Section 6.—Philosophy and Ethics
1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling, produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and the other as pantheistic,[271] despite its dualism. Neither seems to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the universities;[272] and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies[273] by formulating, as Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining Christianity as “Absolute Religion” in comparison with the various forms of “Natural Religion.” Nevertheless, he counted in a great degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had carried its point with the world at large,[274] he was chronically at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated,[275] and on the other declaring that the common run of them “know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame.”[276] Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. “Whether at the marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man heals.” On the story of the marks made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: “Would the angel not have known them without these marks?”, adding: “This faith has no real interest for Spirit.”[277] Such writing, from the orthodox point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy and a form of political utilitarianism.
As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte), pp. 364–69; Renan, Études d’histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406; J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189–91; Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135–41, 176; Eschenmenger, Die Hegel’sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted in Beard’s Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen, 1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753–54—also cited by Beard, pp. 9–12.
The gist of Hegel’s rehabilitation of Christianity is well set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered in connection with his demonstration that in politics the Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social environment than Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to the spirit of Hegel’s general philosophy than the representing of Christianity as a culmination or “ultimate” of all religion; and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.
We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel’s process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel’s officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel, after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded “demagogy,” and in Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes of 1848. It came in their case from the same source—an alarmed memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.
Not only does Hegel’s conception of the Absolute make deity simply the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind,[278] but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds;[279] and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of German thought—as those of Vatke, Strauss,[280] Feuerbach, and Marx—professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke[281] in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have been that Hegel’s formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.
2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel’s method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor, with a few exceptions,[282] to his own disciples, some of whom, as Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity.[283] In 1854 Heine told his French readers that there were in Germany “fanatical monks of atheism” who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted deist;[284] and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel’s system only atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while.[285] Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came in due course the cry of “Back to Kant,” where at least orthodoxy had some formal semblance of sanction.
Hartmann’s work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity[286] is a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for “liberal Christianity” in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal for a “new concrete religion” of monism or pantheism as a bulwark against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann insisted on grounding his pessimism; and with this pessimistic pantheism he hoped to outbid Catholicism against the “irreligious” Strauss and the liberal Christians—in his view no less irreligious. It does not seem to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the effect of all German philosophy has probably been to make for the general discredit of theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism being little propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in spirit or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current religion which their writings in particular manifest[287] must be admitted to stand for a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And this revolt was bound to come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel—aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung as a force that had done its work, and could find no more to do, however it be explained and excused—was a mere expression of their own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a stop on à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an “ultimate” of philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators, seeking simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit which, correcting their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper and wider comprehension of religious evolution and psychosis than could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed, did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact, was fatally shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution, which in their case took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France and England it worked out as a crude return to clerical and political authoritarianism.[288]
3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the “Old Testament” of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein Hegel’s fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality on the other) should be cured.[289] Feuerbach accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of philosophic as well as historical insight—a statement to which there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan,[290] fundamentally averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.
Feuerbach’s special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity, and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a wider concern than Hegel’s for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: “Two years have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way: I am going to study anatomy.”[291] It may have been that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker—a career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach, in the words of Strauss, “broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel, philosophy and theology still went.”[292]
For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy, 1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839) he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness,[293] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. “Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge.”[294] This of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect—philosophic atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares in his preface that “atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.” In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once for all: “A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God, is God—namely the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being—for example, love, wisdom, justice—are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence....”
This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything “under the rude rule of egoism.”[295] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of Feuerbach’s analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of “rude egoism” than is the Christian formula of “God’s will” a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from Feuerbach’s criticism, under cover of alternate cries of “Communism” and “egoism”—a self-stultification which needs no comment—is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. “Max Stirner” (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806–1856) carried the philosophic “egoism” of Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force.[296]
4. Arnold Ruge (1802–1880), who was of the same philosophical school,[297] gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated among its Reverers[298] (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance, proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of “materialism” was for him no bugbear. “Truly,” he writes, “we are not without the earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals, not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it, and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science, and art.”[299]
5. On Feuerbach’s Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion of Büchner’s Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain man of his century what d’Holbach in his chief work sought to do for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy, in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which marks the religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in previous ages; and constantly misrepresented as professing to explain an infinite universe when it does but show the hollowness of all supernaturalist explanations,[300] the book steadily holds its ground as a manual of anti-mysticism.[301] Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may be said to have framed for their age an atheistic “System of Nature,” concrete and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur’s protest against the “one-sidedness” of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen ground of self-consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner’s study of the objective world and see whether his cause fares any better.
6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the other “classic philosophers” of the first third of the century orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism; and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet.[302] The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy, an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up,[303] and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the orthodox. “God,” he wrote,[304] “interposes as little in the regular development of humanity as in the course of the solar system.” He added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual, between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of pronouncing on religious questions.[305]
7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period, however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L’indifférence en matière de religion (4 vols. 1818–24), resorting to the old Catholic device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.
