never can be
formally cogent. He might have added as aforesaid, that all real
inference as to events is from particulars, and that formal cogency
belongs only to mathematics. Mr. Balfour says he will not 'go so far' as
Mill. So that, whatever be Mill's inconsistencies--and they are
many--Mill was at this point somewhat less confident of belief than Mr.
Balfour.
2. Mr. Balfour impugns what he takes to be 'the most ordinary view of
scientific philosophy, ... that science, in so far as it consists of a
statement of the laws of phenomena, is founded entirely on observation
and experiment,' which 'furnish not only the occasions of scientific
discovery, but also the sole evidence of scientific truth--evidence,
however, which is considered by most men of science not only amply
sufficient, but also as good as any which can be well imagined.'[9] In
this statement there are obvious laxities, which may serve as openings
for idle dispute. No man of science, surely, holds that all statements
of the laws of phenomena are equally well 'proved' by observation and
experiment. They do hold that such a proposition as that of 'the
uniformity of nature,' considered as a 'law of phenomena,' is founded on
observation and experiment, as fully as any proposition of natural mode
can be. But there is obvious room for ambiguity, again, in the
expression 'laws of phenomena.' Let us consider, for instance,
3. Mr. Balfour's contention that the 'law of universal causation' is
incapable of proof, and cannot properly be said to be founded on
observation and experiment. Here the rationalist may safely grant him
his whole case--at least the present writer does. He is right, I submit,
in his criticism of Mill's ostensible attempt to prove that the
so-called 'law of universal causation' is deduced from observation and
experiment. I will further waive the question whether he rebuts the
proof offered by Kant for his proposition that 'the judgment of sequence
cannot be made without the presupposition of the judgment of causality,'
which, like many of Kant's formulas, seems to me very awkwardly phrased.
But I advance without hesitation the proposition that all reflection
upon events involves the conception of universal causation, and that all
reflection upon things involves the conception of them _in eventu_.[10]
And this necessary assumption is not as such a product of observation
and experiment, though we can never exactly say how far experience may
condition[11] our manner of making the assumption. It is quite needless
to trace the history of it in human experience, for it is clearly
pre-human. If from a tree you fire at and wound a tiger who sees you, he
will try to get at you, plainly regarding you as the cause of his wound,
though he may never have been shot or seen a shot fired before. The
accuracy of his inference is worth noting, though he might chance, of
course, to have been wounded by a shot fired by an unseen companion of
yours. It may 'reasonably' be 'inferred' (to use terms which Mr. Balfour
would probably censure), that man has always obeyed the law of _thought_
thus illustrated; and no number of wrong particular inferences can
affect the inevitableness of his assumption that any event has a cause.
The _concept_ of cause roots in primary animal habit.
Is this assumption, then, a 'law of phenomena' in Mr. Balfour's sense?
is it to be ruled out, on his principles, as not being founded on
observation and experiment? and are men of science thereby shown to be
wrong in holding that every scientific statement of the laws of
phenomena is so founded? I do not see how he can thus argue; for he has
expressly contended (p. 135), that 'A law of nature refers to a fixed
relation, _not_ between the totality of phenomena, but between extremely
small portions of that totality.' Is a law of phenomena, then, something
other than a law of nature? This he cannot mean; and the conclusion is
that the so-called 'law of universal causation' is not properly to be
called a law of nature, or a law at all, unless we are so to call a
necessary element of all reflection upon nature.
The dispute here, in short, resolves itself into a question of
terminology; and it is quite likely that many men of science, and many
freethinkers, have used lax terminology. But as regards the
reasonableness of their beliefs, or their way of believing, in contrast
with those of the supernaturalists whom Mr. Balfour champions, he has
thus far made out no hostile case whatever. And when we come to what
appear to be his conclusions, they are such as can wring no
rationalist's withers. Our ultimate premisses, he contends, are
incapable of proof. Granted--if the assumption of universal causation is
to be termed a premiss, as is that of the uniformity of nature. The
practical issue for him appears to be contained in this passage (italics
ours):--