argument is seen to recoil on its premiss no less than on its
conclusion. The dilemma that was to turn deists into Christians is
simply the confutation of all theism. Upon none of the tested
principles of inference now normally acted on by men of science, men of
business, and men of affairs, is it rationally to be inferred that the
universe is ruled by a superhuman Good Male Person, who loves and hates,
punishes and rewards, plans and reconsiders, injures and compensates. As
little are we entitled to infer that it is governed by a Superhuman Bad
Person, or a number of Superhuman Persons, male or female, good or bad,
or both. The polytheistic and theistic solutions are the natural ones
for unreflecting ignorance and priestly policy, and the latter remains
the natural one for reverent ingrained prejudice, alias inculcated
faith; but it is only so much sophisticated folklore for the student of
life, nature, history, philosophy. The latest forms of it are but
defecations of the earlier. For Arnold, trained in reverence and avid of
reverend sanctions, the deity of his fellows is confessedly but a
'magnified non-natural man'; and his substituted
'Something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-righteousness,' in turn, is for
his critics but an evasion of the problem of the
something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-unrighteousness.
In sum, then, the case for rationalism as against the creeds is that
they recognise no rational test for truth, and apply none. They are
all, to say the least, grossly improbable in the light of the fullest
human knowledge; and the acceptance of them means either passive
disregard of the principle of sufficient reason or the habitual
employment of arguments which upon any other kind of issue would be
recognised by all competent men as at best utterly inadequate. Theology
is the most uncandid of all the current sciences; its results are the
most self-contradictory; its premisses the most incoherent. Upon those
theologians, then, who accuse the rationalist of self-will and
prejudice, he is forced to retort the charge with a double emphasis.
They are daily disloyal to the Canon of Consistency, which is for him
the moral law of the intellectual life. Claiming to propound the highest
truth, they override all the tests by which truth is to be known.
The modern defence of 'faith,' whether Christian or theistic, is less
and less an attempt to prove truth of doctrine--save as regards the
defence of historicity; more and more an attempt to prove its usefulness
or its comfortableness. Faith has turned utilitarian, as regards its
apologetics. John Mill erred somewhat, indeed, in endorsing the
statement that down to his time much had been written on the truth of
religion, and 'little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy,
concerning its usefulness.' Christian bishops early learned to claim for
their creed a gift of prosperity; and in the eighteenth century there
was an abundance of utilitarian vindication of the faith. But latterly
this has more and more coloured the whole defence. Either as a promise
of peace or as one of comfort and stimulus, as a plea for emotional
indulgence or for the joy of the sense of deliverance from
responsibility for sin, as a guarantee for good government or as a
condition of general progress, Christianity is defended on any ground
rather than on that of the truth of its narratives or the conformity of
its doctrine to good sense, moral or other. And the pleas are
entertainingly internecine.
One day we are told that it makes for race-survival; the next, that it
is a spiritual stay for races that are dying out, and a great deathbed
comfort to ex-cannibals, with a past of many murders. A creed which
involves a cosmology is recommended, not by such arguments as may
commend a cosmology, but by pleas of subjective agreeableness which in
any discussion of historic fact would be felt to savour of trifling.
And this simple and spontaneous sophistry is in a measure kept in
countenance by quasi-philosophies such as that of the 'Will to Believe'
and that latterly termed Pragmatism. The former, as brilliantly
propounded by the late Professor James, amounts simply to this, that in
matters on which there is no good or sufficient evidence either way, we
do well to believe what we would like to believe. As the precept comes
from the thinker who passed on to students the counsel of Pascal
concerning the opiate value of religious practices,[13] it is easy to
infer how it will tend to be interpreted. And the second philosophy is
like unto the first, in so far as it conveys, under cover of the true
formula that the valid beliefs are those which affect action, the
antinomian hint that if we think we have found any belief a help to
action, it is thereby sufficiently certificated as true.
The rationalist comment on Pragmatism, thus applied, is that it really
discredits the religious beliefs of most men, inasmuch as they never
relate their faith to action in general, would not stake a shilling on a
prayer, have no working faith in providence, and do not in the least
desire to pass from this life to another. But these men do not study
philosophy; while the emotional believers, who really feel their faith
to be a help in life, do not need the pragmatist's precept, and believe
without it.
