Chapter 2

The religious sanction, therefore, is logically null, in terms of the religious man's own mental processes.[6] There is left him, to discredit the rationalist, only the threat that the God whom he terms infinitely good will or may punish the unbeliever for not believing on the strength of a Bible packed with incredible narrative and indefensible doctrine. The anti-rationalist position is thus reduced to 'Pascal's wager'--at once the most childish and, from the standpoint of other and nobler religious thought, the most irreligious argument ever advanced by a competent intelligence on the side of faith. Pascal's thesis is that if the unbeliever is wrong, he runs a frightful risk of future torment; whereas, if he should after all be right, he will be no worse off after death for having believed. So the 'belief' required of him is a simple mindless and faithless conformity to a conditional threat. To such moral perversity can religion persuade.

To Pascal's wager there have been many retorts. Mill declared that if a God should doom him to hell for having been unable to believe in such a God, 'to hell he would go'--glad, by implication, not to be in heaven. Mansel's sole answer was a puerile attempt at a pious sneer. Clifford, in effect, denounced the Pascalian appeal for what it was, a base appeal to fear.[7] But it is unnecessary to resort to such logical supererogation. There are two obvious and decisive rebuttals to Pascal's doctrine on purely logical ground. Firstly, his thesis is available to the Moslem or the polytheist no less than to the Christian; and when put from either of these sides it leaves the Christian running the very risk with which he menaces the unbeliever. He may have chosen the wrong God. Secondly, the hypothetical Good God, if in any intelligible sense worthy of the name, would conceivably be as likely to send Pascal to hell for dishonouring him as to send the honest atheist there for refusing to make-believe. The pietist has dishonoured himself to no purpose.

The _a posteriori_ argument for religious conformity has thus come to nothing; and the process of argument has revealed the religio-utilitarian champion of morality as traitor to that cause. There is left him, indeed, the plea that religious fears and sanctions are good for the ill-disposed believer, who ought, therefore, not to be disillusioned. As regards the simple dogma of deity, the position has the emphatic support of Voltaire. But Voltaire declined to use the favourite menaces of faith, as do many religionists of to-day; and if those menaces are to be rationally vindicated, there must first be raised the question whether they could not be improved upon for the purpose professed. Leaving that task to those who affect them, the rationalist may claim to be justified in acting on the maxim that honesty is the best policy in the intellectual as in the commercial life. There has been no such historical harvest of moral betterment from the religion of fear as could induce him of all men to employ it as a moral prophylactic.

Thus far he figures as the vindicator of simple veracity against those who, in the name of morals, would make it of no account. He has still to meet, indeed, the challenge: What of the ill-disposed among your own way of thinking? If an unbeliever should see his way to gain by falsehood or licit fraud, what should deter him? Much satisfaction appears to be derived by many well-meaning people from the propounding of this dilemma. They may or may not be gratified by the answer that if a rationalist should not be, by training and bias, spontaneously averse to lying and cheating, or generally unwilling to do otherwise than he would be done by, or sensitive enough to the blame of his fellows to fear it, there is indeed no more security for his veracity or honesty than for that of a typical Jesuit or a pious company promoter. One can but add that, seeing that in the terms of the case he began by unprofitably avowing an unpopular opinion, he is presumably, on the average, rather less likely to lie for gain than those who confessedly find the sheer fear of consequences a highly important consideration in their own plan of life, and who have at the same time the promise from their own code of plenary pardon for all sins on the simple condition of ultimate repentance.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Even Professor F. H. Bradley, the ablest of living English philosophers, is responsible for the proposition that 'to wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality' (_Ethical Studies_, 1876, p. 180). As the book has not been reprinted, despite much demand, it may be inferred that the author no longer stands to all its positions.

[5] Thus we are told of the heroic Gordon that he was 'perplexed perpetually, and perpetually in doubt as to the precise will of God with him' (W. S. Blunt, _Gordon at Khartoum_, 1911, p. 88).

[6] The logical analysis may be carried further, as by Mr. A. J. Balfour:--'To assume a special faculty which is to announce ultimate moral laws can add nothing to their validity, nor will it do so the more if we suppose its authority supported by such sanctions as remorse or self-approval. Conscience regarded in this way is not ethically to be distinguished from any external authority, as, for instance, the Deity, or the laws of the land' (_A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, 1879, p. 345).

[7] The same might be said of Mrs. Browning's minatory picture of the moment's passage

''Twixt the dying atheist's negative, And God's face waiting after all'--

round the corner with a flail, belike. Religion cannot be more dishonoured than by the moral ideals of some of its champions.

