THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE GREAT ILLUSION
_But the powers of man, so far as experience and analogy can guide
us, are unlimited; nor are we possessed of any evidence which
authorizes us to assign even an imaginary boundary at which the
human intellect will, of necessity, be brought to a stand._
BUCKLE.
There has been an effort made in certain religious publications to imply
that there is a dearth of thought and thinkers beyond the pale of
theism. The subsequent examination of the theological beliefs of great
minds will show that there has never been a lack of brilliant thinkers
who have not sought truth apart from the dominant faith of their age. It
was Socrates, I believe, who first asked if it was not a base
superstition that mere numbers will give wisdom. Granting this truth, it
certainly cannot be claimed that the philosophers of any time
constituted a majority of any population, nor that the philosopher, as
such, was not greatly in advance of the mental status of the populace of
his particular age. It would seem appropriate to briefly comment on the
opinions of the philosophers, both ancient and modern, concerning their
views on "man's giant shadow, hailed divine."
In former ages, philosophy was the handmaiden of theology. From the time
of Socrates and Plato, and throughout the medieval ages, the foremost
task of the philosopher seemed to be to attempt the proof of the
existence and nature of God, and the immortality of the soul. The
leading thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Malebranche, liberated philosophy from its bondage to
theology. The criticism of Kant of the philosophical foundations of
belief destroyed the "theological proofs," and modern thinkers now spend
little time on the question of the existence and nature of God and the
soul.
Modern philosophy has been completely secularized, and it is a rare
occasion to find a philosopher dwelling on the problems of God and
immortality. This question in philosophy, as in all other branches of
thought, is utterly irrelevant and at present there is less insistence
on God and more on the world, man, morals, and the conditions of social
life.
It cannot be denied that we are under a heavy obligation intellectually
to the Greek philosophers. And it may be that the fruitful efforts of
those minds were largely due to their unhampered intellectual freedom.
They had no "holy books" and few authorities to check their free
speculation and hence these Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of
intellectual freedom, from which arose their intelligent criticism and
speculation. "They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper
significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to
human thought." (_James Harvey Robinson: "The Mind In The Making."_)
We know the teachings of Socrates only through his disciple Plato, as
Socrates wrote nothing himself. From this source we gather that Socrates
firmly upheld the right and necessity of free thought. He was mainly a
moralist and reformer, and attempted to prove the existence of God by
finding evidence of design in nature. He rejected the crude religious
ideas of his nation, was opposed to anthropomorphism, but considered it
his duty to conform publicly to this belief. In his old age, he was
charged with rejecting the gods of the state, and was sentenced to
death.
The philosophy of Plato has given rise to diverse interpretations and
there are those who, on reading the Dialogues, believe that it is not
amiss to state that in certain utterances there is ground to hold that
Plato argued for the pragmatic value of a belief in God and personal
immortality; that he does not stress the truth of the matter, but argues
mainly for the benefit which the State derives from the belief; that
such theistic beliefs cannot be demonstrated, and may well be but a
craving and a hope, yet it will be of no harm to believe. He inferred
the existence of God from what he considered the intelligence and design
manifested in natural objects. Mainly, however, Plato's theism was
founded upon his doctrine of a universe of ideas, and as no one today
holds that ideas are self-existing realities, the foundation of his
theism is destroyed. James Harvey Robinson, in his "Mind in The Making,"
discusses the influence of Plato, and remarks, "Plato made terms with
the welter of things, but sought relief in the conception of supernal
models, eternal in the heavens, after which all things were imperfectly
fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which
was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed
the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new
and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser
minds than his to indulge in all sorts of noble vagueness and
impertinent jargon which continue to curse our popular discussions of
human affairs. He consecrated one of the chief foibles of the human
mind, and elevated it to a religion."
The philosophy of Aristotle is commonly known to be the reverse of
Plato's. Plato started with universals, the very existence of which was
a matter of faith, and from these he descended to particulars.
Aristotle, on the other hand, argued from particulars to universals, and
this inductive method was the true beginning of science. The accumulated
knowledge of his age did not furnish him facts enough upon which to
build and he had to resort to speculation. It does not detract from the
stupendous achievement of this man that the clergy of the Middle Ages,
in control of the few isolated centers of learning, looked upon the
philosophy of Aristotle as final and considered his works as
semi-sacred, and in their immersion in un-reason and unreality, exalted
as immutable and infallible the absurdities in the speculations of a
mind limited to the knowledge of centuries before theirs.
