A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 22 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 22Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 4)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 22
Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 4)
RobertsonEnglish
Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse, are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age; and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents, counts for nothing in the critical scale.
14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres, of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter of the century the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his art suffer from his preoccupations with the new humanitarian ideas; while the critic Biélinsky, classed by Tourguénief as the Lessing of Russia, was pronouncedly rationalistic, as was his contemporary the critic Granovsky, reputed the finest Russian stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every form of intellectual influence in Russia, and all educated thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the fiction of the freethinker Tourguénief, the Sophocles of the modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, count indeed for supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of the former was something apart from his philosophy, which was merely childlike; and the latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous artist of the three, made his religious converts in Russia chiefly among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply antagonistic to orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the younger writer, Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his extremely sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still younger Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.
15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen, who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen's Brand, of which the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard. Ibsen, though his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches, showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work; Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother, the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in 1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.
Section 4.--The Natural Sciences
1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the physical universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold by the Christian scheme--he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist--but some later astronomers seem to have done so. When, however, the great Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis, previously guessed at by Bruno and outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit was rudely shaken as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like every other previous advance in physical science this was denounced as atheistic --which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed in essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace's system widens immensely the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism of the Christian era; and the subsequent concrete developments of astronomy, giving as they do such an insistent and overwhelming impression of physical infinity, have made the "Christian hypothesis" fantastic save for minds capable of enduring any strain on the sense of consistency. Paine had brought the difficulty vividly home to the common intelligence; and though the history of orthodoxy is a history of the success of institutions and majorities in imposing incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on this side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change; and as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a Scotch clergyman a very plain indication of disbelief in the Hebrew story of the stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of the rotation of the earth. It is typical of the tenacity of religious delusion that a quarter of a century later this among other irrational credences was contended for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen, and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for all scientifically trained men they had become untenable. And that the general growth of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific men the old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814 (No. 46), and was "universally attributed to Prof. Leslie," the distinguished physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay, Sur les probabilités, it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume that miracles cannot be proved by any testimony.
Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in 1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the school of Hume, who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless he again succeeded Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and was knighted in 1832. The invention of the hygrometer and the discovery of the relations of light and heat had begun to count for more in science than the profession of orthodoxy.
2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737-1808), the colleague of Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius, d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de l'homme (1796-1802) might be described as the systematic application to psychology of that "positive" method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis, the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their ignorance of physiology; and he easily put aside the primary errors, such as the "equality of minds" and the entity of "the soul," which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has not been exhausted.
But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance the most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man on that issue. But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes premières, addressed to Fauriel, in which the aging intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding in favour of a "sort of stoic pantheism" with a balance towards normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical, and accorded its framer authority from that moment.
As for the conception of "vitalism" put forward in the Letter to Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had been a partisan in his youth. The fact remains that he gave an enduring impulse to positive science, his own final vacillation failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the famous phrase that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure "sensationalism." What he taught was that "impressions, reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to act on nutritive substances," etc. It is after this statement of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes: "The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought" and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of the difficulty of those who "cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science, as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines, insisted upon a distinction between "soul" and "vital force"; on the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were reproached accordingly by the orthodox. All that remained was the indisputable "positive" gain.
3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology was seen even more clearly than that of the great generalization of Laplace. Professor William Lawrence (1783-1867), the physiologist, published in 1816 an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, containing some remarks on the nature of life, which elicited from the then famous Dr. Abernethy a foul attack in his Physiological Lectures delivered before the College of Surgeons. Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of French physiological skeptics whose aim was to "loosen those restraints on which the welfare of mankind depends." In the introductory lecture of his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians, Lawrence severely retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but reasserting that the dependence of life on organization is as clear as the derivation of daylight from the sun. The war was adroitly carried at once into the enemy's territory in the declaration that "The profound, the virtuous, and fervently pious Pascal acknowledged, what all sound theologians maintain, that the immortality of the soul, the great truths of religion, and the fundamental principles of morals cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason; and that revelation alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties which perplex those who inquire too curiously into the sources of these important principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other remedy can be so perfect and satisfactory as this, no other can be necessary, if we resort to this with firm faith." The value of this pronouncement is indicated later in the same volume by subacid allusions to "those who regard the Hebrew Scriptures as writings composed with the assistance of divine inspiration," and who receive Genesis "as a narrative of actual events." Indicating various "grounds of doubt respecting inspiration," the lecturer adds that the stories of the naming of the animals and their collection in the ark, "if we are to understand them as applied to the living inhabitants of the whole world, are zoologically impossible." On the principle then governing such matters Lawrence was in 1822, on the score of his heresies, refused copyright in his lectures, which were accordingly reprinted many times in a cheap stereotyped edition, and thus widely diffused.
