‘We called the chess-board white: we call it black,’
the onlooker might say, with Browning; while the analyst might retort that, like the savage, he was quite conscious of the ever-moving point of life, the Living Now, but preferred to give his mind to the still and spacious past, and ‘to cut it up into pieces’ by way of knowing something about the law of things, past, present, and future.
The morally valid element in M. Bergson’s insistence on ‘creative evolution’ (again an old term, by the way) is the vindication of personality as a creative form. But this was not necessary as regards the rational determinist, whose position really assumed it, though possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in assuming that the determinist view of things, mostly accepted by the rationalist, impairs character by reducing will to a ‘mechanism.’ But that is a calculated obscuration of the doctrine. It is a bad sophism to assert that ‘the rejection of mechanism by non-libertarians is a mere phrase. Sooner or later they have to affirm that man is mechanically determined.’[15] It is not so. ‘Going Universe’ negates Machine. That concept adheres to the schema of those who affirm the universe to be made: Naturalism excludes it. Theistic determinism does make man a mere vessel, a tool: for Naturalism he is an individuation of the Living All. The intelligent determinist never was and never will be put out by his conceptual recognition of himself as part of an infinite sequence; and he has no need of M. Bergson’s (untenable) restatement of the problem of free-will and determinism to the effect that the will is sometimes free and sometimes not. That is indeed a hopeless fallacy—an illicit inference from the unduly stressed re-discovery that new truth is reached by a leap and not by a sequence. To say that we are ‘free’ when we have an original idea or guess is to miss the logical truth set forth by so unsophisticated a philosopher as Locke—that the concept of ‘freedom’ is irrelevant to every process of thought. M. Bergson insists on the irrelevance of spatial terms to psychic processes, but overlooks the equal irrelevance of terms of preventable personal action.
Precisely because he is, so to say, the latest outcome of the universe, the rational determinist will insist upon ‘pulling his weight’ and having things go, as far as may be, in the way he prefers. No one’s right is better! And he can confidently claim that here, where he is philosophically at one with the thorough-going theist, he has all the possible moral gain from his determinism without an iota of the theist’s perplexity. That gain consists in the lead to mercy in human affairs. The theist-determinist is certainly not, as some Christian rhetoricians (ignorant of Christian history) affirm all determinists must be, either a coward or a licentious knave, in the ordinary sense. Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Knox were neither, though all four were sadly sinful men. But the theistic determinist is open always on the one hand to the paralysing thought that if he should err he is resisting God, and on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those who resist him are God’s enemies. To escape both snares he must turn thorough pantheist=non-theist. And the upshot is that the theistic determinist is never merciful, whereas the rational determinist is at least under a logical compulsion to be so, however he may resist or divagate. He is free to defend himself, and to defend society; but in so far as he hates and hurts he is illogical, and in so far as he makes punishment retaliation, or prevention punitive, he is either confounding himself or setting lust against light.
Were there no other betterment from the substitution of the non-theistic for the theistic relation to ultimate problems, this might be held to outweigh all claims on the other side, to say nothing of the simple rationality of the negative solution. But that is, of course, in itself decisive. The logically strongest form of the theistic case as against the non-theist is that, even as he lives and moves in gravitation without any subjective consciousness of it, so he may be controlled in every thought by a transcendent volition. But this argument, which excludes M. Bergson’s formula of our occasional ‘freedom’ of will, equally shelters determinism from the contention that we are ‘conscious’ of freedom of thought. Even as we are demonstrably conditioned by gravitation while unconscious of its control, we are demonstrably conditioned by our experience and structure as regards even our guesses. Neither the ignorant nor the ungifted man makes the valid new hypothesis.
There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a non-theistic philosophy is ‘desolate,’ ‘negative,’ ‘materialistic,’ and incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere ignoratio elenchi, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that every ‘explanation of the universe’ is an imposture, exposed as such either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. The normal theist either bilks the problem of evil by avowing it to be a mystery—a thing he cannot explain—or falls back on the alternative evasions that there cannot be good without evil (that is to say, that good needs evil, which is thus good) or that ‘partial ill is universal good,’ and that evil is thus non-ens—which again is a denial of any moral problem. To complain of ‘negation’ as such while making such negations as these is to be more entertaining than impressive.
