Rationalism Part 3

Recognising all this, the balanced rationalist will shun as a special sin of religion the ritualising of his joys, the sectarian extension of his differences of credence to the field of aesthetics. His rationalism as such implies no one of the special 'isms' of the arts; though there he may be an 'ist' like another. For him all art, all literature, all beauty, is so much of Nature's fruitage; and Christian cathedral and Moslem mosque can yield him pleasures which Christian and Moslem can never derive from _his_ distinctive intellectual work. He may even take artistic satisfaction in contemplating the figure of the winged angel which Christianity took over from Paganism, without believing it to be the image of a reality, as so many pietists have so childishly done for thousands of years. 'Religious' music can minister to him in virtue of the common psychosis. His very names for himself and his intellectual code are but insistences on complete inner loyalty to a moral law which most men profess to obey, and which all of necessity obey in many if not in most matters.

The time is for him even in sight, as it were, when most men will recognise and live by that law; and when that day comes there will be no more need to profess rationalism than to profess, as a creed, any of the daily reciprocities by which society subsists. But till that day comes he marks himself, and is marked--to his frequent discomfort, it may be--by his insistence, in the deepest matters, on that law of truth which so many still persistently subordinate to pleas or preferences of authority or habit, convention or subjective taste. Avowing it as his bias, if so challenged, he claims that it is the bias to perfection in the intellectual life as the bias to order and sympathy is the bias to perfection in the civil.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] See Professor James's _Principles of Psychology_, 1891, ii. 321.

-- 8. ULTIMATE PROBLEMS

To a surprising degree, the philosophic disputes of the ages turn upon the same problems; and to an extent that is nothing short of sinister, they resolve themselves for most of the onlookers, if not of the partic.i.p.ants, into the question of the maintenance of the popular religion. Thus academic theists in our own day are found resenting the tendency of ancient freethinkers to discredit and disestablish the G.o.ds of Olympus, who for the academics themselves, as for everybody else, are a set of chimeras. Are we to infer that the current academic philosophies, even where constructive, are no better bottomed than the popular credences they seek to shelter? Kant's 'critical' philosophy was by himself soon turned to the account of pulpit religion; Fichte ended in restating the gospels in terms of his pantheistic personal equation; Hegel soon attained to the champions.h.i.+p of the Prussian State Church; Lotze has reformulated Christianity to the end of giving it continuance as a creed for the educated. Nietzsche said with substantial truth that the vogue of Kant has been that of a philosopher who enabled theological teachers to put a philosophic face upon a doctrine not otherwise presentable to their students; and the vogue of Berkeley in England has been of a similar kind.

In our own day the fortunes of new treatises in popular philosophy turn upon their adaptability to orthodox sophistics. Our generation has seen in succession (1) the absurd work of the late Professor Drummond on 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World' welcomed as turning the tables on 'science' by showing that its doctrines are fundamentally at one with those of the faith; (2) the still more absurd work of Mr. Benjamin Kidd on 'Social Evolution' hailed as demonstrating by ratiocination that the reasonable course for society is not to reason; and (3) the incomparably subtler books of Mr. Balfour acclaimed (whether or not read) as proving that reason cannot bite on religious opinions, and that we could never enjoy our music and our dinners as we do if we thought of ourselves merely as evolved from animal forms, without somewhere inserting Deity as the sanction and exemplar of our preferences, aesthetic or moral.[14]

Always the acclamation tells of a pa.s.sion somehow to humiliate 'science,' to put reason in the wrong, to triumph over 'negation,' to show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy which does not make play with 'spirit,' wors.h.i.+p, and the supernatural.

The cure, however, is never found to be permanent; and latterly we see the not very accommodating philosophy of M. Bergson grasped at as yielding some kind of weapon wherewith to beat back the advance of the ever-encroaching a.s.sailant. Sooth to say, neither the a.n.a.lyses nor the syntheses of M. Bergson are in any way damaging to rationalism, or in any way rationally ancillary to supernaturalism. The anti-rationalists have clutched eagerly at his dictum that reason, considered as a light upon the universe, is a poor thing; and that there is something in us higher than intelligence. Apart from the disparaging form given (gratuitously) to the content of these propositions, there is nothing in them that has not been rationalistically put. That is to say, it is a rationalistic proposition that new truths are reached neither by deduction nor by induction, but by a leap of the judgment, by spontaneous guess or hypothesis. What then?

