FOOTNOTES:[14]It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag,Credibile est quia ineptum est, dismissing it as ‘a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion’ (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 219).[15]Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, 1903, p. 216.
[14]It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag,Credibile est quia ineptum est, dismissing it as ‘a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion’ (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 219).
[14]It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag,Credibile est quia ineptum est, dismissing it as ‘a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion’ (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 219).
[15]Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, 1903, p. 216.
[15]Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh,Hegel and Hegelianism, 1903, p. 216.
Ideals, obviously, are part—the best part—of our bias: to that admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother’s shame. The charge is an illustration of the strange malice of which piety is capable. No human being ever proposed to communicate all truth of any kind to children; and the limit to the gratuitous telling of wounding truth is fixed by normal courtesy and sympathy as regards the sufferings even of adults. The charge is in fact one more illustration of the anti-veridical bias of pietism—the need to distort and pervert the case against the rationalist.
And if pietism can thus distort the bearing of the intellectual canons of rationalism, much more habitually does it distort the specific purport of rationalist morals. The fact that naturalism implies utilitarianism is transformed into theproposition that utilitarianism means the subordination of all play of sympathy to an incessant calculus of profit. As we have seen, theism and Christianity alike do chronically subordinate the veridical instinct—a moral instinct like another—to lower considerations of utility; and only too often in history do we see them annulling the instincts of mercy and reciprocity by the law of dogma. Not by propounders of that test is the rationalist to be put to shame. The very basis of Christianity, in fine, is an other-world utilitarianism. ‘Whatprofitsit a man——?’
Utilitarianism means for him, in brief, what it meant when it first took shape as a moral plea—the testing of traditional moral canons, and their annulment when they are seen to be mere survivals of barbarism, sanctioned only by custom and religion; never the substitution of a calculus of utility for an accepted moral canon in every act of life. Any general moral rule rationally seen to be broadly utilitarian is thereby vindicatedquarule; and to put its practice at the hazard of every trying emergency would be to sin against the very principle of utility. For the rest, the rationalist has his moral bias like another; and in virtue of it, as animating rationalisers of various developments, has been wroughtthe main part of the modern purification of working morality, though the moral instinct in religious men has responded, and has at times initiated reformation. It is left to the religionist to argue that a bias which has wrought for truth, justice, and mercy will somehow fail to preserve other virtues. No reminiscence of the sexual history of Christian societies can restrain Christian advocates from imputing to the spirit of reason a tendency to promote promiscuity in the sex relation and thus to overthrow ‘the family.’ Holding as they do that the family is the keystone of society and civilisation, they in effect argue that the practice of rational calculation of means and ends will destroy both. Pessimism could no further go; and if this be not the height of pessimism it is a stress of false-witness which puts the accuser outside the pale of controversy. As an imputation upon known rationalists in general the theorem is simply false. The systematic revival of Aryan polygamy has been a religious process; and the freest practitioners of sexual choice among reasoning unbelievers, the Russian Nihilists, have been notoriously monogynous.
It may be hoped that we shall in future hear less and less in these matters of the extremities of orthodox malice or misgiving, as we hear less andless of the old plea that whereas a bad believer may be held in moral check by his religious fears, a bad unbeliever will fear only the police. The statistics of the jails do not encourage that line of apologetics; and the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children do not go to show either that rationalism makes parents cruel or that religion keeps them kind. The plain truth is that upon bad bias law is the main check; and that the most vaunted religious methods of developing the good bias of the weak have latterly been systematically supplemented, in the organisation, for instance, of the Salvation Army so called, by secular methods which are the avowal of the final and general futility of the others.
In no other direction are the moral ideals of rationalism less fully vindicated by the movement of civilisation. The humane and scientific treatment of criminals has actually been antagonised, in the name of the Christian doctrine of sin, from the ranks of the Howard Society, established to promote such humane treatment. Rationalism can no other: religion seems willing to leave it the credit. Above all, the great cause of Peace on earth—the very motto (a mistranslation, as it happens) cited as that of nascent Christianity—visibly depends more and more on the spread of rational calculation, the spirit of reason, rather than on that of faith, however faithfully many a good Christian continues to plead for it. There is no Peace Church: even Quakerism has latterly had its war-mongers; and there is no record in history that the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God ever withheld men from fratricidal war.
We shall still hear, it may be, that the intellectual pride of rationalism is in tendency anti-democratic; Gibbon and Hume being cited as cases in point. And the rationalist democrat, shunning the lead of his antagonist to panacea-mongering, may here at once—or once more—confess that the spirit of reason in things intellectual is no guarantee for the immediate elimination of egoism in human relations. Christianity has claimed to be such a guarantee—with the results we know. But it is flatly inconceivable that the spirit which challenges all authority and anomaly in doctrine can tend to conserve either tyranny or social and political inequality. The very apologists who make the charge are the successors and coadjutors of those who have charged upon irreligious philosophy the generating of the French Revolution. Anti-democratic rationalists there will be, as therehave been; but for every one such there are a hundred of the contrary ideal; and it is not in conservative parties that they are found to avow themselves. For rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty, equality, fraternity, ‘the giving and receiving of reasons,’ the complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master, proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such, can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle because strugglehasyielded progress; much less in the pseudo-Darwinism which would further degrade backward races because they have been ill-placed. Of race-hatred he cannot be guilty without infidelity to his first principles.
And if all this be termed vaunting, the objector may, perhaps, be placated by the repeated avowal that neither is rationalism proclaimed to be a wholly new way for the nations, nor is the rationalist as such acclaimed as the monopolist of good. He respectfully urges upon the best and ablest followers of other flags that under his they will not deteriorate or be less cherished; that their gifts are precious in his eyes; that he wants their collaboration for humanity’s sake.His panegyric of Reason is but the praise of what is wisest and best in man: his ‘ism’ is the concern to put off dead husks of opinion, to lift all life to the plane of light. The religionist may, if he must, come over with permission to call the cultus of truth and sanity a religion: some there are who suppose themselves to solve the dispute by that means, as Spencer thought to solve it by inviting Science and Religion to join hands in an avowal of a common ignorance. Such eirenicons do not seem widely acceptable: it is really better to let words keep their historic meanings than wilfully to change their values.
But if the question be whether rationalism is a creed to live by, an ideal to live by, let these pages be taken as giving part of the answer.
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