A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 23 – Robertson · Library Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 23Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 5)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 23
Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 5)
RobertsonEnglish
Damiron, writing his Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than reassuring, commenting on the "strange skepticism" of Lamennais as to the human reason. For himself, he takes up the parable of Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. "In this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall be Christians and something more." The theologian of the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher. "We shall study God through nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our natural lights." Christianity has been a useful discipline; but "our education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers; and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science." "Prayer is good, doubtless," but it "has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment." All this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven; and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.
Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur l'état de l'église had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in 1814 he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction; with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal; but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824 he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write Liberal articles in the journal L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832 received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.
Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and began his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his determination to place himself "as a writer outside of the Church and Catholicism," declaring that "outside of Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere." Still he claimed to be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine "fidelity in obedience with liberty in science." In January of 1834, however, he had ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d'un Croyant, published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned as infidelity.
Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else, he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising in 1831-32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement (1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never changed: "I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect changed from a Catholic to a pantheist; and in 1848, as a member of the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by "an affectation of impiety." On his deathbed he refused to receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and with no cross on his grave.
Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical control. It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France, whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.
8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed while it recast and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism, giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte's direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between the clergy and the philosophers, "suspended by the great political commotion of 1830," had been "revived with a new energy." The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect; and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social regulation is beside the case. A man's way of thinking may involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte's did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any one man's scheme for regulating society and conserving "cultus"; and Comte's was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a "science of society" where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms of "providentialism." In France the general effect of the rationalistic movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire, assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philosophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching.
9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social sciences; Hartley's Christian Materialism making small headway as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable contrast to what was going on in Germany; and in Scotland in the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level. It was over practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and orthodoxy; while the latter, no less pronounced in his private opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker than George Grote, was published in 1822. Pseudonymous as that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.
But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists, such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured champions of orthodoxy, to the great advantage of critical discussion.
10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir William Hamilton, it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance to the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith; though Hamilton's dogmatic views were always doubtful. Admirably learned, and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his theism on the alleged "needs of our moral nature"--a declaration of philosophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front after his death in the Bampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter Dean Mansel; and between them they gave the decisive proof that the orthodox cause had been philosophically lost while being socially won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the negative criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically cognizable qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received severe treatment at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated irrationalism and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine, which insisted on attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknowable Absolute, and on standing for Christian mysteries on the skeptical ground that reason is an imperfect instrument, and that our moral faculties and feelings "demand" the traditional beliefs. But they did exactly what was needed to force rationalism upon open and able minds. It is indeed astonishing to find so constantly repeated by trained reasoners the old religious blunder of reasoning from the inadequacy of reason to the need for faith. The disputant says in effect: "Our reason is not to be trusted; let us then on that score rationally decide to believe what is handed down to us": for if the argument is not a process of reasoning it is nothing; and if it is to stand, it is an assertion of the validity it denies. Evidently the number of minds capable of such self-stultification is great; but among minds at once honest and competent the number capable of detecting the absurdity must be considerable; and the invariable result of its use down to our own time is to multiply unbelievers in the creed so absurdly defended.
It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice, to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective rationalist. Accused of having adopted "the absolute and infinite, as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics," as a "synonym for the true and living God," he protested that he had done "exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite, as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is not the true infinite." Charged further with borrowing without acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman with "transcendent gifts" while claiming to have read almost nothing by him, and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.
It was said of Hamilton that, "having scratched his eyes out in the bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith"; and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil, the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the delivery of Mansel's lectures his and Hamilton's philosophic positions were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the naturalistic First Principles (1860-62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein, with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author's own part, and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism of religious and anti-religious positions, the new cosmic conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond the capacity of the multitude of Spencer's metaphysical critics, marks him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a "System of Nature" rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the "agnostic" foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.
11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion when he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was developed by John the Scot--perhaps from hints in Origen --and again by Bernardino Ochino, is specially associated with the teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747-1825), who appears to have been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed, and who, like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a "personal" Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham, counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to him. This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage of his Bampton Lectures, had shown himself incredibly blind.
The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the development of "Socinian" or other rationalistic views in the Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel." Reactions have been claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.
12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English thought throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), indeed, he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less than for tolerance; and his whole life's work made for reason. "The saint of rationalism" was Gladstone's account of him as a parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances--a theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of the universe nor the worshipper's craving for support--sets up some wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been.
Section 7.--Modern Jewry
In the culture-life of the dispersed Jews, in the modern period, there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those of Spinoza, Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought; and each one of these must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the educated Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably common. The famous Rabbi Elijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled the Gaon, "the great one," set up a movement of relatively rationalistic pietism that led to the establishment in 1803 of a Rabbinical college at Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888 no fewer than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on a certain amount of independent study. In the freer world outside critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox Judaism; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), whose posthumous Guide to the Perplexed of the Time (1851), though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has been said that he "was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle." The result is only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic study, such as went on among Christians in the same period; but it is thus a stepping-stone to further science.
