From the archives: The Humanist Tradition

The Humanist Tradition was a series of articles published in The Humanist (now New Humanist) between February 1957 and June 1960. As well as providing a vast range of ruminations on the key moments and figures in the history of humanism, it also offers a glimpse into how the humanist movement at the time was coming to define and assert itself.

The articles reproduced below represent the views of their respective authors, and some contain language and sentiments we would not condone today.

Click the article title to jump straight there, or scroll down the page to read in order.

I. The Rise of Secularism by H. J. Blackham

II. Humanism in Ancient Greece by Benjamin Farrington

III. Was Confucius a Humanist? by D. C. Lau

IV. The Noblest Roman of Them All by Archibald Robertson

V. The First Challenge of Science by George Godwin

VI. The Scepticism of Montaigne by Clifford Mason

VII. Universal Man by E. H. Hutten

VIII. The Humanism of Francis Bacon by B. Farrington

IX. The Empiricism of Hume by Antony Flew

X. The Rise of French Secularism by Merle Tolfree

XI. The Humanism of Edward Gibbon by John Gillard Watson

XII. The Humanism of Thomas Paine by Adrian Brunel

XIII. The Philosophical Radical by H. J. Blackham

XIV. Comte’s Religion of Humanity by Merle Tolfree

XV. Pioneer of Ethical Humanism by C. S. Dudley

XVI. Herbert Spencer Revalued by Donald G. MacRae

XVII. The Mask of John Stuart Mill by Humphrey Skelton

XVIII. Darwin of Downe by Royston Pike

XIX. T. H. Huxley, Scientific Humanist by Cyril Bibby

XX. The Humanism of Bradlaugh by F. H. Amphlett Micklewright

XXI. Ingersoll: ‘Great Agnostic’ by George Godwin

XXII. The Rationalism of Graham Wallas by G. C. S. Hopcutt

XXIII. The Warm Humanity of George Eliot by Royston Pike

XXIV. Robert Blatchford by George Godwin

XXV. Tribute to Moncure Conway by F. H. Amphlett Micklewright

XXVI. Havelock Ellis 1859–1939 by Frederick Vanson

XXVII. Matthew Arnold’s Ethical Humanism by Royston Pike

XXVIII. George Meredith — the Cheerful Pagan by John Gillard Watson

XXIX. The Humanism of H. G. Wells by John Gillard Watson

XXX. The Humanism of Freud by Humphrey Skelton

XXXI. The Humanism of Bertrand Russell by Humphrey Skelton

XXXII. The Message of E. M. Forster by Robert Greacen

XXXIII. Jawaharlal Nehru: Humanist and Statesman by Robert Greacen

XXXIV. The Origins of American Humanism by John Gillard Watson

XXXV. From Catholic Modernist to Humanist by J. Jourdain

XXXVI. The Humanity of Walt Whitman by Philip Greer

XXXVII. John Dewey’s Liberal Humanism by Patrick Cornford

XXXVIII. Emerson: Apostle of Self-Reliance by John Gillard Watson

XXXIX. The Dream of William Morris by Clare Bartlett

XL. Hardy and the Tragic Sense by Geoffrey Schofield

XLI. The Path from Rome by James Plender

by H. J. BLACKHAM

This is the first of a series of articles dealing with the history of humanism from ancient times to the present day

EVERYBODY has been brought up in a tradition which has been handed down from generation to generation as the highest expression of wisdom and will. Nevertheless, it is possible to reject the tradition in which one is brought up and to look back and pick up, so to speak, a tradition which one has not received, which one chooses for oneself because it offers roots and a home, support and enlargement for outcast or isolated personal convictions and aspirations. Perhaps most humanists brought up in the tradition of a Christian civilization have thought they had in this way to acquire for themselves a tradition of their own. There is nothing bogus about that. Moral affinity is a stronger link than natural descent.

Epicureanism and Confucianism

In the ancient Mediterranean world there was a humanist tradition in the usual sense, before the ascendancy of Christianity brought about the total eclipse of all alternatives, for there was the long ascendancy of Athens over the minds of men (even for St Augustine it was ‘this ancient and goodly city, the only mother of arts and learned inventions, the glory and lustre of Greece’); and after the fall of the self-dependent cities there was a long tradition of moral philosophy as the source of individual self-dependence, providing the ideas, ideals, and techniques of a self-sufficient personal life, Epicurean or stoic or an eclectic blend of the two (Seneca).

In ancient India the constant polemics in orthodox literature against naturalist thought is evidence of the vigorous existence and persistence of this way of thinking, which culminated in the Charvak system, closely akin to Epicureanism. In China a humanist tradition, in so far as Confucianism may be so described, has been dominant from early times until our own day.

One may fairly say, then, that there have been humanist traditions in the usual sense of a body of teaching transmitted by an act of will as the highest wisdom. One may further say that the evidence of independent civilizations goes to show the universality of the humanist tradition, which begins at an early stage as an appeal to reason and Nature against the authority of sacred scriptures and priestly traditions, which applies to human existence utilitarian criteria of welfare and happiness with the idea of liberation and fulfilment, rather than spiritual criteria of a divine perfection with the idea of discipline and redemption, and which encourages self-dependence and self-help in face of an oppressive fate which seems to bind the human lot.

In the European tradition one may distinguish three humanist elements: certain sectarian movements, certain rebels against the dominant Christian tradition, and (in both senses of the word) a secular movement of ideas.

There are two great sectarian movements: the eighteenth-century philosophes organized around Diderot and the Encyclopédie created one; and Bentham and James Mill created the English Utilitarian movement, which in the second generation was led by J. S. Mill. Two lesser sectarian movements followed in France, initiated by Saint Simon and by his one-time secretary, Auguste Comte. All these movements were immensely influential, and, although reproached with their sectarian character, they were all chiefly concerned to give their generation a modern secular outlook and the confidence which comes from exclusive reliance on applicable standards, relevant ideals, and efficient techniques.

Bayle and Spinoza

The rebels are a host of miscellaneous writers: propounders of posers on the Bible, and the professional critics from Richard Simon (1678) to David Strauss (1835); satirists of Christendom who in the early eighteenth century looked at the way things were ordered in Europe through the eyes of a visiting Turk or Persian, or who found their ideal in distant parts or times, in the Noble Savage, the Egyptian Sage, the Chinese Philosopher, or in Utopia; the seventeenth century libertins who subsisted as freethinkers and (possibly) voluptuaries on crumbs of Epicureanism from the réchauffé of Gassendi (1649). The two greatest, if least representative, names to stand for all these rebels are Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), father of the philosophes, and Spinoza (1632-77), in whom the French libertins, would-be freethinkers (exemplified pre-eminently in Saint-Evremond), found the rationalism they were looking for. Spinoza is indeed the prime exemplar of rationalists in the following respects: he examines established beliefs and finds them inconsistent, groundless, and without influence upon practice; he reconstructs a body of beliefs, drawn from first principles, consistent, grounded, regulating and directing the conduct of life.

The secular movement of ideas may be said to have its source in the Renaissance and its consummation in the Enlightenment; it begins by looking back for inspiration and ends by looking forward. Taken as a whole, it is the dissolution of the Christian tradition, which in its Roman form had culminated in the thirteenth century, the ‘great century’ of scholasticism.

Pericles had summed up his famous eulogy of Athens in the funeral oration in these words: ‘As a city, we are the school of Hellas; I doubt if the world can produce a man who, where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian.’ Athens became also the school of Rome and, with the Italian Renaissance, of the European nations. The ‘universal man’, many sided, all-sided, of prodigious accomplishments and pre-eminent in achievement, was the Renaissance ideal. Of two other items in the legacy of Greece, one was thoroughly humanist— namely, the idea that the unexamined life is not a life for man, that the good life for which men live together in cities is something to be achieved by taking thought, by a deliberate art. The other item comprised the actual contents of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, which had provided the stocks on which Christian theology had been worked and which at the Renaissance produced in Florence a Platonic religious humanism (Ficino, 1433-99) and in Padua an Aristotelian scientific humanism (Pomponazzi, 1462-1525). The ‘otherworldliness’, abstract rationalism, and metaphysical preconceptions of both these philosophies were a persistent obstruction, however, to the true development of humanism.

The Century of Genius

The Renaissance was a recovery of ideas and ideals, not the beginning of modern science. It was the seventeenth century, ‘the century of genius’ that included Galileo and Newton, which achieved the spectacular results that followed the employment of new methods and the abandonment of old preconceptions. There followed a shift of intellectual interest from study of the word of God to study of the works of God. The words ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ were universal in the eighteenth century, and enjoyed as much prestige with orthodox Christians as with Deists. Confidence in reason and nature meant that in this century ‘God was on trial’, as it has been said. The characteristic thought of the age expressed in Pope’s Essay on Man, is that man occupies a middle station in the Scale of Being and should therefore cultivate a humanist ideal, not attempting to imitate God nor aspiring to any kind of ‘otherworldliness’, whether by monkish asceticism or by antique Stoicism. Not only ‘the proper study of mankind is man’, but also

This humanism, and the rehabilitation of Nature as the work of the God of Reason (not flawed and ‘fallen’), inevitably diminished the meaning and the value of Revelation and Salvation in this period and opened the doors to toleration and anthropological interests, universal benevolence. When this line of thinking (‘proving’ Nature rational and good) could no longer be sustained, the ways of God had not been justified; natural religion came to an end, and faith and reason fell apart.

The other characteristic thought of the age (the meaning of the long discussion about ‘the social contract’) is that society is mutual advantage; man is naturally social, and therefore morality is not a discipline to be imposed by authority reinforced by religious sanctions, but a natural order to be confirmed by education and good laws. This notion of society as a spontaneous, but also deliberate and artful, furtherance of the good life owed nothing to religion and was matched by a like conception of personal life. ‘We are, in so far as we know how to remain wise, the artisans of our own life’ (Fontenelle). The seminal essays of Shaftesbury which elaborated the specifically social nature of man as the spontaneous ground of morals and of individual fulfilment bore fruit in ethical theory (Hume, Butler) and expressed the social enthusiasm and conviviality which had taken the place of religious ‘enthusiasm’, now regarded with contempt and abhorrence. Hume asked why ‘men of sense’ everywhere despised the ‘monkish virtues’ of celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude; and he gave his answer: these virtues ‘serve no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment’.

The shift of interest from the word of God to the works of God slid into a shift of confidence from Revelation to Reason and Nature, and by the end of the century had gone so far as a resolute turning from attempts at a rational explanation of – the universe to concentration of interest in empirical science and the cultivation of our garden.

As ‘citizens of the world’ eighteenth-century humanists rewrote history to show that all enlightened men shared the same small stock of universal truths that constituted ‘natural knowledge, fundamental reason, and common sense’ and sufficed against all tradition, religion, or mass opinion as the criterion of all possible truth. Voltaire contrasted the Dark Ages of Christian ascendancy with the ‘four happy ages ’— namely, the golden ages of Pericles and Augustus, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

This movement of secular ideas and ideals from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, in continuity with ideas and ideals in classical antiquity, was a general climatic change affecting Europe and the New World from which nothing was insulated and which profoundly affected Christian thought with everything else. Indeed, religious movements during the last century and a half have attempted in one way and another to rescue Christian thinking from, or accommodate it to, the practical preoccupations and middle axioms of a secular civilization which is a product of the influence of the Enlightenment, that setting aside of the divine scheme of the Christian tradition for the sake of perfecting a human scheme launched on the tide of increasing intellectual and material resources.

‘I am a man: I regard nothing that relates to mankind as not my own.’ This famous line from Terence would stake the humanist’s claim to nothing less than all history as his inheritance. ‘The proper study of mankind is man’—and Nature, History, the life of man in time, has taken the place of theology for the humanist. But a spectator’s view is not a view for man; history is current interpretation and the foundation of contemporary projects. ‘Nature is her own standard, one thing throws light on another’, ‘Man is the future of man’: these and their like are pregnant humanist judgments on Nature and on man which because they light the way forward also light the way back and enable the humanist to find his tradition; and indeed to create it, for a tradition is not made by reverent reception but by the active use of it for moral aid and comfort, kinship and community, and, chiefly, for growth and learning, in order to raise the ideas and ideals by which we live to a higher power of accuracy and efficacy, which can be done only by a deliberate development of them in the light of history. Humanism has a future not merely because it has a past but solely in so far as humanists care for their tradition enough to learn from it what they want to do always and what they want to do next.

by Benjamin Farrington

THE humanists of the fourteenth century rediscovered man, and where they found him was in antiquity. Petrarch, to be sure, had already found a real man in Latin Christian literature—in the Confessions of St Augustine. But when he stumbled on a manuscript containing some of the Letters of Cicero he had found another sort of man, and one more typical of what we mean by humanism. Even still today Cicero is the figure of all antiquity best known to us. What Petrarch had found was his letters to Quintus, to Atticus, to Brutus—that is to say, to his brother, to his friend, and to the assassin of Caesar. With Cicero, Petrarch was in a different world from that of St Augustine. Augustine’s concern was with the City of God, Cicero’s with the City of the Tiber.

Certain patriotic boastings of Cicero had induced Petrarch to believe that Roman literature was a finer thing than Greek. Nevertheless it was impossible to know Cicero without knowing Greece. Another of Petrarch’s discoveries had been Cicero’s speech in defence of the Greek poet Archias. Accordingly, though he never learned Greek himself, Petrarch did not fail to encourage his friend Boccaccio to do so. Boccaccio became the first Greek scholar in the modern world. One of his big books is a Genealogy of the Gods. It concludes with a defence of poetry, seeing it as something in its own right, a respectable discipline, like theology, or medicine, or law. That is to say, it is a defence of the subject-matter of ancient poetry. This, in its turn, is only another way of saying that it was a defence of humanism. Then there is his book On Famous Women. There are one hundred and four of them. Very significant is the fact that only seven of them are medieval. The rest, the ninety-seven, are from the ancient world.

So Western Europe had begun its adventure of direct contact with the world of Greece. Here it required no poet to warn it: ‘Affect not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man.’ For from first to last, from Homer to Plutarch, the supreme achievement of Greek literature is its superb gallery of human portraits. Their vitality is amazing. The men and women of the Iliad and Odyssey are as familiar to us as the men and women of Dickens, and I suspect they will outlast them. As for the ‘noble Greeks and Romans’ portrayed for us in the Lives of Plutarch, they provided Shakespeare with half-a-dozen of his great women and a couple of score of men. It is instructive to look in North’s Plutarch and observe how the characters live there ready for Shakespeare’s use.

Eight hundred years separate Homer from Plutarch, and during all those centuries the characteristic Greek absorption in humanity, in man himself, continued to inform one genre of literature after another, the invention of the different genres marking, as it were, the stages of the Greek study of mankind. Homer’s poetry is mainly, though not exclusively, concerned with heroic types. To it succeeded the personal lyric in which ordinary men and women, an Alcaeus or a Sappho, made poetry directly out of their own experience. Centuries later the greatest of Greek literary critics paused spell-bound over Sappho’s description of her own experience of love. On this followed the work of the dramatic poets.

Homer had already taught poets to describe events as springing out of the character of their actors. The tragedians of the fifth century, still employing the traditional heroic characters, ring the changes on this formula in an endless succession of ingeniously invented plots. The poets of the next century created the comedy of private life. Meanwhile the historians and the political philosophers, much indebted no doubt to the fictions of the poets, were attempting the sterner task of analysing the real world.

Furthermore the whole of this literature is the creation of individual men. It is not an anonymous literature, a temple literature, a governmental literature. It is neither a priestly code nor a legal code. It is the work of self-conscious artists, concerned not only for what they say but how they say it, and for the fame or fortune their art may bring. In this it differs from the literature of the older civilizations of the Near East, and differs also, though in a lesser degree, from Hebrew literature. Here the Mosaic books are not by Moses, the prophetic books turn out to be composite products, the psalms of David are not all by David, nor is the wisdom of Solomon all his.

Greek Conception of Man

The anthropomorphism, too, of Greek religion, which is its distinguishing characteristic, is but another aspect of the humanism of the Greeks. Their gods are really made in human form; nay, even in human size. True their gods live for ever, but for the most part they differ from men merely by the perfection of their human attributes, They are stronger, cleverer, better able to help their friends and hurt their enemies. They hunt, fight, dance and sing and play musical instruments, they work and eat, they love and marry. They have neither created the world nor made man, nor do they possess a scheme of human salvation. Indeed, if we confined ourselves to their representation of their gods we might be inclined to accuse the Greeks of a certain shallowness. It is when we examine their conception of man that we appreciate the depth and seriousness of their genius.

Not that the Greek conception of man has entirely escaped the charge of superficiality. Here we come upon an important contemporary debate on the value of Greek humanism. It was the fullness of humanity revealed in the ancient writers that fascinated the early humanists. But in the nineteenth century certain thinkers contended that the Greeks had a very imperfect understanding of the nature of man. The Greeks, it was alleged, succeeded only in appreciating the natural side of man and neglected the spiritual. In philosophical terminology, they understood man as object, not as subject. The discovery of man as spirit, the realization of the active, inner, creative being of man, was, according to these thinkers, reserved for Christianity.

To expand and define the charge a little, it was alleged that the Greeks had a deficient understanding of (1) the consciousness of man, (2) his conscience, and (3) his role in history. The Greeks, it was said, looked upon man’s consciousness too much as a passive reflection of the external world; degraded the moral stature of man by the inadequacy of their understanding of sin, duty, free will, moral responsibility, and other related concepts; and, finally, understood history in an external and mechanical sense, as an eternal recurrence, a movement in a circle, which excluded the idea of real progress.

These are weighty charges and I do not wish to deny that some evidence may be found to support them. It is, in my opinion, wrong to regard Christianity, early or medieval, as a falling-away from the achievement of Classical Antiquity. The ancient world was not an age of reason to be contrasted with the Christian era as an age of superstition. We should appreciate that new values, ideas, and sensibilities emerged with Christianity. It is a mutilated scheme of history that jumps straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and writes off the intervening millennium as a dead loss for human progress. The fact that distinguished historians have explicitly or implicitly approved this view does not make it true. And, no doubt, it is partly in reaction to this biased view that other historians have sought to credit Christianity with the revelation of the spiritual man and to limit the achievement of Greek humanism to the celebration of man as the child of Nature.

Thought and Reality

In the midst of this strife of half-truths it is a delight to hear an authoritative voice pronounce an informed and sober judgment. It has long seemed to me a matter for regret that the works of Rodolfo Mondolfo are not better known in England. This great Italian historian of ideas, who was driven from his Chair at Turin under Mussolini, has since made his home in the Argentine, and his impressive series of works, widely influential in Italian and Spanish, contain several which, it seems to me, have no equivalent in English. One of these (La Comprension del Sujeto Humana en la Cultura Antigua; Buenos Aires, 1955; 625 pp) turns on the problem before us and I shall conclude by reporting some of its findings.

Is it true that the Greeks regarded man’s consciousness as a passive reflection of the world of Nature? Certainly not. Indeed they were sometimes too ready to fly to the opposite extreme. The doctrine that only what can be thought is real is as old as Parmenides and finds repeated expression down the centuries right till the time of Epicurus. This imposition of the categories of the mind on Nature may not be wholly sound, but it at least refutes the charge of passivity.

Equally eloquent are the numerous passages, from the earliest times to the latest, which testify to the view that such inner mental attitudes as volition, attention, faith, and hope are necessary to understanding. Before Shelley admonished us ‘to hope till hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’, Heraclitus had insisted that ‘unless a man hopes for the hopeless, he will find it undiscoverable and impracticable’. Finally, that the synthesizing activity of the mind is the condition of all knowledge was glimpsed by Plato and very fully worked out by Aristotle. He was quite emphatic that the acquisition of knowledge and the creation of culture are an activity of the soul.

Turning to the ethical aspect of the dispute, it may be admitted that sin is at first conceived as something external, a sort of curse. But from Pythagoras on the sense of the responsibility of the individual for his actions steadily grows. Conduct is finally judged as the outcome of an intimate orientation of the will. Accordingly it becomes the unremitting effort of the philosophic schools to strengthen the inner man, to rescue the individual from the external bonds; whether of legality or of passion, by training him to subject himself to the inner compulsion of a voluntarily adopted ideal. Epicurus will serve as an example. His followers adopted him as their ideal of conduct, and, for hundreds of years after his death, still tried to live their lives as if in his presence. Character building, the training of the moral will, is thoroughly Greek.

Man’s Creative Activity

Lastly we come to the question of the role of man in history. Recently the view has again been aired in Christian circles that there is a radical distinction between the pagan and Christian eras, in that Christians see time as a straight line stretching to infinity which gives hope of endless progress, while the ancients saw time as a circle involving an endless repetition of the same pattern of events. Well, it is true that some Greeks, like some moderns, did fall into this form of pessimism. But it was by no means a universal view. All sorts of great names are ranged on the other side—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Hippocrates, Protagoras, Democritus, Panetius, and, among the Romans, Cicero, Vitruvius, Seneca. These thinkers did not limit the creative activity of man only to the moulding of his own character, fundamental as that is. They saw also, agreeing in this with the Hebrew view and carrying it much further, that man was adapted to exercise dominion over Nature. They observed how man seems to create for himself a second nature within external nature, a human world inside the merely natural world, and they set no limit to the possibilities of this development.

The creativity of man in history is one of the conceptions which comes down to us in our Greek inheritance. And the Greek tradition, owing to its unique length and unbroken continuity, is an indispensable clue for the historian of ideas and helps to save us from all sorts of narrow notions, one of which is that the conception of man as subject was not born till Christian times.

by D. C. Lau

Early Confucianism was anthropocentric and agnostic

If humanism is identified too closely with the tradition which arose under the special conditions of the Italian Renaissance, there is obviously no point in asking the question ‘Was Confucius a Humanist?’ But if humanism is taken broadly as an attitude of life which is this-worldly instead of other-worldly, a point of view emphasizing the human rather than the divine, then it may be of some interest to ask whether there was anything akin to humanism in civilizations other than that of the West.

Up to the time of Confucius, who was born in the middle of the sixth century BC, there was a prevalent belief in Heaven. The ancient Chinese spoke of Heaven in the same way as peoples of other cultures spoke of God. Heaven was mentioned by Confucius in the collection of sayings commonly known to English readers as The Analects of Confucius, from which all my quotations concerning him are drawn. Two examples will suffice. When his life was in peril in K’uang, Confucius said: ‘Since King Wén died, has not culture been vested in me? If Heaven meant that culture to perish, how could one who has come after have participated in the culture? But if Heaven does not mean that culture to perish, what can the people of K’uang do to me?’ (IX, 5). Again, on the death of his favourite disciple, Yen Hui, Confucius said: ‘Heaven has bereft me, Heaven has bereft me!’ (XI, 8). References such as these have been taken as indications that Confucius believed in a personal god who took an active interest in the affairs of man. This does not appear to be conclusive. These seem to be no more than references to providence which even the least religious are liable to make in moments of crisis. In the first case, Confucius, filled with a sense that he was charged with the mission of reviving the glory of the sage kings who founded the Chou Dynasty some five hundred years before he was born, which in his time had fallen into decay, was unable to believe that he could be in any danger. In the second case, he was shocked by the early death of the only disciple he regarded without reservation as good.

The attitude of Confucius towards gods and spirits is clearer and bears out this interpretation of his attitude towards Heaven. He said: ‘and to respect spirits and gods and keep one’s distance from them can be said to be wise’ (VI, 20). To say that one should keep one’s distance from gods and spirits does not imply, it seems to me, belief in their existence. It is compatible with an agnostic attitude. His advice would then be not more than a warning against getting too much involved with the unknown. This agnostic attitude comes out more clearly on the occasion when he was asked how spirits and gods should be served. His answer was: ‘Until you know how to serve men, how can you know how to serve spirits?’ When pressed with a further question about death, he answered: ‘Until you know about life, how can you know about death?’. (XI, 1). This shows that whatever he thought about the supernatural he did not deem it a proper subject of inquiry. The proper concern of man should be with the living. In spite of his ambiguous
attitude towards spirits, Confucius was, nevertheless, a staunch advocate of elaborate burials, prolonged mourning, and periodical sacrifices. But the emphasis is shifted from the dead to the living. People who are careful about the final rites and the burial of their elders and the periodical sacrifices even to distant ancestors are unlikely to be unfilial sons and insubordinate subjects. Such ceremonies are also conducive to a reverent state of mind which is useful in the conduct of affairs of government.

If one contrasts Confucius with Mo Tzu, the founder of another school of thought, who lived immediately after him, we can see how different his attitude was from the religious attitude of the latter. Mo Tzu not only believed that Heaven willed that all men should love one another, but that Heaven was efficacious in the dispensation of reward and punishment in this life. This is true also of gods and spirits. Mo Tzu, who was an advocate of rigid economy in anything other than the necessities of life, criticized the Confucians for their extravagance in burial and in sacrifice, for he could not understand why anyone should waste so much money on gods and spirits in whose existence he did not believe. Whatever the merits of this criticism, it at least serves to show that not long after the death of Confucius his followers were already said to disbelieve in gods and spirits.