This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of Sir T. C. Morgan's Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed, and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the philosophic side; and "vitalism" is argued down as explicitly as is anthropomorphism. As a whole the book tells notably of the stimulus of recent French thought upon English.
4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the science of geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the nineteenth century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth century, Werner and Dr. James Hutton (1726-1797), the latter and more important is known from his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794) to have been consciously a freethinker on more grounds than that of his naturalistic science; and his Theory of the World (1795) was duly denounced as atheistic. Whereas the physical infinity of the universe almost forced the orthodox to concede a vast cosmic process of some kind as preceding the shaping of the earth and solar system, the formation of these within six days was one of the plainest assertions in the sacred books; and every system of geology excluded such a conception. As the evidence accumulated, in the hands of men mostly content to deprecate religious opposition, there was duly evolved the quaint compromise of the doctrine that the Biblical six "days" meant six ages--a fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On the ground of that absurdity, nevertheless, there gradually grew up a new conception of the antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular work on geology such as The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847), could begin with the proposition that "long before the human race had been introduced on the earth this world of ours existed as the habitation of living things different from those now inhabiting its surface." Even the thesis of "six ages," and others of the same order, drew upon their supporters angry charges of "infidelity." Hugh Miller, whose natural gifts for geological research were chronically turned to confusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so assailed, when in point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts to salve the Scriptures. Of all the inductive sciences geology had been most retarded by the Christian canonization of error. Even the plain fact that what is dry land had once been sea was obstinately distorted through centuries, though Ovid had put the observations of Pythagoras in the way of all scholars; and though Leonardo da Vinci had insisted on the visible evidence; nay, deistic habit could keep even Voltaire, as we saw, preposterously incredulous on the subject. When the scientific truth began to force its way in the teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the "Mosaic" doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked; and whether or not the suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on perception of the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with Genesis, the scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism for many. What helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation on the scientific side was the attitude of men like Professor Baden Powell, whose scientific knowledge and habit of mind moved him to attack the Judaism of the Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity, and in the name of truth to declare that "nothing in geology bears the smallest semblance to any part of the Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to what extent we may." In 1857 this was very bold language.
5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier forms. As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life; and at the same time (1794-95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar convictions. That views thus reached almost simultaneously in Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution, should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828, was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England, indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the Nebular Hypothesis: "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the different functions they had to perform." And Murchison the geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected till his dying day (1871).
6. Other anticipations of Darwin's doctrine in England and elsewhere came practically to nothing, as regarded the general opinion, until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience, incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that, "as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be tolerated in England"; adding: "You would be surprised to hear the contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the Vestiges." Hugh Miller, himself accused of "infidelity" for his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists of his day "vermin" and "reptiles," and classifying as "degraded and lost" all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution, which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types "can never be maintained again," and pronounced it an "unhallowed imputation."
7. "Contempt and abhorrence" had in fact at all times constituted the common Christian temper towards every form of critical dissent from the body of received opinion; and only since the contempt, doubled with criticism, began to be in a large degree retorted on the bigots by instructed men has a better spirit prevailed. Such a reaction was greatly promoted by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. It was after the above-noted preparation, popular and academic, and after the theory of transmutation of species had been definitely pronounced erroneous by the omniscient Whewell, that Darwin produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of arguments and facts, the Origin of Species, expounding systematically the principle of Natural Selection, suggested to him by the economic philosophy of Malthus, and independently and contemporaneously arrived at by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous; and the Church, as always, arrayed itself violently against the new truth. Bishop Wilberforce pointed out in the Quarterly Review that "the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God," which was perfectly true; and at a famous meeting of the British Association in 1860 he so travestied the doctrine as to goad Huxley into a fierce declaration that he would rather be a descendant of an ape than of a man who (like the Bishop) plunged into questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them and distract his hearers by appeals to religious prejudice. The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare of ignorance; but the battle was practically won within twenty years. In France, Germany, and the United States leading theologians had made the same suicidal declarations, entitling all men to say that, if evolution proved to be true, Christianity was false. Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig, took up the same position as Bishop Wilberforce, declaring that "the whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine of creation"; leading American theologians pronounced the new doctrine atheistic; and everywhere gross vituperation eked out the theological argument.
8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an originating deity--the conception which virtually united the deists and Christians of the eighteenth century against the atheists--was at length scientifically exploded. The principle of personal divine rule or providential intervention had now been philosophically excluded successively (1) from astronomy by the system of Newton; (2) from the science of earth-formation by the system of Laplace and the new geology; (3) from the science of living organisms by the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception should be further excluded from the human sciences--from anthropology, from the philosophy of history, and from ethics--to complete, at least in outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that the process was complete in detail even as regarded zoology. Despite the plain implications of the Origin of Species, the doctrine of the Descent of Man (1871) came on many as a shocking surprise and evoked a new fury of protest. The lacunæ in Darwin, further, had to be supplemented; and much speculative power has been spent on the task by Haeckel, without thus far establishing complete agreement. But the desperate stand so long made on the score of the "missing link" seems to have been finally discredited in 1894; and the Judæo-Christian doctrine of special creation and providential design appears, even in the imperfectly educated society of our day, to be already a lost cause.