Damiron, writing his Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than reassuring, commenting on the “strange skepticism” of Lamennais as to the human reason.[306] For himself, he takes up the parable of Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. “In this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall be Christians and something more.” The theologian of the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher. “We shall study God through nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our natural lights.” Christianity has been a useful discipline; but “our education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers; and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science.”[307] “Prayer is good, doubtless,” but it “has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment.”[308] All this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne’s, the expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven; and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.
Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur l’état de l’église had been suppressed by Napoleon’s police; in 1814 he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction; with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal; but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824 he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write Liberal articles in the journal L’Avenir, in which he collaborated with Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832 received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.
Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with his friends to his and his brother’s estate in Brittany, and began his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his determination to place himself “as a writer outside of the Church and Catholicism,” declaring that “outside of Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere.”[309] Still he claimed to be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine “fidelity in obedience with liberty in science.”[310] In January of 1834, however, he had ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d’un Croyant, published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned as infidelity.
Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else, he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising in 1831–32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement (1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never changed: “I have gone on, that is all.” But he had in effect changed from a Catholic to a pantheist;[311] and in 1848, as a member of the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by “an affectation of impiety.”[312] On his deathbed he refused to receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and with no cross on his grave.
Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher’s mother, who did not stick at libelling her son’s wife in order to get him put under clerical control.[313] It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France, whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.
8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–42) practically reaffirmed while it recast and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism, giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte’s direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between the clergy and the philosophers, “suspended by the great political commotion of 1830,” had been “revived with a new energy.”[314] The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect; and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social regulation[315] is beside the case. A man’s way of thinking may involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte’s did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any one man’s scheme for regulating society and conserving “cultus”; and Comte’s was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a “science of society” where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms of “providentialism.” In France the general effect of the rationalistic movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire, assailed the whole “classic” school in his Philosophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching.[316]
9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social sciences; Hartley’s Christian Materialism making small headway as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable contrast to what was going on in Germany;[317] and in Scotland in the ‘thirties things had fallen to a similar level.[318] It was over practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and orthodoxy;[319] while the latter, no less pronounced in his private opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham’s utilitarianism was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker than George Grote, was published in 1822.[320] Pseudonymous as that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.
But Bentham’s ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists, such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured champions of orthodoxy,[321] to the great advantage of critical discussion.
10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir William Hamilton,[322] it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance to the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith; though Hamilton’s dogmatic views were always doubtful.[323] Admirably learned, and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his theism on the alleged “needs of our moral nature”—a declaration of philosophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front after his death in the Bampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter Dean Mansel; and between them they gave the decisive proof that the orthodox cause had been philosophically lost while being socially won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the negative criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically cognizable qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received severe treatment at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated irrationalism and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine, which insisted on attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknowable Absolute, and on standing for Christian mysteries on the skeptical ground that reason is an imperfect instrument, and that our moral faculties and feelings “demand” the traditional beliefs. But they did exactly what was needed to force rationalism upon open and able minds. It is indeed astonishing to find so constantly repeated by trained reasoners the old religious blunder of reasoning from the inadequacy of reason to the need for faith. The disputant says in effect: “Our reason is not to be trusted; let us then on that score rationally decide to believe what is handed down to us”: for if the argument is not a process of reasoning it is nothing; and if it is to stand, it is an assertion of the validity it denies. Evidently the number of minds capable of such self-stultification is great; but among minds at once honest and competent the number capable of detecting the absurdity must be considerable; and the invariable result of its use down to our own time is to multiply unbelievers in the creed so absurdly defended.
It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice, to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective rationalist. Accused of having adopted “the absolute and infinite, as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics,” as a “synonym for the true and living God,” he protested that he had done “exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite, as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is not the true infinite.”[324] Charged further with borrowing without acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman with “transcendent gifts” while claiming to have read almost nothing by him,[325] and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.
It was said of Hamilton that, “having scratched his eyes out in the bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith”; and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil, the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the delivery of Mansel’s lectures his and Hamilton’s philosophic positions were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the naturalistic First Principles (1860–62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein, with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author’s own part, and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism of religious and anti-religious positions,[326] the new cosmic conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond the capacity of the multitude of Spencer’s metaphysical critics, marks him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a “System of Nature” rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the “agnostic” foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.
11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion[327] when he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was developed by John the Scot—perhaps from hints in Origen[328]—and again by Bernardino Ochino,[329] is specially associated with the teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747–1825), who appears to have been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed,[330] and who, like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a “personal” Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham, counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to him.[331] This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy of Butler’s philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage of his Bampton Lectures,[332] had shown himself incredibly blind.
The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the development of “Socinian” or other rationalistic views in the Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly rationalistic, and in that sense “infidel.”[333] Reactions have been claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.
12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English thought throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), indeed, he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less than for tolerance; and his whole life’s work made for reason. “The saint of rationalism” was Gladstone’s[334] account of him as a parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances—a theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of the universe nor the worshipper’s craving for support—sets up some wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been.