So far we have seen that there is some reason to think that Confucius was much more interested in man than in Heaven, and that his attitude towards gods and spirits was at least agnostic if not atheistic. But his attitude towards ming—that is, the decree (of Heaven)—needs some explanation. In connection with the death of his favourite disciple mentioned above, Confucius said, in another connection, that unfortunately his allotted span (ming) was short and he died (VI, 2). This comes very close to a notion of fate. One of his disciples said: ‘I have heard that in life and death there is fate (ming); and wealth and position depend upon Heaven.’ Here we have a saying that has passed into common speech and which is frequently used to show that the fortunes of life are determined by one’s fate. As the disciple said that he had heard it, presumably, from the Master, there is no reason to doubt that his view derived from Confucius. If Confucius believed in fate, it should be emphasised that his fatalism was of a limited kind, and that his motives for such belief were not wholly irrational. The fatalism was limited because only the length of one’s life and whether one is to achieve worldly success depend on fate. Whether one chooses to be moral or otherwise does not. ‘Is benevolence so far away? I want to be benevolent, and benevolence is at hand’ (VII, 29). In fact, one suspects that the motive behind this doctrine of fatalism is to emphasize the point that one should be concerned only with one’s moral duties, looking upon self-interest as irrelevant, the more so as this is dependent on fate and, therefore, beyond endeavour. This is borne out by the rebuke addressed by Confucius to a disciple who made a fortune in commerce. ‘Ssu,’ said Confucius, ‘refused to accept his lot and turned to commerce’ (XI, 18).

This also helps us to understand passages where term t’ien ming —that is, the decree of Heaven—occurs. Confucius, in an autobiographical passage, said that at fifty he understood t’ien ming (II, 4). Again, he said that a gentleman feared t’ien ming, while a small man, being ignorant of it, did not fear it (XVI, 8). What Confucius understood when he was fifty was that life and death, wealth and a position, depended upon the decree of Heaven and so were not suitable objects of pursuit. To go, in spite of this, after what is impossible is to show one’s ignorance of t’ien ming, and this is a sure sign of a small man. The same point is made more explicitly when Confucius explained the difference between a gentleman and the small man: ‘The gentleman understands what is right; while the small man understands what is to his interests’ (IV, 16).

Now we can return to our initial question ‘Was Confucius a Humanist?’ and give a somewhat qualified answer in the affirmative. He was almost exclusively interested in man, and this means, in the main, moral conduct, and this, he wanted to show, was man’s own affair. Even the belief in fate served only to emphasize this independence. In all this Confucius was moving towards a humanist standpoint. But he made no attempt to arrive at a humanist world-view. Whether this was because he still retained some sort of belief in the religion of his time, or whether he thought his own agnosticism could not be put across to the general public without undermining at the same time their morals, or whether he was simply not interested in a world-view at all, is a point that cannot be settled because there is not sufficient evidence.

It was left to Hsun Tzu, who lived two centuries later, to move further in the same direction. Sacrifices and divination, according to him, were understood by the gentleman as adornments of life but were looked upon as supernatural by the common people. To look upon them as adornments of life would bring good fortune; to look upon them as supernatural would bring ill fortune. Morality, in Hsun Tzu’s view, was an invention of the sages in order to solve the problem of the conflict between men as a result of their desires. ‘The Way (tao) is not the Way of Heaven, nor is it the Way of Earth; it is the Way followed by Man.’

The rationalist tendency in Confucianism did not last long. By early Han times, when Confucianism finally emerged as the orthodox cult, it had become intermixed with superstitious, or if you like, pseudo-scientific, doctrines like the yin and the yang, the five elements, and those found in the Book of Changes, from which it never succeeded in extricating itself. Yet, in spite of the irrational nature of the world-view of much of later Confucianism, Man never lost his position at the centre of a universe which was constituted on a moral basis.

by Archibald Robertson

Lucretius anticipated Darwin’s theory of natural selection

TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS—to give him his full name—is a living refutation of the vulgar error that the Romans, just because they were Romans, were incapable of philosophic thinking. No doubt most of their energy went into war and administration. That happens to every people that becomes an imperial power. England has never produced a philosopher to equal Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. France has never reached again the peaks which she attained in the eighteenth century. German philosophy slumped after 1870. In each case the cause was the same: the national energies were taken up with other things. Similarly, Rome never produced the equal of Lucretius, because his potential equals were nipped in the bud and made to govern provinces and plan roads and aqueducts instead of studying the nature of the universe.

Freethinking Philosophy

We know surprisingly little about Lucretius the man. He was born in 94 BC and died in 55. He put his genius and his art into his poem On the Nature of Things—a learned, eloquent, and impassioned exposition of Epicureanism, the greatest freethinking philosophy produced in antiquity. He sets out deliberately to attack and discredit Graeco-Roman religion. Many have found it paradoxical that such a poem should begin with an invocation of the goddess Venus. But the Venus whom he invokes is a personification of the forces of life in which, as the rest of the poem shows, he takes a close and loving interest.

Lucretius says in his second book that he has no objection to calling natural forces by divine names provided that we do not suppose that we can bribe them by offerings. The religion on which he declares implacable war is not the natural piety which he shares with Wordsworth, Shelley, and other great poets, but the organized priestcraft which exploits ignorance for gain and terrorizes the simple with false stories of another world and a life beyond the grave. Against this he offers the Epicurean philosophy as the sovereign remedy. By revealing the laws of Nature and showing what can and cannot be, Epicureanism makes an end of the priestcraft which profits by false stories of the gods and bogus miracles, and which in practice leads to such horrible crimes as human sacrifice.

Everlasting Atoms

Some may think the indignation of Lucretius on this subject forced and artificial. We must remember that human sacrifice was not extinct in the Roman Empire when he wrote. Not only were human victims immolated in out-of-the-way parts of the Empire until the second century AD, but the gladiatorial shows which disgraced Rome were sacrificial in origin. Perhaps it is to avoid provoking a dangerous hue and cry that he illustrates his case, not by an attack on contemporary practice, but by the legendary tale of Iphigenia.

Such abominable acts and the beliefs which prompt them are to be ended, says Lucretius, by a knowledge of natural law. The central law of Nature is that nothing arises from nothing. Creation and divine intervention are myths. Visible and tangible things come and go; but the raw material of Nature, the atoms, are everlasting. Out of them comes life; into them all life is dissolved. From ignorance of this truth, says he in his second book, men struggle for power which profits them nothing, since no power, however great, can avert death. Indeed, power only embitters life by the fear of losing it. As for death, it is non-existence, and the fear of it is as unmanly as a child’s fear of the dark.

Bacon, who rated the Epicureans more highly than other ancient philosophers, had this passage in mind when he wrote in his essay on Death: ‘Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.’

Naturally modern science by delicate experiments and mathematical reasoning has found out more about matter than Lucretius could ever have hoped to discover. We know—to our cost and, let us still hope, to our gain—that the atom is not everlasting or indivisible but can be split. But though the science of Lucretius is obsolete, a great part of his reasoning is astonishingly up to date. His argument against creation holds good whether we accept his atomism or not.

The Sense Organs

So too in essence does the great argument of the third book against the immortality of the soul. Lucretius was wrong in treating mind as a material entity contained in the body, rather than as a function (as we say now) of the body at a certain level of organization. But he puts his finger unerringly on the weak spots in the doctrine of immortality—for example, on the notion that sense organs are doorways through which the mind perceives the external world. He rightly insists on the close association between bodily and mental growth and decay. He pricks the bubble of reincarnation—beloved of ancient and modern theosophists. And at the end of the third book he rises not only to great reasoning, but to great eloquence, great satire, and great moral exhortation.

Equally up to date is the attack on pure scepticism in the fourth book. In spite of illusion and error, of which the idealist and sceptic make so much, the fact is that the senses are the sole source of knowledge and that, as Locke later pointed out, unless we normally act on their information, we can be ‘sure of nothing in this world, but of perishing quickly’.

In the fifth book Lucretius again rises to the height of his great argument. Nineteen centuries before Darwin he outlines, albeit in a crude way, a theory of evolution by natural selection in the struggle for existence, and goes on to apply his materialism to the history of human society. He knows that the age of bronze preceded the age of iron, and that social life no less than animal life is a process of evolution:

Lucretius left his poem unfinished. In 54 BC, soon after his death, Cicero curtly praises it in a letter. We may reconcile this as we can with Cicero’s statement in a work published some years later that he neither read nor wished to read any Epicurean writers on account of their bad style. Evidently he was unwilling to give Lucretius in public the credit which he conceded him in private.

Centuries later Jerome told a silly story that Lucretius had been driven mad by a love-philtre and had written his poem in the intervals of insanity. Read the poem and believe it if you can.

So it always is. The assailant of established superstition is met by dishonest boycott on the part of those who know, and by puerile vilification on the part of those who know not. But Lucretius ranks among the immortals—in my judgment at least, above Cicero, and certainly above Jerome.

by George Godwin

Modern science is the offspring of renaissance humanism and dates from the bold experiments of Galileo

IN 1540 the Polish lay canon, Nicolaus Copernicus, consented under friendly pressure to the publication of his short treatise, Narratio prima, and, three years later, to the publication of De revolutionibus orbium, a fuller treatment of the subject. Together, these works propounding the revolutionary theory of a standing central sun, by completely demonstrating the falsity of the doctrine of Ptolemy, constituted a tremendous heresy.

For their brilliant and audacious author there could have ensued no unpleasant consequences, for Copernicus was by the later date on his death-bed, and so beyond the reach of the Holy Office. But these works themselves went unchallenged by ecclesiastical authority, which, even today, seems to us a remarkable circumstance. Yet so it was, and neither Pope Paul III, to whom the longer work was dedicated, nor the heresy hunters of the Holy Office, sensed that in this new conception of the phenomenal world, and the dogmas of the Church concerning it, there was latent a conflict which constituted a dire threat to the established order.

Indeed, the Church had shown no antagonism towards humanism, of which Copernicism was but one manifestation, from its first manifestation in the fourteenth century. On the contrary, Petrarch and Boccaccio and other exponents of the literature and science of the rediscovered Antiquity, went not merely undetected as subversives, but were highly honoured. The Church, in most respects itself pagan in another sense, was slow to recognize the paganism implicit in the teaching of those numerous humanist scholars who propounded the Greek way of life—somewhat after the fashion of the Athenian Peripatetics. They went from town to town. They instructed for fees. They visited the houses of the enlightened. They established schools. They even, in one instance, that of the school of Mantua, gave to poor students scholarships.

The humanism of the Italian Renaissance, born as medieval man emerged from the dark night of ghosts into the white light of the Hellenic day, rejected the theological conception of man as a poor wretch oscillating between fear of a future hell and hope of a future heaven. Man, they taught, was to live as the Greeks lived, fully, richly, on the three levels of his being — physical, mental, and emotional. It is not surprising that such wine intoxicated, and that this new weltanschauung, heading for an inevitable showdown with the Holy Office, should sometimes have been mistakenly taken to sanctify vice as the instrument of self-fulfilment.

By the sixteenth century Italian humanism had declined in prestige and had become the subject of gross accusations. But its historical mission was already fulfilled: all philosophical and scientific developments down the centuries to our own day stem from that source. Italian humanism is the begetter of our modern world.

In his incomparable Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt reminds us that the humanists were not invariably exclusively concerned with the rediscovered treasures of the past. They were also stimulated by the Homeric achievements of the heroes of their own age; by the great voyages of discovery that led to the discovery of America by Columbus.

These voyages gave a new impetus to the science of navigation by substituting for the sterile theorizing of the study direct observation of the night sky; they revealed the unsuspected magnitude of Mother Earth, and also her smallness by the comparative method applied to the heavenly bodies.

Thus the ever-changing night sky, which long had spelt out its secret language concerning the fates of men and empires to the astrologer, became now a legible star-language for the navigator. Even so, astrology still flourished as a sort hangover from an omen-ridden medievalism. (And he who inclines to take pride in how far we have travelled since those days has but to glance at his newspaper to get his answer.)

No navigator, and no student who had ever opened the pages of Copernicus’s treatise, could have maintained his belief in the theological dogma of a fixed earth and a revolving sun.

Galileo Galilei, astronomer and philosopher, had early in his career adopted the Copernican theory. But he did not for some years openly endorse it, but maintained a silence, it is thought, through fear of ridicule rather than through fear of the Roman Curia. Even by the closing decades of the sixteenth century the notion that the earth revolved about the sun was regarded by ordinary folk as absurd, and contradicted by a sun that sailed out of the east and sank daily into the west.

It was Galileo’s misfortune that he was later to publish scientific material that made quite plain the divergence between his teaching concerning the true nature of the solar system and the dogma of the Church concerning it at a time when the of Holy Office was alerted to the danger of the humanist peril and ruthless in the pursuit of heresy.

But even before Galileo had become an object of suspicion to the Holy Office he had made many enemies among those humanists who adhered to the Aristotelean school, and he was sniped at by some of these under cover of anonymity.

‘People of this sort,’ Galileo wrote to Kepler, ‘think that philosophy is a kind of book like the Aeneid or the Odyssey, and that truth is to be sought, not in the universe, not in Nature, but—I use their own words—by comparing texts.’

The gathering storm which was to darken the days of his life now broke. The first blow came in the form of the pamphlet Contra il moto della terra, from Lodovico delle Colombo.

It was an attack on Galileo’s theory of the double motion of the earth. The attack was along two fronts, the scientific and the theological. The latter included, of course, the sun-arresting performance during the battle of Joshua, and the verse of Chronicles xvi, 30: ‘The world also shall be stable, that it be not moved’.

Galileo was alarmed and sought to placate the Church by an open visit to Rome to display the marvels of the night skies as revealed by his telescope. The interest in this new scientific toy was enormous; even the Pope, Paul V, was greatly intrigued and most gracious to the philosopher. When he set out for Florence Galileo was elated by this happy outcome and by the honours heaped upon him, including election to the exclusive Accademia dei Lincei.

Galileo’s Big Mistake

Poor man! He was greatly deluded, for no sooner had he left the city than there was appointed by the Roman College a commission of four to report on the new theories. The report was favourable, but was followed by a session of the Holy Congregation which pronounced against Doctor Cremonini, professor of Philosophy in the University of Padua, on the grounds of heresy. If Cremonini was a heretic, it was asked, what of Galileo?

The next attack came from a fanatic monk, Sizy, charging Galileo with a doctrine contrary to Holy Writ. Six months later came to Galileo a friendly warning from Cardinal Conti, his friend. The Cardinal reminded Galileo that the notion that the earth revolved about the sun, as he taught, was contrary to Holy Writ. Let him beware!

Further attacks followed and Galileo, unwisely, instead of lying low attempted the impossible: he sought to show how the new science could be squared with Holy Writ; that the Scriptures and the Copernican theory were compatible. There followed pulpit attacks upon him as a promulgator of heresies.

In 1615 Galileo was summoned to Rome to hear the Copernican theory officially condemned and to see his own treatise placed on the Index. Henceforth he was forbidden to hold, teach, or defend the condemned doctrine, though he might touch upon it ex hypothesi.

One friendly voice comforted Galileo. It was that of Cardinal Barberini, later, alas, to become his implacable enemy as Urban VIII.

Galileo returned to Florence and there maintained a discreet silence, pursuing his scientific inquiries but publishing nothing.

In 1623 Cardinal Barberini became Pope, as Urban VIII. Galileo now broke his seven years of silence and committed the great folly which blighted his life from that time on. He published his treatise Il Saggiatore and dedicated it to his former protector, the newly-elected Pope, despite its obvious heretical arguments. At once the Holy Office condemned the book, and if no further action was taken it was solely because the Pope was known to regard Galileo with favour. But when Galileo appealed to the Pope to annul the prohibition of 1616 he met with a firm refusal.

Urban VIII had been enthroned seven years when Galileo, well aware of the great risk he ran, published again. This time it was to be his magnum opus: Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican. Well read in the literature of Antiquity, Galileo chose to cast his work in the form made for ever famous by Plato.

The dialogue took place over four days and was between three disputants — the Aristotelean, the Copernican, and the ‘Inquiring Layman’. This last character was given the name Simplicius.

Simplicius was the ignoramus, the ass, and into his mouth Galileo put the precise argument of the Pope concerning the nature of the tides. When his attention was called to this affront Urban was furious. He determined to destroy this unruly philosopher who rewarded friendship with ridicule. He produced forthwith a fork with two prongs upon which to impale a masterpiece in which, embedded like an ulcer, festered in a tissue of heresy a gross insult to himself.

The Pope at once initiated proceedings against Galileo by appointing a preliminary commission to examine The Dialogues. He claimed that it was composed of theologians and men versed in science. It was, in fact, packed with Galileo’s enemies.

The subsequent examination of Galileo by the Holy Office did not include, as has sometimes been said, actual physical torture; but the mental suffering it caused then, and for the rest of his life, coupled to the condemnation of perpetual house imprisonment, constituted a punishment both cruel and protracted.

It has been sometimes observed that Galileo cannot be included in the pantheon of the heroes of science, for he submitted to the ignominy of public recantation, his abjuration being complete and made upon his knees before the congregation of the Convent of Minerva. Yet—-and here is the curious central circumstance — Galileo was never tried by the Holy Office for heresy, but only for suspected heresy, and with disobedience to the special prohibition of 1616.

For the eight years of life left to him Galileo remained a papal prisoner in his own villa at Arcetri, near his native Florence. And there one day there came to the old man, then blind, a young English poet, by name John Milton. ‘There it was’, wrote Milton,‘ that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.’

Though the humanist of that period — and any other kind of theological deviationist — went always in peril of the Roman Curia’s wrath, Galileo, who may fairly be included of that company, was to a large extent the architect of his own misfortunes.

Like his contemporary, the philosopher Giordano Bruno, he put his head in the lion’s mouth. For Galileo it was fatal to make open ridicule of the Pope: for Bruno it was sheerest folly to return from the security of other lands to Venice, where only the torture chambers of the Holy Office and, thereafter, the stake awaited him.

Had Galileo possessed but half the astuteness of the author of The Prince he might, despite his horrid heterodoxy, have been left by the Roman Curia in peace and at the end have died as an honoured son of the Church.

by Clifford Mason

An authentic humanist and sceptic, who doubted even secular knowledge, Montaigne was feeling his way toward empiricism

THE great figures of the Renaissance — Leonardo, Erasmus, Copernicus, Cervantes, to name but a few — seem strangely remote from us although they laid some of the foundations of the modern world. Something of the classical world and something of medieval man still enshrouds them, We may enjoy the exuberance of Rabelais, to take a striking example, but do we really understand him?

There is certainly one great man of the Renaissance who admits us to the intimacies of his mind — Michel de Montaigne. His star burned less brilliantly than that of some of his contemporaries and forerunners, but it has a friendly and more accustomed light. It does not illumine the outer world so much as our own minds.

Montaigne made no new discovery, but he asked a question: What do I know? He returned much the same answer as Socrates: I know that I know nothing.

Age of Transition

This may seem a small achievement, taken literally, but we must view it against the background of an age of transition. However we define the Renaissance —and opinions sharply differ — there was a long period during which the medieval world slowly fell apart. The social structure changed, and so did the ideas that in a large measure reflected it. As Donne exclaimed, dismayed by the vanishing certainties: ‘‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’

The very air trembled also with physical violence, After the Reformation a great part of Europe was ravaged by religious wars. The demand was to choose between two armies of bigots, Protestant and Catholic. Each side condemned the other to torture and death in this world and perdition in the next.

Living in South-west France, Montaigne was in the thick of this ferocious struggle. The Bordeaux Parliament of which he was a member condemned over 1,200 people to death in eighteen months. He fought with the King’s army at the siege of Protestant Rouen. He took the Catholic side although his own family, like so many others, was divided. His brother and sister became Protestants. He had Jewish blood on his mother’s side, for her family had fled from Spain, where the Inquisition continued its Reign of Terror.

Paganized Christianity

Such was the world into which Montaigne was born — divided, bewildered, fanatical, and bloodstained. Yet there was another side, Rome was slow to become aware of the significance of the changes taking place. There were anxious glances across the frontiers, but the paganized Christianity of the papal court was tolerant enough to allow Copernicus to expound his odd theory that the earth moved round the sun. The danger of such thoughts was not perceived until after the Council of Trent, Bruno was not burnt or Galileo forced to recant until after Montaigne’s death.

What, then, were Montaigne’s real views on religion? Sainte Beuve and Andre Gide held that he merely outwardly conformed. A case can be made out that he was, in modern parlance, a collaborationist but a secret unbeliever. On the other hand, he reveals a great deal of himself in his essays, and this interpretation seems too simple.

In a divided world it is hard to maintain an undivided mind unless one chooses unreservedly one side, and this was something Montaigne could not do. He had many reservations, and he is candid about them —so much so, that although in his lifetime the Church authorities saw no harm in his book it was subsequently placed on the Index.

He was shocked by the cruelty and cynicism displayed in the religious wars and such atrocities as the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. He was repelled by the puritanical strain in Protestantism and more at ease with the Renaissance humanists who drew their inspiration more from classical literature than from the Scriptures.

Which side was right? Both Protestants and Catholics claimed to be an possession of absolute truth, and it was this arrogant exclusiveness that made them behave with such brutality. No such confidence could be found in the pagan writers Montaigne so much admired.

‘Learn How to Die’

It is significant that his essays are lavishly sprinkled with quotations from the classics. Socrates was his hero. His favourite writers were Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, and Seneca. He does not appeal in the main to the Bible, or the Fathers of the Church, or the Scholastic philosophers. He is not specially interested in the Lives of the Saints.

It would be interesting to speculate how he might have developed but for his intense friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, a devout Catholic, whose early death made a profound and lasting impression on him. Many years afterwards he was still deeply affected by it. The loss left a scar that never completely healed and this may well have been the stimulus of the recurrent theme ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’.

There is not a trace of morbidity in this interest in death. It meant something very different from what Camus, in our day, meant by saying that suicide is the only serious philosophical problem. There was an obvious religious answer available and Boétie gave it on his death bed to his friend. It was contained in a book on Natural Theology by Raymond Sebond, which Montaigne translated.

The Limits of Understanding

For a few years the original was put on the Index, but Montaigne’s bowdlerized version passed muster. Later, in has longest essay, purporting to be a defence of Raymond Sebond against his critics, Montaigne gave full expression to his own scepticism.

He has been accused of betraying rather than defending the Spanish theologian. The essay was probably written after reading Sextus Empuricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which made a strong impression on him. Whatever his intention, the implications of the essay undermined the very foundations of dogmatic religion.

Actually he soon forgets Sebond, who by this time probably bored him. and he plunges into an attack on human presumption and even the power of reason itself. He contends that even if man has acquired great knowledge and is distinguished above all other creatures by the possession of reason, he is not any happier because of it. In any event man’s ignorance is more striking than his boasted knowledge.

If people have real knowledge of God and the soul, why do they disagree? The truth is that reason is powerless to lead to absolute truth. In a world of flux how can man, always changing himself, transcend this relativity? How can he even know moral truths? When confronted by three Brazilian cannibals at Rouen he thought very hard about the relativity of morals.

The essay concludes with a comment on Seneca’s saying: ‘O what a vile and abject thing is man, if he does not rate himself above humanity.’ Montaigne will have none of it. Man must be satisfied with his human limitations. ‘To make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to straddle more than the reach of our legs, is impossible and unnatural. Nor can man raise himself above himself and humanity; for he can see only with his own eyes, and seize only with his own grasp.’

This is the authentic note of humanism. It is a protest against impossible ambitions to become superhuman or angelic. Equally the attack on the presumption of reason is sound humanism if we remember that Montaigne was really groping towards empiricism.

He was appealing to experience as a guide and railing against metaphysics and logic-chopping, but the real issue was not clear to him at that time. In the climate of the turbulent sixteenth century scepticism seemed the safest refuge from intolerant dogmatism, the evils of which were all around him. But total rejection of Christianity could not be admitted — not even to himself, unless we assume he was a coward and a hypocrite.

Faith and Doubt

One part of his mind went on believing what it had been conditioned to believe in childhood; another part of his mind could find no rational justification for believing it. So how could he resolve a contradiction which many other Renaissance humanists felt? Some of them fell back on the device of ‘double truth’— secular knowledge only seemed to conflict with religious knowledge. But this was not quite Montaigne’s problem. It was almost the opposite. He doubted even secular knowledge, so why should he stop doubting?

There could be only one answer: knowledge of religious truth required blind faith. That separates him from the mainstream of the humanist tradition but it makes his mental process seem very modem. The most up-to-date Protestant theology also takes the leap of faith, accepting the unresolved tension between belief and doubt.

In practice, however, Montaigne felt differently about it. The tension caused him no anguish. He wore his religion lightly, perhaps more out of habit than deep conviction. This is confirmed by the way he approached the dominating problem of death.

His greatest friend died; then his father, after prolonged suffering. His brother died soon after and Montaigne himself had an accident while riding which nearly proved fatal. Six of his children died, almost in succession. ‘When these examples, so frequent and so ordinary, pass before our eyes,’ he wrote, ‘how is it possible that one can get rid of the thought of death and that at every instant it should not seem to us that she holds us by the throat?’

At the age of thirty-eight he retired in the belief (fortunately mistaken) that nothing but old age and death lay ahead of him. He settled down to write his reflections and he created the essay, a new literary form.

Back to Nature

More worldly activities lay ahead of him despite the ill health and pain that disturbed the second half of his life. That he became Mayor of Bordeaux reminds us of the significant contribution to culture made by the rising bourgeoisie now that cities and commerce had supplanted the feudal structure. Montaigne’s father had been a prosperous herring merchant.

