FOOTNOTES:[8]This is the elucidation of the puzzling phrase, ‘the exception proves the rule,’ so often fallaciously used. It comes from the Latin schoolmen’s ‘Exceptioprobatregulam,’ where the meaning is patent enough.[9]Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p. 13.[10]Compare Professor Royce:—‘Our intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere images of things, but always involve a consciousness of how we propose to act towards the things of which we have ideas’ (Gifford Lectures, 1900, i. 22).[11]I exclude the possibility that ‘experience’ might be construed to mean the entire development of the mind from infancy. Such a construction would reduce the argument to insignificance all round.
[8]This is the elucidation of the puzzling phrase, ‘the exception proves the rule,’ so often fallaciously used. It comes from the Latin schoolmen’s ‘Exceptioprobatregulam,’ where the meaning is patent enough.
[8]This is the elucidation of the puzzling phrase, ‘the exception proves the rule,’ so often fallaciously used. It comes from the Latin schoolmen’s ‘Exceptioprobatregulam,’ where the meaning is patent enough.
[9]Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p. 13.
[9]Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p. 13.
[10]Compare Professor Royce:—‘Our intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere images of things, but always involve a consciousness of how we propose to act towards the things of which we have ideas’ (Gifford Lectures, 1900, i. 22).
[10]Compare Professor Royce:—‘Our intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere images of things, but always involve a consciousness of how we propose to act towards the things of which we have ideas’ (Gifford Lectures, 1900, i. 22).
[11]I exclude the possibility that ‘experience’ might be construed to mean the entire development of the mind from infancy. Such a construction would reduce the argument to insignificance all round.
[11]I exclude the possibility that ‘experience’ might be construed to mean the entire development of the mind from infancy. Such a construction would reduce the argument to insignificance all round.
The problem as to ‘the sphere of Reason’ could not be more effectually raised. Mr. Balfour clearly implies that thereisa sphere of Reason, but forces a perplexed query as to when he believes himself to enter it. Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his predictions of the future, are such as afford ‘no ground for believing them to be even approximately true’: those of his opponents, of course, coming for him under the same category.He would, perhaps, hold himself to be in the sphere of Reason when following a proposition in mathematics; but he does not admit himself to be there even when he consents to believe that he will die, and that he had better avoid prussic acid. ‘No experience, however large,’ he insists (p. 75), ‘and no experiments, however well contrived and successful, could give usany reasonable assurancethat the co-existences or sequences which have been observed among phenomena will be repeated in the future.’ Not ‘certainty,’ be it observed, but ‘any reasonable assurance.’ That is to say, we have no reasonable assurance that we shall die.
Obviously the extravagance of this proposition is calculated. The point is that no belief whatever concerning life and death and morality and the process of nature can be justified by ‘reason’; and that accordingly no religious belief whatever can be discredited on the score of being opposed to reason or ‘unreasonable.’ If not more reasonable than the most carefully tested or the most widely accepted belief in science, or the belief that the sun will rise or fire burn to-morrow, or that we shall all die, it is not less reasonable than they. Therefore, believe as your bias leads.
It is only fair to Mr. Balfour to say that thereis nothing new in his position, though probably it has never before been quite so violently formulated. The Greek Pyrrho (fl. 300-350B.C.) argued that almost all propositions were doubtful; and some of his followers are said to have been consistent enough to doubt whether they doubted. In the dialogues of Cicero we find the skeptical method employed, with supreme inconsistency, by the official exponents of unbelieved doctrines, to discredit competing doctrines. Among the pagans it was also turned, with no special religious purpose, against all forms of dogmatic doctrine by Sextus the Empiric (fl. 200-250A.C.); and in the early Christian dialogue of Minucius Felix a pagan is presented as turning it against Christianity. In the later Middle Ages it is resorted to by Cornelius Agrippa, previously a great propounder of fantastic propositions in science, against the current science of his time, and in favour of a return to the simplicity of the early Christian creed. Still later, it was much resorted to, after the Reformation, by Catholics for the purpose of discrediting Protestantism; and Pascal and Huet, the latter in particular, sought to employ it against ‘unbelief.’ Huet left behind him, as his legacy to his church and generation, what Mark Pattison has termed ‘awork of the most outrageous skepticism’; and Pascal’s use of the method has left a standing debate as to whether he himself was a ‘skeptic.’ In England, on the Protestant side, Bishop Berkeley put forth an argument to the effect that the Newtonian doctrine of fluxions involved the acceptance of unproved ‘mysteries,’ and that those who applied it had accordingly no excuse for rejecting the mysteries of Christianity.
