[C. Philosophical Influences.]
Now, turning to our heritage in philosophy and science, do we find that it tends to resist, or to thwart in any way the principles of our religious heritage? Not in the slightest degree! At every point and at every stage it has confirmed and restated, with all the pomp of facts and statistics to support it, what the religious spirit had laid down for our acceptance. It is superficial and ridiculous to suppose, as Dr. Draper once supposed, that there has been a conflict between Religion and Science. I take it that he means the Christian Religion alone. Such a conflict has never taken place; what has taken place, however, is a conflict between Science and the Catholic Church. The Christian Religion and Science together, however, have never had any such antagonism, and least of all in England, where, from the time of Roger Bacon,[37] the first English Experimentalist, to the present day, nothing has been left undone, no stone has been left unturned, which might establish scientifically that which Christianity, as we have seen, wished to establish emotionally.
Universal liberty, without a purpose or a direction; the free and plebeian production of thoughts and theories divorced from all aim or ideal, after the style in which children are born in the slums; devotion to a truth that can be common to all; the depression of the value and dignity of man, and a certain lack of reverence for all things—these four aspirations of Christianity and Protestantism have been the aspirations of science, and at the present moment they are practically attained.
Unfortunately, it is in the nature of human beings to imitate success, and England's success as a colonizing and constitutional nation has undoubtedly been a potent force in spreading not only her commercial, but also her philosophical views among all ambitious and aspiring Western nations, who guilelessly took the evil with the good.
The empiricists, Francis Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, were among the first, by their teaching, to level a decisive blow at genuine thought, at the man who knows and who is the measure of all things;[38] and this they did by arriving at a conception of knowledge and thought that converted the latter into possessions which might be common to everybody—that is to say, by reducing all knowledge to that which can be made immediately the experience of all. This was the greatest blasphemy against the human spirit that has ever been committed. By means of it, every one, whatever he might be, could aspire to intellectuality and wisdom; for experience belongs to everybody, whereas a great spirit is the possession only of the fewest.
The Frenchmen, Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Maupertius, Condillac, Diderot, d'Alembert, La Mettrie and Baron Holbach, were quick to become infected, and in Germany, despite the essentially aristocratic influence of Leibnitz,[39] Kant was the first to follow suit.
Begun in this way, English philosophical speculation, as Dr. Max Schasler says, was forced to grow ever more and more materialistic[40] in character, and, if "Science has already come very generally to mean, not that which may be known, but only such knowledge as every animal with faculties a little above those of an ant or a beaver can be induced to admit," and if "incommunicable knowledge, or knowledge which can be communicated at present only to a portion—perhaps a small portion—of mankind, is already affirmed to be no knowledge at all,"[41] it is thanks to the efforts of the fathers of English thought.
Hence Nietzsche's cry, that "European ignobleness, the plebeian ism of modern ideas—is England's work and invention."[42]
But it is not alone in its vulgarization of the concept of knowledge, or in its materialistic tendency, that English influence has helped to reduce the dignity of man and to level his kind; the utilitarians from Bentham to John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, by taking the greatest number as the norm, as the standard and measurement of all things, ably reflected the Christian principle, of the equality of souls, in their works, and, incidentally, by so doing, treated the greatest number exceedingly badly. For what is mediocre can neither be exalted nor charmed by values drawn from mediocrity, and is constantly in need of values drawn from super-mediocrity, for its joy, for its love of life, and for its reconciliation with drabby reality.[43]