What is true in Pragmatism is of the essence of Rationalism. Our lives
at their best are made valid for us by our mutual trust, our reciprocal
sincerities; and Rationalism consists in the effort to extend
intellectual and moral sincerity to the study of all problems. It may
permit, none the less, of some such genial or affectionate glozing of
some facts as love and friendship tend to set up in the relations of
persons, tolerance taking on the vesture of sympathy; and it no more
makes for Gradgrindism, or the belittlement of any of the higher joys,
than for concentration on the lower. Its antagonists alternately indict
it for 'gloom' and for licence; for coldness and for 'Epicureanism'; for
seeking only happiness, and for turning happiness out of doors. The
contradictions of the indictment tell of its collective origin in mere
hostility of temper. Rationalism, of all codes and modes of
life-philosophy, must most seek to make the best of life.
Some professed rationalists, indeed, at times grind in the mills of the
Philistines by professing an apprehension lest their fellows, in
pursuing truth, should lose sight of beauty; and such misconceiving
mentors plead confusedly for some formal association of rationalism with
the arts of feeling, with poetry, with music, with drama, with
fiction--as if without cultivating these things _in the name of_
Rationalism we should be divested of them or discredited as not
possessing them. The fallacy is of a piece with that which identifies
Christianity with progress in civilisation. The rationalistic bias is in
actual experience found to be as compatible with any aesthetic bias as
with the scientific, specially so called; though in point of fact a
scientific culture is in itself more conducive to rationalism in respect
of historical and ultimate problems than is culture in the arts, which
are mostly enjoyed, appraised, and even practised without deliberate
resort to critical analysis.
Some rationalists, again, have been found to contend that the critical
analysis of things aesthetic is destructive of aesthetic joy--an error of
errors, involving blindness to the facts that even a science is in
itself ultimately perceptible as an artistic construction, and that all
the arts live and renew themselves by the sense of truth. The solution
of the verbal conflict lies in recognising that rationalism is after all
but a name for considerate consistency in the intellectual life, where
consistency is still so sadly little cultivated, and where established
habits and institutions tend so powerfully to its exclusion; whereas in
the arts there is no call for such specific championship. There the very
joy of novelty is soon potent to overcome the resistance of
habit--which, for the rest, roots in structural or acquired limitations
not greatly dependent upon cultivation or neglect of the rationalistic
habit. A man of science or of critical research may be dull to new
refinements of aesthesis where an unscientific emotionalist _may_ be
sensitive to them.
Recognising all this, the balanced rationalist will shun as a special
sin of religion the ritualising of his joys, the sectarian extension of
his differences of credence to the field of aesthetics. His rationalism
as such implies no one of the special 'isms' of the arts; though there
he may be an 'ist' like another. For him all art, all literature, all
beauty, is so much of Nature's fruitage; and Christian cathedral and
Moslem mosque can yield him pleasures which Christian and Moslem can
never derive from _his_ distinctive intellectual work. He may even take
artistic satisfaction in contemplating the figure of the winged angel
which Christianity took over from Paganism, without believing it to be
the image of a reality, as so many pietists have so childishly done for
thousands of years. 'Religious' music can minister to him in virtue of
the common psychosis. His very names for himself and his intellectual
code are but insistences on complete inner loyalty to a moral law which
most men profess to obey, and which all of necessity obey in many if not
in most matters.
The time is for him even in sight, as it were, when most men will
recognise and live by that law; and when that day comes there will be no
more need to profess rationalism than to profess, as a creed, any of the
daily reciprocities by which society subsists. But till that day comes
he marks himself, and is marked--to his frequent discomfort, it may
be--by his insistence, in the deepest matters, on that law of truth
which so many still persistently subordinate to pleas or preferences of
authority or habit, convention or subjective taste. Avowing it as his
bias, if so challenged, he claims that it is the bias to perfection in
the intellectual life as the bias to order and sympathy is the bias to
perfection in the civil.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] See Professor James's _Principles of Psychology_, 1891, ii. 321.
Sec. 8. ULTIMATE PROBLEMS
To a surprising degree, the philosophic disputes of the ages turn upon
the same problems; and to an extent that is nothing short of sinister,
they resolve themselves for most of the onlookers, if not of the
participants, into the question of the maintenance of the popular
religion. Thus academic theists in our own day are found resenting the
tendency of ancient freethinkers to discredit and disestablish the Gods
of Olympus, who for the academics themselves, as for everybody else, are
a set of chimeras. Are we to infer that the current academic
philosophies, even where constructive, are no better bottomed than the
popular credences they seek to shelter? Kant's 'critical' philosophy was
by himself soon turned to the account of pulpit religion; Fichte ended
in restating the gospels in terms of his pantheistic personal equation;
Hegel soon attained to the championship of the Prussian State Church;
Lotze has reformulated Christianity to the end of giving it continuance
as a creed for the educated. Nietzsche said with substantial truth that
the vogue of Kant has been that of a philosopher who enabled theological
teachers to put a philosophic face upon a doctrine not otherwise
presentable to their students; and the vogue of Berkeley in England has
been of a similar kind.