Finally, it is fair to note that Mr. Balfour’s nihilistic treatment of reason has a surprising sanction in Hume, to say nothing of the other writers who have practically limited reasoning to mathematical deduction. That great thinker, with his frequent great carelessness, wrote that
‘Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding’ (Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding, Sect. iv. Part ii., par. 2).‘All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning’ (Sect. v., par. 3).‘All these [spontaneous feelings] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoningor process of the thought and understandingis able either to produce or to prevent’ (Ib.par. 6).
‘Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding’ (Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding, Sect. iv. Part ii., par. 2).
‘All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning’ (Sect. v., par. 3).
‘All these [spontaneous feelings] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoningor process of the thought and understandingis able either to produce or to prevent’ (Ib.par. 6).
But Hume, be it noted, would in his earlier life have recoiled from Mr. Balfour’s religious Irrationalism, for in his deistic period he wrote that the belief in Deity is ‘conformable to soundreason.’ And, what is more important, he in effect cancelled his own remarks on reason, above cited, by writing as follows in Note B on theInquirycited:—
‘Nothing is more usual than for writers, even on moral, political, or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience, and to suppose that these species of argumentation (sic) are entirely different from each other. The former are taken for the mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by consideringa priorithe nature of things, and examining the effects that must follow from their operation, establish particular principles of science and philosophy. The latter are supposed to be derived entirely from sense and observation, by which we know what has actually happened from the operation of particular objects, and are thence able to infer what will for the future result from them.... But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in the active and speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to pronounce that it is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.’
‘Nothing is more usual than for writers, even on moral, political, or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience, and to suppose that these species of argumentation (sic) are entirely different from each other. The former are taken for the mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by consideringa priorithe nature of things, and examining the effects that must follow from their operation, establish particular principles of science and philosophy. The latter are supposed to be derived entirely from sense and observation, by which we know what has actually happened from the operation of particular objects, and are thence able to infer what will for the future result from them.... But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in the active and speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to pronounce that it is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.’
Hume, it will be observed, is not here bent on vindicating the rational character of direct inference from observation: he had set out in the text by disparaging customary thinking as non-rational; and he is now claiming for the ‘reasoning’ man that experience goes a long way to generate his reasoning processes. ‘The truth is,’ he says in his final paragraph, ‘an inexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely inexperienced.’ It is a fragmentary noteto a hasty passage; but at least it concedes that reasoningislargely a matter of inference from experience, and thus decisively gainsays the assertion in the text that no inference from experience is an ‘effect of reasoning,’ inasmuch as it says such inference is reasoning; that reasoning is a working of the mind on the facts of life; and that the common distinction between reasoning and [beliefs derived direct from] experience ‘is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.’[12]If, he says in the fourth paragraph of the Note, ‘If we examine thoseargumentswhich, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed to be themereeffects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found toterminateat last in some general principle or conclusion for which we can assign noreasonbut observation and experience.’ If an argument be not a process of reasoning, neither word is intelligible. If an argument terminates (=has one end) in a conclusion founded on observation, and if that observation be a ‘reason’ for a proposition, then arguing is reasoning.