In the attempt to explain plant and animal life, Aristotle formulated
the theory that a special form of animating principle was involved. The
"elan vital" of Bergson and the theory of Joad are modern reiterations
of this conception. Aristotle is not quite consistent when he attempts
to give us his theistic beliefs. At times God is, for him, a mysterious
spirit that never does anything and has not any desire or will.
Elsewhere, he conceives God as pure energy; a prime mover unmoved.
Certain modern physicists still cling to this Aristotelian god. This
conception of a deity was far from the beliefs of his age, and it is not
strange that Aristotle was charged with impiety and with having taught
that prayer and sacrifice were of no avail. He fled from Athens and
shortly afterwards died in exile.
These three supreme Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, have
not contributed a single argument for the existence of a supreme being
which is now not discredited. Socrates relied on the now outmoded
argument from design; and only in a greatly modified form are the
arguments of Plato and Aristotle accepted by modern theists. Holding
such heretical views in an age when history was a frail fabric of
legends, and the scientific explanation of nature in its extreme
infancy, what would their views be today?
In the consideration of the Greek thinkers of lesser importance one
finds that they were continually storming against the religious
conceptions of the populace. The philosophers were ever unpopular with
the credulous. "Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia was
impeached for blasphemy and the tears of Pericles alone saved her;
Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for
a chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of
his disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the
tutor of Alexander." (_Winwood Reade: "The Martyrdom of Man."_)
Anaxagoras, the friend and master of Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates,
was accused by the superstitious Athenians of atheism and impiety to the
gods. He was condemned to death and barely escaped this fate through the
influence of Pericles; which resulted in the accusation of atheism
against Pericles. Euripides was accused of heresy, and Aeschylus was
condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy and was saved from this
fate by his brother Aminias. The philosophy of Parmenides was distinctly
pantheistic, and Pythagoras, who attempted to purify the religion of the
Greeks and free it from its absurdities and superstitions, was exiled
for his scepticism.
Democritus, a materialist and atheist of 2500 years ago, formulated a
mechanical view of phenomena in accordance with which everything that
happens is due to physical impacts. "Such a materialism was a great
liberation from superstition; and had it survived in its integrity, the
path of European wisdom would have been vastly different from what it
was. What the path would have been, we are beginning to see to-day, for
since the nineteenth century we have been treading it more or less
consistently but by no means so gallantly and courageously as
Democritus." (_G. Boas: "The Adventures of Human Thought."_)
Democritus and the Epicureans strove to deliver men from their two chief
apprehensions: the fear of the gods, and the fear of death; and in so
doing rejected the religious beliefs and substituted a rational and
scientific conception of the universe.
It was Xenophanes, the Voltaire of Greece, who brought to the attention
of his countrymen the discovery that man created the gods in his own
image. He attacked the conceptions of the Greek deities with these
words, "Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and have
clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... Yes, and if oxen and horses
or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works
of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses,
and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several
kinds.... The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the
Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair."
Considering Greek philosophy in its entirety, we see that it was
naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather
than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the
existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the
role of Providence and fewer still believed in personal immortality.
Professor Boas, in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy,
remarks: "The Asiatic myths assumed the existence of beings beyond the
world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course
of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They
seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question
was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became
dominant in Europe, much of its theologians' time was spent in answering
it. The only plausible answer then was that God made the world because
He felt like it. For no reason could be given sufficiently compelling to
sway the will of the Omnipotent. But such an answer was unsatisfactory
to the Greek. In his philosophy all this is changed. No god steps out of
the machine to initiate cosmic history. The First Cause is a physical
substance, some material thing, which operates by the laws of its own
nature. Its every movement is theoretically open to the scrutiny of
reason. And hence, a scientific rather than a religious answer can be
given to every question."
At the beginning of the Christian era, the cultured Romans were stoics
or epicureans. The poet Lucretius was an epicurean who regarded the
belief in the gods as a product of the terrors of primitive man and
recommended that the mind should be emancipated from the fear of the
gods and argued against the immortality of the soul. Seneca, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius were stoics. Cicero insinuates that the gods are
only poetical creations, that the popular doctrine of punishment in a
world to come is only an idle fable, and is uncertain whether the soul
is immortal. Seneca wrote against the religion of his country, and the
philosophy of cultured Romans of the time of the physician Galen tended
towards atheism.
The prime factor of Greek philosophy was the insistence on intelligence
and knowledge, and by these means it reached its pinnacle of reasoning.
The blight that exterminated all scientific progress, with the fall of
the Roman Empire, carried with it the neglect of the Greek thinkers.
