A Grammar of Freethought

by Chapman Cohen

There is another and deeper aspect of the matter. As I have already said, language not alone expresses thought, it also governs and directs it. Locke expressed this truth when he said, "It is impossible that men should ever truly seek, or certainly discover, the disagreement of ideas themselves whilst their thoughts flutter about, or stick only on sounds of doubtful and uncertain significance." Quite a number of theological and metaphysical conundrums would lose their significance if it were only realized that the words used are not alone of doubtful and uncertain significance, but often of no possible significance whatever. They are like counterfeit coins, which retain their value only so long as they are not tested by a proper standard. And the evil of these counterfeits is that they deceive both those who tender and those who accept them. For even though slovenliness of speech is not always the product of slovenly thought, in the long run it tends to induce it, and those who realize this need to be specially on their guard against using language which can only further confuse an already sufficiently confused public opinion, and strengthen superstitions that are already sufficiently strong without our clandestine or unintended assistance.[15]

Unfortunately, it remains a favourite policy with many writers to use and define the word religion, not in accordance with a comprehensive survey of facts, but in a way that will harmonize with existing pre-possessions. To this class belongs Matthew Arnold's famous definition of religion as "Morality touched with emotion," Professor Seeley's statement that we are entitled to call religion "any habitual and permanent admiration," or the common description of religion as consisting in devotion to an ideal. All such definitions may be set on one side as historically worthless, and as not harmonizing with the facts. Arnold's definition is in the highest degree superficial, since there exists no morality that is not touched with emotion, and on the other hand there exist phases of religion that have not any connection with morality, however slight. Professor Leuba properly rules definitions of this class out of order in the comment that, as it is "the function of words to delimitate, one defeats the purpose of language by stretching the meaning of a word until it has lost all precision and unity of meaning."[16] A definition that includes everything may as well, for all the use it is, not cover anything.

Equally faulty are those definitions that are based upon an assumed conscious effort to explain the mysteries of existence. No stranger lapse ever overtook a great thinker than occurred to Herbert Spencer when he described religion as consisting in a worship of the unknowable, and as due to the desire to explain a mystery ever pressing for interpretation. Granting the existence of an Unknowable, the sense of its presence belongs to the later stages of mental evolution, not to the earlier ones. Metaphysical and mystical theories of religion are indications of its disintegration, not of its beginnings. Primitive man began to believe in ghosts and gods for the same reasons that he believed in other things; he worshipped his gods for very concrete considerations. Even the distinction between "spiritual" and material existence is quite foreign to his mind. Such distinctions arise gradually with the progress of knowledge and its disintegrating influence on inherited beliefs. If primitive man may be credited with a philosophy, and if one may use the word in a purely convenient sense, then one may say that he is neither a dualist, nor a pluralist, but a monist. The soul or double he believes in is similar to the body he sees; the unseen forces he credits with various activities are of the same kind as those with which he is acquainted. To read our conceptions into the mind of primitive man because we use our words to explain his thoughts is a procedure that is bound to end in confusion. Man's earliest conception of things is vague and indefinite. Later, he distinguishes differences, qualitative and quantitative, his conception of things becomes more definite, and distinctions are set up that lay the foundations of science and philosophy, and which mark their separation from religion.

So far as one can see there are only two causes why people should continue to use the word religion after giving up all for which it properly stands. One is sheer conservatism. When, for instance, Thomas Paine said, "To do good is my religion," he had at least the justification of believing in a deity, but apart from this the only cause for his calling the desire to do good a religion is that there had grown up the fashion of calling one's rule of life a religion. The other cause is the ill-repute that has been attached to those who avow themselves as being without religion. Orthodoxy saw to it that they were treated as pariahs without social status, and, in many cases, legal rights. Once upon a time it was useless unless one believed in the right religion. Nowadays, any religion will do, or anything that one cares to call a religion. But not to have any religion at all still puts one outside the pale of respectability, and there seem to be few who can stand that. And supernatural religion—the only genuine article—being impossible with many, these may still, if they care to, save their face by professing to use the name, even if they have not the thing. Orthodoxy is very accommodating nowadays.

Leaving for a time the question of how religion actually does arise, we may turn to those writers who define religion in terms of ethics. It may be admitted that so far as the later stages of religion are concerned considerable emphasis is laid upon ethics. But we can only make religion a part of ethics by expanding the term morality so as to include everything, or by contracting it so as to exclude all the lower forms of religious belief. And any definition of religion that does not embrace all its forms is obviously inaccurate. It is not at all a question of defining the higher in terms of the lower, or the lower in terms of the higher, it is simply the need of so defining religion that our definition will cover all religions, high and low, and thus deal with their essential characteristics.

