Chapter 4

It was long ago pointed out that Butler's argument was thus as good for Islam or any other religion as for Christianity. Gladstone framed a futile rebuttal to the effect that Christianity had marks of truth, in respect of prophecy and miracles, which Islam lacked--a mere stultification of the Butlerian thesis. The Moslem could retort that if his creed succeeded more rapidly than the Christian with special marks of anomaly upon it, those were presumably the right anomalies! By the Butlerian analogy of Nature, what sort of anomalies, pray, were to be expected in a divine revelation? Gladstone actually made it a disqualification of Islam that it had succeeded by the sword; this when his own creed had slain more than ever did Islam. But on Butler's principles, his plea was vain even if true. If a divinely ruled Nature be red in tooth and claw, why should not the divine faith be so likewise? What is the lesson, by deistic analogy, of the volcano?

The complete answer to Butler, of course, lies in stating the simple fact that analogy leads rationally to the conclusion that all the alleged revelations are alike human products. If every one in turn is found to embody cosmological delusion, historical falsity, fabulous narrative, barbarous ethic, and irrational sanctions, all of which are by each believer singly admitted to be the normal marks of human stumbling, the case is at an end. The one salient and sovereign probability is the one that the believer ignores.

When this mountainous fact is realised, the full force of the Butlerian argument is seen to recoil on its premiss no less than on its conclusion. The dilemma that was to turn deists into Christians is simply the confutation of all theism. Upon none of the tested principles of inference now normally acted on by men of science, men of business, and men of affairs, is it rationally to be inferred that the universe is ruled by a superhuman Good Male Person, who loves and hates, punishes and rewards, plans and reconsiders, injures and compensates. As little are we entitled to infer that it is governed by a Superhuman Bad Person, or a number of Superhuman Persons, male or female, good or bad, or both. The polytheistic and theistic solutions are the natural ones for unreflecting ignorance and priestly policy, and the latter remains the natural one for reverent ingrained prejudice, alias inculcated faith; but it is only so much sophisticated folklore for the student of life, nature, history, philosophy. The latest forms of it are but defecations of the earlier. For Arnold, trained in reverence and avid of reverend sanctions, the deity of his fellows is confessedly but a 'magnified non-natural man'; and his substituted 'Something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-righteousness,' in turn, is for his critics but an evasion of the problem of the something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-unrighteousness.

In sum, then, the case for rationalism as against the creeds is that they recognise no rational test for truth, and apply none. They are all, to say the least, grossly improbable in the light of the fullest human knowledge; and the acceptance of them means either passive disregard of the principle of sufficient reason or the habitual employment of arguments which upon any other kind of issue would be recognised by all competent men as at best utterly inadequate. Theology is the most uncandid of all the current sciences; its results are the most self-contradictory; its premisses the most incoherent. Upon those theologians, then, who accuse the rationalist of self-will and prejudice, he is forced to retort the charge with a double emphasis. They are daily disloyal to the Canon of Consistency, which is for him the moral law of the intellectual life. Claiming to propound the highest truth, they override all the tests by which truth is to be known.

The modern defence of 'faith,' whether Christian or theistic, is less and less an attempt to prove truth of doctrine--save as regards the defence of historicity; more and more an attempt to prove its usefulness or its comfortableness. Faith has turned utilitarian, as regards its apologetics. John Mill erred somewhat, indeed, in endorsing the statement that down to his time much had been written on the truth of religion, and 'little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy, concerning its usefulness.' Christian bishops early learned to claim for their creed a gift of prosperity; and in the eighteenth century there was an abundance of utilitarian vindication of the faith. But latterly this has more and more coloured the whole defence. Either as a promise of peace or as one of comfort and stimulus, as a plea for emotional indulgence or for the joy of the sense of deliverance from responsibility for sin, as a guarantee for good government or as a condition of general progress, Christianity is defended on any ground rather than on that of the truth of its narratives or the conformity of its doctrine to good sense, moral or other. And the pleas are entertainingly internecine.