To say or imply that the guessing faculty is something incomparably higher than intelligence is one of the inconsequences of M. Bergson, whose very acute a.n.a.lysis is apt to play upon special problems without controlling his own dialectic procedure. The sobering fact is that the false hypotheses are reached in the same way as the true, the wrong guesses in the same way as the right, the delusions in the same way as the discoveries. The very theses in science which M. Bergson contemns were reached by the way which he arbitrarily p.r.o.nounces 'superior' to the way of reason. And the court of appeal that determines which is which, is after all just that intelligence or reason which M. Bergson, imitating one of the old methods he has ably helped to discredit, had verbally belittled in merely discriminating its function. No prerogative whatever can thereby be conferred upon either the guessing faculty or the guesser as such. The 'divining' faculty is not more divine than another: it is not really more wonderful to catch fish than to cook them; and the gift of establis.h.i.+ng hypotheses is as rare as the gift of framing them. When all is said, the self-confidence of the transcendentalist avails for none but himself: as his own craving for countenance shows, his hypothesis must pa.s.s muster before reason if it is to persuade.

And for this among other reasons, M. Bergson's attack upon Spencer and other generalisers in science for their 'mechanical' way of conceiving evolution is no blow to 'science,' as M. Bergson would probably avow, though he is lax enough to delimit science at times in his dialectic.

His own way of stating evolution is only another mode of science. To call 'science' superficial is to be so; for the demonstration that any scientific doctrine is inadequate must itself be science or nothing. And here again M. Bergson's criticism, though searching, is not new, however freshly put. In respect of his sociology in particular, Mr. Spencer has been repeatedly so criticised; and it is here alone that his limitation of method is really serious, inasmuch as it affects his prescriptions.

As regards the conception of sub-human evolution, his way of reducing the past to 'pieces' of evolution is not only not injurious, it was the only way in which evolution in Nature could well have been realised by men. M. Bergson is all for the 'creative' aspect of evolution, the Living Now, the emergence of the latest phenomenon as not merely the result of the one before, but the living manifestation of the whole. But this is simply the instinctive, pre-scientific relation to the problem, returned to and restored, as it had need be, to its place in a scientific schema from which it had been dropped precisely because it led nowhere.

M. Bergson has suffered, probably, from the zeal even of instructed exponents, to say nothing of the acclamations of the amateur; but perhaps even M. Bergson, by reason of his linear mode of advance, misconceives the full significance of his own restatements of perceptual and conceptual fact. His theorem has been represented as vindicating the thesis of Mr. Samuel Butler's 'Luck or Cunning'--the thesis, namely, that animal survival and progress are to be conceived in terms of gift or effort rather than of environment; that Lamarckism, once more, is truer than Darwinism. But the argument overlooks the fact that Cunning may be envisaged as Luck; and that Lamarckism without Darwinism halts far worse than Darwinism without Lamarckism. At best, the 'living' view of evolution is but a complement of the other, a return from a.n.a.lysis to outcome. Put singly, it is no addition to knowledge.

'We called the chess-board white: we call it black,'

the onlooker might say, with Browning; while the a.n.a.lyst might retort that, like the savage, he was quite conscious of the ever-moving point of life, the Living Now, but preferred to give his mind to the still and s.p.a.cious past, and 'to cut it up into pieces' by way of knowing something about the law of things, past, present, and future.

The morally valid element in M. Bergson's insistence on 'creative evolution' (again an old term, by the way) is the vindication of personality as a creative form. But this was not necessary as regards the rational determinist, whose position really a.s.sumed it, though possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in a.s.suming that the determinist view of things, mostly accepted by the rationalist, impairs character by reducing will to a 'mechanism.' But that is a calculated obscuration of the doctrine. It is a bad sophism to a.s.sert that 'the rejection of mechanism by non-libertarians is a mere phrase. Sooner or later they have to affirm that man is mechanically determined.'[15] It is not so. 'Going Universe' negates Machine. _That_ concept adheres to the schema of those who affirm the universe to be _made_: Naturalism excludes it. Theistic determinism _does_ make man a mere vessel, a tool: for Naturalism he is an individuation of the Living All. The intelligent determinist never was and never will be put out by his conceptual recognition of himself as part of an infinite sequence; and he has no need of M. Bergson's (untenable) restatement of the problem of free-will and determinism to the effect that the will is sometimes free and sometimes not. That is indeed a hopeless fallacy--an illicit inference from the unduly stressed re-discovery that new truth is reached by a leap and not by a sequence. To say that we are 'free' when we have an original idea or guess is to miss the logical truth set forth by so unsophisticated a philosopher as Locke--that the concept of 'freedom' is irrelevant to every process of thought. M. Bergson insists on the irrelevance of spatial terms to psychic processes, but overlooks the equal irrelevance of terms of preventable personal action.