In the period of his youthful hedonism he adopted a contemptuous, aristocratic attitude towards the common people. But as he mellowed this underwent a change.

He noticed how in the civil wars and the plague the peasants died with a simple courage that philosophers might well envy. ‘I never saw one of my peasant neighbours start cogitating about the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour. Nature teaches him not to think about death except when he is dying.’ If anyone says that this is because peasants are stupid, ‘For heaven’s sake, let us henceforth hold a school of stupidity’.

Back to Nature and simplicity — that was the final lesson he learned. Human nature is not incurably deformed; to realize its potential, to be fully ourselves, to be human, is to be virtuous. ‘The most beautiful lives, in my opinion, are those that conform to the common human pattern’, he concluded. ‘There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and duly.’

There are, of course, inconsistencies in Montaigne’s essays. He made no pretence to provide a system of thought. What he does give us are rich insights that are the very stuff of which humanism is woven. He left the pattern to others.

Yet it is of the essence of humanism that the pattern can never be complete. The sceptical temper which is Montaigne’s legacy saves the humanist from supposing that science has taken the place of religion as the arbiter of final truth. This would be to exchange one form of authoritarianism for another.

by E. H. Hutten

In the Renaissance the humanist ideal was incarnated in Leonardo as the universal or many-sided man

WESTERN civilization is the offspring of the Greek-Roman and the Jewish-Christian traditions. Greece gave us science, Palestine religion. Religions and myths have formed the basis of every civilization that has ever existed. Thus, the Jewish-Christian contribution to our culture is not unique. Similar cosmogonies and moral codes can be found almost everywhere; and, for that matter, Judaism has equally given rise to Islam. But no other civilization, however advanced it may have been in the arts and crafts, like China, has ever developed science. The main inventions of paper, gunpowder, and the compass have in fact come to the West from China. Yet in spite of this superiority in practical things, the Chinese never created anything that could be called science. We need think here only of their medicine employing the method of acu-uncture—that is, the pricking of parts of the body with a gold needle; or take as example their astronomy, which never rose above the level of astrology. Other Eastern cultures were, and still are, even more backward as far as knowledge of reality is concerned. Science is the unique achievement of the Western mind; and we owe it to the Greeks.

There is no doubt that, without science. Western society would have exhibited the same pattern which we can still observe in the contemporary East. In the social, economic, and in almost any other field except, possibly, in the arts, these civilizations are decidedly less advanced than ours. Our advance is due to science, and no one could deny this today. It is in fact not too farfetched to say that the present political struggle, which is after all between the East and the West, has been caused by science in some way. For colonialism and imperialism were possible only as result of the greater technical and military power of the West, and this in turn was the outcome of science. Gunpowder, though they invented it, did not avail the Chinese anything, for they were unable to develop the science of ballistics.

Science in its modern form stems from the Renaissance; and the Renaissance is the age in which Greek learning came to life again. If we want to understand scientific ideas, we must trace them back to their origin in classical Greece. We must adopt the evolutionary view and say that our ideas as well as our bodies are the product of natural development and that, however abstract they may be, the ideas contain a residue of the simpler thought from which they sprang. I mean to say that the emotional climate in which the ideas of science first grew, the feelings that drove the ancient Greeks to invent science, are still of importance to us today. In the last resort, it is not a specific result that characterizes science: it is a general, emotional attitude toward the world and ourselves. It is what we call the rational attitude which allows us to regard facts dispassionately and to theorize about them without fear or favour that underlies science.

The Birth of Science

This rationality was first displayed by the Greeks of the sixth century BC—‘the only miracle in history’ as Renan said. It is true that the rise of science and of philosophy occurred within a miraculously short time: barely 200 years, from Thales to Demokritos, sufficed to lay the foundations. Certainly, within a further generation, that is, with Aristotle, the creative period had passed; and then, gradually, Greek rational thought was being submerged by the wave of Eastern religion until it was almost drowned. Only when this wave had subsided, science became possible again, with the revival of Greek learning in the Renaissance. From then onwards science developed without a break and its ideas spread to some extent to other fields. The Enlightenment was a direct result of Newtonian physics; and it is of course no accident that the Age of Reason also saw a return to classical learning. The French philosopher and the British empiricists were followers of the the ‘mechanical’ philosophy; and from them stem the social, economic, and political ideas that made Western society.

Science has thus revolutionized the world, materially as well as intellectually; and it is responsible for the fact that the balance of power and every advantage still lies with the tiny European minority. It is, I think, not unreasonable to say that, even as late as the Renaissance, the East was more prosperous than the West. But it was the West that discovered the East and not vice versa, even though Eastern people were technically as capable of sailing the oceans as were the Europeans. This gives the lie to the simple-minded interpretation of history according to which economic advance and technical tools come first and theoretical science follows in their wake. Practical inventions mean very little, e.g. those of gunpowder and of the compass, unless men are capable of using them for rational ends. The Chinese used gunpowder only for fireworks.

What, then, is the mental and emotional attitude that underlies science? How did this attitude arise in ancient Greece? And why was this emotion recaptured during the Renaissance?

Obviously, I cannot answer these questions in detail here, but I can try to suggest a general answer. Let us remember a few facts of history. The Greeks of the ninth to eighth centuries had abolished the divinity of the king and replaced the monarchy by an aristo-democratic regime. In the wake of this revolution, they emigrated overseas and colonized the Asian coast. The beginnings of science were laid in this colony of Ionia, when Thales founded the School of Miletos.

We can get a glimpse of what the Greeks must have felt at that time when we read the poems of Hesiod and Homer. The old gods were no longer taken seriously; fear and awe had given way to disbelief. Xenophanes, who was the spokesman for this Enlightenment, said that the god of the donkeys would be a donkey and that the gods did all the wicked things human beings were not allowed to do. That is, in some way the gods were recognized as projections of human feelings; and this represents an all-important step in mental development.

The Dawn of Reason

Adolescence is the stage that divides the child from the man. The childish fears and phantasies are fought through once more; and then the young man starts to think for himself and becomes a reasonable human being. The instinctual energies are tamed or sublimated when they are channelled into intellectual activities. Something like this happened in the sixth century in Greece; after the earlier upheaval. The philosophers started to inquire about what is real; they were obsessed with the desire for knowledge. both of external nature and of themselves. That is, they wanted to draw a line of demarcation between dreaming and being awake, between fact and fiction, or between what we call today physics and metaphysics. The wish to separate these two realms drove the Ionian philosophers to their speculations that represent the beginnings of science. During the very brief period which lasted from Thales to Demokritos, this wish was very strong and brought about rational thought. If the psychological explanation offered here is right, this was no more a miracle than is the maturing of the individual human being.

During this classical period the character of Western civilization was determined; not only science and philosophy, but art as well—especially music, closely connected with mathematics— found their typically western mode of expression. When we compare Eastern with Western art we see that their difference lies in this. Eastern art appears to us as very fantastic, full of strange, dreamlike, unrealistic shapes; eastern music lacks the control, that is, the scale and harmony first established by the Pythagoreans. The same applies to every activity: eastern religions, for instance, are full of ghosts and devils. We need only look at the Parthenon and then, say, at a Hindu temple with its grotesque decorations to recognize that the Greeks of the Classical Age strongly repressed these childish phantasies. This repression represents a first step in sublimation. It is expressed by the typically Greek advice of the Delphic Apollo, ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing too much’.

From God to Man

With the collapse of the Macedonian empire the Eastern religions came back, and science almost disappeared from the earth. It is true that science lingered on in Alexandria and Byzantium, but the creative flow was exhausted. Philosophy, too, became alloyed with alien doctrines; in fact, from this time dates the unholy alliance of theology and philosophy. When the Christians wanted to gain the confidence of the Western world, they made use of, and distorted; the views of the Greek philosophers. Thus they foisted Christianity on to Plato and Aristotle and brought about a misinterpretation of these philosophers which is widely accepted even today.

But the wave of Eastern religious feeling eventually subsided again and so, after the long period of the dark Middle Ages, rationality was rediscovered in the Renaissance. And the conditions were quite similar to those which had stimulated the original phase in Greece. Again, there was rebellion against established authority and a desire to voyage across the seas, to discover new lands and to colonize. Columbus triumphantly shouted, ‘il mondo è poco’—the world is so small. Another step in becoming more mature had been taken when the Renaissance writers emphasized virtù, that is, the dignity of the individual. Humanism, after all, owes its name to this contrast of scholasticism, namely, that it taught people to turn toward man and, therefore, away from the gods. Men became more self-conscious, less dependent: it is as if they had developed, collectively, an Ego. Western individualism and respect for life (such as it is) has no counterpart in the East even today; Buddhist tolerance, for instance, is based on the unimportance of human life and its identity with that of the lower organisms, not on its importance.

This new-found confidence and enterprise is expressed by the Renaissance ideal of I’uomo universale. The ‘many-sided’ man is interested in everything; his desire to know and to discover is unlimited and he no longer fears old gods and superstitions. More than that: the universal man wants integration, he tries to bring all his discoveries into some sort of harmony. This is again typical of the maturing personality.

It was this willingness to play an active part that brought about science in its modern form. We usually say that modern science is characterized by the fact that it has joined theory to the deliberately planned experiment. This is supposed to be in contrast to Greek science, but we must be fair here; the Greeks were, after all, excellent observers, and science must begin with observation. It was Tycho Brahe’s discovery of a Nova in 1572 and Galileo’s perception of new worlds through his telescope in 1610 that shook the authorities of the time. But it is true that Galileo’s experiment in which he let a ball run down an inclined plane represents a turning-point. As Leonardo said, ’those sciences are vain and full of errors which are not born from experiment, the mother of all certainty, and which do not end with one clear experiment’.

When the reaction to this rational effort set in, with the Reformation, the new religion could not destroy science as the old religion had almost succeeded in doing when it first appeared. And this, I think, was due to the Renaissance artists and scientists who applied mathematics to painting to discover perspective or who described motion mathematically and so founded dynamics. Unlike the scholastics who misused Aristotle for empty disputes, the humanists took classical learning as a model for, and a method of, explaining the world. They rejected rationalization and returned to the Greek view in which reason is not cut off from reality. The rational attitude was thus safely established by science, at long last ; thinking and doing were coordinated when men started to transform the world by experimentation. This great step towards integration was taken by the scholars of the Renaissance.

by B. Farrington

Bacon believed that applied science could transform the conditions of human life

FRANCIS BACON was, for his time, an unusual kind of humanist. Those who ordinarily bear the name were the protagonists of a cultural revolution. Their growing acquaintance with the ancient world had given them an enlarged conception of the human personality. They felt suffocated by the system of beliefs and values of the medieval Church and struggled for more elbow-room for the individual to develop all his potentialities. But Francis Bacon was not so much concerned with the claims of the individual. He asserted the claim of the human race as a whole to a more active, purposeful, and dominant role within the realm of Nature.

The nature of this claim has not always been clearly understood, even by those who have written the books about him. So let us have a long quotation. Bacon explains the plan of his master work, The Great Instauration:

These words were published in 1620. Bacon was trying to persuade mankind that it was within its power to create a new kind of applied science which would radically transform the conditions of human life. He succeeded. Not long after his death the foundation of The Royal Society fulfilled part of his programme. A corporate public effort had been inaugurated to increase the sum of scientific knowledge and apply it to practical purposes. Later the French encyclopedists carried out another part of his programme. They provided a comprehensive history of the productive techniques of civilized man. This was only a beginning. Now all over the world governments organize scientific research and its practical applications for the increase of human security and well-being. ‘The destiny of the human race will supply the issue’, wrote Bacon more than 300 years ago. It has indeed done so.

To try to understand the mind of the man who most clearly foresaw and most persuasively championed the scientific revolution is fascinating. Unhappily it has not proved altogether easy. Bacon could not avoid entanglement in the public life of his time, and what a time it was! He had great admiration for Macchiavelli, and some capacity to benefit from his precepts. His public life could not but offer some contrast to the burning idealism of his propaganda for an improvement in the material circumstances of mankind. But the contrast really affords no justification for the famous characterization of him by Pope as ‘the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind’. Still less justification is there for the black-and-white portrait of him by Macaulay, with its intelligent, but slightly vulgar, enthusiasm for his philosophy, and its much less intelligent, and criminally careless, denigration of his character.

The great corrective for this distortion is the thirty years’ work of the faithful Spedding in editing the Works and the Letters, in writing the Life, in tracking down the misrepresentations of Macaulay. But even when we have recovered from Pope and Macaulay it is not easy to penetrate the mind of Bacon, nor to grasp the degree of originality and real significance of what he had to say. In what follows I shall try to bring his personality into focus in the light of some recent research. How sadly this was, and no doubt still is, needed is revealed by the latest study of the subject. Paolo Rossi’s Francesco Bacone; which bears the sub-title Dalla magia alla scienza, came out only this year, and is so full of new insights that it dates all the existing literature.

First, how did it come about that Bacon, who from his boyhood had dedicated himself in his own mind to the championship of useful knowledge, allowed himself to be caught by public affairs? Various circumstances and considerations overbore him. He analyses them himself in a paper written when he was forty-two. First his birth and education had, he says, seasoned him in business of State. Then, though he was dedicated to the service of all mankind, he allowed that a man’s country had special claims on him. Then there was a subtler temptation. Even for his own special private ambition of improving human destiny by a fresh conquest of Nature much help was needed, and he thought that if he secured a place of honour in the State it would give him command of industry and brains. And, indeed, to publish his Great Instauration as Lord Chancellor, and not simply as Mr Bacon, did help it along. Finally, religious, or politico-religious, considerations weighed with him. His father had been one of the architects of the Elizabethan Church. But much remained to be done. Francis reflected that his projected scientific reform ‘reached no further than the condition and culture of this mortal life’, and he hoped, if he held high office in the State, that ‘he might get something done too for the good of men’s souls’. I have no doubt myself, from a study of the various prayers that Bacon wrote, that if he could have had his way the English Book of Common Prayer would have have been enriched by many supplications for the advance of applied science. His History of the Winds, a book by no means forgetful of the position of England as a sea-power, is introduced by this prayer: ‘May God the Creator, Preserver, and Restorer of the universe, in accordance with his mercy and his loving kindness towards man, protect and guide this work both in its ascent to his glory and its descent to the service of man, through his only Son, God with us.’ The ‘ascent to his glory’ is the inductive process leading to the highest axioms; the ‘descent to the service of man’ is the deductive process by which science is applied to works.

But, though he had good reasons for embarking on his public career, Bacon felt the need of justifying this choice before the bar of his own conscience. In the paper from which we have been quoting, the paper written when he was forty-two, he says: ‘Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which like air and water belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might best be served, and what service l was myself best fitted to perform.’ We know the answer he gave. He wanted ‘to kindle a light in Nature which would bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world.’ He was confident that the man who did that would be ‘the benefactor of the human race, the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities’.

Key to Nature

The conflict between his public duties and his private ambition produced a tension from which Bacon escaped only in the last few years of his life, when he was dismissed from office for taking bribes. The short time left to him he devoted solely to promoting his ideal, and he was prodigiously productive. But during the many years in which his public career reduced his private ambitions to the second place he indulged in daydreams about his great project which throw light not only on his character but on the historical background of the project itself.

His recurrent dream was to imagine himself, or some nameless person who stands for himself, as a great sage in possession of the key to Nature and in the act of transmitting it into the hands of a faithful disciple or disciples. In The Masculine Birth of Time, in The Confutation of Philosophies, and in The New Atlantis this image repeats itself. ‘God bless thee, my son,’ says the head of Solomon’s House, ‘I will give thee the greatest jewel I have.’ ‘My sons,’ says the confuter of philosophies, ‘let us dismiss these abstract philosophies and attach ourselves to things themselves; let us not be ambitious for the glory of founding a sect, but let us soberly take upon us the task of furthering human utility and greatness.’ ‘My dear, dear son,’ says Bacon, speaking in the first person in The Masculine Birth of Time, ‘what I plan for you is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy and legal wedlock. And from this association you will secure an increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages, to wit, a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race, which cause it more destruction than all giants, monsters, or tyrants, and will make you peaceful, happy, prosperous and secure.’ ‘Take heart, then, my son, and give yourself to me so that I may restore you to yourself.’

Prospero Power

In this recurrent image we have said that Bacon sees himself as a sage. But it would be more true to substitute the word ‘mage’. This secret that he wishes to pass on reminds us of the philosopher’s stone. There is frequently the suggestion that there is a single clue or key to Nature’s mystery. There is a quasi-religious solemnity about the proceedings. There is an anxiety to emphasize the chastity, holiness, legitimacy, and what-not of the new method. Finally there are the extravagant hopes of the acquisition of a really Prospero-like power over Nature. ‘I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.’ All these things suggest the debt of Bacon to the magical and alchemical tradition. And this debt is certainly true, though it does not carry with it the implication many have been ready to make of Bacon’s incapacity to understand the true nature of scientific advance. It is a fact that Bacon found little to help him in his project of scientific reform either in the Greek or Christian tradition, and viewed with more indulgence than we at first sight can approve the despised activities of the magicians and alchemists. But recent research is enabling us to appreciate the justice of his point of view.

The fact is that both Greek philosophy and Christian theology, which is so closely dependent on it, tended to exclude from their purview all knowledge of Nature that is active, operational, and productive. The philosophical-theological tradition is in its nature contemplative. It is concerned with essence and not with accident, with permanence and not with change, with eternity and not with time. Accordingly, all the activities from which applied science might eventually grow were excluded from the philosophical and theological tradition and set apart in the magical and alchemical tradition. ‘Much early science,’ writes E, J. Holmyard in his new Pelican book, Alchemy, ‘comprising remnants of the classical spirit and the classical feeling for Nature, could not be accepted by the Church and found asylum in medieval natural philosophy ’—i.e. in magic and alchemy. Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon’s great thirteenth-century namesake, had fought passionately for the acceptance of ‘beneficent magic’ into the circle of Christian wisdom; and in the following centuries, as the insufficiency of the medieval world-view became clear, magic was again defended and exalted as a legitimate human science. This is the position of Bruno, Campanella, Kepler, Gassendi, Descartes, It was with them that Francis Bacon stood. He condemned magic and alchemy for their undisciplined imagination and fond credulity. But, in the utter inability of the official world of culture to rouse itself out of its torpor and conceive the possibility of any great change for the better in the fortunes of mankind, he welcomed the support which magic and alchemy could bring to the project he had in mind. ‘Magic,’ he wrote, ‘sets before itself the task of recalling natural philosophy from its endless speculations to the effecting of great works.’ ‘The alchemists,’ he adds, ‘by their strenuous toils and exertions for the making of gold have achieved not a few brilliant inventions and experiments apt both to unlock Nature’s mystery and benefit human life’ (De Augmentis Scientiarum, l).

lt is not easy to be certain what value Bacon set upon the Christian doctrine of the next life, but there is no doubt that he found its attitude to this life sadly deficient. In particular, he suffered under its lack of imagination as to what could be done to help the human condition here and now. He tried to draw helpful lessons from the Christian tradition. In his Sacred Meditations he notes as regards the miracles of Jesus: ‘He restoreth motion to the lame, light to the blind, speech to the dumb, health to the sick, cleanness to the lepers, sound mind to them that were possessed with devils, life to the dead. There was no miracle of judgment, but all of mercy, and all upon the human body.’ But he did not propose that humanity should depend on miracles for an improvement in its well-being. And it was in the magical and alchemical tradition that he found support for his idea that man might be able by his own exertions to achieve something towards this end.

by Antony Flew

Since Hume both philosophers and theologians have been struggling to answer the disturbing questions he raised

IN his essay on ’Bentham’, John Stuart Mill claimed that: ‘England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume.’ As far as it goes, Mill’s assessment is right. For Hume’s fundamental thought in philosophy was negative. This thought is that nothing at all can be known a priori, that is, apart from and in advance of experience, about any matter of fact and existence. We cannot know anything whatever about things as they actually are without inspecting or relying on someone else’s inspection of what, as a matter of brute fact, the world happens to be like. This principle of radical empiricism guided all his thinking and found its development and justification in his four great philosophical works: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), published before he was thirty; Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748), now known less appositely as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), which he himself considered ‘incomparably the best’ of all his writings; and finally his devastating masterpiece, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which from ‘abundant caution’ he had wisely arranged to publish only posthumously.

Apart from these philosophical works Hume wrote various Essays Moral and Political, a Natural History of Religion, and a History of England (in eight volumes). The NHR was important as an attempt to treat religious behaviour as one more natural phenomenon among others: it was this detachment, this natural historian’s attitude towards religion, which most enraged his orthodox contemporaries. The HE was a very substantial achievement, again remarkable for its naturalistic detachment: it won from Voltaire the tribute that in ‘this History, perhaps the best ever written in any language… he speaks of weaknesses, blunders, cruelties as a physician speaks of epidemic diseases’.

These other works were important. But they have already exerted all their influence and done their work. So we concentrate on the philosophy, which is now more alive and better understood than ever, though outside the English-speaking countries it has scarcely begun to do its work.

It might be suggested that there was nothing original or new about empiricism. After all, there had been a Scholastic maxim: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. (Literally: ‘There is nothing in the understanding which has not previously been in the senses.’) But, as Whitehead once said, ‘everything has been said before by someone who did not discover it’. Hume’s revolutionary originality lay, not in simply stating an empiricist principle, but in seeing and developing radically some of its main implications.

First; about causality. Hume argues that there is and can be no a priori reason why anything should, or should not, be the cause of any other thing. ‘I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation [viz, of causal connection—A.F.] is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other… Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him’ (EHU, § iv).

The Primary Denial

The burden of what Hume is saying here is best brought out by considering the sort of thing he is denying. It is sometimes urged: that living organisms could not be the product of non-living uses; that consciousness could not emerge as a result of the operations of entirely non-conscious causes; or, more generally, that the ‘higher’ could not result simply from the operations of the ‘lower’. Hume would insist that all these contentions must be radically unsound. Whether or not life, and consciousness, and the ‘higher’ generally, do in fact result from non-living, non-conscious, ‘lower’ causes can be determined only by investigation. A priori there is no reason at all why they should not ; nor yet why they should.

From this primary denial Hume proceeds: both to his famous positive analysis of the nature of causality; and to the logical discovery which has come to be labelled ‘the problem of induction’. The core of the former is the contention that to say A’s cause B’s is to say that A’s are always closely and immediately followed by B’s. The crux of the latter is the observation that no accumulation of evidence of the form ‘A’s have in our experience always been associated with B’s’ can ever logically entail any generalization of lawful connection of the form ‘All A’s are, or produce, B’s’. Certainly Hume’s analysis of causality is as it stands importantly inadequate, particularly in its failure provide a true account of the difference between a causal connection and a coincidental conjunction. This is unfortunate. For until its defects have been convincingly made good—as they surely can be—it will continue to be possible to trade on them in the interests of the idea that after all there are some a priori limitations on what may or may not be causally connected with what.

The logical discovery has usually been presented, as it was by Hume, as showing that no amount of evidence of experience can ever logically guarantee that whatever regularities we have found in the past must hold good still in the future. So far so good. Surely the chief moral to be taken is one of eschewing dogmatism and preserving the spirit of inquiry, the ‘mitigated scepticism’ which Hume himself advocated. Unfortunately Hume also suggested sometimes that his purely logical discovery had uncovered a lamentable cognitive predicament, to be remedied only by an unobtainable guarantee that ‘the future will resemble the past’. This has encouraged the mistaken idea that all scientific procedures logically depend for their intellectual respectability on a gigantic assumption, a Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, an unformulated and unformulable Article of Faith. Here too the efforts of some contemporary philosophers to consolidate Hume’s work are particularly important, if his slips are not to be exploited against the work of the Enlightenment.

Second; about natural theology, the attempt to establish theological propositions without appeal to revelation. In EHU (§ xi) Hume first outlines his general objections to any such enterprise. He has argued already that there are no a priori limitations on what may or may not be the cause of what, and that only by reference to experience can we learn what is or is not the cause of what. But this must make causal arguments doubly inapplicable to any attempt to establish ‘the religious hypothesis… as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe’. They cannot be applied, first, because the God of theism is by definition transcendent and sui generis in every way. Thus it is unsound in principle to postulate God as an explanatory hypothesis, arguing that this is what God would do in these circumstances and that in those. This is the unregarded consequence which after all must follow from the divine inscrutability; on which the theist at other times is eager to insist. They cannot be applied, second, because the Universe to be explained is itself by definition unique. Hence necessarily there can be no experience of the causes of other universes to guide us to infer some divine cause for ours. For the sense of ‘Universe’ relevant here is: not that in which we might say that the extra-galactic nebula in Andromeda is ‘an island universe’ of which there may perhaps be thousands or millions of others; but that in which the word covers everything there is, ‘island universes’ and everything else. In this second sense, but not in the first, it is true as C. S. Pierce once wryly remarked: ‘Universes are not as plentiful as blackberries.’

Elsewhere in EHU Hume makes very short work of other arguments of natural theology which do not depend on the notion of cause: ‘Whatever is may not be. No negation of fact can involve a contradiction. The non-existence of any being, without exception, is as clear and distinct an idea as its existence… The existence, therefore, of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience.’ So much for the notorious Ontological Argument, the famous Cosmological Argument, and all the elaborations on the theme of God as an absolutely Necessary Being! It is these fundamental ideas, all derived from his radical empiricism, which Hume developed in DNR into the most shattering onslaught ever launched against natural theology.