§ 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE

But we have now clearly imported into the rationalist philosophy a principle or factor which ostensibly rivals or primes reason. The rationalist avows a moral bias--an attitude towards his fellows, a moral 'taste,' let us say--which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds 'revelation' frequently repellent and the popular 'God' a chimera; even as the believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to his moral and speculative bias, and he has been brought up to pretermit judgment beyond those limits. This bias appears to be partly congenital, partly acquired; though most men are agreed that many who reveal a given bias would have presented another had they been differently trained. Certain forms of congenital bias, that is to say, yield more or less easily to others, specially fostered or exercised. Whatever be the respective force of the generative factors, the fact of bias remains; and there is no escape from the conclusion that it operates in regard to 'intellectual' as well as to 'moral' judgments--to judgments, that is, of causal interpretation or non-moral discrimination as well as to judgments upon human action.

The rationalist, in fact, is merely a person who in certain directions carries the processes of doubt, analysis, and judgment further than do persons of a different habit of mind. His neighbour, who believes in 'God' or 'the saints' or Mrs. Eddy, may chance to carry those processes in other directions further than he,--may be more reflective and experimental and judicious, for instance, in matters of diet,--may even be an analytical thinker in matters of science to which the so-called rationalist has given no independent thought. There are well-known instances of men of science who by analysis widen the bounds of physical knowledge while accepting, in ways which other men find grotesquely uncritical, loose propositions on psychic existence. When sounds are heard from furniture, the rationalist, with his naturalistic bias, looks for explanations in terms of physics; while the spiritualist, even if he chance to be a professed physicist, looks for them in terms of speculative psychics.

Upon a strictly impartial and 'objective' consideration, the two kinds of bias are seen to be alike forms of craving, desires seeking satisfaction. Both inquirers seek for 'causes.' But one has the habit of seeking causes in terms of sequences of known or intelligible processes, capable of willed repetition; the other yearns to find proof of the existence of non-material personalities in the cosmos and in his personal neighbourhood, and, believing in such existence in advance, either provisionally or rootedly, hopes to bring others to his way of thinking by a demonstration that certain physical phenomena are not physically producible. And it must be granted him that herein he is theoretically at par with the man of science--physical or moral--who, having spontaneously framed a hypothesis, seeks to find that facts conform to it. Every man with a hypothesis, broadly speaking, wants to find that facts are so-and-so.

The rationalist, then, has his bias like another. Though it takes in part a critical or negative form, it is fundamentally as positive as another. He has come to crave for coherence and consistency in narratives, statements, explanations, arguments, propositions, and systems of thought; even as his 'contrary' or competitor has come to crave for evidence that something 'supernatural' wields a purposive and 'intelligent' control, mediate or immediate, over all things, using among others 'supernormal' means. This 'contrary' thinker may or may not believe in 'spirits' in the ordinary sense, may or may not believe in the immortality of human minds; but if he is really to be an opponent of the rationalist bias he is to be classed as having a bias to traditional or authoritative views of the cosmos, to religious as against naturalistic explanations of history, to a conception of the human as of the extra-human processes in terms of a controlling will and purpose. He too, it is true, must have some craving for coherence and consistency--else he could not debate and reason at all; but the other craving in him has primed that.

It is a fallacy, we may note in passing, to suppose that the 'agnostic' attitude, so-called, is something between the two main forms of bias here posited. Agnosticism, logically carried out, can differentiate from other forms of rationalism only in local limitation of belief; and in practice it is not often found to do even that. The agnostic inevitably begins in terms of the rationalist bias, in craving for coherence and consistency of statement; and his most circumspect negations stand for precaution against inconsistent credulity. But precisely in virtue of that bias, he is the opponent of the supernaturalist bias. He does not in effect merely say, 'I do not know': he implicitly says 'You do not know' to the professor of non-natural knowledge.

Bias, then, being clearly posited, the debate at once turns--as indeed it usually does even without formal acknowledgment of bias--to a competition of claims to consistency. All debate presupposes agreement on something. As antagonists _in_ religion appeal either to God-idea or to Bible, to probability or to usage, to expediency or to authority, or to historic evidence for one revelation as against another, so antagonists upon the fundamentals of religion appeal to accepted laws of proof, measures of evidence, consistency of reasoning. The most tenacious of traditionists must put his case in a 'reasoned' form. And therein, of course, lies the secret of the gradual historic dissolution of traditional credence in the minds of those who come at all within the range of the argument. Every act of reasoning--as priesthoods are more or less clearly aware--is a concession to the rationalist position to begin with; and only superior skill in fence can ostensibly countervail the advantage thus given to the disputant who claims that reason must determine beliefs. Reasoning against the validity of reason is recognisable as suicidal by all who can reason coherently. If reason be untrustworthy, what is the value of reasoning to that effect? Either you go by reason or you do not. If not, you are out of the debate, or you are grasping your sword by the blade, a course not long to be persisted in. Even the skeptical defender of religion, following religious precedent, says, 'Come now, let us reason together.'