Precisely because he is, so to say, the latest outcome of the universe, the rational determinist will insist upon 'pulling his weight' and having things go, as far as may be, in the way he prefers. No one's right is better! And he can confidently claim that here, where he is philosophically at one with the thorough-going theist, he has all the possible moral gain from his determinism without an iota of the theist's perplexity. That gain consists in the lead to mercy in human affairs.

The theist-determinist is certainly not, as some Christian rhetoricians (ignorant of Christian history) affirm all determinists must be, either a coward or a licentious knave, in the ordinary sense. Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Knox were neither, though all four were sadly sinful men. But the theistic determinist is open always on the one hand to the paralysing thought that if he should err he is resisting G.o.d, and on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those who resist him are G.o.d's enemies. To escape both snares he must turn thorough pantheist=non-theist. And the upshot is that the theistic determinist is never merciful, whereas the rational determinist is at least under a logical compulsion to be so, however he may resist or divagate. He is free to defend himself, and to defend society; but in so far as he hates and hurts he is illogical, and in so far as he makes punishment retaliation, or prevention punitive, he is either confounding himself or setting l.u.s.t against light.

Were there no other betterment from the subst.i.tution of the non-theistic for the theistic relation to ultimate problems, this might be held to outweigh all claims on the other side, to say nothing of the simple rationality of the negative solution. But that is, of course, in itself decisive. The logically strongest form of the theistic case as against the non-theist is that, even as he lives and moves in gravitation without any subjective consciousness of it, so he may be controlled in every thought by a transcendent volition. But this argument, which excludes M. Bergson's formula of our occasional 'freedom' of will, equally shelters determinism from the contention that we are 'conscious'

of freedom of thought. Even as we are demonstrably conditioned by gravitation while unconscious of its control, we are demonstrably conditioned by our experience and structure as regards even our guesses.

Neither the ignorant nor the ungifted man makes the valid new hypothesis.

There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a non-theistic philosophy is 'desolate,' 'negative,' 'materialistic,' and incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere _ignoratio elenchi_, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that every 'explanation of the universe' is an imposture, exposed as such either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. The normal theist either bilks the problem of evil by avowing it to be a mystery--a thing he cannot explain--or falls back on the alternative evasions that there cannot be good without evil (that is to say, that good needs evil, which is thus good) or that 'partial ill is universal good,' and that evil is thus _non-ens_--which again is a denial of any moral problem. To complain of 'negation' as such while making such negations as these is to be more entertaining than impressive.

And to be told that, in putting aside these logomachies, he is depriving 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 ma.s.s 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 compa.s.sed by our thought, and that to a.s.sert 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 compa.s.s 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-wors.h.i.+p,' self-pleasing, the bias of pre-supposition, the aversion to surrender. All theistic dialects alike sing the song of self-esteem. The spiritist p.r.o.nounces 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d--a formula never fathered by a considerate atheist. G.o.d, undefined,=_x_; and we do not say, There is no _x_. Of the defined G.o.d-idea, whichsoever, we demonstrate the untenableness; but in giving the theist an inconceivable universe we surely meet his appet.i.te 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 a.s.sured the present writer that the ma.s.s 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 a.n.a.lysis with credulous a.s.sertion' (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, p. 219).

[15] Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, 1903, p. 216.

-- 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 subst.i.tution 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 s.e.xual history of Christian societies can restrain Christian advocates from imputing to the spirit of reason a tendency to promote promiscuity in the s.e.x 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 pract.i.tioners of s.e.xual 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 G.o.d 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.