The only sense in which ethics may be said to be included in religion lies in the fact that in primitive times religion includes everything. The fear of unseen intelligences is one of the most powerful factors of which early humanity is conscious, and the necessity for conciliating them is always present. The religious ceremonies connected with eating and drinking, with lying down and rising up, with sowing and reaping, with disease, hunting, and almost every circumstance of primitive life prove this. Differentiation and discrimination arise very slowly, but one after another the various departments of life do shake off the controlling influence of religion. Ethics may, therefore, be said to originate in the shadow of religion—as do most other things—but in no sense can morality be said to owe its origin to religion. Its origin is deeper and more fundamental than religion. As a matter of practice morality is independent of religious belief and moral theory, and as a matter of theory the formulation of definite moral rules is substantially independent of religion and is an assertion of its independence. Indeed, the conflict between a growing moral sense and religion is almost as large a fact in the social sphere as the conflict between religion and science is in the intellectual one.

In all its earlier stages religion is at best non-moral. It becomes otherwise later only because of the reaction of a socialized morality on religious beliefs. Early religion is never concerned with the morality of its teaching, nor are the worshippers concerned with the morality of their gods. The sole question is what the gods desire and how best to satisfy them. We cannot even conceive man ascribing ethical qualities to his gods until he has first of all conceived them in regard to his fellow men. The savage has no moral reverence for his gods; they are magnified men, but not perfect ones. He worships not because he admires, but because he fears. Fear is, indeed, one of the root causes of religious belief. Professor Leuba quite admits the origin of religion is fear, but he reserves the possibility of man being occasionally placed under such favourable conditions that fear may be absent. We admit the possibility, but at present it remains a possibility only. At present all the evidence goes to prove the words of Ribot that, "The religious sentiment is composed first of all of the emotion of fear in its different degrees, from profound terror to vague uneasiness, due to faith in an unknown mysterious and impalpable power." And if that be admitted, we can scarcely find here the origin of morality.

What is here overlooked is the important fact that while religion, as such, commences in a reasoned process, morality is firmly established before mankind is even aware of its existence. A formulated religion is essentially of the nature of a theory set forth to explain or to deal with certain experiences. Morality, on the other hand, takes its rise in those feelings and instincts that are developed in animal and human societies under the pressure of natural selection. The affection of the animal for its young, of the human mother for its child, the attraction of male and female, the sympathetic feelings that bind members of the same species together, these do not depend upon theory, or even upon an intellectual perception of their value. Theory tries to account for their existence, and reason justifies their being, but they are fundamentally the product of associated life. And it is precisely because morality is the inevitable condition of associated life that it has upon religion the effect of modifying it until it is at least not too great an outrage upon the conditions of social well-being. All along we can, if we will, see how the developing moral sense forces a change in religious teaching. At one time there is nothing revolting in the Christian doctrine of election which dooms one to heaven and another to hell without the slightest regard to personal merit. At another the doctrine of eternal damnation is rejected as a matter of course. Heresy hunting and heretic burning, practised as a matter of course by one generation become highly repulsive to another. In every direction we see religious beliefs undergoing a modification under the influence of moral and social growth. It is always man who moralizes his gods; never by any chance is it the gods who moralize man.

If we are to arrive at a proper understanding of religion we can, therefore, no more assume morals to be an integral part of religion than we can assume medicine or any of the special arts, all of which may be associated with religion. It will not even do to define religion with Mr. W. H. Mallock[17] as a belief that the world "has been made and is sustained by an intelligence external to and essentially independent of it." That may pass as a definition of Theism, but Theism is only one of the phases of religion, and the idea of a creator independent of the universe is one that is quite alien to the earlier stages of religion. And to deny the name of religion to primitive beliefs is to put oneself on the level of the type of Christian who declines to call any superstition but his own religion. It is for this reason impossible to agree with Professor Leuba when he says that "the idea of a creator must take precedence of ghosts and nature beings in the making of a religion." If by precedence the order of importance, from the standpoint of later and comparatively modern forms of religion, is intended, the statement may pass. But if the precedence claimed is a time order, the reply is that, instead of the idea of a creator taking precedence of ghosts and nature beings, it is from these that the idea of a creator is evolved. It is quite true Professor Leuba holds that "belief in the existence of unseen anthropopathic beings is not religion. It is only when man enters into relation with them that religion comes into existence," but so soon as man believes in the existence of them he believes himself to be in relation with them, and a large part of his efforts is expended in making these relations of an amicable and profitable character.

A further definition of religion, first given, I think, by the late Professor Fiske, but since widely used, as a craving for "fulness of life," must be dismissed as equally faulty. For if by fulness of life is meant the desire to make it morally and intellectually richer, the answer is that this desire is plainly the product of a progressive social life, of which much that now passes for religion is the adulterated expression. Apologetically, it is an attempt so to state religion that it may evade criticism of its essential character. From one point of view this may be gratifying enough, but it is no help to an understanding of the nature of religion. And how little religion does help to a fuller life will be seen by anyone who knows the part played by organized religion in mental development and how blindly obstructive it is to new ideas in all departments of life. All these attempts to define religion in terms of ethics, of metaphysics, or as the craving after an ideal are wholly misleading. It is reading history backwards, and attributing to primitive human nature feelings and conceptions which it does not and cannot possess.