Thus we reach the standing anomaly that the defence of faith against rationalistic criticism alternately takes the courses of pronouncing the appeal to reason a foolish presumption, and of claiming to reason more faithfully than the rationalist. The two positions being, to say the least, incompatible from the point of view of dialectic, we must fight upon one or the other at a time; and, having briefly dealt with the former, we may fitly consider at greater length the latter. The more philosophic assailant of the rationalist, we assume, professes after all to stand or fall by reasoning. That is to say, he claims to hold his supernaturalist positions in logical and moral consistency with his historical positions, his practice as a judge or juror, as a man of science, as a critic in politics, as a man of honour, as a player of cricket by the rules of the game. As a matter of fact, however, he at times goes about the task by way of an undertaking to show, not that his beliefs are well founded in reason, but that no beliefs are; and that his beliefs are therefore at least as valid as any one else's. All the while he is ostensibly appealing to reason, to judgment. That position in turn must be considered.

§ 5. THE SKEPTICAL RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE

The philosophic issue under this head has been usefully cleared for English readers by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_; and, in another sense, very usefully for rationalists by the same writer in his work _The Foundations of Belief_. The gist of the former treatise is an expansion of the proposition of Hume that all moral judgments, on analysis, are found to root in a sentiment or bias. In particular, Mr. Balfour argues that all scientific beliefs so-called, however immediately proved, rest upon general beliefs which are 'incapable of proof.' It is noteworthy that never through the whole treatise does Mr. Balfour analyse the concept of 'proof,' though his main aim is ostensibly to discriminate between proved and unproved propositions. It may be worth while, then, at this stage, to note the risks of intellectual confusion in connection with the term proof. The common conception, implicit in Mr. Balfour's argument, is that concerning a 'proved' thing either we have, or men of science say we have, a right of certainty, as it were, which we cannot have concerning anything not proved or not capable of proof. The simple fact is that the very idea of proof involves that of uncertainty you seek to prove that which is not unquestionable. To prove is to _probe_,[8] to test. The idea of 'demonstration,' which seems commonly to connote special certainty, carries us no further. It means a 'showing,' a 'letting you see with your own eyes.' In geometry, it stands for a chain of reasoning in which every step rests upon previous steps which ultimately rest upon axioms and definitions agreed upon. There the process is one of analysis--a showing that a proposition formerly unknown as such is really contained in or implied by propositions known. Certainty follows. Yet there is abundant record of 'proofs' or 'tests' which were fallacious, and of ostensible demonstrations which were flawed--modes of squaring the circle, for instance. The ultimate in the matter is the belief arrived at or evoked; and the significant fact for us is, that beliefs ostensibly so arrived at may be false, because the cited proof or evidence is erroneous or the demonstration inconsequent.

Certainty, on the other hand, attaches in the highest degree to certain beliefs that, in the nature of the case, are 'incapable of proof,' that is, of being tested. No belief is more certain for all men than the belief that they will all die, though the event, posited as future, cannot as such be 'tested.' In this case, the connotation of the word 'proof,' nevertheless, is by common consent transferred to the concept of mortality: the invariable dying of all previous men is allowed to be 'proof,' or decisive evidence, that all living men will die to the last generation. In regard to some other certainties, the concept of 'proof' is wholly irrelevant. You cannot 'prove' that you feel a pain, though it is one of the most certain of all facts for you while it lasts. If, then, any general scientific or other belief be shown to be 'incapable of proof,' in this merely negative sense (as distinguished from 'capable of disproof'), that is no argument against it for any practical or philosophic purpose. Such a belief is that in the 'uniformity of nature,' which is held by the same tenure as that in the mortality of all men. It cannot be 'proved,' either as to the past or the future, in the sense of being tested, save as regards past particulars, which are necessarily a small selection from the totality of phenomena. For the future, in the terms of the case, there can be no proof. Yet no man has any more doubt as to the rising of the sun to-morrow than as to his own ultimate death. Concerning this we are quite certain, which we cannot be as to many things reasonably held to have been 'proved.' Such and such are our 'certainties.'

What, then, is Mr. Balfour's case against men of 'science,' and those whom he calls 'the Freethinkers'? It may be put under three heads.