Similar to the retrogression of scientific thought, traced in former
chapters, is the corresponding retrogression in philosophic thought. In
place of the free inquiry of the Greeks we see arising the theology of
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Augustine, and finally that of St.
Thomas Aquinas. At the time of St. Augustine most of the cultural Greek
writings had disappeared in western Europe. The greatest store of Greek
thought was in the hands of the Arab scholars and led to a marked
scepticism, as we see manifested in the writings of the Spanish Moors.
It is significant that during the "age of faith" in Europe no
philosopher of merit arose, and the only philosophy permitted was the
puerile Scholastic-Aristotelic. This scholastic philosophy, hemmed in
between metaphysics and theology, sought to reconcile Plato, Plotinus,
and Aristotle with the needs of orthodoxy, and split hairs over subtle
essences and entities. Francis Bacon impeaches, in this manner, the
medieval philosophers: "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of
leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in
the cells of a few authors, as their persons were shut up in the cells
of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of
nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite
agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which
are extant in their books."
The sole preoccupation of medieval philosophy seemed to be conjectures
as to what would happen to man after death, and the entire system of
thought was based on authority. The medieval philosopher turned in
disdain from the arduous path of investigation of actual phenomena and
confidently believed that he could find truth by easy reliance upon
revelation and the elaboration of dogmas. A few brave minds rebelled
against this unnatural imprisonment of the intellect, with the usual
consequences. Peter Abelard was condemned for his scepticism at a
council at Sens in 1140; the philosophy of John Scotus Erigena was
condemned for its pantheistic ideas by a council at Sens in 1225; and
the pantheistic views of Bruno had much to do with his martyrdom in the
year 1600.
Montaigne, the pioneer of modern scepticism, gave voice to his
repugnance for dogmas in his brilliant Essays, in which he stated that
all religious opinions are the result of custom; and that he doubted if,
out of the immense number of religious opinions, there were any means of
ascertaining which were accurate. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes
were the inaugurators of a school of thought which is characterized by
its practical spirit; and while these men professed theistic beliefs,
their systems of thought had done much, when applied and amplified by
their followers, to undermine that belief. These men furnished the
source of a later agnosticism.
Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bacon and Galileo that all knowledge starts
from experience, and, carrying out the inductive method of Bacon, he
produced his "Leviathan" in 1651. It was promptly attacked by the clergy
of every country in Europe. Hobbes says of the immortality of the soul,
"It is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it
supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them, that knew others
that knew it supernaturally."
Locke concerned himself with a philosophic inquiry into the nature of
the mind itself, and was looked upon as a destroyer of the faith.
Descartes based his philosophy on the rejection of authority in favor of
human reason for which his works were honored by being placed on the
Index in 1663. Hume, with the publication of the highly heretical
"Treatise on Human Nature," threw consternation into the ranks of the
theists. His theory of knowledge played havoc with the old arguments for
belief in God and immortality of the soul. His works were widely read
and were instrumental in leading to the philosophical agnosticism of the
nineteenth century.
Spinoza's religious views seemed in his time little short of atheism and
brought him the hostility of both Jews and Christians, to which was
added the excommunication from the synagogue. In his philosophy God and
nature are equivalent terms and it is pantheistic only in the sense that
if man is to have a god at all, nature must be that god, and whatever
man considers godlike must be found in nature. Spinoza recognizes no
supernatural realm and denies the survival of personal memory. Professor
G. Boas, in his "Adventures of Human Thought," discusses the attitude of
public opinion of the time of Spinoza. "He was the arch-atheist, the
materialist, the subverter of all that was held most dear by the
reigning powers. It was only after the French Revolution that he came
into his own when certain Germans, captivated by Neo-Platonism,
emphasized the pantheistic element in him. But by then Christianity had
ceased to be a dominant intellectual force and had become what it is
today, a folk belief." In the "Tractus Theologico-Politicus," Spinoza
states: "When people declare, as all are ready to do, that the Bible is
the Word of God teaching men true blessedness and the way of salvation,
they evidently do not mean what they say, for the masses take no pains
at all to live according to Scripture, and we see most people
endeavoring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of God, and
giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling
others to think as they do. We generally see, I say, theologians
anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the
sacred text, and to fortify them with divine authority."
In France, Pierre Bayle cleverly satirized the absurdity of dogma, and
La Mettrie, an army physician, was exiled for the publication of his
"Man a Machine." He insisted that if atheism were generally accepted
society would be happier. His views were taken up and expanded by such
atheists as Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and Diderot, who taught
that morality should be founded on sociology and not on theology. The
publication of their Encyclopaedia incurred the fierce opposition of the
Church. Of Voltaire's anti-clericism little need be said, except to
recall our debt to his victory over ecclesiasticism and superstition.
