[CHAPTER XIV]
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT
Authority and Knowledge in Science—The Duty of Doubt—Authority and Individual Judgment in Religion—The Protestant Position—Sir Charles Lyell and the Deluge—Infallibility—The Church and Science—Morality and Dogma—Civil and Religious Liberty—Agnosticism and Clericalism—Meaning of Agnosticism—Knowledge and Evidence—The Method of Agnosticism.
In the practice of modern law-courts, a witness rarely is allowed to offer as evidence any statement for which he himself is not the direct authority. What he himself saw or heard or did with regard to the matter at issue—these, and not what others told him they had seen or heard or done, are the limits within which he is allowed to be a competent witness. As a matter of fact, in the business of life we have to act differently. A large proportion of our opinions, beliefs, and reasons for conduct must come to us on the authority of others. We have no direct experience of the past; of the present we can see little and only the little immediately surrounding us. In a multitude of affairs we have to act on authority, to accept from books or from persons what we have not ourselves the opportunity of knowing. It would seem, then, to be a primary duty to learn to distinguish in our minds those matters which we know directly from those matters which we have accepted on trust; and, secondly, to learn and to apply the best modes of choosing the good and of rejecting the bad authorities. The work of the scientific man is a lifelong exercise of these primary duties. From the first moment he begins to observe living things or to dissect their dead frameworks, to mix chemical substances, to make experiments with magnets and wires, he begins to build, and as long as he continues to work he continues to build for himself a body of first-hand knowledge. But, however he work arduously or through long years, he can visit only the smallest portion of the field of nature in which he is working. It is necessary for him to employ the work of others, submitting, from time to time such accepted work to the tests suggested by his own observations. He learns to regard in a different light all knowledge taken on the authority of others; to distrust it a little until he has learned to weigh its general credibility by his own standards, and its particular credibility by subjecting portions of it to his own tests; to distrust it still more when even small portions fail to answer his tests, and to reject it altogether when the percentage of detected error is large. He learns, in fact, what Huxley called the duty of doubt.
This duty has not been universally accepted. In the history of Christian civilisation (and a parallel series of events might be portrayed from the history of other civilisations), many great institutions and very many great and good men have condemned and feared the habit and attitude of doubt in all its forms. Certain doctrines believed to be of supreme importance to mankind were held to rest on authority independent of, and perhaps not susceptible to, the kind of testing employed in science. Around these doctrines there grew, in time, a body of traditions, customs, new dogmas, and fantasies; and the duty of belief in the first was extended to cover the whole system, the central jewel as well as the accretions and encrustations of time. The domain of religious authority was extended to the whole field of human thought and of human action, and the more unreasonable the dominion became, the more strenuously was the duty of belief urged. The Protestant Reformation was one of the great stages in the conflict for freedom against the universal tyranny that had arisen, but the reformers very naturally retained a considerable portion of the bias against which they had fought. In Protestant countries, in the first half of this century, the duty of belief in the Protestant doctrines, traditions, philosophy, history, and attitude to science reigned supreme, and all weapons, from legitimate argument to abusive invective and social ostracism, were employed against those who acted in accordance with the duty of doubt. Allegations of "unsoundness" or of "free thinking" became barriers to success in life, and those against whom they were made became lowered in the esteem of their fellows.
At the present time, when the advance of science and of civilisation has almost won the battle for freedom of thought, it is difficult to realise the strength of the forces against which Huxley and many others had to fight. Huxley himself said with perfect justice: "I hardly know of a great physical truth whose universal reception has not been preceded by an epoch in which most estimable persons have maintained that the phenomena investigated were directly dependent on the Divine Will, and that the attempt to investigate them was not only futile but blasphemous." As a particular instance of this he cited some episodes in the history of geological science.
"At the present time, it is difficult to persuade serious scientific enquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to than mere antiquarianism. But it was not so in my youth. At that time geologists and biologists could hardly follow to the end any path of enquiry without finding the way blocked by Noah and his ark, or by the first chapter of Genesis; and it was a serious matter, in this country at any rate, for a man to be suspected of doubting the literal truth of the Diluvial or any other Pentateuchal history. The fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Geological Club (in 1824) was, if I remember rightly, the last occasion on which the late Sir Charles Lyell spoke to even so small a public as the members of that body. Our veteran leader lighted up once more; and, referring to the difficulties which beset his early efforts to create a rational science of geology, spoke, with his wonted clearness and vigour, of the social ostracism which pursued him after the publication of the Principles of Geology, in 1830, on account of the obvious tendency of that noble work to discredit the Pentateuchal accounts of the Creation and the Deluge. If my younger contemporaries find this hard to believe, I may refer them to a grave book On the Doctrine of the Deluge, published eight years later, and dedicated by the author to his father, the then Archbishop of York. The first chapter refers to the treatment of the 'Mosaic Deluge,' by Dr. Buckland and Mr. Lyell, in the following terms: 'Their respect for revealed religion has prevented them from arraying themselves openly against the Scriptural account of it—much less do they deny its truth—but they are in a great hurry to escape from the consideration of it, and evidently concur in the opinion of Linnæus, that no proofs whatever of the Deluge are to be discovered in the structure of the earth.' And after an attempt to reply to some of Lyell's arguments, which it would be cruel to reproduce, the writer continues:—'When, therefore, upon such slender grounds, it is determined, in answer to those who insist on its universality, that the Mosaic Deluge must be considered a preternatural event, far beyond the reach of philosophical enquiry; not only as to the causes employed to produce it, but as to the effects most likely to result from it; that determination wears an aspect of scepticism, which, however much soever it may be unintentional in the mind of the writer, yet cannot but produce an evil impression on those who are already predisposed to carp and cavil at the evidence of Revelation.'"