And to be told that, in putting aside these logomachies, he is depriving himself of intellectual and moral comfort, is for the rationalist no perturbing experience. He is what he is because he knows the utter inanity of the theistic declamation about his putting in place of the ‘Immeasurable Divine Eye’ a ‘vast bottomless Eye-Socket’; knows that for the vast mass of mankind the imagined Eye has been a menace of all their myriad ills, that its levin slays them like flies, that the iron has entered uncounted millions of souls who daily prayed for divine succour. The prate of his ‘negation’ is as childish as the complaint of the avowal that we cannot reach the planet Jupiter, not to say the constellation Hercules: he does but affirm the incontrovertible truth that an infinite universe cannot be compassed by our thought, and that to assert its permeation by ‘mind’—a finite process of perception and discrimination, verbally defined as transcending both—is to pay ourselves with words. To the Berkeleyan formula that existence is only as perceived, and that without perception there can be no existence, he answers, similarly, that the first proposition means only that we perceive what we perceive, and that the second is mere intellectual nullity, a verbal pretence to unthinkable knowledge. The further Zenonian frivolity of the denial of an ‘external world’ needs from him no further comment than this, that in the terms of the argument ‘external’ has no meaning, and the proposition, therefore, none either. It may be left to the denier of existence ‘outside consciousness’ to tell us where consciousness is. The inquiry may perhaps lead him to the discovery that he, the professed foe of materialism, has been limiting consciousness to the compass of the skull.
The ultimate claims of the theist to spiritual superiority and serenity are oddly bracketed with the charges of arrogance and Epicureanism constantly made by him against his antagonist. All alike are irrelevant to the issue of truth; and all alike tell of other motives than those of truth-seeking. Those other motives are substantially what our theological ancestors called ‘will-worship,’ self-pleasing, the bias of pre-supposition, the aversion to surrender. All theistic dialects alike sing the song of self-esteem. The spiritist pronounces his gainsayer ‘impercipient,’ thus inexpensively cutting the knot of argument; and, himself a wilful continuator of the thought-forms of the savage, declares himself to be transcending the earthiness of the sciences in virtue of which he is civilised. All this is a poor way of proving serenity; as poor, at bottom, as the perpetual display of wrath at gainsaying by men who claim to have the backing of Omnipotence. Consciousness of intercourse with the supernatural has never ostensibly availed to give the common run of theists imperturbability in their intercourse with the naturalist.
And if in the stress of controversy the rationalist should in turn prove himself capable of perturbation, let him, avowing that he claims no supernatural stay, at least plead that he sets up no intellectual ‘colour line,’ and that his gospel is after all fraternal enough. Once more, he does but ask the theist to take one more step in a criticism which he has already carried far, with small trouble to himself. Every religion sets aside every other: the rationalist only sets aside one more. Every theist has negated a million Gods save one: the rationalist does but negate the millionth. And in doing this, he is not committing the verbal nullity of saying, There is no God—a formula never fathered by a considerate atheist. God, undefined,=x; and we do not say, There is no x. Of the defined God-idea, whichsoever, we demonstrate the untenableness; but in giving the theist an inconceivable universe we surely meet his appetite for the transcendent.
Rationalism, when all is said, is the undertaking, in George Eliot’s phrase, to do without opium. And perhaps the shrewdest challenge to it is the denial that the average man can so abstain—a denial which may be backed by the reminder that the framer of the phrase did not. A jurist once cheerfully assured the present writer that the mass of men will never do without alcohol and religion. He was not aware that he was adapting a Byronic blasphemy. It may be that in a world in which most men chronically crave alternately stimulants and narcotics, he was in a measure right. But as one of his two necessaries is already under a widening medical indictment and avoidance, it may be that the other will fare similarly. In any case, is not the ideal a worthy one, as ideals go?