In our own day the fortunes of new treatises in popular philosophy turn
upon their adaptability to orthodox sophistics. Our generation has seen
in succession (1) the absurd work of the late Professor Drummond on
'Natural Law in the Spiritual World' welcomed as turning the tables on
'science' by showing that its doctrines are fundamentally at one with
those of the faith; (2) the still more absurd work of Mr. Benjamin Kidd
on 'Social Evolution' hailed as demonstrating by ratiocination that the
reasonable course for society is not to reason; and (3) the incomparably
subtler books of Mr. Balfour acclaimed (whether or not read) as proving
that reason cannot bite on religious opinions, and that we could never
enjoy our music and our dinners as we do if we thought of ourselves
merely as evolved from animal forms, without somewhere inserting Deity
as the sanction and exemplar of our preferences, aesthetic or moral.[14]
Always the acclamation tells of a passion somehow to humiliate
'science,' to put reason in the wrong, to triumph over 'negation,' to
show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of
in any philosophy which does not make play with 'spirit,' worship, and
the supernatural.
The cure, however, is never found to be permanent; and latterly we see
the not very accommodating philosophy of M. Bergson grasped at as
yielding some kind of weapon wherewith to beat back the advance of the
ever-encroaching assailant. Sooth to say, neither the analyses nor the
syntheses of M. Bergson are in any way damaging to rationalism, or in
any way rationally ancillary to supernaturalism. The anti-rationalists
have clutched eagerly at his dictum that reason, considered as a light
upon the universe, is a poor thing; and that there is something in us
higher than intelligence. Apart from the disparaging form given
(gratuitously) to the content of these propositions, there is nothing in
them that has not been rationalistically put. That is to say, it is a
rationalistic proposition that new truths are reached neither by
deduction nor by induction, but by a leap of the judgment, by
spontaneous guess or hypothesis. What then?
To say or imply that the guessing faculty is something incomparably
higher than intelligence is one of the inconsequences of M. Bergson,
whose very acute analysis is apt to play upon special problems without
controlling his own dialectic procedure. The sobering fact is that the
false hypotheses are reached in the same way as the true, the wrong
guesses in the same way as the right, the delusions in the same way as
the discoveries. The very theses in science which M. Bergson contemns
were reached by the way which he arbitrarily pronounces 'superior' to
the way of reason. And the court of appeal that determines which is
which, is after all just that intelligence or reason which M. Bergson,
imitating one of the old methods he has ably helped to discredit, had
verbally belittled in merely discriminating its function. No prerogative
whatever can thereby be conferred upon either the guessing faculty or
the guesser as such. The 'divining' faculty is not more divine than
another: it is not really more wonderful to catch fish than to cook
them; and the gift of establishing hypotheses is as rare as the gift of
framing them. When all is said, the self-confidence of the
transcendentalist avails for none but himself: as his own craving for
countenance shows, his hypothesis must pass muster before reason if it
is to persuade.
And for this among other reasons, M. Bergson's attack upon Spencer and
other generalisers in science for their 'mechanical' way of conceiving
evolution is no blow to 'science,' as M. Bergson would probably avow,
though he is lax enough to delimit science at times in his dialectic.
His own way of stating evolution is only another mode of science. To
call 'science' superficial is to be so; for the demonstration that any
scientific doctrine is inadequate must itself be science or nothing. And
here again M. Bergson's criticism, though searching, is not new, however
freshly put. In respect of his sociology in particular, Mr. Spencer has
been repeatedly so criticised; and it is here alone that his limitation
of method is really serious, inasmuch as it affects his prescriptions.
As regards the conception of sub-human evolution, his way of reducing
the past to 'pieces' of evolution is not only not injurious, it was the
only way in which evolution in Nature could well have been realised by
men. M. Bergson is all for the 'creative' aspect of evolution, the
Living Now, the emergence of the latest phenomenon as not merely the
result of the one before, but the living manifestation of the whole. But
this is simply the instinctive, pre-scientific relation to the problem,
returned to and restored, as it had need be, to its place in a
scientific schema from which it had been dropped precisely because it
led nowhere.
M. Bergson has suffered, probably, from the zeal even of instructed
exponents, to say nothing of the acclamations of the amateur; but
perhaps even M. Bergson, by reason of his linear mode of advance,
misconceives the full significance of his own restatements of perceptual
and conceptual fact. His theorem has been represented as vindicating the
thesis of Mr. Samuel Butler's 'Luck or Cunning'--the thesis, namely,
that animal survival and progress are to be conceived in terms of gift
or effort rather than of environment; that Lamarckism, once more, is
truer than Darwinism. But the argument overlooks the fact that Cunning
may be envisaged as Luck; and that Lamarckism without Darwinism halts
far worse than Darwinism without Lamarckism. At best, the 'living' view
of evolution is but a complement of the other, a return from analysis to
outcome. Put singly, it is no addition to knowledge.
