"the uniformity of nature, or any other great principle," I hold,
as the reader will see if his patience lasts to the end of the
volume, with as much persistence as any man. But I must altogether
take exception to the statement, which is the central point of the
argument just stated, namely, that the fact that these principles
work in practice is _any ground for believing them to be even
approximately true_' (p. 145).
Our patience may easily stand the suggested test, since Mr. Balfour's
book is for the most part extremely well written; and unless I have
totally misunderstood him, his conclusions are (_a_) that he and we do
well to accept the general body of accepted scientific doctrines,
including those of the theory of evolution and the uniformity of nature,
without _any ground for believing them to be even approximately true_;
and (_b_) that he and his co-believers do equally well to hold what he
vaguely indicates (p. 324) as 'the Theological opinions to which I
adhere,' _also_ without 'any ground for believing them to be even
approximately true.' In a sentence (p. 320) of which the diction is
noticeably lax, he says:--
'...I and an indefinite number of other persons, if we contemplate
Religion and Science as unproved systems of belief standing side by
side, _feel a practical need for both_; and if this need is, in the
case of those few and fragmentary scientific truths by which we
regulate our animal actions, or an especially imperious and
indestructible character--on the other hand, _the need for
religious truth, rooted as it is in the loftiest region of our
moral nature_, is one from which we would not, if we could, be
freed.... _We are in this matter_,' he adds, '_unfortunately
altogether outside the sphere of Reason_.'
FOOTNOTES:
[8] This is the elucidation of the puzzling phrase, 'the exception
proves the rule,' so often fallaciously used. It comes from the Latin
schoolmen's 'Exceptio _probat_ regulam,' where the meaning is patent
enough.
[9] _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, p. 13.
[10] Compare Professor Royce:--'Our intelligent ideas of things never
consist of mere images of things, but always involve a consciousness of
how we propose to act towards the things of which we have ideas'
(_Gifford Lectures_, 1900, i. 22).
[11] I exclude the possibility that 'experience' might be construed to
mean the entire development of the mind from infancy. Such a
construction would reduce the argument to insignificance all round.
Sec. 6. THE MEANING OF REASON
The problem as to 'the sphere of Reason' could not be more effectually
raised. Mr. Balfour clearly implies that there _is_ a sphere of Reason,
but forces a perplexed query as to when he believes himself to enter it.
Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived
outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his
predictions of the future, are such as afford 'no ground for believing
them to be even approximately true': those of his opponents, of course,
coming for him under the same category. He would, perhaps, hold himself
to be in the sphere of Reason when following a proposition in
mathematics; but he does not admit himself to be there even when he
consents to believe that he will die, and that he had better avoid
prussic acid. 'No experience, however large,' he insists (p. 75), 'and
no experiments, however well contrived and successful, could give us
_any reasonable assurance_ that the co-existences or sequences which
have been observed among phenomena will be repeated in the future.' Not
'certainty,' be it observed, but 'any reasonable assurance.' That is to
say, we have no reasonable assurance that we shall die.
Obviously the extravagance of this proposition is calculated. The point
is that no belief whatever concerning life and death and morality and
the process of nature can be justified by 'reason'; and that accordingly
no religious belief whatever can be discredited on the score of being
opposed to reason or 'unreasonable.' If not more reasonable than the
most carefully tested or the most widely accepted belief in science, or
the belief that the sun will rise or fire burn to-morrow, or that we
shall all die, it is not less reasonable than they. Therefore, believe
as your bias leads.
It is only fair to Mr. Balfour to say that there is nothing new in his
position, though probably it has never before been quite so violently
formulated. The Greek Pyrrho (fl. 300-350 B.C.) argued that almost all
propositions were doubtful; and some of his followers are said to have
been consistent enough to doubt whether they doubted. In the dialogues
of Cicero we find the skeptical method employed, with supreme
inconsistency, by the official exponents of unbelieved doctrines, to
discredit competing doctrines. Among the pagans it was also turned, with
no special religious purpose, against all forms of dogmatic doctrine by
Sextus the Empiric (fl. 200-250 A.C.); and in the early Christian
dialogue of Minucius Felix a pagan is presented as turning it against
Christianity. In the later Middle Ages it is resorted to by Cornelius
Agrippa, previously a great propounder of fantastic propositions in
science, against the current science of his time, and in favour of a
return to the simplicity of the early Christian creed. Still later, it
was much resorted to, after the Reformation, by Catholics for the
purpose of discrediting Protestantism; and Pascal and Huet, the latter
in particular, sought to employ it against 'unbelief.' Huet left behind
him, as his legacy to his church and generation, what Mark Pattison has
termed 'a work of the most outrageous skepticism'; and Pascal's use of
the method has left a standing debate as to whether he himself was a
'skeptic.' In England, on the Protestant side, Bishop Berkeley put forth
an argument to the effect that the Newtonian doctrine of fluxions
involved the acceptance of unproved 'mysteries,' and that those who
applied it had accordingly no excuse for rejecting the mysteries of
Christianity.