Third; not content with this onslaught on the whole idea of a natural theology, Hume discovered radical difficulties in principle and in practice about the endorsement of a religious revelation by proving a miracle. The essay ‘Of Miracles’ in EHU (§ x), though written with characteristic eighteenth-century lucidity and elegance, has been more often attacked than understood. The first thing to grasp is that it is not an argument designed to show that miracles do not or cannot in fact occur. It is an argument primarily designed to show ‘that a miracle can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’ (italics mine). Hume is in the first place concerned not with facts but with evidence.

A miracle, to be suitably remarkable, must be an exception to a law of Nature. (If virgin readers of the Daily Mirror really gave birth this would make the dogma of the Virgin Birth rather less implausible: but only at the cost of making it a proportionately less emphatic endorsement of Christ’s teachings.) Yet to be justified in holding some general proposition to express a law of Nature we must have the best possible evidence that it holds good without exception: and this would constitute a proof against any miraculous exception. He concludes: ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless… its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.’ In the second part of § x he goes on to suggest that this condition never has been met, and to point out certain general weaknesses apt to vitiate testimony in cases of supposed miracles, particularly supposed religious miracles.

Throughout Hume makes it very plain that the case which he has chiefly in mind is that of the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ. (In the Easter number of the Spectator this year Mr Christopher Hollis argued that the falsehood of the testimony in this case would be more miraculous than the occurrence to which it testified. This remarkable contention, made without explicit reference to Hume, neglected, inter alia, the clause he adds to the passage just quoted, ‘and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior’.)

Fourth; in theoretical ethics Hume’s chief contribution was clearly and emphatically to distinguish ought from is, insisting that the former cannot be deduced from the latter, and suggesting that ‘Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment’. The protean error of trying to deduce ought from is has now been given the name ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’. This is appropriate as most versions make some appeal to ‘nature’ and ‘what is natural’ as an arbiter of what should be. It was typical of Hume that he found practical application for this theoretical insight in an essay on ‘Suicide’, where he excoriated the notion that suicide must always be wrong because ‘unnatural’ and an interference with Providence. The sentiment which Hume thought was the taproot of sound morality was that of benevolence. With justice his latest biographer considers that the most suitable epitaph on the philosopher’s own life would be some words on this theme which he added to EPM only thirteen days before his death: ‘Nothing can bestow more merit on any human creature than the sentiment of benevolence in an eminent degree; and that a part at least of its merit arises from its tendency to promote the interests of our species, and bestow happiness on human society.’

by Merle Tolfree

The Encyclopedists took reason as their guide and blazed the trail for humanists to follow

IT was in 1745 that the Englishman, Mills, and the German, Sellius, brought to the French publisher, Le Breton, a translation of the Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of Chambers, which had had a great success on its first publication in England in 1728. Le Breton accepted it, for indeed the time was opportune. During the first half of the eighteenth century both England and France were being flooded with encyclopedias, dictionaries of arts and sciences, popular explanations of everything from astronomy to insectology, not omitting philosophy, history, travel, law.

The intellectual curiosity of the time was insatiable. After the comparatively stable period of the seventeenth century, with the autocracy of Louis XIV, its brilliant State and unquestioned religion, everything was again in the melting-pot. Conventional explanations satisfied very few. Genesis had succumbed to science. Authority was no longer immune from criticism, and even the Sorbonne was finding its decrees no longer absolute. In the libraries of the time fiction and belles-lettres occupied but a small place compared with that allotted to science, philosophy, and explanatory work of all kinds. Therefore Chambers was welcomed, but even without Chambers the new project would probably have materialized.

For Diderot, to whom the preparation was entrusted, very soon elaborated on the original idea. Far from being content with a bare translation, he proposed to compile a vast repertoire of the whole of human knowledge. D’Alembert, already famous for his scientific work, a member of the Academy of Sciences at twenty-four, agreed to collaborate in the direction and be responsible for the mathematics section. Voltaire and Montesquieu promised to participate, although as it turned out they did not give many articles. However, Diderot gathered round him a large and active group of people, eminent in all fields of science and culture, and the encyclopedia quickly became the focal point of all the intellectual life of the period. Subscriptions began to roll in, manuscripts piled up in the rooms of the indefatigable editor, the prospectus was out in October 1750, and the first volume in 1751.

Not, however, that everything had gone smoothly. In spite of the enthusiasm of the launching, there was an opposition which spared itself no pains. Every possible attack was made against Diderot himself, every excuse was used to stop the publication. He was denounced by the local priest; he was suspected of being a ‘libertin’; he was thought to have been the author of certain Pensées Philosophiques, which had been publicly burned. On the publication of a Letter on the Blind, which suggested that the argument purporting to prove the existence of God by reference to the beauties of external nature is no proof to the blind man, Diderot’s rooms were searched, and although there was no proof that he had written the offensive Letter, he was nevertheless thrown into the dungeons of Vincennes, where he was left for three months, until his publishers, anxious about their profits, managed to secure his release. The work went on again, and the second volume was published in 1752.

It was violently attacked. From the first appearance of the prospectus the Jesuits had conducted a campaign against the whole enterprise, as clever, as bitter, and as unrelenting as any for which that famous Order is known. In their Journal de Trévoux, they patiently reveal all the plagiarisms, the unacknowledged borrowings, and the real unorthodoxy behind the reverent language. They secured the reversal of a judgment of the Sorbonne, granting a degree of Doctor of Theology to the Abbé de Prades, one of the many progressive Members of the Church who had associated themselves with the encyclopedia, and forced him out of the country.

The Archbishop of Paris attacked it, and thoughtfully warned his flock against ‘this encyclopedic hell’. Fury was at such a pitch on the appearance of the second volume that in February the Royal Council indicted the first two 1752 volumes. But the publisher, Malesherbes, was a relative of the Chancellor, and when a new search was ordered nothing was found. New collaborators came along, and volumes III to VI appeared. New attackers also, and in 1757, much to the grief of Diderot, D’Alembert grew tired and gave up. Others also retired, and Voltaire advised Diderot to leave the country and finish his tremendous task abroad. He refused and, summoning still greater reserves of energy, found new friends even in the highest social circles with de Pompadour, Richelieu, Turgot, and with terrifying labour and unremitting courage forced the pace again.

In 1758, Helvétius, whose wealthy home was one of the favourite meeting-places of the Encyclopedists, published his book of materialist philosophy, De L’Esprit, where he attributes all action to self-interest (the self-regarding sentiment of the modern psychologist) and all progress to physical causes. The book was banned and hadthe honour of being also condemned by the Pope, together, of course, with the encyclopedia.

The struggle of the times was claiming other victims also. In 1762 Calas, a Protestant, was broken on the wheel, unjustly accused of having murdered his son, who had wanted to become a Catholic. Voltaire was to spend years struggling for his rehabilitation. But what finally broke Diderot’s heart was the discovery, in 1764, that his articles had been systematically altered by Le Breton, to make them innocuous, after they had been corrected by Diderot himself. His despair at finding much of his life’s work ruined by the stupidity of a cowardly publisher makes painful reading.

However, victories were being gained. In 1764 D’Alembert became a member of the French Academy and the spirit of the philosophers went with him. In 1762 the Jesuits were themselves suppressed. In 1765 the rehabilitation of Calas took place, and in 1772 the final volumes of the encyclopedia were published and had an immediate success. It was a victory for rationalism against the forces of authority in Parliament, the Sorbonne, and the Church.

Why was it that these volumes, which now collect dust on the shelves of many a library, aroused such fierce opposition and such passionate devotion when they were first published? What was the fire behind these old characters on a yellowing page that could set alight a whole century, tear the hearts and minds of men to pieces, and virtually erect the basis of a new civilization on the ruins of the old? The volumes certainly contain more than a simple alphabetical classification of subjects. In the famous prospectus D’Alembert explains the arrangement and the connection between the various subjects treated. But throughout all the articles of a purely factual nature, or those seeking to explain a point of view, philosophical or religious, one feels that the authors are trying to present a conception of history and of man that was—perhaps still is—new.

The Bible is no longer taken as centre. Although there is a certain amount of contradiction among the various contributors, the overall view of history which it gives is a secular one. The aim was to substitute a scientific outlook for a religious one, but in that age, where open or even suspected unorthodoxy could incur the severest penalties, many a ruse had to be adopted to get the point across. In treating religious subjects, the authors used frequently a comparative method showing that the Christian religion was not necessarily superior to other religions which also claimed divine inspiration. At other times they would expound the problems of doubtful authenticity in the Biblical story, problems in which the theologians were themselves involved. Very often it was sufficient to cite the uncertainty of dates, the contradictory nature of different accounts of the same event, the arbitrariness of the choice of certain gospels to the exclusion of others, or the way in which the whole system of rites and ceremonies has been built up by people claiming divine authority, but which has no necessary connection with the Bible or with early Christianity. In short, the history of religion is seen as a vague, uncertain, complicated, and transitory chapter of human history. Reason is the guiding light of the encyclopedia and all irrational beliefs and practices are seen as obstacles to progress.

The Encyclopedists were reacting not only against dogma, but also against the purely speculative philosophies of previous periods, such as that of Descartes, with its long chain of abstract reasoning which seemed to lead only to another metaphysic. A basic feature of the Cartesian philosophy is the distinction made between soul and body. It helps those who want to believe in life after death, but to the Encyclopedists, nurtured on the ideas of Locke, it was a false division, because thought or mind or soul is dependent on physical processes and therefore cannot be separated from them. Like Locke also they were experimentalists, trusting in the value of the proved experience, desiring the logical system but not willing to depart from the evidence of their senses.

Many of them were determinist and materialist and already affected to some extent by evolutionist or transformist ideas. They had a strong belief in the possibility of progress through reason, an attitude which again distinguishes them from those of religious outlook, whose desire for happiness will be satisfied they think in the life hereafter, while to the Encyclopedist what mattered was the increase of happiness on earth. Like the good humanists which they were, they valued the human effort directed towards this end. It follows that their morality is a social one, disengaged from all transcendental influence, either religious or metaphysical, and providing a rational approach to life.

Politically and socially the Encyclopedists were by no means revolutionary. No one of them called for the disruption of society or even seemed to favour a republican State. Nevertheless, absolutism is attacked and complete freedom thought and tolerance in matters of religion is demanded. The other reforms sought are those which were on everybody’s lips. However, in their study of the techniques of industry and art they entered workshops and studied the processes at first hand, consulting with hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, learning to control the machines themselves, before putting pen to paper. Thus they showed a democratic spirit unknown earlier metaphysicians.

That is why, if one is asked, Who were the Encyclopedists after all? one is tempted to reply, Who indeed were they not? The enterprise attracted to itself at one time or another most of the brightest spirits of the age, but it was helped by a very large number of people in all walks of life, who sought no payment and received none. The questions it concerns itself with, the nature of man, the nature of thought, the origin of religions, free-will and determinism, the habits and manners of other peoples and other countries, science and progress, all these things were being discussed from day to day in café and bar, in country-house and bohemian attic, on college benches and in the salons of the philosophic ladies of period, many of whom did good publicity for the ideas of the Encyclopedists. One might have met in their rooms D’Alembert, brilliant mathematician, caustic critic of religion, but fond of his own comfort, and withdrawing when things get too hot; Helvetius, the liberal Maecenas, who did not contribute to the encyclopedia itself but who was closely linked with the authors and often shared their battles; d’Holbach, the German baron, who entertained the whole cohort of Encyclopedists in order to enjoy their conversation, and who himself wrote the clearest account of man’s relationship to Nature; Condillac, Buffon, Turgot; Rousseau, who left them, and Voltaire, who did most of his work independently and in some respects went beyond them.

But above all the work was inspired and carried through by Diderot. A man of rare intelligence, educated by the Jesuits, he was well-read in the classics of Greece and Rome and in all the sciences of his time. He was also a man of great sensibility, who established art criticism, and an artist in his own right, as his witty and sparkling stories show. He went from salon to salon, discussing, arguing, firing off ideas like sparks from a cannon. Generous to the last degree, he would help even those who were trying to injure him, if they seemed to be in need.

He began as a deist, like many of the Encyclopedists, but moved toward materialism and atheism. A certain honesty prevented him from sinking into any sort of dogmatism, however, and he would repudiate ideas he had himself put forward when he saw them leading to dogmatism in others. He was an individualist rather than a constructor of systems, believing in the value of the personal judgment and of each human personality. He had wide contacts abroad, in Germany and in Russia, where his papers are still found. His sympathies were quick and immediate, transcending national boundaries. Of such stuff are good humanists made, as Jean Thomas, in The Humanism of Diderot, and Mornet, in his biography of Diderot, point out.

by John Gillard Watson

To the eighteenth-century humanist the rise of Christianity was the triumph of barbarism

IN the tenth number of the Spectator, in 1711, Addison wrote: ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.’ Not only philosophy, but history philosophically treated, was a suitable subject for the urbane eighteenth century.

‘Il faut écrire l’histoire en philosophe’ (‘It is necessary to write history like a philosopher’) wrote Voltaire in 1738; in England, David Hume and William Robertson made successful attempts to carry out the injunction. Hume, satisfied with the standards of his age, asked, ‘Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans?’ and answered: ‘Study well the temper and actions of the French and English: you cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.’ In Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared between 1776 and 1788, the same assumption is made.

Impeccable Scholarship

The modern historian, however, tries to put himself in the age he is studying, and cultivates a sense of period. This attitude has value for research but denies any judgment by universally valid standards, although the historian still does make judgments conditioned by his own epoch. Gibbon judged the men and events of the past and the present by the same standards, of what he called ‘eternal reason’.

Unlike Voltaire and Hume, his scholarship, within the limits of the sources to his hand, was impeccable, and it is extraordinary how little the Decline and Fall needs correction. He was justified in condemning the superficiality of Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Fontenelle. In his Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature, published in 1761, he demanded classical scholarship with a historical background, and discussed the philosophical—that is, the scientific—approach to history. Among the infinity of facts, many had no significance beyond themselves; others could form links in a chain of reasoning to support a limited conclusion; and finally there were the cardinal facts which played the essential part in forming a general system. These last were few, as were the minds able to find and interpret them.

The Religious Phase

This ‘philosophical’ approach had not been made to Church history. In the Decline and Fall Gibbon put such history in its place within secular history. He had peculiar advantages for this; just as his experience as a captain of militia helped him to understand military matters, so his religious history helped him to understand that of the Church. He had always been interested in theology, and at Oxford read Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry, a work rejecting the evidence for ecclesiastical miracles; Gibbon reversed the argument. He then read Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle, whose interpretation of history as a manifestation of divine providence convinced him. ‘I surely fell by a noble hand’, Gibbon wrote, ‘but my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental words, “Hoc est corpus meum“, and dashed against each other the figurative half-meanings of the Protestant sects; every objection was resolved into Omnipotence, and after repeating at St Mary’s the Athanasian creed, I humbly acquiesced in the Mystery of the real presence.’ This was in 1753; but on Christmas Day 1754 he re-entered the Protestant Church; ‘I suspended my Religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.’ This had been done, not by his Calvinist tutor, but by reading Voltaire and other writers, including Bayle, and the Philosophes, whose Encyclopédie began to come out 1751. In 1759 he read Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christinae, and asked himself if he accept the evidence for Christianity as a revealed religion. He concluded that belief in miracles and in mysteries was unsupported by human testimony and that faith must be supported by Grace, which was not vouchsafed to him.

Rejection of Religion

Thus in 1763, writing of the Renaissance, he could use words typical of the Decline and Fall: ‘ If we turn from letters to religion, the Christian must grieve and the philosopher will smile.’ The whole process had been one of conviction by reason.

Gibbon’s cool contempt towards religion was widespread in the eighteenth century. He also disliked Christianity for other reasons, especially the doctrine of exclusive salvation— salus extra ecclesiam non est—which condemned wise and virtuous pagans to eternal torment; ‘these rigid sentiments’, he wrote, ‘which had been unknown in the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony’. The new Christian world had had no place for the philosophy of Cicero, and ‘the Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers suspended the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or the sceptic to eternal flames. In many a volume of laborious controversy they exposed the weakness of the understanding and corruption of the heart, insulted human nature in the sages of antiquity, and proscribed the spirit of philosophical inquiry, so repugnant to the doctrine, or at least the temper, of an humble believer.’

Why Rome Fell

Despite his hostility to Christianity, Gibbon was fair and accurate—take, for example, his treatment of St Athanasius—and Newman acknowledged the value of Gibbon as an ecclesiastical historian. He had, however, a conviction that Christianity was a main cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: ‘I believed, and still believe, that the propagation of the gospel and the triumph of the Church are inseparably connected with the decline of the Roman Monarchy.’

For, he argued, ‘as the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal, that the introduction, or at least, the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity’. Yet he adds: ‘If the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.’

The greatest weakness of Gibbon is his treatment of the Eastern Empire, whose history from the time of Heraclius (610-640) seemed to him ‘a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery’. Research since has provided evidence for a more favourable view. Gibbon admitted that Byzantium was a bulwark of Europe against Asia; in fact, it was the one island of civilization in a sea of barbarism. By the end of the twelfth century the Empire was scarcely tenable, yet the city survived. It had been besieged in 616 by the Persians, in 675 and 717 by the Arabs, in 813 by the Bulgars, and in 864, 904, 936, and 1043 by the Russians. In such a life of perpetual siege, it is no wonder that men turned to religion and that literature and philosophy decayed. Gibbon did not realize that such cults batten, not on stupidity, but on a lack of desire to use human intelligence for its proper purpose—a weakness born of fear. Yet by their intelligent military organization the Byzantine Greeks were able to protect the remnant of civilization; and when their city fell in 1453, its 1,000-year walls breached by artillery, the task was done and civilization had spread throughout Europe again. Gibbon had no sympathy with the Greeks who succumbed to superstition, but it is easy for us to see how slight is our hold on ‘immortal reason’; if we do not approve, we can at least understand.

Eighteenth-Century Humanism

Another weakness of the Decline and Fall is often held to be the treatment of the Middle Ages, which the eighteenth century regarded with scorn. Since then, stemming from the renewed interest in the ‘Gothick’ in Gibbon’s own time, there has been a reassessment of the Middle Ages. When Gibbon compared them with the age of the Antonines, of whom he said, ‘their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government’, he, in common with his contemporaries, saw that age with an added lustre gained from the contrast with what followed. If we now look upon the Middle Ages with more understanding, it is salutary to be reminded by Gibbon of those features which are played down by apologists for the medieval world. The cathedrals, the Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, and Chaucer—these, rightly, are the admiration of the twentieth century; but Gibbon reminds us that these matchless works are the few flowers blooming in an age which for most men was one of ignorance and misery.

In his ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’, Gibbon gives an idea of the outlook of a typical eighteenth-century humanist. He concluded that there was little danger of a new barbarian invasion from the East. Even if it did happen, and Europe was barbarized again, civilization would continue in America. Even if the calamity was world-wide, there would not be a reversion to complex savagery.

Belief in Progress

He observed that man’s ‘progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the world have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of 4,000 years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions; we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of Nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism’.

This is not unreasonable optimism, and has not been falsified. The French and Industrial Revolutions were already shattering the social order before he died, but the nineteenth century showed marked progress. In this century there has been a resurgence of barbarism in Europe, but even the horrors of Stalin’s Russia, of Nazi Germany, and of Hungary today are in the long view fleeting incidents, terrible indeed for those involved but not amounting to a collapse of civilization.

The retreat from reason has been real, and that would be a disappointment to Gibbon, in whose time Catholic superstition and Protestant enthusiasm were both retreating before the progress of reason. But nothing comparable to ‘the triumph of religion and barbarism’ which accompanied the fall of Rome has occurred, even though the stresses of our time make the urbane self-sufficiency of the eighteenth century inadequate. The standards of eighteenth-century civilization, demonstrated so impressively in Gibbon’s work, are still the standards to which the humanist holds. These standards have a universal validity, and Gibbon takes them for granted. They prevent even the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters from being merely destructive. He regarded both writer and reader as gentlemen living by the same standards as Roman patricians: the standards of absolute civilization, indicated by his reiteration of such words as ‘rational’, ‘candid’, ‘polite’, ‘elegant’, and ‘humane’. By these standards he judged men and events in every age. By them the early Christians must appear ignorant and uncouth fanatics; many later Christians must appear irrational and contemptible. Nor was he blind to the faults of the Romans: the opening three chapters describing the Empire under the Antonines have a qualification in almost every line of praise.

Gibbon’s Greatest lesson

The weakness in Gibbon is the weakness of his time. His civilization was less secure than he believed and was soon to suffer upheavals. There is irony in his death at fifty-seven of a disease a easily cured today; the immediate cause was small operation which killed him owing to ignorance of antisepsis. This polished, civilized, humane man died as squalidly as one of the medieval men he despised. A social truce, such as that of the eighteenth century, with a highly developed social system, and humanitarian efforts, are not enough to raise the mass of mankind above barbarism, or to secure a civilization permanently.

Although Gibbon was right to believe no absolute collapse would occur, he and his age, were wrong to assume that the human achievement was sufficiently permanent or widespread or deeply founded. A high civilization must be based on a stable and progressive social, economic, and political system if it is to be more than a brief interlude in history. It needs a development of scientific and industrial resources such as the eighteenth century only guessed at.

Gibbon’s greatest lesson for the modern humanist is that keen and sceptical intelligence, regard for the majestic and noble, and the cultivation of good sense, good order, rational enjoyment and humanity must be supported by an appropriate social system. In the eighteenth century they were not, any more than in the Ancient World, and until they are man’s civilized achievements must be fleeting.

by Adrian Brunel

For Thomas Paine the world was his country and to do good his religion

THOUGH we may differ somewhat in our interpretation of the word ‘humanist’, we all agree that while it implies a rejection of the authority of sacred scriptures, priests, and oracles it stresses the happiness, freedom, and welfare of mankind as a prime aim. To me the humanist is a humanitarian who is guided by his reason, and such was Thomas Paine.

As a boy I was under many humanitarian influences and by the time I was a youth I was active and vocal against such things as bloodsports and racism and in favour of feminism and the under-dog. Naturally these attitudes involved politics and religion, and as the supporters of my various causes came from all sides in political and religious controversy, I was becoming a mixed-up kid. Then my problems were suddenly eased on coming across Thomas Paine’s summing up of his political and religious philosophies with the words: ‘The world is my country, and to do good is my religion.’ To me this was not one of those facile over-simplifications which lead only to greater confusion but an inspired summary which helped me to growing understanding.

I began to read Paine and was further led to accept him as my guide when reading the account of his discussion of liberty with Benjamin Franklin, who declared: ‘Where there is liberty, there is my country.’ To this Thomas Paine, the fighter, replied: ‘Where there is not liberty, there is my country.’ And so I found my idol in the fighting humanitarian—though I have added to my collection of idols since.

Before considering some examples of Paine’s humanist attitude it may be profitable to survey his childhood, a background that was filled with so many occasions for compassion and resentment, which must have determined his ultimate outlook and aims as a man.

Thomas Paine was born in 1737, at Thetford, where his father was a master stay-maker and had a small farm. He was a Quaker, poor and popular, and a freeman of the borough. Thomas’s mother, eleven years older than her husband, felt that she was socially superior to her married position and was aggrieved and harassed by their poverty. She was not a Quaker and held firmly to an unlovely faith in hell-fire, a belief that shocked her son.

The way of life in England as a whole was a reflection of this vengeful design for living. The Assize Courts came to Thetford and passed savage sentences for trivial offences; many a time could young Paine have heard the cries of the condemned and have seen men, women, and even children publicly hanged for petty theft; and almost daily he could have seen unhappy people of all ages locked in the stocks, some eighty yards from the Quaker Meeting House. The only protests against this savagery came from the Quakers, who were a tiny community of some fifty in a total population of 2,000. When Thomas was nine years old troops returning from the massacre at Culloden camped at Thetford and behaved with such brutality that the boy protested to them indignantly—which is the first recorded example of his notable courage.

Thetford was probably as good a place as anywhere for Thomas to observe the workings and effects of the feudal system, for it was on the main road to London, and within two hundred yards of his home were, and still are, the King’s House and the Bell Inn, where he could have seen the dashing equipages of the great nobles and their ladies and compared their obvious riches with the poverty around him.

There is no doubt that all these things had their effect upon Thomas Paine and that his father further influenced him, for he wrote: ‘My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning.’ He went to Thetford Grammar School, but though he distinguished himself in mathematics his father could not keep him there beyond the age of thirteen.

He was then apprenticed to his father as a stay-maker, a craft for which he rather naturally had no liking. As Mr Paine found economic pressure increasingly severe, and perhaps because young Paine became more out of tune with the fundamentalism of his mother and her family, when he was nearly seventeen he ran away to serve on the privateer Terrible (whose Captain’s name was prophetically Death), but as he records: ‘From this adventure I was happily prevented by the affectionate and moral remonstrances of a good father who, from the habits of his life, looked on me as lost.’

Thomas Paine might certainly have been lost entirely, for in an engagement the Terrible lost 175 of its 200 men.

Thomas left home for good in his nineteenth year, again going to sea. Fortunately he soon tired of the life, and then began a period of eighteen years of struggle for existence and persistent search for knowledge, reading, attending scientific lectures, and even teaching in school. When he was twenty-two he married, but his wife died a year later, apparently in childbirth, though there is no record of a child surviving. He was working as a stay-maker, but on his father-in-law’s advice and with the approval of his father he studied to become an excise officer. His first appointment as a supernumerary officer was in his home town, but he was soon promoted and transferred, ending up at Lewes, a town like Thetford in many respects.