To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same proportions as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and fanatical believers; and representatives of all three types, of different social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement for the acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much attention and sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that movement attains to any decisive political success, Judaism clearly cannot escape the solvent influences which affect all European opinion. As in the case of the Christian Church, the synagogue in the centres of culture keeps the formal adherence of some who no longer think on its plane; but while attempts are made from time to time to set up more rationalistic institutions for Jews with the modern bias, the general tendency is to a division between devotees of the old forms and those who have decided to live by reason.
Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations
We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India, China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology, while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of the "unprogressiveness of the East." While a cheerfully superstitious religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history; and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell more and more on Asiatic life.
As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years ago that the Japanese "now bow down before the shrine of Herbert Spencer" (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803 Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing "several million dollars," was built in the last dozen years of the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000 each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick, an American missionary organizer.)
Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed "devotional" in the light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites, "the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest excesses that seek the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if not excelled" (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 1876, p. 163); and Professor Chamberlain admits that "the religion of the family binds them [the Japanese in general, including the 'most materialistic'] down in truly sacred bonds"; while another writer, who thinks Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling thankful that his hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).
A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon, while noting a generation ago that "among certain classes in Japan not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition still prevail," decides that "at the same time it remains true that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people, and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than probably it has ever been in the country's history. Religious indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan" (The Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not because of any "essential" incapacity for "devotion," but because of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy, with their regard to externals, seem "essentially" irreligious; and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent, obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the "middle" peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62; Dixon, ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis, p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family, with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904), seems to hold its ground as well as any.
So universal is sociological like other law that we find in Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, "Japan's most representative thinker and educationist," as openly declaring that "It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several kinds--Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint there is no more difference between those than between green tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the prices cheap...." (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view, however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman, a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There was a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours, I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked by equal candour, may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be led to adore any form of "tea" by the mere assurance of its indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning whom "it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely from the materialistic agnostics of Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of the missionary, that "decaying shrines and broken gods are to be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph in the near future...."
The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that they are not, meaning that they have "religious instincts," while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual seriousness. Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his theory and forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the West" (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may be taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on "Freethought in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that "the Japanese in translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them."
But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion (R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament is so far from being "essentially" devoid of devotion as to be capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House, after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the "virtues of the Imperial Ancestors." In every school throughout the Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at the same time. All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan, but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised, has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia.
Thus there is not "plain sailing" for freethought in Japan. In such a political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing more than sporadic freethought existed. Some famous captains were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the burial of effigies in substitution. But, as elsewhere under similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the ruling caste. I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire, apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette, exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration is of no importance. To this day the educated Chinese, though lacking in Japanese "efficiency" and devotion to drill of all kinds, are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer step is the independent development of the speculative and critical intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to economic conditions.
A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses, however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture; and though some system of education for them is probably on the way to establishment, their life must long remain quasi-primitive, mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an "esoteric" credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment to life.
Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 207-211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132).
Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious thought--e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya preached a "surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the manner of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.)
More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak, who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Müller, Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123) tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem to gravitate towards Hinduism.
Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise; and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual, pp. 557-63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80-86; Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224-46; De la Saussaye, pp. 669-71; Tiele, p. 160).
The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks, had no justification in social science, though bad politics may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage, and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity, which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely self-seeking as against each other's influence on Turkish destinies.
In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, "asserting that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of the youth." He adds that he has "known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion," and would gladly have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood. But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was "in general at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the community"; and it remained socially predominant and reactionary. "Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but little assistance from them." Liberal-minded professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students, a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching "atheistic doctrines," and found guilty with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending.
Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony, school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the exclusion of religious teaching from the schools. Despite the political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share.
CONCLUSION
Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations, and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in which it could perhaps least confidently be expected--to wit, that of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly, the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain, as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth the number has increased at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist. Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries.
The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution, as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi in Italy, and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent, Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand, Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists, were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of Lord Morley.
While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and "Christianity" is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the Catholic pale.
In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works: no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of a general transference of interest from religious to social problems that the decay of belief is disguised. "Piety," in the old sense, counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in international relations. In the war of 1899-1902, "Bible-loving" England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences by proclaiming that "God is not neutral"; and his Emperor habitually parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of Germany--the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On the side of the Allies "Christianity" is less systematically but still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of sacrificed victims; and "family prayer" is said to be reviving.
Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the "ages of faith" deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those of fellow-citizenship.
There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civilization escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all previous eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control, latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dangerous persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it controls international relations, it will be dominant in the life of thought. In the words of a great fighter for freethought, "No man ever saw a religion die"; and there are abundant survivals of pre-Christian paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Christianity; but it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth century is written it will be recognized that what has historically figured as religion belongs in all its forms to the past.
The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism. Here, again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the general fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of clerical voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war, while others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing effect upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there will always be adherents with the will to persecute; and from time to time acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a private character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly restricted to cases in which the technical offence of "blasphemy" is associated with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdiction. After the unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swinburne had to be officially ignored, it became impossible, in the present stage of civilization, that any serious and decent literary indictment of the prevailing creeds should be made a subject of persecution; and before long, probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the cases of offenders against police regulations.
The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from the action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people everywhere, save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disinclined to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit among the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster. But the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909, which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country, was defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by Catholic littérateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere excited by the judicial murder of Ferrer, however, gives promise that even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church will hesitate again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a reversion to the methods of the eras of religious rule.
