The Forces of Renascence
As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible, within the scheme of a “Short History,” to treat it on even such a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition of international influences such as had never before been evolved, save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of broad and general views of the past century’s work, leaving adequate critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings.[11] The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of the main movements and forces that during the century affected in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2) of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological order, as follows:—
I.—Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly on religious beliefs.
1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular freethought begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the present day.
2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack of Voltaire, d’Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most persistently in Catholic countries by the Freemasons, as against official orthodoxy after 1815.
3. German “rationalism,” proceeding from English deism, moving towards naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions, dissolving the notion of the miraculous in both Old and New Testament history, analysing the literary structure of the sacred books, and all along affecting studious thought in other countries.
4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions a place in a scheme of “divine education.”
5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge, a disintegrating force, promoting the “Broad Church” tendency, which in Dean Milman was so pronounced as to bring on him charges of rationalism.
6. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into moral and social science.
7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the “constructive” lines laid by the founder, but affecting critical thought in many directions.