Here he lodged with a Quaker tobacconist named Ollive, for although he was critical of the Quakers’ sombre way of life he was drawn to the community by his ‘reverence for their philanthropy’. When Mr Ollive died, leaving a widow and a grown-up daughter, Paine felt that he should move to other lodgings, which he did; but Mrs Ollive was soon in difficulties and so Paine returned, to marry the daughter and in his spare time to help look after the business. Although this was a one-sided marriage of convenience, Paine and Elizabeth were fond of each other, but it seems that the marriage was never consummated, probably owing to the strange inhibitions governing the first year of marriage among some Quakers.

Nonetheless Paine blossomed as a personality in Lewes and in spite of the unpopularity of excise officers in a district that thrived on smuggling he was a man of outstanding popularity, particularly as a debater and the advocate of original ideas. It was at this period that he struck his first blow for the Rights of Man with his petition on behalf of the underpaid excisemen. Although aloof from partisan politics, which he regarded as a contest in what he called ‘jockeyship’, he was said to be a Whig and ‘tenacious of his opinions, which were bold, acute, and independent, and which he maintained with ardour, elegance, and argument’.

His Case for the Officers of Excise, written when he was thirty-five, was printed and distributed throughout the country, it was moderate and even respectful, reasoned and reasonable, exposing clearly the folly of so grossly underpaying men who should be sufficiently rewarded for their integrity to prevent them being tempted by bribes and passing excisable goods free of duty, in which even members of the Government participated.

As was to be expected, this petition made Paine unpopular with the authorities, particularly as he was active in promoting his views among members of Parliament. It was the beginning of the end of his life in England, culminating in losing his job, separation from his wife, and emigration to America under the patronage of Benjamin Franklin.

From America to France

He had hardly been in America five months, working in Philadelphia as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, when the so-called Battle of Lexington occurred, and Paine sat down to think out and put on to paper his views on the war that had begun. The following January, just before his thirty-eighth birthday, he published his Common Sense, a short work which swept the country, converted the leaders of the American Revolution to his view, and prepared the way for the Declaration of Independence. Common Sense was a blue-print for the Declaration and it is even claimed that Paine actually drafted much of this historic document; however that may be, as Cobbett maintained, no matter who wrote the Declaration, Paine was its author.

Having launched his charter of war aims, the Quaker Paine put down his pen, picked up his musket, and distinguished himself as a very gallant soldier. As the fortunes of the American colonists declined, he poured out a series of exhortations and clarifications of the current and changing situations, known as the American Crisis papers. The first began with the famous words ‘These are the times which try men’s souls’ and by Washington’s order was read to his ragged, half-starved, cold, and defeatist troops on the eve of the Battle of Trenton, which they unexpectedly won. For all of Paine’s political writing he would accept no payment, always giving his royalties back to the causes he championed, with the result that he was often desperately hard-up.

The rest of his career during the war is a record of altruistic action and outspokenness. He held high positions, was always sacrificing himself to the cause, was incredibly underpaid, and often did not receive his salary. In the end, though he was too poor to go to the victory celebrations, he was honoured and somewhat rewarded.

He might well have been in Washington’s Cabinet, but once the revolutionary fight was over the reactionaries reappeared, climbed on to the band-waggon and crowded Paine off. In any case, he was tired of politics and happy to retire to his scientific and engineering experiments, and it was his iron bridge and his desire to see his parents that brought him back to England in 1787, after re-visiting Paris.

In both countries he was fêted and in England the great Whigs tried to harness him to their party, without success. But active though he was, the rest from strife was what he needed. When his friend Burke’s sentimental and unbalanced book on the beginning of the French Revolution appeared, Paine felt that he had to accept the challenge and so replied with Part One of The Rights of Man, following it a year later with the second part, in which he outlined his daring and practical plan for something very like a Welfare State.

This was regarded as treason, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and he escaped to France, where he was already an Honorary Citizen and he had been elected Deputy for Calais. Partly owing to the organized antagonism to the new regime by surrounding States, careerists and sanguinary fanatics were goaded into excesses, changing the character of the Revolution from its early idealism, so that Paine was increasingly depressed and disillusioned. When it was proposed in the National Convention that Louis XVI should be decapitated, Paine raised his voice against soiling the cause of the Revolution with the King’s blood; abolish kingship, he said, hold the man as hostage and eventually expel him, but do not kill him. If the vote had been taken on the day of Paine’s plea, the King’s life might have been spared in spite of Marat’s violent outcry against the foreigner, with his unrealistic Quaker principles. In any case, there was only a small majority next day; in the face of an organized mob, fifty-five deputies were absent, and with 690 present, the majority in favour of the King’s execution was seventy.

This was the end of Paine’s career in the Convention, from which he was barred. He retired to his home in the Faubourg St Denis, awaiting his arrest and the guillotine. He decided that there was one thing he must do before he died and that was to set down his accumulated views on revealed religion. Time was short, but he managed to complete Part One of The Age of Reason before his arrest, a remarkable achievement since he had no reference books, not even a Bible. He continued the work in prison, although he contracted prison fever and was always in great pain. By accident (or was it design?), he escaped the guillotine, and some time after the fall of Robespierre, his friend James Monroe, who had replaced his enemy Gouverneur Morris as American Ambassador, got him out of prison, a sick man and strikingly aged; but in eighteen months Mrs. Monroe had nursed him back to comparative health. Eventually he finished Part Two of The Age of Reason, which was published in Paris and London in 1796, Part One having appeared in London, Paris, and New York two years previously.

Some maintain that this was Paine’s most courageous work; it certainly was the end of his career as one of the most influential men of his time. Of course The Age of Reason had considerable effect in stimulating the open-minded to think for themselves, but it was the stick to beat him with that his political opponents needed, and they welcomed the aid of the Churches. Although he fought against these hordes to the end, his physical energy had been too undermined for him to overcome their concerted enmity. He returned to his beloved America in 1802, where he, who had named the ‘United States of America’ and had possibly done more than any one man to create the new country, was neglected and even reviled. He died there in 1809. He still has much to teach us from his writings—and by his example as a fighting humanist.

by H. J. Blackham

Bentham bequeathed a method of reform which laid the foundations of the Welfare State

BENTHAM died in the year of the Reform Act, and it was he who gave principles and a social philosophy to the radical agitation for parliamentary reform which became a political tide. English institutions cried out for reform, but the panic fear excited by the French Revolution was hostile to innovation. In the circumstances, Bentham’s language was reassuring, for it was the language of mechanics not of agitation. Indeed, he himself roundly dismissed the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as ‘terrorist language’ and ‘bawling on paper’, and, in a more famous phrase, ‘nonsense upon stilts’.

This was the attitude to the Revolution of a man who was certainly himself a political innovator, but in the manner of an inventor, a man of device, of ingenious schemes which, at the outset, he had hoped to sell to enlightened despots or to the oligarchy of an unreformed parliament. It was bitter experience of these ‘closed corporations’, these ‘sinister interests’ opposed to the general interest as well as the logic of his ideas, which led him to fix all his hopes on a democratically elected majority, and thus to become the theorist of radical politics.

As a young student, Bentham had discovered the first of these closed corporations, these sinister interests, in the law. He was not prepared to accept as normal and necessary that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, and the day of his revolt, Lord Acton suggested, ‘is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen’.

Into the chaos of the law and its administration he introduced a principle of order, the principle of utility, which he borrowed and which he exploited, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Here was a test which could be applied to laws, to institutions, and to personal conduct, a quantitative principle by means of which legislation, ethics, and politics could be reduced to a science. How?

If pleasure is the only thing good in itself and pain the only evil, and if everyone seeks pleasure and avoids pain, and each is in the main the best judge of his own happiness, it follows that laws, since they take away liberty and impose punishments, are evils which are only justified in so far as they are necessary to regulate coexistence, to induce everyone to refrain from injuring another, to create by device an artificial harmony of interests which maximizes happiness. This was a criterion for law reform which, if pressed, would have resulted in a drastic simplification, a sweeping away of relics, of unnecessary restrictions, and of privileges. And it was a criterion for legislation which would have drastically limited statutes.

On the assumption that pleasure is alone good and that the equal pleasures of any two or more men are equally good and that each is the best judge of his own happiness, it follows that each is to count for one and no one for more than one. In this way, radical democracy is implied in the foundations of Bentham’s thinking; unless men can be treated as identical for the purpose, politics cannot be reduced to a science.

Misgovernment is the worst of evils because it introduces evils which are unnecessary and irresistible, since their means of protection is turned against all the subjects. But misgovernment can be certainly avoided and good government as certainly secured by the employment of the requisite devices. The way to ensure that those in authority were, and were kept, honest, capable, and energetic was to make them appointable, removable, answerable, and punishable by those who put their happiness in their hands, In order to make the interest of rulers coincide with their duty in this way, it was necessary to contrive that the punishment immediately followed the omission of the duty, and the reward its performance.

‘This arrangement presents the idea of absolute perfection said Bentham… ‘because to all the force of the punishment is united all the attractiveness and certainty of the reward.’ Standing in today’s context of behaviouristic studies, one can hardly help seeing Bentham’s politicians as rats in his laboratory, and what a contrast it is to the politics of Burke or of Rousseau. Still, Bentham’s thinking was not without a tradition: one might say, the tradition of Newton’s idealized mechanical thought-models; but already there was a mechanistic or utilitarian tradition in political theory, the tradition of Hobbes and Hume. It was Hobbes who had broken with the classical tradition of political theory, and thought of the State as a device for reconciling men’s selfish interests, not as the means of realizing their higher selves nor of protecting their natural rights. Bentham carried this line of thinking to a conclusion.

Towards Democracy

Bentham’s theory of representative government was essentially the same as Thomas Paine’s in Common Sense. And to show that a democratic constitution was practicable and did produce the promised fruits, he instanced the USA.

‘No other constitution is there, or has there been, under which, in anything like so small a degree (slave-purchasing and pertinaciously slave-holding States always excepted) the interest and happiness of the many have been sacrificed to those of the ruling and influential few: no other, under which what yet remains of that sinister sacrifice, will, with so little difficulty, and sooner or later with such perfect certainty, be abolished’.

What was needed to complete the utilitarian thought model of a self-regulated society governed by self-executing laws, producing maximum energy, efficiency, liberty, security, and happiness, was borrowed by Bentham from the political economists; the theory of economic man pursuing unhindered his enlightened self interest in a self-regulating market.

It is easy today to refute Bentham (and Hobbes); but all abstract intellectual systems, whatever their uses, are highly vulnerable and doomed. The psychological, moral, and sociological shallowness of Bentham’s assumptions and the inadequacy of his analysis are easy to see now; what is less evident is the bold relevance of his thinking in his own time, its essential applicability to the needs of the day.

At the turn of the century, England lacked the modern institutions which would enable her to strive and thrive in the new world in the making. Bentham provided the constructive principles for institutional invention and reform, renovation and innovation. Comte tried to do the same for France in the next generation, and the comparison serves to bring out how successful Bentham was as a thinker. His ideas really were applied.

He it was who introduced the spirit and principles of modern social legislation which transformed the institutions of this country in the nineteenth century. The legislative and administrative foundations of our modern highly organized Welfare State were definitively laid in the nineteenth century, and the most decisive social changes in our history took place then and not before nor since, and they took place under Benthamite inspiration and guidance.

His professed disciples, the doctrinaire Philosophical Radicals, were influential enough. The Mills and the Benthamite legal members of the Viceroy’s Council left their mark on Indian administration; the Durham Report (staff-work of Charles Buller) was a landmark in imperial relations: Molesworth helped to mould our colonial policy in a formative phase; the Utilitarian philosophy dominated the universities throughout the greater part of the century; in domestic policy, the hand of Edwin Chadwick, Bentham’s secretary, is seen in a series of monumental reports on the Poor Law, Public Health, Constabulary Forces, and Factory Labour, in which, by his power of social analysis, Chadwick during twenty years brought to bear on the government from the inner advisory circle the influence of Bentham’s administrative method: investigate, legislate, inspect, report.

But Bentham’s influence transcended party lines. The reform of parliamentary representation, the reform of commercial laws and institutions to facilitate enterprise and business, the opening of the public service to competition, the dismantling of privilege and the emancipation of the individual: these were measures which forced themselves for the needs of the times on the deeply conservative yet moving minds of Peel, Gladstone, and Disraeli, who formed the main administrations in the creative political work of the century.

Discovery of a Method

How was it that Bentham’s radical individualism, his insistence that each is the best judge of own interest, his movement to sweep away unnecessary traditional legislative restraints, fathered the structure of social legislation which has destroyed individualism? There were two main reasons: (1) the ordinary industrious worker had to be enabled to be self-dependent, and the provision of the basic conditions of self-help was found to require far-reaching social organization, with powerful central and local organs of administration; (2) the inertness or the obstruction of interests compelled the Government to take initiatives.

Thus Bentham in sponsoring political democracy and methodical reform sponsored social democracy and socialism. The Fabians in their methodical approach were his heirs, and Sidney Webb was the personal disciple of J. S. Mill. When the present secretary of the Labour Party said that the Labour movement in this country owed more to Methodism than to Marxism, he might have meant (though he did not) the methodism of Bentham, not that of Wesley.

It is as a methodical reformer that Bentham is great. His method was to analyse existing practice, discern the principles of success, and institutionalize them as rules, whether in politics, economics, legislation, education, administration, the punishment of criminals, or parliamentary debate. His greatness is measured by his practical success, for which he was largely indebted to loyal and gifted friends and disciples, pre-eminently James Mill, his spokesman, but hardly less notably Francis Place, Edwin Chadwick, and J. S. Mill, with a host of proselytes throughout two generations. The disciples include also the American Pragmatists, in whom Utilitarianism had a second and mature birth followed by an influential career, with John Dewey as the American oracle.

What Bentham and his friends attempted and achieved in education is a chapter in itself, and a special chapter in the history of British education. For it made a clean break with ecclesiastical associations and traditions of learning. Their educational policy brought them into uncompromising hostility to the Church, which Bentham laboured to expose as one of the most ‘sinister’ of closed corporations, and their scheme for a public system of primary and secondary education was abortive. But University College was the first secular foundation for higher learning of university status.

Personally, Jeremy Bentham was an amiable eccentric, He described himself as ‘a comical old fellow’ but this did no justice to his good humoured simplicity. He was not more complacent than most philosophers. He was practically benevolent as well as theoretically philanthropic. He loved music, good cooking and the country, and in spite of intensive preoccupation with his theories and projects was never solemn.

His personal contribution to the stream of tendency in which modern humanism is borne forward was immense, and his place in the humanist pantheon is unquestioned; at the same time, this affability and child-like simplicity, not forgetting the ‘comicality’ secure him a place in our affections also.

by Merle Tolfree

The secular religion founded by Auguste Comte has been described as ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’

THE philosophy of Auguste Comte found its point of departure in the state of intellectual and moral anarchy which he found at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This crisis, which in its essence had been developing for at least 300 years, had been brought to a head by the French Revolution. The Revolution, however, for one reason or another, had not resulted in a stable system and had unleashed a long series of social disturbances, which, together with the disorganization of intellectual and moral life, were threatening society with complete disintegration.

In these circumstances it was urgent for philosophy to take stock of itself and of the situation and to set about building a new, positive, and constructive system of thought, basing itself on the one element of stability in a disintegrating universe—the steady progress of science. The organization of intellectual and moral life would serve as a guide to the reconstruction of society, the state of anarchy would be resolved, and humanity would continue its evolution in harmony and lucidity.

Comte saw that the confused state of ideas was due to the co-existence and clash of three different systems, two of them legacies of the past and the third struggling to be born. And these three different systems corresponded to the states or stages of development through which all our conceptions pass. These are the theological stage, the metaphysical or abstract stage, and the scientific or positive stage.

In the theological stage the mind is concerned with inquiry into first and last causes, and the quest of the absolute, and presents natural phenomena as produced by the action and intervention of supernatural agencies. In the metaphysical stage the supernatural agents are simply replaced by abstract forces or entities which in turn cause all phenomena. The objects of research remain the same. In the positive stage, however, the mind renounces all inquiry into first and last causes, abandons the search after the absolute, and seeks to determine, by observation and reasoning, the effective laws of natural phenomena and the nature of their relationships.

The Framework of Science

Every branch of knowledge shows traces of its development through these three states. Man himself passes through them, being dependent in childhood upon theological conceptions, showing a disposition in adolescence to criticize the old gods, but frequently only substituting for them a set of metaphysical abstractions, while in his maturity he sets about constructive thought, based on reality. For it is obvious that, in order that advance may be made in an organic society, some all-embracing theory is necessary which will give coherence and meaning to all the component parts.

It was because of this necessity that man invented the theological background, which later was seen as fictitious but which sufficed at the primitive stage of human investigation. As positive scientific knowledge progresses, theological and metaphysical systems fall into decay. Since the time of Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes science has been gradually emancipating itself from outworn conceptions, but it is necessary now to complete the process and effect an organization of the sciences on a rational basis. For this it is necessary to have a vue d’ensemble, for science has suffered partly from too much specialization and partly from a purely empirical approach, both of which have led to a certain fragmentariness, and the mind has lost itself in too much detail.

A rational arrangement will show the interdependence of all the various sections and the general purpose of the whole. In such an arrangement of ideas the reorganization of society will find a sure basis; without it, the fundamental anarchy will never be resolved and all political action will be of a temporary and palliative nature.

Comte therefore proceeds to his organization of the sciences, moving from the more simple and general to the more complex, and from the abstract to the concrete, and placing them in a strict hierarchy according to their relationships and according to his plan for their study. He places first mathematics, as the most fundamental; then astronomy, as being obviously connected with mathematics and completely emancipated in its positive state from its early beginnings in astrology; then come physics, chemistry, and biology, reaching in logical sequence those sciences of most direct interest to man. Within this encyclopedic framework all the sciences were to be studied.

Reorganizing Society

Whatever criticisms may be made of it as a system, it will readily be seen to be an advance on the arrangement suggested by D’Alembert in the eighteenth century Encyclopedia, where the sciences are grouped according to human qualities, such as memory, imagination, reason. But what is interesting particularly in the Comtian system is that all these sciences are seen as leading directly to the final, most important, science of all —that is, the science of society, or sociology, as it came to be called.

Unfortunately, while all other sciences are developing on the positive level, the science of society still remains encumbered by out-of-date theological and metaphysical conceptions. It is the task of the positive age to develop this universal science, so that all others are seen, together with religions and the arts, as sociological facts, contributing to human history but determined in each case by the degree of development of society at each epoch. In order to make a rational study of society two methods must be employed. We must study the arrangements, at any given period, of the various institutions and groupings, such as the family, the town, the nation. Examination of the dynamic of society will show, however, society in its evolution or progress. These two aspects of study correspond to the study of the conditions of existence and of the laws of movement, and also to the double idea of order and progress, which positivism made famous.

The idea of progress, in this context, means the evolution of society from one stage to the next. The three stages correspond to the three great epochs of human development. The earliest theological stage showed a certain development through fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism. The social relationships of the time were feudal in character, based on slavery, and the dominant aim was that of military conquest. Science and industry were only developed to the point of being able to keep this military system going.

In spite of the futility and incoherence of much of the thought of this period, Comte was a great admirer of it from the point of view of organization, esteeming it to be an organic period, because of the all-embracing nature of its doctrine. The metaphysical period, however, does not show the same degree of cohesion. Science and industry had developed sufficiently for new social relationships to become necessary. Criticism had broken down the old dogma, without, however, putting any coherent body of thought in their place.

It was a period of individualism, delighting in setting up new gods to worship, such as liberty and the sovereignty of the people. According to Comte, these abstractions were hardly an advance on theological concepts, and the effect of the period as a whole was destructive and anarchic. The positive age must re-establish cohesion. Industry has now become the dominant factor. The military aspect, from being first aggressive and then defensive, has now sunk into a subordinate position, and the time is now ripe for society to organize itself, on the basis of its positive philosophy, in a rational and harmonious manner.

Comte’s plan for the organization of society is consequent on his whole outlook and philosophical system. He was, as has been seen, a lover of the hierarchical system. He had no patience with egalitarian ideas. They were to him chimerical dreams, remote from reality. His admiration for the structural wholeness of the Middle Ages is also well known. According to his ideas, his plan is logically formed.

Comte divided society, therefore, into three classes. The first consisted of those concerned with the affective life—women. The second consisted of those concerned with the intellectual or spiritual side—the sages or priests. The third was made of all those concerned with action—the industrials, whom he subdivided into two groups—the directors and the proletariat.

It was no doubt the posthumous influence of Clotilde de Vaux which determined that women would have a class of their own. But if they were to reign, it was only as the centre of family life, for Comte wished to take them out of all with the workaday world. However, in all spheres woman was to recognize the dominance of man, and to accept it ‘with gratitude’.

In the sphere of activity, Comte makes it quite clear that he considers the possession of wealth gives the right to administer, but the administration should be disinterested, altruistic, and with a high sense of social responsibility. The proletariat should be allowed good conditions of work and housing and should be generously paid, but they should never aspire to a share in the government. Comte was against representative government and preached the virtues of resignation. It is important to see that this arrangement was not suggested as a temporary one but was to be the basic pattern for the future.

The second class remains to be considered—that of the priests. The circle is complete. The hierarchy of priests, constantly elaborating the doctrine of positive science and positive history, will give to the positive régime the authority of a corps of belief. It is called the religion of Humanity, and many think that a religion of Humanity is at any rate superior to the worship a Primitive, cruel, and revengeful god. But there can be no doubt that Comte had a certain nostalgia for Catholicism, and that his organization of a religion, complete with ritual, dogma, and observances, shows how he was influenced by the revival of Catholicism in the early nineteenth century.

If we make an estimate of this philosophy, we must give credit to the powerful intellect which sought to bring all knowledge within a comprehensive, homogeneous system. It represents a remarkable effort to impose order on a chaotic universe. It has an architectural structure and symmetry. Moreover Comte’s establishment of sociology as a science was a step of immense value, and his emphasis on positive thinking is a useful counterpart to negativism.

But there are many debatable points. In his view of history Comte gives an over-riding importance to the influence of ideas. Changes in history were brought about by intellectual changes. Other schools, however, see the changes in ideas as themselves produced by economic changes and changes in technique. Which is correct?

But thought must also be organized into a system. This led Comte to undervalue the period that has been, one would have thought, intellectually one of the most fecund in human history—that which extends from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. He conceived the period of big industry to be one of peaceful development, where the military aspect of things would be eliminated and science would serve human happiness.

He was, of course, not to blame for not knowing the cataclysm of the twentieth century, where big industry and science have gone hand in hand towards the total destruction of that Humanity to which he raised altars; but one would have thought that even in the circumstances of the nineteenth century his picture of the benevolent capitalist and the docile, well-fed worker was a little unreal.

In 1830 people were working seventeen hours a day in utterly intolerable conditions for starvation wages, and every attempt to organize for improvement was met with vigorous police repression. The story of the Six Men of Dorset was repeated a hundred times all over Europe. Savage rioting took place in all the main towns as repeated economic crises led to unemployment and famine.

Comte thought that by the imposition of intellectual unity social conflict would be resolved. But the conflict was too bitter and economic realities too pressing. One is forced to the conclusion that he did not understand the nature of the social struggle that was going on before his eyes.

Some of the despised Utopists like Saint-Simon were perhaps nearer the mark when they said that the world was upside down because those who produced did not share the benefits and those who reaped the benefits did not produce. Or that liberal anarchist, John Stuart Mill, who while helping Comte materially, wrote passionate essays pleading for all the things of which the master—the High Priest of Positivism—disapproved: such things as Liberty, Representative Government, and even the Emancipation of Women.

by C. S. Dudley

William Johnson Fox, founder of South Place Chapel, fought for social reforms in pulpit and Parliament

HUMANISM has many facets and the name might be applied rightly to those who have devoted themselves in one way another to the service of humanity without reference to the orthodoxies of traditional religion. Just over a century ago, it is not surprising to find that a humanist approach often went side by with expanding views upon the divine origins traditional Christianity or the absolute authority the Bible as a divine revelation rather than with complete negation. Deism had done its work and during the years which followed the activities of Place or Bentham it had linked with radical politics to produce an attitude to life which was essentially that of an enlightened utilitarianism and which led on to a constant warfare against all which made for cruelty or oppression. At this stage of development, it is natural to seek for pioneers of modern humanism among those who were then leaders in the expansion of religious thought.

William Johnson Fox, founder of South Place Chapel, was a representative man of this group. He had been born of lower middle-class parents in a Suffolk village in 1786 and brought up amid the intellectual ferment of contemporary Norwich. Trained for the Calvinistic ministry at the Homerton Academy, he became the Independent minister at Fareham and there showed the first signs of a remarkable power of oratory.

Fox devoted these formative years to the study the Trinitarian controversy, then a living issue in English dissent, and finally declared himself upon the Unitarian side. After a few years as mister to a microscopic Unitarian congregation at Chichester, Fox was called to a chapel at Bishopsgate in 1817. So far; his world had not been unlike the dissenting world of ‘Mark Rutherford’s’ novels, but he now speedily developed in a far broader atmosphere.