'We called the chess-board white: we call it black,'
the onlooker might say, with Browning; while the analyst might retort
that, like the savage, he was quite conscious of the ever-moving point
of life, the Living Now, but preferred to give his mind to the still
and spacious past, and 'to cut it up into pieces' by way of knowing
something about the law of things, past, present, and future.
The morally valid element in M. Bergson's insistence on 'creative
evolution' (again an old term, by the way) is the vindication of
personality as a creative form. But this was not necessary as regards
the rational determinist, whose position really assumed it, though
possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their
phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in assuming that the
determinist view of things, mostly accepted by the rationalist, impairs
character by reducing will to a 'mechanism.' But that is a calculated
obscuration of the doctrine. It is a bad sophism to assert that 'the
rejection of mechanism by non-libertarians is a mere phrase. Sooner or
later they have to affirm that man is mechanically determined.'[15] It
is not so. 'Going Universe' negates Machine. _That_ concept adheres to
the schema of those who affirm the universe to be _made_: Naturalism
excludes it. Theistic determinism _does_ make man a mere vessel, a tool:
for Naturalism he is an individuation of the Living All. The
intelligent determinist never was and never will be put out by his
conceptual recognition of himself as part of an infinite sequence; and
he has no need of M. Bergson's (untenable) restatement of the problem of
free-will and determinism to the effect that the will is sometimes free
and sometimes not. That is indeed a hopeless fallacy--an illicit
inference from the unduly stressed re-discovery that new truth is
reached by a leap and not by a sequence. To say that we are 'free' when
we have an original idea or guess is to miss the logical truth set forth
by so unsophisticated a philosopher as Locke--that the concept of
'freedom' is irrelevant to every process of thought. M. Bergson insists
on the irrelevance of spatial terms to psychic processes, but overlooks
the equal irrelevance of terms of preventable personal action.
Precisely because he is, so to say, the latest outcome of the universe,
the rational determinist will insist upon 'pulling his weight' and
having things go, as far as may be, in the way he prefers. No one's
right is better! And he can confidently claim that here, where he is
philosophically at one with the thorough-going theist, he has all the
possible moral gain from his determinism without an iota of the theist's
perplexity. That gain consists in the lead to mercy in human affairs.
The theist-determinist is certainly not, as some Christian rhetoricians
(ignorant of Christian history) affirm all determinists must be, either
a coward or a licentious knave, in the ordinary sense. Augustine and
Luther and Calvin and Knox were neither, though all four were sadly
sinful men. But the theistic determinist is open always on the one hand
to the paralysing thought that if he should err he is resisting God, and
on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those
who resist him are God's enemies. To escape both snares he must turn
thorough pantheist=non-theist. And the upshot is that the theistic
determinist is never merciful, whereas the rational determinist is at
least under a logical compulsion to be so, however he may resist or
divagate. He is free to defend himself, and to defend society; but in so
far as he hates and hurts he is illogical, and in so far as he makes
punishment retaliation, or prevention punitive, he is either confounding
himself or setting lust against light.
Were there no other betterment from the substitution of the non-theistic
for the theistic relation to ultimate problems, this might be held to
outweigh all claims on the other side, to say nothing of the simple
rationality of the negative solution. But that is, of course, in itself
decisive. The logically strongest form of the theistic case as against
the non-theist is that, even as he lives and moves in gravitation
without any subjective consciousness of it, so he may be controlled in
every thought by a transcendent volition. But this argument, which
excludes M. Bergson's formula of our occasional 'freedom' of will,
equally shelters determinism from the contention that we are 'conscious'
of freedom of thought. Even as we are demonstrably conditioned by
gravitation while unconscious of its control, we are demonstrably
conditioned by our experience and structure as regards even our guesses.
Neither the ignorant nor the ungifted man makes the valid new
hypothesis.
There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a
non-theistic philosophy is 'desolate,' 'negative,' 'materialistic,' and
incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere _ignoratio
elenchi_, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that
every 'explanation of the universe' is an imposture, exposed as such
either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. The normal theist
either bilks the problem of evil by avowing it to be a mystery--a thing
he cannot explain--or falls back on the alternative evasions that there
cannot be good without evil (that is to say, that good needs evil, which
is thus good) or that 'partial ill is universal good,' and that evil is
thus _non-ens_--which again is a denial of any moral problem. To
complain of 'negation' as such while making such negations as these is
to be more entertaining than impressive.