Finally, it is fair to note that Mr. Balfour's nihilistic treatment of
reason has a surprising sanction in Hume, to say nothing of the other
writers who have practically limited reasoning to mathematical
deduction. That great thinker, with his frequent great carelessness,
wrote that
'Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not
founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding'
(_Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding_, Sect. iv. Part ii.,
par. 2).
'All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of
reasoning' (Sect. v., par. 3).
'All these [spontaneous feelings] are a species of natural
instincts, which no reasoning _or process of the thought and
understanding_ is able either to produce or to prevent' (_Ib._ par.
6).
But Hume, be it noted, would in his earlier life have recoiled from Mr.
Balfour's religious Irrationalism, for in his deistic period he wrote
that the belief in Deity is 'conformable to sound reason.' And, what is
more important, he in effect cancelled his own remarks on reason, above
cited, by writing as follows in Note B on the _Inquiry_ cited:--
'Nothing is more usual than for writers, even on moral, political,
or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience,
and to suppose that these species of argumentation (_sic_) are
entirely different from each other. The former are taken for the
mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by considering _a
priori_ the nature of things, and examining the effects that must
follow from their operation, establish particular principles of
science and philosophy. The latter are supposed to be derived
entirely from sense and observation, by which we know what has
actually happened from the operation of particular objects, and are
thence able to infer what will for the future result from them....
But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally
received, both in the active and speculative scenes of life, I
shall not scruple to pronounce that it is at bottom erroneous, or
at least superficial.'
Hume, it will be observed, is not here bent on vindicating the rational
character of direct inference from observation: he had set out in the
text by disparaging customary thinking as non-rational; and he is now
claiming for the 'reasoning' man that experience goes a long way to
generate his reasoning processes. 'The truth is,' he says in his final
paragraph, 'an inexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were
he absolutely inexperienced.' It is a fragmentary note to a hasty
passage; but at least it concedes that reasoning _is_ largely a matter
of inference from experience, and thus decisively gainsays the assertion
in the text that no inference from experience is an 'effect of
reasoning,' inasmuch as it says such inference is reasoning; that
reasoning is a working of the mind on the facts of life; and that the
common distinction between reasoning and [beliefs derived direct from]
experience 'is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.'[12] If, he
says in the fourth paragraph of the Note, 'If we examine those
_arguments_ which, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed
to be the _mere_ effects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found
to _terminate_ at last in some general principle or conclusion for which
we can assign no _reason_ but observation and experience.' If an
argument be not a process of reasoning, neither word is intelligible. If
an argument terminates (=has one end) in a conclusion founded on
observation, and if that observation be a 'reason' for a proposition,
then arguing is reasoning.
If not, what is Mr. Balfour's book? By his own definition, _that_ is
'outside the sphere of Reason,' inasmuch as it is a series of negative
propositions which, like their denied contraries, must be 'incapable of
proof.' What term, then, would he apply to his argument, if he admits
that he is arguing?
The philosophic skeptic, it would appear, has logically overreached
himself--a very usual consummation. There is little sign that any of the
religious skeptics above named ever made any converts to religion; and
there is much 'reason' to think that they turned many to unbelief. Mr.
Balfour from time to time speaks of 'reasonable people' and of
'absurdity.' But he leaves us in the dark as to what absurdity means,
and his thesis excludes from the 'reasonable' class alike all religious
persons and all scientific persons, unless, possibly, mathematicians as
such. Since there is no 'reasonable assurance' for the belief that the
sun will rise to-morrow, and politicians have no ground in reason for
anything they say as such, the mass of the ordinary beliefs of educated
mankind are not reasonable or rational; and since we have no 'reason'
for believing in either mortality or immortality, we can have no reason
for believing (whether we do or not) in Mr. Balfour, who avowedly
believes in both without reason. His book, by implication, is not an
appeal to reason, is not a process of reasoning, and can give no
'reasonable assurance' of anything, positive or negative, to anybody.
All this by his own showing.
The rationalist, it should seem, has small cause to deprecate such
antagonism. He could hardly have a more comprehensive clearing of the
field of dialectic for the formulation of his own conception of reason
and reasoning, and his own appeal to the reason of reasonable people. As
thus:--
1. _Reason_ is our name for (_a_) the sum of all the judging processes;
(_b_) the act of reflex judgment; (_c_) 'private judgment' as against
obedience to authority; and (_d_) the state of sanity contrasted with
that of insanity; and '_a_ reason' is a fact or motive or surmise which
we judge sufficient to induce us or others to believe or do (or doubt or
not do) something without much or any danger of error, failure, or
injury.