In 1824 the congregation moved to a new chapel at South Place, Finsbury, and their minister became a foremost figure in denominational journalism and in the affairs of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. At this stage in his life it looked as if Fox was destined to become a leading Unitarian divine for whom the activities of his office would form his lifework. He had already equipped himself in controversial theology, but he was also becoming influenced in another direction through his distaste for the narrow trivialities of the conventional pastorate.

Tongues of Scandal

The first big split was to come in 1835. Fox had become the guardian of the two talented daughters of Benjamin Flower, a member of his congregation. For many years his marriage had proved unhappy and he was deeply attached to Eliza Flower.

Mrs Fox, moved by jealousy, withdrew from the household, leaving her children with their father. Eliza Flower remained with him as housekeeper and companion, braving public opinion.

There was no suggestion that the attachment was anything other than Platonic, but the tongues of scandal caused Fox to bring the matter before his congregation, claiming the same liberty as a layman to order his private affairs. In the end, about a third of the seatholders left South Place. Fox then published his open approval of Milton’s views upon divorce as being the only way out of incompatability in marriage.

The other Unitarian ministers of London withdrew from fellowship with Fox and South Place even though he continued to have the support of James Martineau and some of the northern Unitarians. The rift had now gone deep and Fox stood outside any exact religious denomination.

In many ways the upheavals were a turning-point in Fox’s life. He moved to Bayswater and abandoned the title of ‘the Reverend’. Taking to journalism, he ceased any form of pastoral ministry and used South Place purely as a pulpit. Within the chapel, he gave up all administration of the sacraments and his ministry became more or less one of a universal theism with Jesus as the exemplar but quite detached from historical Christianity. His congregation were both intellectual and influential, with the result that Fox became a pioneer in propagating the broadening religious views which were then coming to life. Certainly, with the collapse of Biblicism and with his conception of deity as revealed in all life and motion, he was paving the way for humanism pure and simple, though he remained himself a theist who made use of prayer.

Dangerous ideas

But Fox was more and more drawn away from religious controversy into the vortex of radical politics. During the dangerous days of George IV he had been outspoken upon the radical side and had addressed meetings in favour of reform when he put his own liberty in peril by so doing. ‘The little parson was the bravest of us all’, according to Francis Place, and Fox had allowed no personal concern to stand in the way of that which he regarded as a clear duty springing out of his views of life and of man.

In his political journalism he was a prominent radical writer; his Letters of a Norwich Weaver Boy did much to shake contemporary opinion. He was a Chartist and a constant exponent of the six points of the People’s Charter. But Fox was also an extremely practical man who refused to he beguiled by fantasies or dreams. To him the Corn Laws were the immediate cause of cruelty and oppression; Chartism could not fulfil itself till these iniquitous laws had been swept aside.

He allied with middle-class demands for immediate reform and from 1843 till 1846 he was a paid writer and speaker for the Anti Corn Law League. Again and again Fox addressed great meetings with Cobden and Bright. It is a remarkable sign of his platform progress that he was considered the greatest and most powerful orator of them all.

After this reform had come in 1846, Fox stood at the general election of the following year as candidate for Oldham. It is strange that his nomination caused a split among the Oldham radicals and it took Fox several years to convince the local weavers that he was not a renegade but was a friend of reform. With a short exception, he held the seat in Parliament once occupied by William Cobbett until 1862, when increasing age forced his retirement. His later years were spent almost entirely in politics as the champion of every humanitarian cause.

When he entered the House, Fox was over sixty and suffered from heart trouble. It was too late to commence an outstanding parliamentary career. Nevertheless, he left his mark upon the place. In 1852 he brought forward a Bill demanding compulsory and secular education.

Supported Female Suffrage

Fox was before his time and the Bill was wrecked by contending religious factions. He had been dead for six years when one part of his measure finally became law and he never saw his great desire come about. But it is interesting that Fox understood thoroughly the difficulties which arise when religion is brought into any scheme for national education. Like many others in after years, he saw that the only way out lay in a secular solution which removed religious instruction from school hours.

It is also interesting that, over 100 years later, the obvious solution to overwhelming difficulties still awaits acceptance in England even though the religious issues have brought about all of the problems which Fox foretold throughout almost century of State education. Fox likewise upheld female suffrage when it was thought to be nothing other than a wild and cranky dream.

The friend of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau, he championed the cause both in the House and with his pen. But the Crimean War proved to be a parting of the ways from many friends. Fox was in favour of the war and spoke strongly against the pro-Russianism of Cobden and Bright. In 1857, however, he came out firmly against the oppressive measures following Indian Mutiny, while he was also the champion of political refugees and their right to asylum in England. By then, Fox had become one of the leading humanitarian legislators of his day.

Peace After Storm

In 1846 Fox had found his outside work becoming too great and had attempted to withdraw from South Place. Journalism had brought to him the friendship of Macready, the Brownings, and many of the eminent of the time. It was clear at his work could not be confined to one congregation. Samuel Courtauld, a radical dissenter, by a generous gift, made him financially independent, and Fox now turned almost exclusively to Parliament as his main work in life.

In 1848 he gave a series of lectures at South Place, the ‘Religious Ideas’, which were in practice his farewell to his old pulpit. But they were a remarkable series which vastly stirred thought. Fox expounded a universal sense of religion as revealed imperfectly through the many religions. Its authority lay in the heart, mind, and conscience of man.

His approach was far in advance of any of the conventional religious teachings of the day and anticipated the later ‘Hibbert Lectures’ by almost half a century. It may be said that they set the seal upon Fox’s reputation as a vast broadening influence which helped to break up the hard crust of conventional English religion a century ago.

When he gave up his seat in Parliament in 1862 and finally ceased his journalistic activities in the following year, Fox also gave up public life. He was, as he said, too old to start again. Living quietly in Bayswater, he saw South Place go through bad times and then recover by welcoming Dr Conway to its ministry. Mrs Fox was now reconciled to him and Eliza Flower had been dead for many years.

Old storms were passed and, in 1864, Fox slipped away from life at a ripe age while looking back upon many achievements. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery and, at South Place, Dr Conway conducted the memorial service.

In Advance of His Time

Fox had been one of the best-known men of his day and yet, within ten years of his death, he was almost forgotten in the London where he had once been an outstanding figure. His fate was that of the orator and politician who is soon forgotten when new faces have replaced the old.

As some of his lectures reveal, Fox had in him much of the creative artist. But this urge was constantly repressed in favour of the practical attack upon passing events, with the result that few of his writings or speeches outlived his own day. His mark, deep and wide though it was, lay almost exclusively upon the history of his own time. But it would be ungenerous on these grounds to refuse Fox his niche among great pioneers of humanism.

He brought the progress of thought to public attention and marked out a way of advancement in religion which allied it to a deep concern for the social affairs of man and for the alleviation of every aspect of human suffering. Limited in some ways by the thought and expressions of his own age, Fox was nevertheless a great forerunner without whose work later developments would have been difficult, if not impossible.

by Donald G. MacRae

Although Spencer’s philosophy is out of fashion his services to the social sciences should not be forgotten

A CONTEMPORARY American philosopher, Professor Aiken of Harvard, has written: ‘On the whole, and with many reservations, I am, like Santayana, “in Spencer’s camp”.’ And Professor Aiken goes on to prophesy ‘that Spencer is due for a revival. If his own age over-rated him, ours has underestimated his merits… In times like these Spencer’s dull, discursive sanity has a good deal to commend it’.

It is in that last Sentence that the trouble lies. Spencer never wrote a sentence the meaning of which is not at once apparent. Alas, he seldom wrote a lively, elegant, or attractive one. His prose is dead, heavy, and repulsive. The amount he wrote—though less than he would have wished—is immense. Now there are two rules which philosophers, if they wish to be successful, must follow and choose between. Perhaps Locke is, in modern times, the one exception. Successful philosophy must be either clear and elegant like Hume or Russell, or crabbed, obscure but portentous. This latter mode is temporarily out of fashion in the English-speaking world, but it will revive—I am not sure that certain contemporary linguistic philosophers, paying lip service to the first mode, have not, indeed, revived it already. Spencer, however, is dull without obscurity, and I don’t think this will be forgiven him or Professor Aiken’s prophecy fulfilled.

Yet there is much to be said for Spencer, and our debt to him is considerable. He is also of interest as a representative man of a great and strange period in history and as a remarkable but not untypical member of a class which did much to shape not just modern British society but industrial society everywhere. And to the connoisseur of human character and eccentricity he ought to be irresistibly attractive.

Herbert Spencer was born in 1820 and died in 1903. He belonged to the English nonconformist industrial and commercial classes and, like most of their best minds, had the good fortune to escape the universities of his time. He was early involved—not very successfully—in engineering, mechanical invention, and the railway boom. For a time he worked, not very hard, on The Economist. After the age of forty he devoted himself, aided by legacies and the financial support of his friends, to the production of his philosophical works, hypochondria, and the composition of his Autobiography.

In the imperfect state of nineteenth-century medical knowledge, various minor disorders and worries which today would be cured or despised were of inestimable value to intellectual workers as an excuse for rest, refreshment, and withdrawal from the world. The output of a Carlyle, Darwin, or Spencer depended on their being to some degree hypochondriacs, and the price does not seem a high one. But Spencer was in addition a genuine eccentric. His chair was constructed after a plaster mould of his body; when too poor to afford a cab in wet weather he had spread newspapers to form a path across muddy streets; although marriage had been thought of between him and George Eliot, whose sexual behaviour— though high minded—shocked Victorian principles, yet Spencer refused holiday lodgings on the ground that the landlady had been divorced, and so on… His last years were involved with the Potter family, which produced Beatrice Webb, and their sad comedy can be savoured to the full in the pages of My Apprenticeship.

On the whole the arts counted for little to Spencer save for music, and his piano is still available for the use of students of the London School of Economics. I can recall few visual aesthetic judgments—except of scenery—in either his writings or the record of his conversation but for the comment that ‘French art, if not sanguinary, is usually obscene’.

Cosmic Evolution

His philosophy belongs to an old and very English tradition. Although ontologically he would never commit himself to materialism and argued that such questions were part of the realm of the ‘Unknowable’ to which he attached great importance, yet his roots go back to Hobbes by way of obscure and radical currents in eighteenth-century thought. De facto if not de jure he was a materialist as well as an evolutionist. It was this that put him at the heart of the intellectual movement of his century and which has lost him the attention of succeeding generations.

The proudest achievements of the nineteenth-century mind were those of the physical sciences. Spencer embraced this new knowledge, attempted to synthesize it and to extend its sway into psychology, ethics, politics, and sociology. The master-key to his synthesis was the idea of cosmic evolution. He was an evolutionist before Darwin, and Darwin regarded him as the greatest philosopher of the age. What he had to say about biological evolution fitted the Darwinian theory admirably, and it seemed likely therefore that he might also be right about the evolution of the physical world.

His central formula was simple and was worked out with great—and usually underestimated—learning and scholarship. The cosmos and all its content proceeds, Spencer claimed, from a state homogeneity to one of increasingly defined and specific heterogeneity under the interplay ‘Matter, Motion, and Force’. These are symbols and even in the last analysis remain symbols beyond lies the Unknowable before which we should feel awe and which was in some way to be equated with God,

Spencer was better informed in biological than in physical science, and much that he has to say about physics is muddled and confused. Oddly enough, some of it would square better with the post Newtonian world of Planck, Einstein, and atomic energy than it did with the physics of his own time. Nevertheless the picture of universal development is undeniably impressive, and it not vulgarly optimistic—though why pessimism should be thought to be necessarily superior, intellectually and aesthetically, to optimism I am never clear, though I feel it myself. At any rate, Spencer’s picture of development is correlated with one of a cosmic rhythm in which the movement towards increased organization is reversed and the Primeval chaos restored.

Now all this is very unlike what is normally called philosophy today. I do not, however, think it illegitimate even though unsuccessful. To attempt to synthesize and comprehend in the light the best knowledge of one’s time is bold and difficult. Spencer came nearer success than is given most philosophers, and much of what he has to say is, in detail, still instructive. If it is less alive that, say, the work of Comte, that is because Spencer offers conclusions rather than a method, and this is par excellence in an age of methodology.

But Spencer was not only a philosopher trying to grapple with the new cosmos of the natural scientists. He was also a great social scientist; great in aspiration and in achievement. By a not uncommon paradox, what he thought his most important work in this field has not survived, but methods and concepts have shown a strength that their originator probably did not expect or foresee. In accordance with his general view of reality, he approached society as in some sense an organism, but as an organism of a special kind in which not just a few specialized organs but each constitutive individual has rights and feelings. These organisms struggle with their environments and each other in order to exist. Hence comes the military organization of society created by human fears and needs. War unites societies into larger and more internally specialized aggregates, and thus at last produces peaceful industrial societies.

Such basically is Spencer’s picture of social evolution. It is not very sophisticated, but one might wish that it were true and that industrial societies were essentially peaceful. What is important about it today is, however, that Spencer in working it out gave sociology and social anthropology their essential, apparatus of concepts, usages, and vocabulary, and, in addition, established the use of the comparative method in the social sciences on a sounder basis than had hitherto been achieved. His work gave a clue to the greatest of modern sociologists, E. Durkheim, in his seminal study of the social causes and effects of the division of labour in society. It is in this debt owed him by the sciences of man that Spencer’s central claim to our attention and gratitude lies.

Like others in his generation Spencer went on to try to derive the validity of ethical judgments from his evolutionary views. His attempt, like all others of its kind, was a failure and led him to some odd ideas—such, for example, as his belief that the satisfactions of sex are keener for civilized than for primitive man. His ethics were private, rather than public, and his laissez faire economics and atomistic politics were never among the stronger parts of his system.

Unlike Professor Aiken, therefore, I do not feel that Spencer as philosopher is due for revival, while as sociologist his failures have already been forgotten and his success become part of the subject. His virtues of candour, industry, clarity, and imagination are far more important than his eccentricities and peevishness. He cared about freedom and truth. There is no one of similar breadth of vision among us today, and this is a genuine misfortune. He remains a man of stature and an example of important virtues from a great, past age—strange as the monsters of geologic time which fascinated his contemporaries, and as impressive.

by Humphrey Skelton

The conflict in Mill’s mind between reason and emotion was never completely resolved

IT is the strange fate of philosophers to be remembered largely by their mistakes. The sensible things they said seem so obvious to later generations that the original shock is forgotten. Thus the heresies of yesterday tend to become the commonplaces of today.

This is peculiarly the case with John Stuart Mill. Fame came to him with the publication of A System of Logic. Few people read it today except for purposes of an examination. Everyone who does so has its errors duly impressed upon him. The view that mathematical truths are derived from experience, for example, is regarded as a particularly unfortunate lapse.

Mill’s contribution to modern logic was not as important as Boole’s, nor was he as skilled a philosopher as Bradley. Like so many eminent Victorians he was an amateur of genius in several fields. In our own age of narrow specialization—as inevitable as it is regrettable—such a lone voice may seem to lack the comforting ring of authority.

Emasculated Giant

Between 1840 and 1860 Mill was ‘the one conspicuous figure in the higher regions of thought’, according to Herbert Spencer. The tremendous influence he excited was greatly deplored by Jevons and Bradley. But in the last quarter of the century a reaction set in.

For a time his stock fell, then it made a recovery; and such are the revenges of time that Jevons and Bradley are now among the unread if not wholly forgotten. The reason for this is doubtless that Mill was a far more interesting personality and what agitated his mind still troubles people to day. He was immensely concerned about the problem of intellectual liberty, and that is very much with us still. He was also torn between the competing claims of the emotions and the intellect, reason and the imagination—or, in the jargon of psychology, the conscious and the unconscious.

We do not re-read Mill for his views on epistemology but for his insight into the human problems that continue to assail us. His persona was that of ‘the saint of rationalism’, in Gladstone’s famous phrase; but behind that austere mask his mind was a ferment of romanticism bubbling under the iron lid of his early conditioning. The arid and blinkered type of rationalism imposed upon him by his incredible father strove with a deeply emotional temperament which chafed at the restraint. Bentham and Coleridge were like opposed planets in his strange horoscope.

He never won through to a harmonious synthesis. As is well known, his emotions swept him into an extraordinary relationship with a married woman, Harriet Taylor, and his reason maintained it (in spite of all appearances) on a platonic level. His judgment, however, was so bewitched that he imagined her to be his intellectual equal and sole inspiration—a view which she did not dispute.

If the affair had run a more ordinary course Mill might have been a happier man, but a far less interesting one. It was silly of Carlyle to say that Mill was ‘stuffed with sawdust’. In all probability he was sexually impotent—like Carlyle himself and other emasculated giants of those days. But after such a monstrous childhood it not surprising if he was incapable of entering into a normal love relationship.

His father set out to make him into a prodigy. John began to learn Greek at the age of three and Latin when he was seven. By then he could read six of Plato’s dialogues, without, however, completely understanding the argument. At the age of eight he was familiar with the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; he had read the Iliad and Odyssey in the original and was studying arithmetic and history. He did not read Aristotle’s logic until he was twelve and there was still the calculus to he mastered.

Small wonder that when he was twenty-one he had a nervous breakdown. In his Autobiography he describes very movingly the melancholia that afflicted him, and we can better understand the reason for it today. His emotions were starved and his brain had been subjected to intolerable stress. During childhood and adolescence he identified himself completely with his father, and in early manhood found part of his mind in revolt.

His intellect matured too quickly in that early forcing-house; but his emotions were immature. He remained in a state of infantile dependence on his father, since there was no other authority he could trust. Some of his contemporaries found a parent substitute in the Church, but this was ruled out for Mill. ‘I acquired the habit of leaving my responsibility as a moral agent to rest on my father and my conscience never speaking me except by his voice’, he confessed.

He was freed from this tyranny by the death of his father. He then turned eagerly to Goethe’s ideal of ‘many-sidedness’, much to the dismay of some of the diehard Benthamites, But the infantile longing for dependence was too deep-rooted to be eradicated at this comparatively late stage. In the end he found a substitute for authority in Harriet Taylor whom he grossly over-estimated although she satisfied an emotional need.

As a man, therefore, Mill failed to achieve the liberation and completeness which is the goal of humanism as a way of life. Unlike Montaigne—or Goethe—his humanism is expressed chiefly in the realm of ideas. His great virtue was the intellectual one of integrity. He did his best to love humanity, but he did not succeed in loving his fellows, and he behaved at times very badly to his family, especially to his sister and his dying mother.

He was a powerful advocate for causes which were unpopular in his lifetime though they have since triumphed. As a young man he nearly got into serious trouble through his support of birth control, then an unmentionable subject. Most of the people who agreed with the gloomy predictions of Malthus thought it better to rely on abstinence or ‘graveyard luck’ than on contraceptives.

Mill also championed the equality of the sexes. His book, The Subjection of Women, helped to create a favourable climate for the feminist movement in spite of derisive opposition. It was translated into many languages and its influence was world-wide. If it is not read today that is because the battle has been so largely won.

Socialism and Liberty

Again, Mill gained a working-class following on the strength of his Political Economy. According to Sidney Webb, this book was one of the main causes of socialism in England. Whether Mill was what we now mean by a socialist may be doubted, even allowing for the many different brands. Communism would have been anathema to him. He would probably have spoken of it as he did of Comte’s system, as ‘the completest spiritual and temporal despotism that had ever been brought to bear upon the conduct and lives of individuals with an energy and potency truly alarming to think of’.

It is true that he called socialism ‘the greatest element of improvement in the present state of mankind’ and stated in his Autobiography that ‘our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond democracy and would class us decidedly under the general designation of socialists’. Nevertheless, he was disturbed by the possible threat to individual liberty that common ownership might bring.

He was passionately opposed to all forms of tyranny: but how could the control of society be left to the whims of uninformed opinion? His father had supported universal suffrage because of his faith that the workers would always regard their interests as identical with those of their employers. John was not so naive.

‘Every man possessed of reason’, said James Mill, ‘is accustomed to weigh evidence and to be guided and determined by its preponderance. When various conclusions are, with their evidence, presented with equal care and with equal skill, there is a moral certainty, though some few may be misguided, that the greater number will judge right, and that the greatest force of evidence, wherever it is, will produce the greatest impression.’

Alas, as John recognized, this is not so; the faith in the rationality of the mass of mankind is as much a myth as the belief in their intrinsic depravity. Many radicals and Benthamites were tempted to think that if only all men could he educated everything would be well. It is greatly to John’s credit that in spite of the pressure of opinion in the avant garde circle in which he moved—in spite of the powerful influence of his father and Harriet Taylor—he was not convinced that life was so simple.

‘The idea of a rational democracy ’, he wrote, ‘is not that the people themselves govern, but that they have security for good government. The people ought to be the masters, but they are masters who must employ servants more skilful than themselves: like a ministry when they employ a military commander, or the military commander when he employs an army surgeon.’

Thinking along these lines raised the question of the limits of the right of society to interfere with the freedom of the individual. Mill’s essay On Liberty, published in 1858, shortly after his wife’s death, is a classic. Together with the Autobiography it will be read long after his other works are relegated to the student and historian. It deals with issues that are of even more urgent importance today than when he wrote. It still appears in new editions, and the latest translation is in Hebrew for Israel.

Mill regarded self-development as the end of life. He saw with utmost clearness that popular prejudice could become a despotism disguised as the will of the people. Prophets could be stoned, innovators persecuted, if there were no checks in a democracy that was a mere counting of votes.

‘Protection, therefore, against the tyranny the magistrate is not enough’, he wrote. ‘There needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling which would compel all other characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.’

There must be certain boundaries across which no government should step, an area ‘sacred from authoritarian intrusion’. And he defined this as follows: ‘The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself his independence is of right absolute. Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’

Thus, today, the doctrine could be invoked in favour of the Wolfenden Report and against treating suicide as a crime. What, of course, Mill could not have foreseen was the employment of psychological techniques in government propaganda and the insidious planting of ideas in the unconscious mind—the last bastion of privacy.

And the most difficult of all problems of liberty as left unsolved by Mill—namely, should we tolerate the enemies of toleration?

But it is less for the answers he gives to specific problems than the liberal values he extolled that the humanist still returns to Mill for refreshment of spirit at a time when fanaticism, indoctrination; lies, and even physical torture make us realize how precarious are civilization’s gains. His honesty and fearless pursuit of truth and justice are a touchstone for the humanist in moments of cynicism and despair. His ambivalence is a wholesome reminder that life is more complex and the universe more mysterious than the cocksure like to think.

by Royston Pike

This glimpse of the personal life of the great scientist contains several surprises

‘STRANGE, isn’t it,’ said the old man as we walked slowly together along the garden path at Downe, ‘that in the room behind those windows Charles Darwin used to lie on his sofa of an afternoon, studying the City page of The Times and speculating, very profitably, in railway shares?’

As he made the remark, Sir Arthur Keith smiled, for, canny Scot that he was and a man who was not ashamed of his peasant ancestry, he was well aware of the value of money. A few minutes later, when we had entered the house, he returned to the subject, as he laid out on the desk before me some of the couple of dozen account books in which Darwin, day by day over all the years between his marriage in 1839 and his death in 1882, recorded every penny that he received and every penny that he spent or saved. Here too were the ledgers into which he transferred the details at intervals, so that at all times he knew exactly where he stood and could keep a tight hold on his always substantial resources. Together the volumes constitute a record which, as Sir Arthur Keith wrote in Darwin Revalued, may well be unique, stretching as it does over a period of forty-three years.

Born into Money

When his cousin, Francis Galton, was in search of data for his study of English men of science he asked Darwin to mention any ‘special talents’ that he might possess. Darwin replied: ‘None, except for business as evinced by keeping accounts, replies to correspondence, and investing money very well.’ It was an excellent answer. He knew himself as well as he knew one of his beloved barnacles. He had indeed a talent for business that in other circumstances—if his health had not been such a worry, if he had ever had to earn his own living—might well have placed him among the foremost private capitalists in the age of Victorian expansion. But in that case it is pretty certain that we should not be honouring his memory today.

Looking back, we can see how fortunate it was that he was born into money. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a popular physician in Lichfield, who wrote verses on the Loves of the Plants, anticipated in some measure the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck, and in the interval between two marriages begat two illegitimate daughters whom he helped in due course to establish a school for young ladies. Charles’s father was also a doctor, and his practice at Shrewsbury must have been large and successful, since when he died in 1848, in his eighty-third year, he left a fortune of round about £280,000. He made a good marriage too, for his wife was a Wedgwood, the eldest daughter of the celebrated potter. The mixture of Darwin and Wedgwood genes provided Charles Darwin with a wonderfully rich inheritance of brain if not of muscle, but his mother also brought with her riches of another kind. It is probably true to say that it was the reeking kilns of the Wedgwood works at Etruria, outside Burslem, that eventually made it possible for Charles Darwin to lead a life of cultured and unharassed ease, free to do his life’s work just when and how he wanted.

Doubtless it was the Wedgwood strain in him that made him so careful about money; certainly there was no real need for it. When he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood—more Wedgwood money!—his father made him an allowance which with various other items brought his income to some £500 a year, added to which was £400 a year from Emma’s father. Year by year he invested in land and stocks, and in most cases his investments turned out very well. In 1858-59, the period which saw the publication of The Origin of Species, his income from investments was £5,186, and in his latter years he was receiving over £8,000 a year. Why, he even at length, though not at first, made money out of his writings; from first to last, his books brought him just over £10,000. And as for income-tax, the highest rate that he ever had to pay was 1s 4d in 1857; for most of the years of his long life the rate was between twopence and tenpence in the pound. No wonder he saved money.