1. They are lax, he thinks, in their conception of proof. As it happens, he argues against Mill's criticism of the syllogism, which is that there can be no real inference from the premisses of a syllogism, because in the major premiss there is already asserted what is afterwards asserted in the conclusion. Mr. Balfour's reply is, that 'So long as in fact we do assert the major premiss without first believing the conclusion, so long will the latter be an inference from the former.' Now, Mill's express contention is that we never do assert the major premiss without first believing the conclusion; and the dispute resolves itself into one as to the proper meaning of 'inference.' Mill is at this point guarding against erroneous conceptions of proof; his thesis being that the 'proof' of the conclusion is not given in the major, but in the body of evidence on which that is founded, and which carries the conclusion at the same time. As the kind of syllogism in question is the old one about the mortality of Sokrates, Mill here takes as 'proof' the evidence which all men now reckon sufficient to establish the fact of universal human mortality, though, as aforesaid, it is not literally a complete 'proof' at all. Mr. Balfour is arguing, if anything relevant to his main thesis, that a so-called 'inference' which is merely a statement in one particular of what is believed of all such particulars, is a 'real' inference, and therefore somehow more valid than inferences not so drawn. Perhaps he does not mean this: if so, the argument has no bearing on his main case.

Concerning 'inference,' the proper development of Mill's position would be that the processes of reasoning properly to be so called are either hypotheses still to be tested or beliefs held by the tenure of uncontradicted experience. And inferences of the latter kind are in fact of the most various degrees of certainty. We 'infer' that we shall all die, not from the generalisation that all men are mortal, but from the accepted fact that all men hitherto have been. The major premiss in the typical syllogism is itself the inference. But we also infer, from a much narrower experience, that inasmuch as pitchblende, say, has been found to yield radium in certain very small quantities, other pitchblende will do so in future. Here the certainty is distinctly less: few men would wager heavily on it. And we may at once grant to Mr. Balfour that in this and many other cases 'scientific beliefs' fall far short of 'certainty,' as that term is established for us by other beliefs. As Mill put it, inference from particulars never can be formally cogent. He might have added as aforesaid, that all real inference as to events is from particulars, and that formal cogency belongs only to mathematics. Mr. Balfour says he will not 'go so far' as Mill. So that, whatever be Mill's inconsistencies--and they are many--Mill was at this point somewhat less confident of belief than Mr. Balfour.

2. Mr. Balfour impugns what he takes to be 'the most ordinary view of scientific philosophy, ... that science, in so far as it consists of a statement of the laws of phenomena, is founded entirely on observation and experiment,' which 'furnish not only the occasions of scientific discovery, but also the sole evidence of scientific truth--evidence, however, which is considered by most men of science not only amply sufficient, but also as good as any which can be well imagined.'[9] In this statement there are obvious laxities, which may serve as openings for idle dispute. No man of science, surely, holds that all statements of the laws of phenomena are equally well 'proved' by observation and experiment. They do hold that such a proposition as that of 'the uniformity of nature,' considered as a 'law of phenomena,' is founded on observation and experiment, as fully as any proposition of natural mode can be. But there is obvious room for ambiguity, again, in the expression 'laws of phenomena.' Let us consider, for instance,

3. Mr. Balfour's contention that the 'law of universal causation' is incapable of proof, and cannot properly be said to be founded on observation and experiment. Here the rationalist may safely grant him his whole case--at least the present writer does. He is right, I submit, in his criticism of Mill's ostensible attempt to prove that the so-called 'law of universal causation' is deduced from observation and experiment. I will further waive the question whether he rebuts the proof offered by Kant for his proposition that 'the judgment of sequence cannot be made without the presupposition of the judgment of causality,' which, like many of Kant's formulas, seems to me very awkwardly phrased. But I advance without hesitation the proposition that all reflection upon events involves the conception of universal causation, and that all reflection upon things involves the conception of them _in eventu_.[10] And this necessary assumption is not as such a product of observation and experiment, though we can never exactly say how far experience may condition[11] our manner of making the assumption. It is quite needless to trace the history of it in human experience, for it is clearly pre-human. If from a tree you fire at and wound a tiger who sees you, he will try to get at you, plainly regarding you as the cause of his wound, though he may never have been shot or seen a shot fired before. The accuracy of his inference is worth noting, though he might chance, of course, to have been wounded by a shot fired by an unseen companion of yours. It may 'reasonably' be 'inferred' (to use terms which Mr. Balfour would probably censure), that man has always obeyed the law of _thought_ thus illustrated; and no number of wrong particular inferences can affect the inevitableness of his assumption that any event has a cause. The _concept_ of cause roots in primary animal habit.