2. _Reasoning_ is our name for the process of comparing or stating
'reasons why' certain propositions or judgments should be believed or
disbelieved, or certain acts done or not done.
3. We are emphatically 'in the sphere of Reason' when we are reflecting
and reasoning, as distinct from merely feeling, sensating, desiring, or
hating; but even the feelings are, as it were, part of the stuff of
Reason. Strictly speaking, we are in the sphere of Reason even when we
believe what we are told to believe on matters outside the knowledge of
our instructors (in so far as we credit them with greater wisdom than
our own), or try to believe that what we would like to be true must be
true because we would like it (inasmuch as we are proceeding
reflectively on a 'reason why'); though in these cases we are reasoning
fallaciously--that is, in a way which can lead to manifold error and
injury.
4. _Reasonable_ is our approbatory epithet for an action, course, or
person that is guided by reasoning which we see to exclude most risks of
error and injury--save of course where the taking of risk of injury is
assumed.
Every one of these definitions is justified by the dictionary to begin
with, though the dictionaries, of necessity, note further conflicting
meanings, as when reason is indicated as 'the faculty or capacity of the
human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the
lower animals,' or hazily distinguished, on philosophic authority, from
'the understanding.' But the lexicographer loyally notes that _a_ reason
is 'a thought or consideration offered in support of a determination or
an opinion'; and that _to_ reason means, among other things, 'to reach
conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts,' 'to examine or discuss
by arguments.' These senses are implicit in daily usage.
The concept of Reason, in short, must include the whole factory of
beliefs. The judging faculty, the judging propensity, is a complex of
instincts, experiences, inferences, and necessities of thought. It
originates at an animal stage, and conserves to the last animal
elements--as when, without any process of calculation, you infer, as it
were through the muscular sense, that a top-heavy omnibus is likely to
overbalance, or that in riding your bicycle round a sharp corner you
must incline your body inwards. It deals with diet and medicine, art and
industry, no less than with theology and science and politics. In the
former, its accepted procedure is obviously a set of survivals of more
or less tested ideas from among an infinity of detected mistakes; and
the moral law of the intellectual life for the rationalist, the
principle which best justifies his assumption of that name, is that
every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any
of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more
effectually be tested in the future. We are to do with both our
religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and
are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our
physics, our historiography.
Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs
are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people--in
other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified.
FOOTNOTE:
[12] So Kant: 'Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without
conceptions are blind' (_Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, ed. Kirchmann,
1870, p. 100); and Comte: 'There is no absolute separation between
observing and reasoning' (_Politique Positive_, 1851, i. 500).
Sec. 7. THE TEST OF TRUTH
It may have been observed, with or without perplexity, that Mr. Balfour
specified a 'need for religious _truth_' as his ground for holding his
unspecified 'theological beliefs,' this after bracketing Religion and
Science as alike 'unproved systems,' consisting (by implication) of a
body of propositions as to which we have not 'any ground for believing
them to be even approximately true.' The skeptico-religious conception
of truth being thus found to be as nugatory as that of 'reason' put
forward from the same quarter, we are compelled to posit one more
conformable to common sense, common usage, and common honesty. For the
generality of instructed men, truth in secular affairs means not merely
'that which is trowed,' but (_a_) that which we have adequate 'reason'
to trow, and (_b_) that of which our acceptance is consistent with our
way of testing credences of any or all other kinds. The ultimate
criterion of our beliefs, in short, is the consistency with which we
hold them.
By this test the ground is rapidly cleared of skeptico-religious
literature. That puts a spurious problem to mask a real one. The
question for us is not and cannot be whether, seeing that by inference
from experience some of the beliefs we now hold are likely to be found
false by posterity, we have any right to accept one belief and discredit
another. The skeptic is himself doing so in this very argument, and all
the time. His whole intellectual life is one of judgments and
preferences. There is no intellectual life without them. The question is
whether we have applied to any one belief or set of beliefs the tests we
have applied to others: whether, for instance, we can honestly profess
to believe in prayer or the doctrine of the Trinity or heaven and hell
as we believe in Gresham's Law or the effects of quinine or the
roundness of the earth; whether we have criticised the religion in which
we were brought up as we criticise Mohammedanism or any other; whether
we have scrutinised the legends of our creed as we have scrutinised the
legend of King Arthur and his Knights; or whether, on the other hand, we
hold the atomic theory or faith in vaccination by mere authority, while
we dispute about religious teaching in the schools.