If not, what is Mr. Balfour’s book? By his owndefinition,thatis ‘outside the sphere of Reason,’ inasmuch as it is a series of negative propositions which, like their denied contraries, must be ‘incapable of proof.’ What term, then, would he apply to his argument, if he admits that he is arguing?
The philosophic skeptic, it would appear, has logically overreached himself—a very usual consummation. There is little sign that any of the religious skeptics above named ever made any converts to religion; and there is much ‘reason’ to think that they turned many to unbelief. Mr. Balfour from time to time speaks of ‘reasonable people’ and of ‘absurdity.’ But he leaves us in the dark as to what absurdity means, and his thesis excludes from the ‘reasonable’ class alike all religious persons and all scientific persons, unless, possibly, mathematicians as such. Since there is no ‘reasonable assurance’ for the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow, and politicians have no ground in reason for anything they say as such, the mass of the ordinary beliefs of educated mankind are not reasonable or rational; and since we have no ‘reason’ for believing in either mortality or immortality, we can have no reason for believing (whether we do or not) in Mr. Balfour, who avowedly believes in both without reason. Hisbook, by implication, is not an appeal to reason, is not a process of reasoning, and can give no ‘reasonable assurance’ of anything, positive or negative, to anybody. All this by his own showing.
The rationalist, it should seem, has small cause to deprecate such antagonism. He could hardly have a more comprehensive clearing of the field of dialectic for the formulation of his own conception of reason and reasoning, and his own appeal to the reason of reasonable people. As thus:—
1.Reasonis our name for (a) the sum of all the judging processes; (b) the act of reflex judgment; (c) ‘private judgment’ as against obedience to authority; and (d) the state of sanity contrasted with that of insanity; and ‘areason’ is a fact or motive or surmise which we judge sufficient to induce us or others to believe or do (or doubt or not do) something without much or any danger of error, failure, or injury.
2.Reasoningis our name for the process of comparing or stating ‘reasons why’ certain propositions or judgments should be believed or disbelieved, or certain acts done or not done.
3. We are emphatically ‘in the sphere of Reason’ when we are reflecting and reasoning, asdistinct from merely feeling, sensating, desiring, or hating; but even the feelings are, as it were, part of the stuff of Reason. Strictly speaking, we are in the sphere of Reason even when we believe what we are told to believe on matters outside the knowledge of our instructors (in so far as we credit them with greater wisdom than our own), or try to believe that what we would like to be true must be true because we would like it (inasmuch as we are proceeding reflectively on a ‘reason why’); though in these cases we are reasoning fallaciously—that is, in a way which can lead to manifold error and injury.
4.Reasonableis our approbatory epithet for an action, course, or person that is guided by reasoning which we see to exclude most risks of error and injury—save of course where the taking of risk of injury is assumed.
Every one of these definitions is justified by the dictionary to begin with, though the dictionaries, of necessity, note further conflicting meanings, as when reason is indicated as ‘the faculty or capacity of the human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the lower animals,’ or hazily distinguished, on philosophic authority, from ‘the understanding.’ But the lexicographer loyally notes thatareason is ‘athought or consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion’; and thattoreason means, among other things, ‘to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts,’ ‘to examine or discuss by arguments.’ These senses are implicit in daily usage.
The concept of Reason, in short, must include the whole factory of beliefs. The judging faculty, the judging propensity, is a complex of instincts, experiences, inferences, and necessities of thought. It originates at an animal stage, and conserves to the last animal elements—as when, without any process of calculation, you infer, as it were through the muscular sense, that a top-heavy omnibus is likely to overbalance, or that in riding your bicycle round a sharp corner you must incline your body inwards. It deals with diet and medicine, art and industry, no less than with theology and science and politics. In the former, its accepted procedure is obviously a set of survivals of more or less tested ideas from among an infinity of detected mistakes; and the moral law of the intellectual life for the rationalist, the principle which best justifies his assumption of that name, is that every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more effectuallybe tested in the future. We are to do with both our religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our physics, our historiography.
Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people—in other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified.
FOOTNOTE:[12]So Kant: ‘Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind’ (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Kirchmann, 1870, p. 100); and Comte: ‘There is no absolute separation between observing and reasoning’ (Politique Positive, 1851, i. 500).
[12]So Kant: ‘Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind’ (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Kirchmann, 1870, p. 100); and Comte: ‘There is no absolute separation between observing and reasoning’ (Politique Positive, 1851, i. 500).
[12]So Kant: ‘Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind’ (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Kirchmann, 1870, p. 100); and Comte: ‘There is no absolute separation between observing and reasoning’ (Politique Positive, 1851, i. 500).
It may have been observed, with or without perplexity, that Mr. Balfour specified a ‘need for religioustruth’ as his ground for holding his unspecified ‘theological beliefs,’ this after bracketing Religion and Science as alike ‘unproved systems,’ consisting (by implication) of a body of propositions as to which we have not ‘any ground for believing them to be even approximately true.’ The skeptico-religious conception of truth being thus found to be as nugatory as that of ‘reason’ put forward from the same quarter, we are compelled to posit one more conformable to common sense, common usage, and common honesty. For the generality of instructed men, truth in secular affairs means not merely ‘thatwhich is trowed,’ but (a) that which we have adequate ‘reason’ to trow, and (b) that of which our acceptance is consistent with our way of testing credences of any or all other kinds. The ultimate criterion of our beliefs, in short, is the consistency with which we hold them.
By this test the ground is rapidly cleared of skeptico-religious literature. That puts a spurious problem to mask a real one. The question for us is not and cannot be whether, seeing that by inference from experience some of the beliefs we now hold are likely to be found false by posterity, we have any right to accept one belief and discredit another. The skeptic is himself doing so in this very argument, and all the time. His whole intellectual life is one of judgments and preferences. There is no intellectual life without them. The question is whether we have applied to any one belief or set of beliefs the tests we have applied to others: whether, for instance, we can honestly profess to believe in prayer or the doctrine of the Trinity or heaven and hell as we believe in Gresham’s Law or the effects of quinine or the roundness of the earth; whether we have criticised the religion in which we were brought up as we criticise Mohammedanism or any other; whether we have scrutinised the legends of ourcreed as we have scrutinised the legend of King Arthur and his Knights; or whether, on the other hand, we hold the atomic theory or faith in vaccination by mere authority, while we dispute about religious teaching in the schools.
This does not mean that we are to apply the same kind of test to every kind of proposition; that we are to ask for evidence of immortality as we ask for evidence of the Darwinian theory. The test is one of consistency. Does the belief in immortality, we are to ask, consist with either our knowledge or our imagination? Do we hold it critically and coherently or as a mere congeries of irreconcilable propositions? Do we ask ourselves what we mean by ‘meeting again’? Is it anything more than a fantasy which we affirm for our own comfort or the supposed comfort of others, or for the sake of mere conformity with popular sentiment? No thoughtful man, perhaps, will deny that he holds some of his opinions by some such easy tenure; were it only for the reason that consistent ascertainment is often laborious, and that common consent has to be allowed to take its place in regard to many beliefs of plainly inferior importance. But religious beliefs are not so classed by those who seriously debate them; and here, if ever, thechallenge to scrutiny and consistency is imperative.
And so disturbing is the challenge that for centuries past the higher religious consciousness has been engaged in an unceasing effort to persuade itself and its antagonists of the secular or mundane reasonableness of its supernaturalist creed. Religious life is seen going on at two widely removed standpoints: one that of the emotional believer who knows no conceptual difficulties, and is concerned only to maintain in himself and others the quasi-ecstatic state of faith; the other that of the would-be reasoner who is concerned to secure peace of mind by arguing down his own misgivings and the positive antagonism of unbelief. Between those extremes, probably, is lived the mass of religious life so-called, untouched either by ecstasy or by conceptual unbelief as distinguished from passive conformity. But the conflict of the thinking minority is unceasing; and orthodox professions of triumph deceive no one who is really engaged in the struggle.