One day we are told that it makes for race-survival; the next, that it is a spiritual stay for races that are dying out, and a great deathbed comfort to ex-cannibals, with a past of many murders. A creed which involves a cosmology is recommended, not by such arguments as may commend a cosmology, but by pleas of subjective agreeableness which in any discussion of historic fact would be felt to savour of trifling.

And this simple and spontaneous sophistry is in a measure kept in countenance by quasi-philosophies such as that of the 'Will to Believe' and that latterly termed Pragmatism. The former, as brilliantly propounded by the late Professor James, amounts simply to this, that in matters on which there is no good or sufficient evidence either way, we do well to believe what we would like to believe. As the precept comes from the thinker who passed on to students the counsel of Pascal concerning the opiate value of religious practices,[13] it is easy to infer how it will tend to be interpreted. And the second philosophy is like unto the first, in so far as it conveys, under cover of the true formula that the valid beliefs are those which affect action, the antinomian hint that if we think we have found any belief a help to action, it is thereby sufficiently certificated as true.

The rationalist comment on Pragmatism, thus applied, is that it really discredits the religious beliefs of most men, inasmuch as they never relate their faith to action in general, would not stake a shilling on a prayer, have no working faith in providence, and do not in the least desire to pass from this life to another. But these men do not study philosophy; while the emotional believers, who really feel their faith to be a help in life, do not need the pragmatist's precept, and believe without it.

What is true in Pragmatism is of the essence of Rationalism. Our lives at their best are made valid for us by our mutual trust, our reciprocal sincerities; and Rationalism consists in the effort to extend intellectual and moral sincerity to the study of all problems. It may permit, none the less, of some such genial or affectionate glozing of some facts as love and friendship tend to set up in the relations of persons, tolerance taking on the vesture of sympathy; and it no more makes for Gradgrindism, or the belittlement of any of the higher joys, than for concentration on the lower. Its antagonists alternately indict it for 'gloom' and for licence; for coldness and for 'Epicureanism'; for seeking only happiness, and for turning happiness out of doors. The contradictions of the indictment tell of its collective origin in mere hostility of temper. Rationalism, of all codes and modes of life-philosophy, must most seek to make the best of life.

Some professed rationalists, indeed, at times grind in the mills of the Philistines by professing an apprehension lest their fellows, in pursuing truth, should lose sight of beauty; and such misconceiving mentors plead confusedly for some formal association of rationalism with the arts of feeling, with poetry, with music, with drama, with fiction--as if without cultivating these things _in the name of_ Rationalism we should be divested of them or discredited as not possessing them. The fallacy is of a piece with that which identifies Christianity with progress in civilisation. The rationalistic bias is in actual experience found to be as compatible with any æsthetic bias as with the scientific, specially so called; though in point of fact a scientific culture is in itself more conducive to rationalism in respect of historical and ultimate problems than is culture in the arts, which are mostly enjoyed, appraised, and even practised without deliberate resort to critical analysis.

Some rationalists, again, have been found to contend that the critical analysis of things æsthetic is destructive of æsthetic joy--an error of errors, involving blindness to the facts that even a science is in itself ultimately perceptible as an artistic construction, and that all the arts live and renew themselves by the sense of truth. The solution of the verbal conflict lies in recognising that rationalism is after all but a name for considerate consistency in the intellectual life, where consistency is still so sadly little cultivated, and where established habits and institutions tend so powerfully to its exclusion; whereas in the arts there is no call for such specific championship. There the very joy of novelty is soon potent to overcome the resistance of habit--which, for the rest, roots in structural or acquired limitations not greatly dependent upon cultivation or neglect of the rationalistic habit. A man of science or of critical research may be dull to new refinements of æsthesis where an unscientific emotionalist _may_ be sensitive to them.

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 æsthetics. 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 participants, 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 Gods 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 championship 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, æsthetic or moral.[14] Always the acclamation tells of a passion 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,' worship, 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 assailant. Sooth to say, neither the analyses 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 analysis 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 pronounces '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 establishing 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 pass 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 analysis 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 analyst 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 spacious 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 assumed it, though possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in assuming 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 assert 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 God, and on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those who resist him are God'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 lust against light.

Were there no other betterment from the substitution 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.