I cannot treat with fulness the many remaining issues. To Mr. Harrison’s statement that it was uncandid in me to implicate him with the absurdities of the Comtean belief and ritual, notwithstanding his public utterances, I reply that whereas ten years ago I was led to think he gave but a qualified adhesion to Comte’s religious doctrine, such public utterances of his as I have read of late years, fervid in their eloquence, persuaded me that he had become a much warmer adherent. On his summary mode of dealing with my criticism of the Comtean creed some comment is called for. He remarks that there are “good reasons for declining to discuss with Mr. Spencer the writings of Comte;” and names, as the first, “that he knows [I know] nothing whatever about them” (p. 365). Now as Mr. Harrison is fully aware that thirty years ago I reviewed the English version of those parts of the Positive Philosophy which treat of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics; and as he has referred to the pamphlet in which, ten years later, I quoted a number of passages from the original to signalize my grounds of dissent from Comte’s system; I am somewhat surprised by this statement, and by the still more emphatic statement that to me “the writings of Comte are, if not the Absolute Unknowable, at any rate the Absolute Unknown” (p. 365). Doubtless these assertions are effective; but like many effective assertions they do not sufficiently recognize the facts. The remaining statements in this division of Mr. Harrison’s argument, I pass over: not because answers equally adequate with those I have thus far given do not exist, but because I cannot give them without entering upon personal questions which I prefer to avoid.
On the closing part of “Agnostic Metaphysics” containing Mr. Harrison’s own version of the Religion of Humanity, I have at remark, as I find others remarking, that it amounts, if not to an abandonment of his original position, still to an entire change of front. Anxious, as he has professed himself, to retain the “magnificent word, Religion” (p. 504), it now appears that when “the Religion of Humanity” is spoken of, the usual connotations of the word are to be in a large measure dropped: to give it these connotations is “to foist in theological ideas where none are suggested by us” (p. 369). While, in his first article, one of the objections raised to the “neo-theisms” as well as “the Unknowable,” was that there is offered “no relation whatever between worshipper and worshipped” (p. 505) (an objection tacitly implying that Mr. Harrison’s religion supplies this relation), it now appears that humanity is not to be worshipped in any ordinary sense; but that by worship is simply meant “intelligent love and respect for our human brotherhood,” and that “in plain words, the Religion of Humanity means recognising your duty to your fellow-man on human grounds” (p. 369). Certainly this is much less than what I and others supposed to be included in Mr. Harrison’s version of the Religion of Humanity. If he preaches nothing more than an ecstatic philanthropy, few will object; but most will say that his name for it conveyed to them a much wider meaning. Passing over all this, however, I am concerned chiefly to point out another extreme misrepresentation made by Mr. Harrison when discussing my criticism of Comte’s assertion that “veneration and gratitude” are due to the Great Being Humanity. After showing why I conceive “veneration and gratitude” are not due to Humanity, I supposed an opponent to exclaim (putting the passage within quotation marks) “But surely ‘veneration and gratitude’ are due somewhere,” since civilized society, with all its products “must be credited to some agency or other.” [This apostrophe, imagined as coming from a disciple of Comte, Mr. Harrison, on p. 373, actually represents as made in my own person!] To this apostrophe I have replied (p. 22) that “if ‘veneration and gratitude’ are due at all, they are due to that Ultimate Cause from which Humanity, individually and as a whole, in common with all other things has proceeded.” Whereupon Mr. Harrison changes my hypothetical statement into an actual statement. He drops the “if,” and represents me as positively affirming that “veneration and gratitude” are due somewhere: saying that Mr. Spencer “lavishes his ‘veneration and gratitude,’ called out by the sum of human civilization, upon his Unknowable and Inconceivable Postulate” (p. 373). I should have thought that even the most ordinary reader, much more Mr. Harrison, would have seen that the argument is entirely an argument ad hominem. I deliberately and carefully guarded myself by the “if” against the ascription to me of any opinion, one way or the other: being perfectly conscious that much is to be said for and against. The optimist will unhesitatingly affirm that veneration and gratitude are due; while by the pessimist it will be contended that they are not due. One who dwells exclusively on what Emerson calls “the saccharine” principle in things, as illustrated for example in the adaptation of living beings to their conditions—the becoming callous to pains that have to be borne, and the acquirement of liking for labors that are necessary—may think there are good reasons for veneration and gratitude. Contrariwise, these sentiments may be thought inappropriate by one who contemplates the fact that there are some thirty species of parasites which prey upon man, possessing elaborate appliances for maintaining their hold on or within his body, and having enormous degrees of fertility proportionate to the small individual chances their germs have of getting into him and torturing him. Either view may be supported by masses of evidence; and knowing this I studiously avoided complicating the issue by taking either side. As anyone may see who refers back, my sole purpose was that of showing the absurdity of thinking that “veneration and gratitude” are due to the product and not to the producer. Yet, Mr. Harrison having changed my proposition “if they are due, etc.” into the proposition “they are due, etc.,” laughs over the contradictions in my views which he deduces, and to which he time after time recurs, commenting on my “astonishing perversity.”
In this division of Mr. Harrison’s article occur five other cases in which, after his manner, propositions are made to appear untenable or ludicrous; though anyone who refers to them as expressed by me will find them neither the one nor the other. But to show all this would take much trouble to small purpose. Indeed, I must here close the discussion, so far as my own desistence enables me. It is a wearisome and profitless business, this of continually going back on the record, now to show that the ideas ascribed to me are not the ideas I expressed, and now to show that the statements my opponent defends are not the statements he originally made. A controversy always opens side issues. Each new issue becomes the parent of further ones. The original questions become obscured in a swarm of collateral questions; and energies, in my case ill-spared, are wasted to little purpose.
Before closing, however, let me again point out that nothing has been said which calls for change of the views expressed in my first article.
Setting out with the statement that “unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense,” I went on to show that the rise of this consciousness begins among primitive men with the belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, capable of wandering away from him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death; and that from this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural, there develop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all orders up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive religion is not belief in, and propitiation of, the ghost, but is worship of “physical objects treated frankly as physical objects” (p. 498). That he has disproved the one view and proved the other, no one will, I think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion for me to cite weighty authorities against him.
Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural beings thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were superior to others; and that, as the compounding and recompounding of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers of different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of ghosts or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the minor supernatural agents became merged in the major supernatural agent, this single great supernatural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to retain but few of them; and, eventually losing these, will then merge into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. This proposition has not been contested.
In pursuance of the belief that the religious consciousness naturally arising, and thus gradually transformed, will not disappear wholly, but that “however much changed it must continue to exist,” it was argued that the sentiments which had grown up around the conception of a personal God, though modified when that conception was modified into the conception of a Power which cannot be known or conceived, would not be destroyed. It was held that there would survive, and might even increase, the sentiments of wonder and awe in presence of a Universe of which the origin and nature, meaning and destiny, can neither be known nor imagined; or that, to quote a statement afterwards employed, there must survive those emotions “which are appropriate to the consciousness of a Mystery that cannot be fathomed and a Power that is omnipresent.” This proposition has not been disproved; nor, indeed, has any attempt been made to disprove it.
Instead of assaults on these propositions to which alone I am committed, there have been assaults on various propositions gratuitously attached to them; and then the incongruities evolved have been represented as incongruities for which I am responsible.