On both sides it has long been a question of balancing ‘probabilities,’ a conflict of ‘reasons.’ Bacon, declaring that he would ‘rather believe all the fables in the Golden Legend and the Koranthan that this universal frame is without a mind,’ opened a door that let in all the forces of doubt. The Koran is the form in which the God-idea recommended itself to the Moslem mind, as the Bible is the form in which it commended itself to the Christian; and if for each the other is always fabulising in detail, where could be the certitude of the common doctrine? Was mind any likelier to be the form of the power of the universe than any other of the anthropomorphic characteristics of Jehovah and Allah and Zeus? However that might be, Bacon was appealing to the sheer sense of probability; the ‘Evidences’ of Grotius were addressed to the same kind of judgment; and Pascal’s ‘wager’ was a blank appeal to the principle of chances plus the instinct of fear. Butler, anxiously striving to reduce the straggling deistic controversy to its logical bases, accepted the test of probability as the guide of life; and Gladstone, his last champion, with all his show of sheer faith, strenuously endorses the doctrine. The vital question is seen to be, then, whether the Butlerian ‘believer’ or the rationalist is the more loyal to that standard of probability by which each avowedly guides himself.
But Butler, in the very act of professedly basing his case on probability, introduced thecontrary principle. Gladstone, gravely reprehending that Jesuit doctrine misleadingly termed Probabilism—which permits of a choice of the less probable course in morals and belief—supposed himself to be upholding a true Probabilism in Butler. The fact is that Butler, seeking to checkmate the Deists, committed himself to anomaly as a mark of revelation. ‘You believe,’ he virtually argued, ‘in a benevolent God of Nature, though Nature is full of ostensible cruelty and heartlessness: if these moral anomalies do not stagger your deism, why should anomalies in the Scriptures be for you an argument against their being a divine revelation? Should you not rather expect to find difficulties in the revelation as in Nature?’ So that the champion of the standard of probability ends by putting an element of improbability as a mark of divine truth.
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 alltheism. 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 testfor 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 beenwritten 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 isin 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 emotionalbelievers, 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 suchmisconceiving 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 thingsin the name ofRationalism 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 emotionalistmaybe 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 fromhisdistinctive intellectual work. He may even take artistic satisfaction in contemplating the figure of the winged angel which Christianity took over fromPaganism, 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’sPrinciples of Psychology, 1891, ii. 321.
[13]See Professor James’sPrinciples of Psychology, 1891, ii. 321.
[13]See Professor James’sPrinciples of Psychology, 1891, ii. 321.
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 nototherwise 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 tohumiliate ‘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 intelligenceis 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 toand 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,’
‘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 oflife, 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.Thatconcept adheres to the schema of those who affirm the universe to bemade: Naturalism excludes it. Theistic determinismdoesmake man a mere vessel, a tool: for Naturalism he is anindividuation 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 gainconsists 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 negativesolution. 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 mereignoratio 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 alternativeevasions 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 thusnon-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 mass 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 compassed by our thought, and that to assert its permeation by ‘mind’—a finite process of perception and discrimination, verbally defined astranscending 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 uswhereconsciousness is. The inquiry may perhaps lead him to the discovery that he, the professed foe of materialism, has been limiting consciousness to the compass 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-worship,’ self-pleasing, the bias of pre-supposition,the aversion to surrender. All theistic dialects alike sing the song of self-esteem. The spiritist pronounces 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 Gods save one: the rationalist does butnegate the millionth. And in doing this, he is not committing the verbal nullity of saying, There is no God—a formula never fathered by a considerate atheist. God, undefined,=x; and we do not say, There is nox. Of the defined God-idea, whichsoever, we demonstrate the untenableness; but in giving the theist an inconceivable universe we surely meet his appetite 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 assured the present writer that the mass 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?