His assertion that "a fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance
has been the sickness of all the centuries," still holds too great an
extent of truth. His denial of miracles, the supernatural efficacy of
prayer, and the immortality of the soul earned for him the undying
enmity of the clergy. Condorcet, another deist, was the successor of
Voltaire in the Encyclopaedic warfare.
The "Critique of Pure Reason" of Kant demolished the ontological and the
cosmological arguments for the existence of God and showed the weakness
in the teleological argument. He demonstrated that all the current
arguments for God and immortality; the entire basis of rational proof of
religious beliefs; were invalid. The theists protested vehemently, and
showed their superiority by calling their dogs "Immanuel Kant." In his
"Critique of Practical Reason," however, he went on to restore the
credit of religion through the moral sense, the "Categorical
Imperative," and, as certain commentators have stated, after having
excluded God from the cosmos, he attempted to find Him again in ethics.
Holding that the moral sense is innate and not derived from experience,
he reduced the truth of religion to moral faith. Kant believed that he
found a divine command in his own conscience; but the science of ethics
now gives a natural account of moral laws and sentiments. The study of
the evolution of our moral ideas has, today, destroyed Kant's theory of
an innate and absolute moral sense.
When Franklin showed the nature of lightning, the voice of God was
displaced from that of thunder. The sciences of ethics and psychology,
like modern Franklins, show plainly that conscience is no more the voice
of God than is thunder. Schopenhauer, commenting on Kantian theology,
offers the suggestion that Kant was really a sceptic, but became
frightened when he contemplated what he thought would happen to public
morals if belief were to be denied to the masses. Nietzsche speaks of
Kant: "With the aid of his concept of 'Practical Reason,' he produced a
special kind of reason, for use on occasions when reason cannot
function: namely, when the sublime command, 'Thou shalt,' resounds." In
his old age Kant became more bold, and perhaps voiced his true views,
for we find that in "Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason," he is
actively antagonistic to ecclesiasticism, so much so that, for
publishing this work, he was censured by the Prussian king, who wrote,
"Our highest person has been greatly displeased to observe how you
misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most
important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of
Christianity." Indeed, many a man approaching Kant with a firm theistic
belief finds his belief somewhat shaken by Kantian logic.
Schopenhauer's "Will" has nothing in common with the God-idea as
commonly held, and he was bitterly anti-theistic. In a dialogue entitled
"Religion," he places these words in the mouth of his character
Philalethes: "A certain amount of general ignorance is the condition of
all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. And as soon as
astronomy, natural science, geology, history, the knowledge of countries
and peoples, have spread their light broadcast, and philosophy finally
is permitted to say a word, every faith founded on miracles and
revelation must disappear; and philosophy takes its place."
Hegel's deification of thought or reason left no room for personal
immortality, and his query, "Do you expect a tip for having nursed your
ailing mother, and refrained from poisoning your brother?" is well
known. A vague conception of a deity whose existence can be proved, if
it can be proved at all, only by the abstruse arguments of a Hegel is
not a god of practical service to the theists.
Schelling was pantheistic, and Feuerbach played havoc with the
philosophic evidence for God and immortality and treated all religions
as a dream and an illusion.
Herbert Spencer, James Mill, J. S. Mill, and Huxley popularized the
agnostic standpoint. Spencer in his "First Principles" argues in this
manner: "Those who cannot conceive of a self-existent Universe, and
therefore assume a creator as the source of the Universe, take for
granted that they can conceive a self-existent creator. The mystery
which they recognize in this great fact surrounding them on every side,
they transfer to an alleged source of this great fact, and then suppose
that they have solved the mystery. But they delude themselves.
Self-existence is inconceivable; and this holds true whatever be the
nature of the object of which it is predicated. Whoever agrees that the
atheistic hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible
idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistic hypothesis
is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea.... If religion and
science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this
deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts, that the Power which the
Universe manifests to us is inscrutable."
Nietzsche, the great liberator of modern thought, vigorously opposed
religious morality, the influence of Christianity, and all religious
beliefs. "When the natural consequences of an action," he wrote, "are no
longer looked upon as natural, but are considered to be produced by the
phantasms of superstition, by 'God,' 'Ghosts,' and 'Souls,' and appear
as 'moral' consequences, as rewards, punishments, guidance and
revelation, then the whole basis of knowledge is destroyed; and the
greatest possible crime against humanity has been committed."
