FOOTNOTES:
[14] It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag, Credibile est quia ineptum est, dismissing it as ‘a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion’ (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh, Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 219).
[15] Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh, Hegel and Hegelianism, 1903, p. 216.
§ 9. IDEALS
Ideals, obviously, are part—the best part—of our bias: to that admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother’s shame. The charge is an illustration of the strange malice of which piety is capable. No human being ever proposed to communicate all truth of any kind to children; and the limit to the gratuitous telling of wounding truth is fixed by normal courtesy and sympathy as regards the sufferings even of adults. The charge is in fact one more illustration of the anti-veridical bias of pietism—the need to distort and pervert the case against the rationalist.
And if pietism can thus distort the bearing of the intellectual canons of rationalism, much more habitually does it distort the specific purport of rationalist morals. The fact that naturalism implies utilitarianism is transformed into the proposition that utilitarianism means the subordination of all play of sympathy to an incessant calculus of profit. As we have seen, theism and Christianity alike do chronically subordinate the veridical instinct—a moral instinct like another—to lower considerations of utility; and only too often in history do we see them annulling the instincts of mercy and reciprocity by the law of dogma. Not by propounders of that test is the rationalist to be put to shame. The very basis of Christianity, in fine, is an other-world utilitarianism. ‘What profits it a man——?’
Utilitarianism means for him, in brief, what it meant when it first took shape as a moral plea—the testing of traditional moral canons, and their annulment when they are seen to be mere survivals of barbarism, sanctioned only by custom and religion; never the substitution of a calculus of utility for an accepted moral canon in every act of life. Any general moral rule rationally seen to be broadly utilitarian is thereby vindicated qua rule; and to put its practice at the hazard of every trying emergency would be to sin against the very principle of utility. For the rest, the rationalist has his moral bias like another; and in virtue of it, as animating rationalisers of various developments, has been wrought the main part of the modern purification of working morality, though the moral instinct in religious men has responded, and has at times initiated reformation. It is left to the religionist to argue that a bias which has wrought for truth, justice, and mercy will somehow fail to preserve other virtues. No reminiscence of the sexual history of Christian societies can restrain Christian advocates from imputing to the spirit of reason a tendency to promote promiscuity in the sex relation and thus to overthrow ‘the family.’ Holding as they do that the family is the keystone of society and civilisation, they in effect argue that the practice of rational calculation of means and ends will destroy both. Pessimism could no further go; and if this be not the height of pessimism it is a stress of false-witness which puts the accuser outside the pale of controversy. As an imputation upon known rationalists in general the theorem is simply false. The systematic revival of Aryan polygamy has been a religious process; and the freest practitioners of sexual choice among reasoning unbelievers, the Russian Nihilists, have been notoriously monogynous.
It may be hoped that we shall in future hear less and less in these matters of the extremities of orthodox malice or misgiving, as we hear less and less of the old plea that whereas a bad believer may be held in moral check by his religious fears, a bad unbeliever will fear only the police. The statistics of the jails do not encourage that line of apologetics; and the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children do not go to show either that rationalism makes parents cruel or that religion keeps them kind. The plain truth is that upon bad bias law is the main check; and that the most vaunted religious methods of developing the good bias of the weak have latterly been systematically supplemented, in the organisation, for instance, of the Salvation Army so called, by secular methods which are the avowal of the final and general futility of the others.