On the face of it, it seems a pity that he should have spent so much time over his personal accounts, and one cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs Darwin, who also had to keep a strict record of just how much she had paid out on cab fares and servants’ wages and dress (remarkably little in her case). Well-to-do, comfortably off—such terms hardly apply to a man in Darwin’s position; he was wealthy, indeed immensely rich by present-day standards. When he died his estate was valued at approximately £282,000, enough to provide each of his five sons with £40,000. Keith is surely right in saying that Darwin’s answer to Galton’s question was an understatement; ‘Darwin, the great naturalist and philosopher, was also a great financier.’

Now that we know something of his origins, we may perhaps appreciate the better the extraordinary character of his achievement. In his early days he collected birds’ eggs and mineral specimens, but was far more interested in field sports. There was a very real risk that he would become one of the huntin’, fishin’ set for good. He might well have developed into a country squire, with no interests beyond his rod and gun and bottle. On one occasion his father, in an untypical outburst of exasperation, let fly at him with the accusation: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to your family.’

Nor for years did he give any sign of intellectual distinction. He went to Shrewsbury School, where he was taught some history and geography, tried to learn Latin and Greek, and was almost persuaded that an interest in science was beneath the notice of a gentleman. At sixteen he was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine alongside his elder brother Erasmus, but he didn’t like the look of operations without anaesthetics and never got within sight of qualifying as a doctor. He thought he might be a clergyman, but was not enthusiastic about the idea. His career at Cambridge was undistinguished. His passion for shooting and hunting and riding across country got him into a sporting set, where ‘we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards’.

Though never a scholar in the strict sense, he loved reading. As a boy at Shrewsbury he used to slip away to a window-seat in the thick old walls and bury himself in the historical plays of Shakespeare. He also read the poems of Scott and Byron as they came out. Later he took much delight in Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on his shore excursions during the voyage of the Beagle he never forgot to put a copy of Paradise Lost in his haversack. After the age of thirty and even beyond it, poetry gave him much pleasure, but then the absorbing nature of his scientific interests gradually excluded it from his reading, until the time came when he had to confess that ‘I cannot endure to read a line of poetry’. He still read novels, or had them read aloud to him. ‘I like all if moderately good’, he wrote in his Autobiography, ‘and if they do not end unhappily, against which a law ought to be passed. A novel according to my taste doesn’t come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman, all the better.’

Devotion to Truth

Music was another of his early interests: it is on record that at Cambridge he used occasionally to hire the choristers from King’s College chapel to sing in his rooms. He liked looking at pictures, and had a keen eye for beautiful scenery. But in course of time he found Shakespeare intolerably dull, music set him thinking too energetically about what he was already working on, and fine scenery no longer gave him the exquisite delight that it once did. Darwin was sorry, and the blunting of his aesthetic sensibilities has been adduced as a horrid warning of what may happen to those who try to probe too deeply into the mysteries of creation. The argument would carry greater weight if those who use it were themselves distinguished for light and learning, which as a rule they are not.

Surely it is to Darwin’s credit that wealth did not enervate or corrupt him. Indeed, his career of selfless devotion to a noble ideal, the disinterested search for truth about the processes of Nature and their origin, might well be accounted an argument in favour of inherited wealth in the social economy.

In the heat of the intellectual turmoil that his books stirred up he remained ever the English gentleman. He was a loving husband, a devoted father, a good neighbour, a firm and generous friend. Down House when he lived there must have been a happy place, what with a crowd of children growing up, visitors coming and going, and plenty of servants to do the chores—Darwin’s manservant, a cook, four housemaids, two menservants in livery, in addition to gardeners and stable-hands. Today the glory of the place has departed, and not even a ghost remains.

If we find it difficult to imagine Darwin as a very likeable human being it must be because in the photographs, and in John Collier’s portrait, he is shown as an old, old man with a flowing white beard. It comes as a shock to recall that he was no more than seventy-three when he died. But the Darwin who wrote The Origin of Species was a balding fifty with side-whiskers, and he did not grow a beard until he was nearing his sixties. He was about six feet in height, although an habitual stoop made him appear not quite so tall. His complexion was fresh, his eyes blue-grey under bushy eyebrows and deep overhanging brow. What impressed those who met him was his transparent sincerity, his simple goodness, the sunny geniality of his temperament save when he was sunk in one of his moods of nervous depression, and his formal, old-world politeness. His temper was serene, but any act of cruelty roused him to indignation and anger.

Because he was such a considerate sort of fellow, he arrived at last in Westminster Abbey. He did not care for arguing about religion (or indeed much else) and was afraid of hurting people’s feelings, particularly his wife’s. Mrs Darwin was a sincerely religious woman, who notwithstanding her Unitarian leanings regularly attended the village church with her children, but anyone who has read the Autobiography can have no doubt that Darwin was what he styled himself—an Agnostic. Recently a new edition of the Autobiography has been published in which the editor, Darwin’s granddaughter Lady Barlow, has included a number of passages which were omitted from the original edition for family reasons. These do not amount to much, but there is one passage worth quoting that deals with the progress of his religious disbelief: ‘The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can hardly indeed see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.’ Mrs Darwin annotated the MS that she would dislike this passage to be published. ‘It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief—but very few now wd. call that Christianity (tho’ the words are there).’

Nowadays we often hear it said that Christianity has gained through the general recognition of the truth of the evolutionary theory— that Darwin was responsible for sweeping away much theological lumber and for giving a much needed stimulus to Christian thought. Compared with such pious shuffling, Darwin’s verdict on his life and work has a rock-like simplicity. ‘My success as a man of science ’, he wrote on the last page of his Autobiography, ‘whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these the most important have been—the love of science—unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject—industry in observing and collecting facts—and a fair share of invention as well as of common-sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that thus I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of scientific men on some important points.’

by Cyril Bibby

Dr Bibby is the author of a biography of T. H. Huxley due early next year

THE word ‘agnostic’ was coined by T. H. Huxley, he tells us, because early in life he discovered that one of the unpardonable sins was for a man to presume to go about unlabelled: ‘The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I could find no label to suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one.’

The new word rapidly caught on, for it provided a convenient unifying badge for several hitherto separate movements of thought. The high philosophical scepticism, with its roots in eighteenth-century France and seventeenth-century England, the traditional working-class secularism and anti-clericalism, and the new evolution-minded scientific rationalism, all combined in the group which founded The Agnostic Annual. Huxley, it is true, was never too well disposed toward Charles Watts, whom he considered not a suitable person to represent free thought on the London School Board, and he refused to support Foote in his trial for blasphemy on the ground that the heterodox had no right coarsely to insult the beliefs of those who were orthodox, but nothing could prevent his becoming the prime representative of agnosticism in the public mind.

Champion of Rationalism

There had been many highly respectable sceptics before Huxley, but they had in the main merely exercised the usual privilege of the well-placed in an undemocratic society, that of expressing quietly among their equals opinions which would have sent an artisan to gaol. There had been outspoken rationalists who were not very respectable, but they were largely disregarded and otherwise abused or persecuted by polite society. But here was the leading scientist of the age, influential at Oxford and Cambridge, a Crown Senator of London University and Lord Rector of Aberdeen, a Governor of Eton and the intimate of the mighty, Secretary and then President of the Royal Society, and finally a Privy Councillor—by every test of Victorian society one of the most respectable of men—and yet he showed no more regard for presbyter in Edinburgh than he did for prelate in Oxford.

He minced no words in his public lectures up and down the land, he boldly entered the citadel of theology to tell the clergy in Sion College what the facts of geology implied for the myths of Genesis, and when he engaged in public controversy with Gladstone he left the Prime Minister looking uncommonly slashed about. Here indeed was a champion after the people’s heart, one who spoke straightly and yet insisted that there was nothing disreputable about being a rationalist.

‘Darwin’s Bulldog’

Roughing it round the world as the young assistant-surgeon of the cockroach-ridden frigate HMS Rattlesnake, Huxley had written in his diary ‘Gott hilfe mir! Morals and religion are one wild whirl to me’, but all his life he was to be preoccupied by questions of morality. Brought up in evangelicalism and temperamentally attracted to religious thought, he nevertheless found very soon that intellectual honesty forbade him to remain a Christian. He had no a priori objection to the doctrine of immortality or to any of the miracles upon whose truth Christianity rests, but he felt entitled to demand some adequate evidence for statements so inherently improbable. ‘The longer I live,’ he declared, ‘the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel “I believe such and such to be true”,’ and he was not prepared to make such assertions on the basis of inadequate documents or institutionalized tradition.

Although Huxley’s agnosticism was basically philosophical, it was inevitable in the conditions of his time that he became deeply involved in the evolution controversy. As ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ he bore the brunt of the battle with the Churches, and he was determined that the theory of evolution should get a fair hearing and not be submerged in a flood of abuse. ‘After all,’ he remarked, ‘it is as respectable to be modified monkey as to be modified dirt.’

He was ready to cooperate with those liberally minded clergy, like Charles Kingsley, who sought to cleanse religion of its superstitious accretions and bring it into harmony with scientific fact, but he was not willing to pretend that things were true which in fact were untrue or at least unproven. And, when he was told that even bishops and archbishops had quietly abandoned some of the traditional beliefs, he asked a simple question: ‘Why, then, do you not teach these things to your congregations?’

In a notebook of aphorisms Huxley made two entries which, on the one hand, crystallize his contempt for dishonest compromise and, on the other hand, indicate his general view of religion as a positive factor for humanity. The first entry is:

The second entry is::

Behind and beneath all his controversies with the Christians, Huxley always had this basic belief, that it was possible to build a system of religion, free of dogmatic theology and superstitious demonology, on the basis of scientific fact and in a spirit of scientific humanism. For the Positivist system of Auguste Comte, with its authoritarian structure and secular priesthood, he had no sort of sympathy, characterizing it in a brilliant apophthegm as ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’. Nor had he much more regard for the efforts of people like Herbert Spencer to extract an ethic from a theory of evolution and the natural struggle for existence.

From the point of view of the moralist, he insisted, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiators’ show, and ‘the course shaped by the ethical man—the member of society or citizen—necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical man—the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom— tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle’. Those who sought to apply to human society the idea that progress necessarily resulted from unlimited competition were, in Huxley’s view, merely distorting Darwinism for the benefit of the apologists of laissez faire capitalism.

Science or Superstition

In these more mealy-mouthed days, when a sort of phoney truce has been set up between science and orthodoxy by a tacit agreement to use words with a double meaning, it is refreshing to go back to the more open and forthright controversies of the Victorians. Writing in The Nineteenth Century, Huxley scathingly remarked that ‘Nothing has done more harm to the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding them, when in the pulpit, as a sort of chartered libertines, whose divagations are not to be taken seriously’. He took the clergy seriously enough, and whether it was the Chancellor of St Paul’s or the Bishop of Oxford or the Archbishop of York, he allowed them no escape from the words they had uttered. Hurling massive learning at their heads with almost contemptuous ease, much better versed in theology than any of them in science, he maintained the advantage over the establishment in a manner unknown in our times. We have no Huxley—and if we had, it is very doubtful whether the country’s leading editors would give him the freedom of their pages as they did in those days.

When Huxley was criticized for spending such efforts on the demolition of Gladstone’s defence of the story of the Gadarene swine, his reply was illuminating. The great question at issue, he said, was ‘whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it, as degrading falsity… Whether the twentieth century shall see a recrudescence of medieval papistry, or whether it shall witness the severance of the living body of the ethical ideal of prophetic Israel from the carcase, foul with savage superstitions and cankered with false philosophy, to which the theologians have bound it’. There were many in Huxley’s generation who naively assumed that the advancing flood of scientific knowledge would automatically submerge all remnants of archaic error, but our own generation can see how much more realistic was his estimate of the credulity of man and the survival power of superstition.

The Invention of Doubt

‘I am inclined to think’, Huxley once wrote, ‘that not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt… For it is out of doubt of the old that the new springs; and it is doubt of the new that keeps invention within bounds.’ Above all, he urged, it was necessary to doubt those who, in whatever field of human thought, claimed infallibility, for ‘ no personal habit more surely degrades the conscience and the intellect than blind and unhesitating obedience to unlimited authority.’

He once wryly remarked that, if ever there were a General Council of the Church Agnostic, he would probably be declared a heretic; and he was entirely opposed to the creation of ‘an Established Church Scientific, with a hierarchical organization and a professorial Episcopate’. Science, he saw, would increasingly become a highly specialized business, and there would be great danger of the emergence of a new form of authoritarianism, with a priesthood of the few men initiated in the scientific mysteries.

To guard against this danger there was only one effective step: the complete bouleversement of education so that every citizen understood enough about science and its methods to be able to form an opinion on the great issues which would arise—he was even optimistic enough to believe that ‘nothing can now prevent [scientific knowledge] from continuing to distil upwards and permeate English society, until, in the remote future, there shall be no members of the legislature who does not know as much of science as an elementary schoolboy’.

A New Morality

It is therefore not surprising that, on the London School Board and the Governing Body of Eton, by lectures to all classes of society across half the land, through the columns of periodicals of all sorts, Huxley devoted himself to the diffusion of scientific knowledge and, more important, to the promotion of scientific understanding. He had a sensitive appreciation of art and literature and music and did not at all wish to make education one-sidedly scientific, but he was in no doubt that science should be at the very centre of any culture for the modern world.

‘I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which alone can still spiritual cravings’, he told one audience; ‘I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.’

He suggested that the great need was to discover pragmatically what would happen if people behaved in a certain way and leave the question of what ‘ought’ to be done for decision in the light of the evidence. This desired new science of ‘eubiotics’ still remains to be established, but in proposing it Huxley established himself unambiguously as a thoroughgoing scientific humanist.

by F. H. Amphlett Micklewright

Charles Bradlaugh fought, suffered and triumphed in the cause of freethought and social justice

AMONG the various forces which led to the breaking-up of traditional religion in England during the last century the iconoclastic was perhaps the most pungent so far as the working-classes were concerned. Various movements such as Chartism and Owenism had paved the way for a gospel of secularism, a teaching that man’s social interests are bounded by this world of experience and that he has no need to pay any attention to religion or to another life.

George Jacob Holyoake was an early propagandist of this outlook, but it was not for another generation that it was to become a national movement, influencing politics both locally and over a wider scale, allying itself with aggressive atheism, republicanism, the population question. Yet this growth actually took place and, by the eighteen-seventies, the National Secular Society, with its journal, the National Reformer, was a power among the working-classes and did much to break up both traditional religious views as well as the petty tyrannies of ecclesiastical autocracy.

Early Struggles

In this movement one man stands forth as the leader par excellence. Nationally, Charles Bradlaugh is but the shadow of a name today. But at this period he was a great national leader who did much for the liberation of thought and for the right to freedom of expression.

Charles Bradlaugh was born in Hoxton in 1833 of poor parents. He was brought up in an orthodox membership of the Church of England and, at the age of fourteen, was being prepared by the Rev J. G. Packer for confirmation. Bradlaugh asked awkward questions about the doctrines that he was taught, and Mr Packer replied by suspending him from his office as a Sunday school teacher. Bradlaugh gave up going to church and listened to the open-air speakers in Bonners’ Fields. As a result he was converted to freethought and made his views known.

This was too much for Mr Packer, who sought the help of Bradlaugh’s father. Charles was given the opportunity of recanting or of leaving both home and job. The young Bradlaugh took the persecution at its face value and found shelter with the widow and family of Richard Carlile, a freethought leader of a generation before.

Life was difficult and he did not find it easy to make a living. In a fit of despair, seeking money to pay a trifling debt, he enlisted in the Dragoons and was a trooper for a few years until he bought himself out with a legacy from an aunt.

He then became a solicitors’ clerk, receiving a training from which he derived his knowledge of law and procedure. Later, he was to spend a few years in business in the city. But he had already become a prominent figure in the National Secular Society, of which he was also to serve as president for many years.

Lecturing and writing under the name ‘Iconoclast’, Bradlaugh spent his week-ends touring the country. The nom-de-guerre was necessary as Bradlaugh had his living to earn and he had already some experience of the methods used by the orthodox against opponents. During this period he fought several County Court actions vindicating the right of secularists to the legal protection of their contract when they hired a hall for freethought lectures as well as working for the defeat of the stamp-tax on newspapers.

Giving up business in order to devote his whole time to this work, Bradlaugh threw off his mask. By now, he was well known in freethinking circles. A powerful orator and debater, his services were in constant demand. He had equipped himself with a fair amount of Biblical scholarship and was no mean match for his Christian opponents.

Few others could have trounced as he did the scurrilities of the Rev Brewin Grant and other leading lights of the Christian Evidence platform. At the same time, he took a hand in radical politics and was of assistance in drawing up the Fenian manifesto of 1867. He was a foremost leader of the working-class republican movement which attracted so much notice during the eighteen-seventies.

His secularism was of a piece. Because he was a secularist and atheist, he was also a strong opponent of all that made for injustice or oppression. It led him to attack the monopolies of a State Church but also to plead for Irish Home Rule. In 1869 he first stood as radical candidate for Northampton on a secularist programme, but was at the bottom of the poll. From 1874 he had the devoted assistance of Mrs Annie Besant, whose marriage to a Church of England vicar had been broken up by her religious heterodoxy.

Bradlaugh had long believed that misery was caused in poor homes by over-large families. The police had prosecuted a Bristol bookseller for selling an old birth-control pamphlet, the Fruits of Philosophy by an American, Dr Knowlton. Charles Watts, the freethinking publisher, refused to defend himself for selling the book when he too was summoned. Bradlaugh and Mrs Besant then stepped in.

They issued a new edition and sold it themselves in order to challenge the authorities. A prosecution followed, they were convicted at the Old Bailey and sentenced to be imprisoned, but the judgment was reversed upon appeal. The battle over this out-of-date pamphlet marked a new stage in birth-control propaganda so far as England was concerned, and Bradlaugh performed both a yeoman and dangerous service to freedom of utterance.

After several unsuccessful attempts Bradlaugh was elected as member for Northampton in 1880. Immediately he faced more trouble by claiming the right to affirm instead of taking a theological oath. The House of Commons disallowed the claim. Bradlaugh then asked to be allowed to take the oath but was refused because of his atheism.

A four-years’ battle followed. Conservatives opposed Bradlaugh because they did not like his radicalism. The Fourth Party, headed by Lord Randolph Churchill, opposed him because they found pious horror of atheism a convenient means for embarrassing Gladstone’s administration. More than once Bradlaugh was unseated by resolution of the House and immediately re-elected by his faithful constituents at Northampton. On one occasion he was expelled by a posse of police and only the tact of Bradlaugh himself and of Mrs Besant prevented a riot in Palace Yard.

Shameful Slanders

The end of the struggle came after the general election of 1884 when Speaker Peel, who had succeeded to the chair, refused to stand between an elected member and his oath, thus settling years of bitter controversy in a few seconds. As a member, Bradlaugh proved himself of the greatest value and won the high praise of the redoubtable Mr Gladstone himself. He carried an Affirmation Bill preventing any other elected freethinker from being forced to undergo his own experiences.

He worked hard for India; he took a deep interest in questions of market tolls and dues, a matter of which he had a wide knowledge; and he toiled for his constituents. In later years the House of Commons gave him a rival pulpit to that of his old platform at the Hall of Science, his London headquarters.

It was natural that this work for freedom and for the emancipation of the working-classes from everything which made for oppression should have been conducted against the background of a campaign of unparalleled slander concocted by his Christian opponents. There were few vile things which could be said against Bradlaugh himself, his daughters, or Mrs Besant which the Christians left unsaid. On several occasions he took his libellers to court and received damages, which he handed to the Masonic Boys’ School.

The common complaint made against him by Christians was that he had deserted his wife. Bradlaugh never replied and not till after his death did it appear that chivalry had sealed his lips. Mrs Bradlaugh had become a hopeless dipsomaniac and he had been forced to place her away privately in the country. Even long after his death it was not uncommon for clerical slanderers to affirm that Horatio Bottomley was the son of Bradlaugh and Mrs Besant although age alone made the parenthood impossible.

Few men can have been more slandered. A libellous biography, concocted by a jealous rival freethinker and in which the Rev Brewin Grant took a hand, was the subject of a law case not long before his death. Bradlaugh certainly had plenty of experience of the practical side of Christian evidential activity.

Journey’s End

When Bradlaugh died in January 1891 he was a tired man, aged by the long years of hard battle. He had placed a resolution before the House to expunge from its minutes the resolutions of censure passed upon him during the parliamentary struggle. It became clear that he would be too ill to take his place to move the resolution and it was taken over by Dr W. M. Hunter, who obtained a promise that the Government would abstain from opposition. When Dr Hunter rose to bring forward the motion he had to tell the House that the member for Northampton was dying. The House heard the news with shocked silence for, during the intervening years, Bradlaugh had become deeply respected personally by members of many different views.

Nevertheless, the Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, a devout Churchman, moved the rejection of the motion with characteristic unction and boorish piety. But he was swept aside by a House which had no patience with his religious witness at such a time and the offending resolution was ordered to be removed for ever. Bradlaugh was, however, never to know that greatest victory of all. When a messenger from the House arrived at St John’s Wood, he had already lapsed into his last unconsciousness.

Some days later he was laid to rest in silence at Brookwood Cemetery. The funeral was attended by thousands, Indians as well as Englishmen, who represented the causes for which Bradlaugh had fought. Perhaps the most touching scene was that of the file of men who took purple and green rosettes from their coats and threw them into the open grave, saying that they would never be needed again. They were the old Northampton colours.

Bradlaugh was in every respect a great and good man who fought for honesty of belief and purpose. A glance at his published writings reveals a materialism characteristic of his day, a radicalism bounded by the contemporary outlook, and a type of opposition to the Christian faith which was called forth by the circumstances of the nineteenth century. His secularism has long tended to merge into wider movements ceasing to attract many as a separate or isolated issue. But Bradlaugh himself stood forth as a beacon-light of sincerity, a warrior for human freedom and happiness, and a drastic opponent of all forms of conventionalism and humbug.

For these reasons alone, even if the Knowlton or parliamentary struggles had never taken place, he would deserve to be recalled as a great pioneer of humanism who opened the way to vast developments for the future.

Bradlaugh had known his moments of disappointment. One of the most bitter was when Mrs Besant left him for theosophy after serving for over ten years as his lieutenant. But, at the end, he could look back upon many victories of achievement in his war against superstition and in his struggles to free human life. For these reasons he still stands forth as among the greatest humanists of his generation, one who was none the less great because he spoke not as an academic figure but as a common man to the common men whom he sought to teach and to serve.

by George Godwin

Common sense became genius in this fiery orator, who brought freethought to the American masses

WHEN Robert Ingersoll was born in the little township of Dresden, in the State of New York, almost a century had passed since the Great Awakening had convulsed the New England States: but the spirit of Jonathan Edwards, the Grand Inquisitor of that revival, still darkened the lives of men and women—and children, too.

Throughout the decades that came after that morbid manifestation small-scale revivals were endemic throughout New England. They were usually initiated by professional revivalists travelling from settlement to settlement thundering threats of hell-fire and eternal damnation for all who did not repent and thus qualify to ‘be saved’.

Into this atmosphere of terror of a malevolent deity Robert Ingersoll was born in the shoddy little frame timber house that served his father, the Rev John Ingersoll, as manse.

Ingersoll’s father was a minister of the ‘New School’ Presbyterians; a cover-to-cover Fundamentalist. There exists a painting of him based on a daguerreotype. It depicts a dour and humourless face, the mouth tight-lipped and grim.

Since God so commanded it, he beat his children; but he also loved them, and Robert, the youngest, returned that love throughout his life and wrote and spoke of his father in terms of respect and affection.

There was no security in the Ingersoll home, for the poor, ill-educated minister, whose income never exceeded $300 a year, was constantly on the move, a peripatetic evangelist who dragged his poverty-stricken family from the State of New York through Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Vermont, Ohio, Illinois, and several other States.

Ingersoll has described his sufferings as a small child from the ministrations of visiting revivalists and from the all-pervading gloom cast by an artificially-produced sense of guilt. ‘The two hours sermon over,’ he wrote, ‘the children were examined. The minister asked us if we knew that we all deserved to go to hell, and we all answered “Yes”. Then we were asked if we would be willing to go to hell, if it was God’s will, and every little liar shouted “Yes”.’

Ingersoll was seven years old when a Baptist revivalist, expatiating on the story of the rich man and Lazarus, so revolted the small boy by his blood-curdling descriptions of the eternal fires of hell that the little fellow concluded that such sufferings in the hereafter could not possibly be. ‘It is a lie,’ he told himself; ‘I hate your religion.’

Such were the conditions of his childhood that engendered in Ingersoll the repugnance to Christianity that in maturity developed into its complete rejection as a religious system. Reading widely history and comparative religions, he became convinced that not only Christianity but all religions based on supernaturalism were harmful to humanity, that they divided man against man, son against father. He held the office of priest in abhorrence as the archetype of parasitism: the parson and his tithe, Peter’s Pence, the peddled Indulgences of the Popes.

Like other men of great ability and strong character, Ingersoll surmounted the early handicaps of childhood poverty and limited educational opportunities. After a spell as a village schoolmaster he was called to the Bar of Illinois. He rapidly made a reputation as an advocate of remarkable forensic ability and persuasive oratorical power.