William James, claimed as a supporter of religion, argues that our inner
experience makes us cognizant of a spiritual world. The advance of
psychological research does not deal kindly with this contention, and
such works as Leuba's "Psychology of Religious Mysticism" give a
rational explanation of the mystic state. Moreover, James did not give
his support to monotheism. "That vast literature of proofs of God's
existence," he stated, "drawn from the order of nature, which a century
ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than
gather dust in the libraries, for the simple reason that our generation
has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of
God may be, we know today that he is nevermore that mere external
inventor of 'contrivances' intended to make manifest his 'glory' in
which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction."
James claimed to be a pluralist in the sense that there are several or
many spiritual beings above us, and his writings lead one to believe
that he was not convinced that man, as a distinct personality, survives
the grave.
Royce rejected all the current arguments for God and immortality and
argues for the mysticism of internal experience. Eucken offers no
support to theologians; and Bergson does not seem to express a clear
belief in a personal god or personal immortality.
Coming to the more popular of contemporary philosophers one finds that,
just as the Greek philosophers reasoned outside the pale of the then
held beliefs which were theistic, so do these modern philosophers reach
conclusions that are outside the pale of organized religion of today.
George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in
Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality.
"It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives
that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what
a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given
the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly
and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the
gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most
exhorbitant scale.... The idea that religion contains a literal, not a
symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea.
Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable
philosophizing on that subject."
Bertrand Russell, considered by some the keenest philosophical mind of
the present age, is an agnostic who maintains "The objections to
religion are of two sorts, intellectual and moral. The intellectual
objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the
moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men
were more cruel than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate
inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise
outgrow."
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce is an atheist who states that
philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing. C. E. M. Joad
is a young English philosopher who repeatedly predicts the disappearance
in the near future of the present forms of theistic beliefs. M. C. Otto
holds to "An affirmative faith in the non-existence of God." William P.
Montague discards all organized religions for a "Promethean Religion."
John Dewey is a naturalistic philosopher who will have nothing to do
with supernatural causation and insists that all things be explained by
their place and function in the environment. His philosophy is permeated
with the secular ideal of control of the external world.
What consolation does organized religion receive from the views of such
modern philosophers as Russell, Alexander, Joad, Croce, Santayana,
Dewey, Otto, Montague, Sellars, and the Randalls? The views of an
intellectual incompetent, such as Bryan was, are spread widecast, but
few know the extent of the scepticism of Edison, Luther Burbank, Albert
Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Ernst Haeckel, Robert Koch, Fridjof Nansen, and
Swante Arrhenius. What consolation can the theists derive from the
religious views of Shelley, Swinburne, Meredith, Buchanan, Keats, George
Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and Anatole France?
In the not far distant past deism and pantheism served as a polite
subterfuge for atheism. There is a growing tendency in this present age
to dress one's atheistic belief in an evening suit, and for the sake of
social approbation call such a belief "religious humanism." A quotation
from the Associated Press, appearing recently in one of our magazines,
states the need for this "new religion" as being the inadequacy of the
religious forms and ideas of our fathers, and the new creed to be:
"Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not
created.
"Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the
scientific spirit and method.
"The distinction between the sacred and secular can no longer be
maintained.
"Religious humanism considers the complete realization of human
personality to be the end of a man's life, and seeks its development and
fulfilment in the here and now.
"In place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer, the
humanist finds his religious emotions exprest in a heightened sense of
personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.
"There will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind
hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural. Man will learn to
face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness
and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by
education and supported custom.
"We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental
hygiene, and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful
thinking.
"The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which the
people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good.
"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in
religious thoughts throughout the modern world. Science and economic
change have disrupted the old beliefs.
"Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms
with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and
experience."
Professors John Dewey, E. A. Burtt, and Roy Wood Sellars are among the
signers of this statement. It is an excellent and comprehensive
statement, but one is left wondering why the name "religious humanism"?
It is difficult to become enthusiastic when one realizes that these men
take to themselves the thunder of the atheists of the past, and under
the misnomer, "religious," place before the public what all atheists of
the past ages have been preaching.
It is most gratifying to perceive that such distinguished men as signed
this statement are frank enough to admit the extent of the religious
revolution, and determined enough to take a hand in the clearing away of
the debris that clutters the crumbling of all religious creeds. Yet it
is only fair to point out that this statement contains nothing that
would not be recognized by those intrepid atheists of the past, and
little more than they urged in their time. I refer to those brilliant
French atheists La Mettrie, Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and
Diderot.