As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class that resisted the new truth: the men of science themselves were often disgracefully hostile; and that "class" continued to give a sufficiency of support to clericalism. If the study of the physical sciences be no guarantee for recognition of new truth in those sciences, still less is it a sure preparation for right judgment in matters of sociology, or, indeed, for a courageous attitude towards conventions. Spencer in his earlier works used the language of deism at a time when Comte had discarded it. It takes a rare combination of intellectual power, moral courage, and official freedom to permit of such a directly rationalistic propaganda as was carried on by Professor Clifford, or even such as has been accomplished by President Andrew White in America under the comparatively popular profession of deism. It was only in his leisured latter years that Huxley carried on a general conflict with orthodoxy. In middle age he frequently covered himself by attacks on professed freethinkers; and he did more than any other man of his time in England to conserve the Bible as a school manual by his politic panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists were striving to get it excluded from the State schools. Other men of science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by more or less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of the universe; so that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are able to cite from them many quasi-scientific phrases --taking care not to ask what bearing their language has on the dogmas of the Churches. Physicists who attempt to be more precise are rarely found to be orthodox; and the moral and social science of such writers is too often a species of charlatanism. But the whole tendency of natural science, which as such is necessarily alien to supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of the religious tradition; and the real leaders of science are found more and more openly alienated from the creed of faith. We know that Darwin, though the son and grandson of freethinkers, was brought up in ordinary orthodoxy by his mother, and "gave up common religious belief almost independently from his own reflections." All over the world that has since been an increasingly common experience among scientific men.
Section 5.--The Sociological Sciences
1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit or implicit in the whole literature of Deism; and had been attempted with various degrees of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by lesser men. So clear had been the classic lead to naturalistic views of social growth in the Politics of Aristotle, and so strong the influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is seen even in the work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as Bossuet; while in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous generalizations; and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the Scotland of the middle and latter parts of the century. Here again there was reaction; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to promote broader views than his own; Eusèbe Salverte in his essay De la Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a general view; and Charles Comte in his Traité de Législation (1826) made a marked scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As we have seen, the eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere of natural law equally with cosmic phenomena. At length, in the great work of Auguste Comte, scientific method was applied so effectively and concretely to the general problem that, despite his serious fallacies, social science again took rank as a solid study.
2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visible in this as in other fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example of a strictly naturalistic treatment of history; and the clerical Robertson was faithful to their method; but Hallam makes a stand for supernaturalism even in applying a generally scientific critical standard. The majority of historical events he is content to let pass as natural, even as the average man sees the hand of the doctor in his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in his escape from a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at Legnano, Hallam pronounces that it is not "material to allege ... that the accidental destruction of Frederic's army by disease enabled the cities of Lombardy to succeed in their resistance.... Providence reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor may be broken; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate whether the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome marshes of Rome or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter."
But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend such nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of history. Even the oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for "special providences" in his histories, though he leant to that conception; and though Ranke also uses mystifying language, he writes as a Naturalist; while Michelet is openly anti-clerical. Grote was wholly a rationalist; the historic method of his friend and competitor, Bishop Thirlwall, was as non-theological as his; Macaulay, whatever might be his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most secular spirit when exhibiting theological evolution; and George Long indicated his rationalism again and again. It is only in the writings of the most primitively prejudiced of those German historians who eliminate ethics from historiography that the "God" factor is latterly emphasized in ostensibly expert historiography.
3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such views, and at length, in England and America, by the works of Draper and Buckle, in the sixth and later decades of the century, the conception of law in human history was widely if slowly popularized, to the due indignation of the supernaturalists, who saw the last great field of natural phenomena passing like others into the realm of science. Draper's avowed theism partly protected him from attack; but Buckle's straightforward attacks on creeds and on Churches brought upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was unmollified by his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his erratic attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against his sociological teaching. Spencer's Principles of Sociology nevertheless clinched the scientific claim by taking sociological law for granted; and the new science has continually progressed in acceptance. In the hands of all its leading modern exponents in all countries--Lester Ward, Giddings, Guyau, Letourneau, Tarde, Ferri, Durkheim, De Greef, Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld, Schäffle--it has been entirely naturalistic, though some Catholic professors continue to inject into it theological assumptions. It cannot be said, however, that a general doctrine of social evolution is even yet fully established. The problem is complicated by the profoundly contentious issues of practical politics; and in the resulting diffidence of official teachers there arises a notable opening for obscurantism, which has been duly forthcoming. In the first half of the century such an eminent Churchman as Dean Milman incurred at the hands of J. H. Newman and others the charge of writing the history of the Jews and of early Christianity in a rationalistic spirit, presenting religion as a "human" phenomenon. Later Churchmen, with all their preparation, have rarely gone further.
