himself of intellectual and moral comfort, is for the rationalist no
perturbing experience. He is what he is because he knows the utter
inanity of the theistic declamation about his putting in place of the
'Immeasurable Divine Eye' a 'vast bottomless Eye-Socket'; knows that for
the vast mass of mankind the imagined Eye has been a menace of all their
myriad ills, that its levin slays them like flies, that the iron has
entered uncounted millions of souls who daily prayed for divine succour.
The prate of his 'negation' is as childish as the complaint of the
avowal that we cannot reach the planet Jupiter, not to say the
constellation Hercules: he does but affirm the incontrovertible truth
that an infinite universe cannot be compassed by our thought, and that
to assert its permeation by 'mind'--a finite process of perception and
discrimination, verbally defined as transcending both--is to pay
ourselves with words. To the Berkeleyan formula that existence is only
as perceived, and that without perception there can be no existence, he
answers, similarly, that the first proposition means only that we
perceive what we perceive, and that the second is mere intellectual
nullity, a verbal pretence to unthinkable knowledge. The further
Zenonian frivolity of the denial of an 'external world' needs from him
no further comment than this, that in the terms of the argument
'external' has no meaning, and the proposition, therefore, none either.
It may be left to the denier of existence 'outside consciousness' to
tell us _where_ consciousness is. The inquiry may perhaps lead him to
the discovery that he, the professed foe of materialism, has been
limiting consciousness to the compass of the skull.
The ultimate claims of the theist to spiritual superiority and serenity
are oddly bracketed with the charges of arrogance and Epicureanism
constantly made by him against his antagonist. All alike are irrelevant
to the issue of truth; and all alike tell of other motives than those of
truth-seeking. Those other motives are substantially what our
theological ancestors called 'will-worship,' self-pleasing, the bias of
pre-supposition, the aversion to surrender. All theistic dialects alike
sing the song of self-esteem. The spiritist pronounces his gainsayer
'impercipient,' thus inexpensively cutting the knot of argument; and,
himself a wilful continuator of the thought-forms of the savage,
declares himself to be transcending the earthiness of the sciences in
virtue of which he is civilised. All this is a poor way of proving
serenity; as poor, at bottom, as the perpetual display of wrath at
gainsaying by men who claim to have the backing of Omnipotence.
Consciousness of intercourse with the supernatural has never ostensibly
availed to give the common run of theists imperturbability in their
intercourse with the naturalist.
And if in the stress of controversy the rationalist should in turn prove
himself capable of perturbation, let him, avowing that he claims no
supernatural stay, at least plead that he sets up no intellectual
'colour line,' and that his gospel is after all fraternal enough. Once
more, he does but ask the theist to take one more step in a criticism
which he has already carried far, with small trouble to himself. Every
religion sets aside every other: the rationalist only sets aside one
more. Every theist has negated a million Gods save one: the rationalist
does but negate the millionth. And in doing this, he is not committing
the verbal nullity of saying, There is no God--a formula never fathered
by a considerate atheist. God, undefined,=_x_; and we do not say, There
is no _x_. Of the defined God-idea, whichsoever, we demonstrate the
untenableness; but in giving the theist an inconceivable universe we
surely meet his appetite for the transcendent.
Rationalism, when all is said, is the undertaking, in George Eliot's
phrase, to do without opium. And perhaps the shrewdest challenge to it
is the denial that the average man can so abstain--a denial which may be
backed by the reminder that the framer of the phrase did not. A jurist
once cheerfully assured the present writer that the mass of men will
never do without alcohol and religion. He was not aware that he was
adapting a Byronic blasphemy. It may be that in a world in which most
men chronically crave alternately stimulants and narcotics, he was in a
measure right. But as one of his two necessaries is already under a
widening medical indictment and avoidance, it may be that the other will
fare similarly. In any case, is not the ideal a worthy one, as ideals
go?
FOOTNOTES:
[14] It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag,
_Credibile est quia ineptum est_, dismissing it as 'a blending of
sceptical analysis with credulous assertion' (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh,
_Hegel and Hegelianism_, p. 219).
[15] Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, 1903, p. 216.
Sec. 9. IDEALS
Ideals, obviously, are part--the best part--of our bias: to that
admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can
afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount
consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things
intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I
have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as
commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother's shame. The
charge is an illustration of the strange malice of which piety is
capable. No human being ever proposed to communicate all truth of any
kind to children; and the limit to the gratuitous telling of wounding
truth is fixed by normal courtesy and sympathy as regards the sufferings
even of adults. The charge is in fact one more illustration of the
anti-veridical bias of pietism--the need to distort and pervert the case
against the rationalist.
And if pietism can thus distort the bearing of the intellectual canons
of rationalism, much more habitually does it distort the specific
purport of rationalist morals. The fact that naturalism implies
utilitarianism is transformed into the proposition that utilitarianism
means the subordination of all play of sympathy to an incessant calculus
of profit. As we have seen, theism and Christianity alike do chronically
subordinate the veridical instinct--a moral instinct like another--to
lower considerations of utility; and only too often in history do we see
them annulling the instincts of mercy and reciprocity by the law of
dogma. Not by propounders of that test is the rationalist to be put to
shame. The very basis of Christianity, in fine, is an other-world
utilitarianism. 'What _profits_ it a man----?'