This does not mean that we are to apply the same kind of test to every
kind of proposition; that we are to ask for evidence of immortality as
we ask for evidence of the Darwinian theory. The test is one of
consistency. Does the belief in immortality, we are to ask, consist with
either our knowledge or our imagination? Do we hold it critically and
coherently or as a mere congeries of irreconcilable propositions? Do we
ask ourselves what we mean by 'meeting again'? Is it anything more than
a fantasy which we affirm for our own comfort or the supposed comfort of
others, or for the sake of mere conformity with popular sentiment? No
thoughtful man, perhaps, will deny that he holds some of his opinions by
some such easy tenure; were it only for the reason that consistent
ascertainment is often laborious, and that common consent has to be
allowed to take its place in regard to many beliefs of plainly inferior
importance. But religious beliefs are not so classed by those who
seriously debate them; and here, if ever, the challenge to scrutiny and
consistency is imperative.
And so disturbing is the challenge that for centuries past the higher
religious consciousness has been engaged in an unceasing effort to
persuade itself and its antagonists of the secular or mundane
reasonableness of its supernaturalist creed. Religious life is seen
going on at two widely removed standpoints: one that of the emotional
believer who knows no conceptual difficulties, and is concerned only to
maintain in himself and others the quasi-ecstatic state of faith; the
other that of the would-be reasoner who is concerned to secure peace of
mind by arguing down his own misgivings and the positive antagonism of
unbelief. Between those extremes, probably, is lived the mass of
religious life so-called, untouched either by ecstasy or by conceptual
unbelief as distinguished from passive conformity. But the conflict of
the thinking minority is unceasing; and orthodox professions of triumph
deceive no one who is really engaged in the struggle.
On both sides it has long been a question of balancing 'probabilities,'
a conflict of 'reasons.' Bacon, declaring that he would 'rather believe
all the fables in the Golden Legend and the Koran than that this
universal frame is without a mind,' opened a door that let in all the
forces of doubt. The Koran is the form in which the God-idea recommended
itself to the Moslem mind, as the Bible is the form in which it
commended itself to the Christian; and if for each the other is always
fabulising in detail, where could be the certitude of the common
doctrine? Was mind any likelier to be the form of the power of the
universe than any other of the anthropomorphic characteristics of
Jehovah and Allah and Zeus? However that might be, Bacon was appealing
to the sheer sense of probability; the 'Evidences' of Grotius were
addressed to the same kind of judgment; and Pascal's 'wager' was a blank
appeal to the principle of chances plus the instinct of fear. Butler,
anxiously striving to reduce the straggling deistic controversy to its
logical bases, accepted the test of probability as the guide of life;
and Gladstone, his last champion, with all his show of sheer faith,
strenuously endorses the doctrine. The vital question is seen to be,
then, whether the Butlerian 'believer' or the rationalist is the more
loyal to that standard of probability by which each avowedly guides
himself.
But Butler, in the very act of professedly basing his case on
probability, introduced the contrary principle. Gladstone, gravely
reprehending that Jesuit doctrine misleadingly termed Probabilism--which
permits of a choice of the less probable course in morals and
belief--supposed himself to be upholding a true Probabilism in Butler.
The fact is that Butler, seeking to checkmate the Deists, committed
himself to anomaly as a mark of revelation. 'You believe,' he virtually
argued, 'in a benevolent God of Nature, though Nature is full of
ostensible cruelty and heartlessness: if these moral anomalies do not
stagger your deism, why should anomalies in the Scriptures be for you an
argument against their being a divine revelation? Should you not rather
expect to find difficulties in the revelation as in Nature?' So that the
champion of the standard of probability ends by putting an element of
improbability as a mark of divine truth.
It was long ago pointed out that Butler's argument was thus as good for
Islam or any other religion as for Christianity. Gladstone framed a
futile rebuttal to the effect that Christianity had marks of truth, in
respect of prophecy and miracles, which Islam lacked--a mere
stultification of the Butlerian thesis. The Moslem could retort that if
his creed succeeded more rapidly than the Christian with special marks
of anomaly upon it, those were presumably the right anomalies! By the
Butlerian analogy of Nature, what sort of anomalies, pray, were to be
expected in a divine revelation? Gladstone actually made it a
disqualification of Islam that it had succeeded by the sword; this when
his own creed had slain more than ever did Islam. But on Butler's
principles, his plea was vain even if true. If a divinely ruled Nature
be red in tooth and claw, why should not the divine faith be so
likewise? What is the lesson, by deistic analogy, of the volcano?
The complete answer to Butler, of course, lies in stating the simple
fact that analogy leads rationally to the conclusion that all the
alleged revelations are alike human products. If every one in turn is
found to embody cosmological delusion, historical falsity, fabulous
narrative, barbarous ethic, and irrational sanctions, all of which are
by each believer singly admitted to be the normal marks of human
stumbling, the case is at an end. The one salient and sovereign
probability is the one that the believer ignores.