4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be thoroughly followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative conclusions--those of anthropological archæology (including comparative mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional belief. The lessons of anthropology had been long available to the modern world before they began to be scientifically applied to the "science of religion." The issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses in the eighteenth century were in practice put aside in favour of direct debate over Christian history, dogma, and ethic; though many of the deists dwelt on the analogies of "heathen" and "revealed" religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant made a vigorous attempt to bring the whole phenomena under a general evolutionary conception in his work De la Religion. But it was not till the treasure of modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such students as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and above all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science of it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic evolution of humanity began to be decisively superseded.
In 1871 Tylor could still say that "to many educated minds there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals." But the old repulsion had already been profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor's book met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and Buckle. "It will make me for the future look on religion--a belief in the soul, etc.--from a different point of view," wrote Darwin to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle, began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.
In the hands of Spencer all the phenomena of primitive mental life--beliefs, practices, institutions--are considered as purely natural data, no other point of view being recognized; and the anthropological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at the same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation--the supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion--but whether the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological research is being carried on without any reference to such issues, the total effect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from the study of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.
Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics
1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling, produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and the other as pantheistic, despite its dualism. Neither seems to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the universities; and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies by formulating, as Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining Christianity as "Absolute Religion" in comparison with the various forms of "Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had carried its point with the world at large, he was chronically at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated, and on the other declaring that the common run of them "know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. "Whether at the marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man heals." On the story of the marks made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: "Would the angel not have known them without these marks?", adding: "This faith has no real interest for Spirit." Such writing, from the orthodox point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy and a form of political utilitarianism.
As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte), pp. 364-69; Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406; J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189-91; Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135-41, 176; Eschenmenger, Die Hegel'sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen, 1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54--also cited by Beard, pp. 9-12.
The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered in connection with his demonstration that in politics the Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the representing of Christianity as a culmination or "ultimate" of all religion; and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.
We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel's process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel's officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel, after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded "demagogy," and in Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes of 1848. It came in their case from the same source--an alarmed memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.
Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity simply the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind, but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds; and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of German thought--as those of Vatke, Strauss, Feuerbach, and Marx--professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.
2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel's method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor, with a few exceptions, to his own disciples, some of whom, as Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity. In 1854 Heine told his French readers that there were in Germany "fanatical monks of atheism" who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted deist; and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel's system only atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while. Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came in due course the cry of "Back to Kant," where at least orthodoxy had some formal semblance of sanction.
Hartmann's work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity is a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for "liberal Christianity" in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal for a "new concrete religion" of monism or pantheism as a bulwark against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann insisted on grounding his pessimism; and with this pessimistic pantheism he hoped to outbid Catholicism against the "irreligious" Strauss and the liberal Christians--in his view no less irreligious. It does not seem to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the effect of all German philosophy has probably been to make for the general discredit of theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism being little propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in spirit or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current religion which their writings in particular manifest must be admitted to stand for a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And this revolt was bound to come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel--aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung as a force that had done its work, and could find no more to do, however it be explained and excused--was a mere expression of their own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a stop on à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an "ultimate" of philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators, seeking simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit which, correcting their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper and wider comprehension of religious evolution and psychosis than could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed, did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact, was fatally shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution, which in their case took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France and England it worked out as a crude return to clerical and political authoritarianism.
3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament" of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality on the other) should be cured. Feuerbach accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, fundamentally averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.
Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity, and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." It may have been that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach, in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel, philosophy and theology still went."
For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy, 1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839) he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness, is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." This of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...."
This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude rule of egoism." Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism" and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force.
4. Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), who was of the same philosophical school, gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated among its Reverers (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance, proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of "materialism" was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we are not without the earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals, not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it, and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science, and art."
5. On Feuerbach's Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion of Büchner's Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain man of his century what d'Holbach in his chief work sought to do for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy, in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which marks the religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in previous ages; and constantly misrepresented as professing to explain an infinite universe when it does but show the hollowness of all supernaturalist explanations, the book steadily holds its ground as a manual of anti-mysticism. Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may be said to have framed for their age an atheistic "System of Nature," concrete and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur's protest against the "one-sidedness" of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen ground of self-consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner's study of the objective world and see whether his cause fares any better.
6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the other "classic philosophers" of the first third of the century orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism; and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet. The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy, an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up, and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the orthodox. "God," he wrote, "interposes as little in the regular development of humanity as in the course of the solar system." He added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual, between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of pronouncing on religious questions.
7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period, however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L'indifférence en matière de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.