Utilitarianism means for him, in brief, what it meant when it first took
shape as a moral plea--the testing of traditional moral canons, and
their annulment when they are seen to be mere survivals of barbarism,
sanctioned only by custom and religion; never the substitution of a
calculus of utility for an accepted moral canon in every act of life.
Any general moral rule rationally seen to be broadly utilitarian is
thereby vindicated _qua_ rule; and to put its practice at the hazard of
every trying emergency would be to sin against the very principle of
utility. For the rest, the rationalist has his moral bias like another;
and in virtue of it, as animating rationalisers of various developments,
has been wrought the main part of the modern purification of working
morality, though the moral instinct in religious men has responded, and
has at times initiated reformation. It is left to the religionist to
argue that a bias which has wrought for truth, justice, and mercy will
somehow fail to preserve other virtues. No reminiscence of the sexual
history of Christian societies can restrain Christian advocates from
imputing to the spirit of reason a tendency to promote promiscuity in
the sex relation and thus to overthrow 'the family.' Holding as they do
that the family is the keystone of society and civilisation, they in
effect argue that the practice of rational calculation of means and ends
will destroy both. Pessimism could no further go; and if this be not the
height of pessimism it is a stress of false-witness which puts the
accuser outside the pale of controversy. As an imputation upon known
rationalists in general the theorem is simply false. The systematic
revival of Aryan polygamy has been a religious process; and the freest
practitioners of sexual choice among reasoning unbelievers, the Russian
Nihilists, have been notoriously monogynous.
It may be hoped that we shall in future hear less and less in these
matters of the extremities of orthodox malice or misgiving, as we hear
less and less of the old plea that whereas a bad believer may be held
in moral check by his religious fears, a bad unbeliever will fear only
the police. The statistics of the jails do not encourage that line of
apologetics; and the records of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children do not go to show either that rationalism makes
parents cruel or that religion keeps them kind. The plain truth is that
upon bad bias law is the main check; and that the most vaunted religious
methods of developing the good bias of the weak have latterly been
systematically supplemented, in the organisation, for instance, of the
Salvation Army so called, by secular methods which are the avowal of the
final and general futility of the others.
In no other direction are the moral ideals of rationalism less fully
vindicated by the movement of civilisation. The humane and scientific
treatment of criminals has actually been antagonised, in the name of the
Christian doctrine of sin, from the ranks of the Howard Society,
established to promote such humane treatment. Rationalism can no other:
religion seems willing to leave it the credit. Above all, the great
cause of Peace on earth--the very motto (a mistranslation, as it
happens) cited as that of nascent Christianity--visibly depends more
and more on the spread of rational calculation, the spirit of reason,
rather than on that of faith, however faithfully many a good Christian
continues to plead for it. There is no Peace Church: even Quakerism has
latterly had its war-mongers; and there is no record in history that the
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God ever withheld men from fratricidal
war.
We shall still hear, it may be, that the intellectual pride of
rationalism is in tendency anti-democratic; Gibbon and Hume being cited
as cases in point. And the rationalist democrat, shunning the lead of
his antagonist to panacea-mongering, may here at once--or once
more--confess that the spirit of reason in things intellectual is no
guarantee for the immediate elimination of egoism in human relations.
Christianity has claimed to be such a guarantee--with the results we
know. But it is flatly inconceivable that the spirit which challenges
all authority and anomaly in doctrine can tend to conserve either
tyranny or social and political inequality. The very apologists who make
the charge are the successors and coadjutors of those who have charged
upon irreligious philosophy the generating of the French Revolution.
Anti-democratic rationalists there will be, as there have been; but for
every one such there are a hundred of the contrary ideal; and it is not
in conservative parties that they are found to avow themselves. For
rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty,
equality, fraternity, 'the giving and receiving of reasons,' the
complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the
same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master,
proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such,
can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle
because struggle _has_ yielded progress; much less in the
pseudo-Darwinism which would further degrade backward races because they
have been ill-placed. Of race-hatred he cannot be guilty without
infidelity to his first principles.
And if all this be termed vaunting, the objector may, perhaps, be
placated by the repeated avowal that neither is rationalism proclaimed
to be a wholly new way for the nations, nor is the rationalist as such
acclaimed as the monopolist of good. He respectfully urges upon the best
and ablest followers of other flags that under his they will not
deteriorate or be less cherished; that their gifts are precious in his
eyes; that he wants their collaboration for humanity's sake. His
panegyric of Reason is but the praise of what is wisest and best in man:
his 'ism' is the concern to put off dead husks of opinion, to lift all
life to the plane of light. The religionist may, if he must, come over
with permission to call the cultus of truth and sanity a religion: some
there are who suppose themselves to solve the dispute by that means, as
Spencer thought to solve it by inviting Science and Religion to join
hands in an avowal of a common ignorance. Such eirenicons do not seem
widely acceptable: it is really better to let words keep their historic
meanings than wilfully to change their values.
But if the question be whether rationalism is a creed to live by, an
ideal to live by, let these pages be taken as giving part of the answer.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press