Why, then, it may be asked, did the successful young lawyer, with a fast-growing practice and with political ambitions, give hostages to fortune by spending time and energy in a sustained onslaught on the Old Testament and on Christianity generally as a system of religion?

This was a question frequently put to Ingersoll. He answered: ‘I did not attack Christianity until I was perfectly convinced that it was not only a false system, but that it had done and was doing an immense harm to the human race.’

The vehemence with which Ingersoll in America, and Bradlaugh, Holyoake and others in England, attacked the orthodox Christianity of their time appears extravagant to an age when Christianity has become, even for the majority who nominally profess it, little more than a social convention. If one excepts the Catholic Church and certain primitive sects, it is true to say that theology has moved towards, rather than away, from Ingersoll’s position. Indeed, not so long since, we had the significant spectacle of an Anglican bishop—the late Bishop Barnes of Birmingham—stating a credo that many a humanist might have found acceptable.

Faith in Science

In childhood, as we know, Ingersoll had been repelled from supernatural religion by the teachings of its fanatical exponents. Throughout the important years of his twenties he was greatly influenced by the series of epoch-making theories and discoveries in the scientific world. He was twenty-five when Virchow published his famous paper on cellular pathology; one year older when Darwin published The Origin of Species; a year older, again, when Kirchoff and Bunsen demonstrated the uniform distribution of chemical substances throughout the universe. And he was thirty when Huxley published his Man’s Place in Nature, suggesting man’s descent from the apes.

Absorbing these new and revolutionary ideas, Ingersoll was persuaded that natural science was the answer to supernatural religion. He stated his faith in one of his lectures: ‘Science is the real redeemer. It will put honesty above hypocrisy; mental veracity above all belief. It will teach the religion of usefulness. It will betray bigotry in all its forms… It will give us philosophers, thinkers, and savants, instead of priests, theologians, and saints. It will abolish poverty and crime, and greater, grander, nobler than all else, it will make the whole world free.’

This noble hope that mankind would achieve so much by science has been, alas, only partially fulfilled. For if religions have brought holy wars, rack and thumb-screw, the flames of an imaginary hell, and those of the auto da fé of reality, science has now filed its petition in moral bankruptcy in presenting mankind with the means and the vision of universal death. The physicists have forced the door of the house of the invisible and have stolen its treasure: illimitable powers of destruction. Such a world was not dreamed of in Ingersoll’s philosophy.

A Great Orator

An orator’s achievement depends on more than the substance of his oration. In his lifetime Ingersoll was regarded as a modern Demosthenes, and he certainly had the power to move deeply great audiences. That was an achievement the more remarkable for his time since he was always, as it were, the devil’s advocate. He attacked the holy of holies, as Voltaire and Thomas Paine, both of whom he vastly admired, attacked it. He had nothing to gain but odium, calumny, and hatred. Yet, such was his prestige as a man that even his enemies came to respect him, and in the case of the Rev Henry Ward Beecher even became his close friend.

Ingersoll was not a profound thinker. He was, pre-eminently, a destructive critic. Philosophically considered, he was a Determinist. ‘Believing as I do,’ he wrote, ‘that all persons act as they must, it makes not the slightest difference whether the person so acting is what we call inebriated, or sane, or insane—he acts as he must.’

Ingersoll’s determinism may well have resulted from his enthusiastic acceptance of Darwinism, with its implication that man is the end-product of a vast chain of causal development, and consequently is so conditioned by psychological and material factors as to possess only the illusion of free will.

Speaking of the theology of those who see in the phenomenal world everywhere evidence of design and purpose—as St Paul put it, ‘All things working together for good’; Tennyson’s ‘Far off divine event to which the whole Creation moves’ —Ingersoll observed: ‘Does it ever occur to them that a cancer is as beautiful in its development as the reddest rose?’

He saw behind the fair face of Nature only blind forces, implacable and cruel, everywhere the negation of the benevolent plan of a benign Supreme Being. ‘She,’ [Nature], he wrote, ‘produces man without purpose and obliterates him without regret.’ Like Thomas Hardy, Ingersoll was painfully conscious of the tears at the heart of things. ‘A heart breaks, a man dies, a leaf falls in the forest, and a babe is born, and the great world sweeps on.’

But the human race will not acquiesce in a verdict against its destiny; its egotism recoils from the idea of a meaningless life and ultimate extinction. And the man who presses home these chilling thoughts can never hope to find favour with the crowd. ‘The sun,’ Ingersoll observed, ‘shines as gladly on coffins as on cradles.’

Yet despite the bleakness of his central theme, Ingersoll the orator was able to fill to capacity the largest halls and theatres in the United States. It is said that he had a fine voice and a splendid presence, full of vitality and magnetism, and his sincerity shone through all he spoke. Though not a scholar in the academic sense, Ingersoll was a very widely-read man and, above all, a Shakespearean. Indeed, much of his imagery and power over words bears evidence of his familiarity with the great dramatist. Many who heard Ingersoll speak bear witness to his greatness as orator.

Dr Conway, in My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, wrote, after hearing lngersoll’s lecture, Some Mistakes of Moses: ‘Every variety of power was in this orator—logic and poetry, humour and imagination, simplicity and dramatic art, moral earnestness and boundless sympathy. The wonderful power which Washington’s attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to Thomas Paine of insinuating his idea equally into learned and unlearned had passed from Paine’s pen to Ingersoll’s tongue. The effect on the people was indescribable.’

Ingersoll was equally effective in debate and controversy. When the North American Review opened its columns to him, by general consent, Ingersoll demolished those who entered the field to oppose him. Among those were W. E. Gladstone and Cardinal Manning. Gladstone, himself orthodox and pious, complained not so much of Ingersoll’s infidelism as of his manner of propounding it as lacking in reverence ‘for subjects that can only be approached in a deep reverential calm’.

To that Ingersoll replied that anything might be the subject of ridicule, save truth.

Ingersoll’s occasional flippancy, or ‘guying’, often gave offence. On one occasion, after listening to a long and dreary discourse on the supreme value of baptism from a Baptist minister, Ingersoll said: ‘Yes; baptism is a good thing—with soap.’

But flippancy and hard hitting in debate and public controversy were incidental to a character almost feminine in sensibility and tenderness. In one of his most beautiful orations, spoken at the graveside of a little child, he asked: ‘Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We cannot tell, we don’t know, which is the greater blessing—life or death.’

It has been told, too, how Ingersoll succeeded by reason in persuading his aged father from his narrow theology; and how, at the end, the old fundamentalist asked his son to read, not from the Bible, but from that passage in the Phaedo where Echecrates puts into the mouth of Socrates his thoughts on the approach of death.

In his professional and private life Ingersoll was a successful man. He gained fame as a great advocate; he fought and attained the rank of colonel in the Army of the North. He was happy in his marriage and adored his children. He had many friends.

In the long history of humanism there are lights that shine as brightly today as they shone centuries ago. But the contribution made by Ingersoll was for his time only. He is a museum piece of the nineteenth century, but that does not detract from his value, for there are many treasures in museums. Yet the quintessence of his philosophy should be valid for all time. ‘I have a creed,’ he wrote, ‘for this, the only world of which I know anything. 1, Happiness is the only good; 2, The way to be happy is to make others so; 3, The time to be happy is now; 4, Help for the living, hope for the dead.’

Such was the credo of the man of whom Georg Brandes wrote that in him common sense became genius.

by G. C. S. Hopcutt

This is the centenary year of a great political scientist and champion of secular education

GRAHAM WALLAS was born a hundred years ago, on May 31, 1858. He came into the rationalist movement late in life, though he had from his early manhood sympathized with its aims and its work. His first connection with the RPA was in May 1921, when he attended the Annual Dinner as a speaker. He quickly made his mark and, by 1926, had become President of the Association—a position he retained till 1929. From then till his death in August 1932 he was an Honorary Associate. At that time he was well known in academic circles, especially for his work on political psychology. Now, however, his work is largely forgotten—at any rate in England—and his centenary is an appropriate moment to bring to light some of the facts of his life.

Dismissed for Unbelief

Wallas belonged to a clerical family of the Evangelical kind and received the usual religious instruction and training at his preparatory schools and at Shrewsbury. This indoctrination did not, however, produce the desired results, for—early in his undergraduate days at Oxford (1877-81)— he rejected supernatural religion once and for all. In 1885 he showed that he had the courage of his convictions. He was then a classics master at Highgate School and his refusal to oblige the headmaster by becoming an Anglican communicant led to his dismissal.

Writing of the episode in The Literary Guide for September 1932, H. J. Laski declared: ‘As a young schoolmaster, ordered to perform devotions in which he did not believe, he did not hesitate to choose dismissal and economic uncertainty rather than hypocrisy and comfort. And he discovered… that what seemed to be the hard way was in fact the way of emancipation.’

This episode could, however, have wrecked his career, for in those days the social consequences of the expression of religious unbelief were much more serious than they are now. As it was, he remained in the wilderness till, in 1890, he was fortunate enough to obtain a post as a London University Extension Lecturer. From then on events went his way. In 1895 he became a Lecturer at the London School of Economics, which had just been founded by the Fabian Society; and his career there culminated in his appointment as Professor of Political Science in 1914.

Champion of Secular Education

When Wallas broke with the Christian religion the evolution controversy which followed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was at its height. The controversy between unbelievers and clerics was a straight issue between those who accepted the new evidence and those who attempted to disprove it. Today the situation is not so simple. The modern critic of religion has to take into account developments in liberal Christianity and—more especially—the various forms of Christian existentialism and irrationalism in which questions of evidence are set aside as irrelevant. Wallas would doubtless have had little sympathy with the views of Barth or Tillich, but he would have found them more difficult to attack than those of the anti-evolutionists of his early manhood.

Wallas’s importance for the rationalist movement was practical rather than theoretic. Throughout his life he fought against ecclesiastical influence and control in popular education. His pamphlet, The Case Against Diggleism (in which he attacked the parsimony which accompanied theological indoctrination in schools controlled by the Church of England), played a major part in bringing about a ‘Progressive’ victory in the London School Board election of 1888. From 1894 to 1904 Wallas was himself a member of the London School Board and was Chairman of its School Management Committee from 1897 to 1904.

During these years he saw at first hand the inefficiency and corruption which went with the local administration of the schools, and he witnessed the disastrous effects inter-denominational rivalry was having on the course of popular education. He maintained that the situation could be remedied only by the creation of a centrally-directed secular system of popular education. He regarded the London Education Act of 1903, which abolished the old School Board, as a step in the right direction, but he was disappointed that it did not go further and eliminate all denominational influence. In this he was in strong opposition to Sidney Webb, who thought it inexpedient to insist on complete secularization at this stage.

Webb, like Wallas, had rejected Christianity early in his life, and the disagreement between the two was partly over tactics and partly over the ‘rights’ of parents concerning the religious training of their children. Webb’s hope that a measure of local authority control in the denominational schools would open the way to secularization in the future has not in fact been realized.

The 1944 Education Act maintained the dual system, and Roman Catholic and Church of England schools are now guaranteed independence and receive financial assistance both in upkeep and in expansion.

Wallas decisively rejected the notion that parents have a right to compel their children to assent to the religious beliefs they hold themselves. He realized that we can only properly speak of religious freedom where opportunity has been given to the child or adolescent to form his opinions without outside pressure. We cannot allow that parents’ rights may extend so far as to deny the right of the intellectually awakened adolescent to form independent opinions on religious and other controversial matters. Here again, however, events have not gone Wallas’s way. It is laid down in the 1944 Education Act, not only that the dual system shall be allowed to continue, but also that corporate worship and religious instruction are obligatory in all schools recognized by the Ministry of Education.

The Blasphemy Laws

In his speeches delivered at RPA functions Wallas continued to draw attention to the dangers of clerical control over education. He believed that the situation in the ’twenties had become more serious because of the growth of ‘sacramentalism’ in the Anglican Church. Anglo-Catholics, through their organ The Church Times, were preaching a return to the type of ceremonial calculated to appeal to and satisfy the primitive emotions: they advocated ‘The Mass for the Masses’, as Wallas put it. Moreover, they openly stated that they aimed at clerical domination in education. In particular, they wished to effect a complete change in the teaching of History, so that ‘Church History’ might take the place of the type of history usually taught. Wallas insisted, as before, that the only way to remedy this situation was to make the national education system wholly secular.

Wallas was acutely aware that educational endowments are likely to restrict intellectual liberty. Endowed institutions, he pointed out, are concerned primarily to maintain the views and principles of the founders: they are not interested in the emergence of new thoughts and, indeed, may frequently find it necessary to suppress them. Again he pointed to The Church Times, in which the view was taken that, if spiritual benefits are to be received, it is necessary that the recipients shall be obedient to the founders’ wishes. This pull of ‘the dead hand’ must, he said, somehow be resisted, for no progress in education would be possible while it remained.

The climax of Wallas’s work for the rationalist movement was in 1929, when he led a deputation to the Home Secretary on behalf of the Society for the Abolition of the Blasphemy Laws. The Society wished to see an Act brought into force to provide that ‘no criminal proceedings shall be instituted in any court against any person for schism, heresy, blasphemy, blasphemous libel, or atheism’. Unfortunately, however, the Bill failed to get a majority and the blasphemy laws remain in force to this day.

Wallas has been described as narrow and intolerant in his agnosticism and anti-clericalism, but it is difficult to see how this charge can be substantiated. He had, in fact, every respect for a genuine and sincere expression of religious belief; and he was concerned to combat only those types of religious belief which proselytize and persecute. Hence both Anglo-Catholicism and Evangelicanism were anathema to him, though liberal Christianity was not. His reasonable and tolerant attitude is shown by his resignation from the Secular Education League in 1931. In a letter to Gilbert Murray he wrote: ‘I’ve just left the Secular Education League because Chapman Cohen, Walsh, etc, pushed the “principles” to a point which could have meant the forbidding of State-aided secondary education to all but convinced agnostics.’ Though he wished to see the creation of a secular system of popular education, he did not wish to interfere in any way with the private religious activities of the individual.

Emotion and Reason

Wallas is still remembered as one of the most important of the early Fabians and as a contributor to the Fabian Essays of 1889. It is less often recalled that he resigned from the Fabian Society in 1904 because he found himself unable to subscribe to its orthodoxy. He remained a socialist, in the broad sense of the word, but never afterwards identified himself wholeheartedly with any political party. He was in fact a fearless and independent thinker of a kind now rare; and, having escaped from one repressive orthodoxy in his youth, he had no desire to fall into another later in life. In his work on political science he showed himself to be an empiricist, and he was one of the first to urge that politics must be studied scientifically and that vague and unverified generalizations must give place to statistical methods. In Human Nature in Politics (1908) he presented a critique of democratic theory and an exposé of democratic practice which have not yet received effective answers.

Rationalists are often accused of concentrating on reason to the exclusion of emotion. This charge is only occasionally justified, and it certainly cannot be brought against Wallas. In a number of works—and especially in The Art of Thought (reprinted in abridged form in ‘The Thinker’s Library’), he insisted that emotion and reason cannot be regarded as in separate watertight compartments and that fruitful thought requires satisfactory emotional conditions.

Lastly, Wallas was unusually free from the vice of dogmatism. This is not to say that he did not have strong views on a number of subjects. Indeed he did, but he was always willing to give his opponents’ views respectful consideration and to admit that his own conclusions might he mistaken.

by Royston Pike

Rebel against religious orthodoxy and conventional morals, George Eliot made a religion of humanism

ONE of the hymns that they sing at South Place on Sunday mornings is George Eliot’s O May I Join the Choir Invisible. As hymns go, I have always thought it pretty good. Certainly it is the best thing of the kind that she wrote; the rest of her verse is—well, the sort of stuff that clever young women can turn out easily enough with the aid of a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary.

Good poetry or not so good, it is essentially George Eliot. It expresses what she most sincerely believed and most deeply felt. The moral earnestness is there, the conviction of the imperative character of the sense of duty, just as any idea of a supernatural sanction is not there. The grateful reference to the ‘immortal dead’ is a testimony to her feeling for history, to the abiding influence of the generations of human kind that have walked this earth, done their work, and passed away. And what she asks for herself, that she may be able to ‘Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love. Beget the smiles that have no cruelty… Be the sweet presence of a good diffused’ is proof, if proof be needed by anyone who has read her novels, that sympathy was the keynote of her nature and the inspirer of her genius. Only one thing is missing, her rich sense of humour.

Childhood and School

The girl who was to become George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 when George III had still a year left of his long reign. How she arose from out of her heredity and environment is a puzzle that none of her many biographers has been able to solve. Her ancestry seems to have been stodgily undistinguished, but there was a Welsh strain which may have added a spice of vivacity to the heavy Midland clay. Her grandfather was a carpenter and builder in a small way, and her father followed the same useful, trades until by hard force of character he raised himself to the position of agent to several substantial landowners in the neighbourhood of Nuneaton, in Warwickshire. Her mother was Robert Evans’s second wife, and she was considered to be a cut above him in family position and culture. It is her laugh that you hear in between the wisecracks coming from Mrs Poyser’s dairy, while if you want to know what Mr Evans was like, you have only to clap your hand on the shoulder of Adam Bede.

As a child, Marian (as she abbreviated her name) was sent to a dame’s school and then as a boarder to girls’ schools at Nuneaton and Coventry. She was sixteen and still at school when her mother died, and since her elder sister had married, she was elevated to the position of mistress of a farmer’s home. She developed into an excellent housewife, and prided herself on the fact; in after years she was wont to remark complacently that one of her hands was bigger than the other because it had done so much butter and cheese making.

After she had left school, her father arranged for tutors to come from Coventry to teach her French and German and Italian, and a music-master to instruct her in the piano. Her education was thus much better than that given to most farmers’ daughters in those days, and she also read anything and everything that came her way. The Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, Bailey’s Dictionary and Poor Richard’s Almanac were on Adam Bede’s shelves and doubtless on hers too. But she also had books revealing a more personal taste, Pascal and Rousseau’s Confessions and Thomas à Kempis.

Like Maggie Tulliver, she was considered to be a clever slip of a girl. She was also decidedly religious and a bit of a prig. Conscious of a mental power out of all proportion with her limited surroundings, she strove to find an outlet in good works. She devoted many hours to the preparation of a chart of Ecclesiastical History. She conducted prayer meetings for girls of her acquaintance and went regularly and often to church.

Loss of Faith

The first breach in her religious faith came when she was about twenty-two, and strangely enough it was Sir Walter Scott who made it. She had been reading his novels and was astounded to realize that there could be and were some quite decent, upright, and honest people among Moslems and unbelievers. Even an infidel might be a good man. The thought spelt danger to her Calvinistic inheritance, and its effect was very soon enhanced by the influence of a group of liberal-minded young people, the Brays and Hennells, to whom she had been introduced when her father, having retired from active business, removed himself and her to a house in Coventry.

Through her new friends she was entrusted with the task of translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu from the German, and she found it a dreadful business. With something akin to anguish she saw the historical Jesus slipping away into the shadowy realm of supposition and myth, and soon there was very little left of the simple but sometimes shockingly harsh creed that she had learnt at her mother’s knee. In the terminology of the next generation she might have been described as an agnostic, but she was never a vigorous champion of unorthodoxy. Basically she remained a deeply religious woman, believing that even if Deity is reduced from personality to abstraction there still remains Duty as the peremptory absolute.

In Strange Company

In appearance she was plain to the verge of ugliness, but judging from the number and quality of her men friends she cannot have been without considerable sex appeal. Notwithstanding her strong mind, she always felt the need of a man to stir her heavy sympathies, soothe her jangling nerves. First was her brother, who if he were really like Tom Tulliver was thoroughly selfish and narrowminded. In the Coventry circle were several young men who were good friends but nothing more. She was over thirty when her father died and she became her own mistress, with a small income of her own. She went to London, and there for a time formed one of the strange company assembled beneath the roof of John Chapman’s publishing establishment at No. 142 Strand.

Chapman was a publisher of ‘advanced’ literature, and Marian soon made herself exceedingly useful as a sub-editor. A ‘born polygamist’ as Michael Sadleir called him, he found her ‘shy, calm, and affectionate’, and some symbolic markings in his diary have been taken to mean that he and she did rather more than hold hands as they sat together over the proofs in the room looking down on the turgid Thames.

Eliza Lynn, another young woman writer on Chapman’s list, described her as ‘essentially underbred and provincial’, a woman who ‘held her hands and arms kangaroo-fashion, was badly dressed, had an unwashed, unkempt look altogether’. But William Hale White, who was a lodger under the same roof, said that what impressed him most about her was her beautiful brown hair and grey eyes, in which there was ‘a curiously shifting light, generally soft and tender, but convertible into the keenest flash’, and in his Autobiography of Mark Rutherford he represents her as a woman of the most tender sympathy and understanding for the poor failures in life’s race.

Without Benefit of Clergy

Yet another of those who knew her well at this time was Herbert Spencer, and that whiskered icicle was as near to falling in love with her as he ever was with anybody. However, it was not Spencer who was destined to set aflame her sombrely glowing spirit but a shaggy little fellow, a rather battered man of letters named George Henry Lewes. He was married, with three children, but his marriage was already going on the rocks when he met Marian Evans. It speaks volumes for his essential integrity and worth that he alone, of all the men who knew her and valued her friendship, was able to hear the lonely heart beating behind the black velvet, and for nearly a quarter of a century he was her husband and business manager and all else that she expected a man to be.

When the two went off to the Continent together in July 1854, it was the most open and pronounced flouting of the most strongly held of the Victorian moralities. Marian’s friends were aghast; her brother and the rest of her family cut her dead. But she never for a moment regretted the step. She and Lewes were as truly married, she maintained, as any couple who had had the marriage service said over them by a parson, and she insisted that the world should treat them as such. She was Mrs Lewes, even though there was another Mrs Lewes just round the corner. Eventually the world, not excepting the circles of society, accepted her and her husband on her own terms. A hundred years later, in an age of cheap and widespread divorce, of boasted emancipation from the ancient taboos, their reception might not have been so happy.

Novelist in the Making

It was Lewes who started her along the road to becoming George Eliot. He suspected that she had within her the making of a story-teller, and encouraged her to begin and to persevere. She started with the simple tales of country parsons which appeared first in the pages of Blackwood and then were issued in volume form as Scenes of Clerical Life. They were surprisingly successful, and she set about writing a full-length novel. Adam Bede was followed by The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, each as good as the other and commanding a substantial sale.

In their pages the provincial life of the last century is pictured with a supreme artistry. Nothing, or next to nothing, is due to imaginative creation; practically everything is the result of the most keenly penetrating observation. The people and scenes were transferred from her impression-crowded brain and were brought home to millions of readers who had never realized what drama, what passion, what humour, were to be found beneath the drab exterior of people very much like themselves. Only when she stepped outside the period and place she knew so well did she trip up; Romola is a comparative failure, even though she made a packet of money out of it.

Her Greatest Achievement

So we come at length to Middlemarch, surely to be placed in the very front rank of English fiction. From the alien time and place of Renaissance Italy she returned to the people and scenery of her childhood, and once again she triumphed. The book is on a massive scale—indeed, it has been complained that it is really four novels in one. But the themes are carefully interwoven, the characters are almost all interestingly alive, and though the general atmosphere is sombre almost to pessimism there shines through the clouds a compassion that is warm and bright. It is the most mature of her books, the highest and deepest manifestation of an intellect that was rare indeed.

As in the earlier novels, she herself appears under a thin disguise. This time she is Dorothea Casaubon, the eager young woman who wants so desperately to be of use in a worthwhile cause. She has a religion, she tells the man who in some ways is so like Lewes. What is it? he asks, and she makes reply: ‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’ Humanists will have to go a long way before they find a better faith than that to live by.

by George Godwin

Blatchford believed that Socialism, Determinism, and Rationalism are factors making the sum of Humanism

CARLYLE wrote of William Cobbett that he was ‘the pattern John Bull of his century’ (1763-1835). One might use the same words of Robert Blatchford of his (1851-1943). Not only had both remarkable men many characteristics in common—forthrightness, pugnacity, honesty, and the sort of highly-developed social conscience whose dynamic is compassion and hatred of injustice and cruelty—but there are many points of comparison in their respective careers. Both began life humble and poor, both suffered in youth, both served for some years in the ranks of the Army, both were self-educated, and both became masters of a magnificent prose style.

If Cobbett is mentioned in this connection, it is because Blatchford soaked himself in Cobbett’s writings and modelled his own largely upon them. Cobbett, who attacked corruption and poverty, the political and social evils of his time, certainly influenced Blatchford’s thought; and in that bitter book, Merrie England, the reader may catch echoes of Cobbett’s earlier indictment of our social system.

In Britain for the British Blatchford set forth his political credo. ‘The purpose of this book, he wrote, ‘is to convert the reader to socialism: to convince him that the present system—political, industrial, and social—is bad; to explain to him why it is bad, and to prove to him that socialism is the only true remedy.’

Blatchford’s mother was a widow at thirty-two, with two small boys to fend for, Robert being the younger, a puny undersized child. She was half Italian, had a fiery temperament, but high principles. She sent the two boys to the Congregational chapel.

Like many very delicate children, Blatchford—as Darwin, for instance—lived long; to be ninety-two, to be precise. He was short and swarthy and described as looking like an Italian organ-grinder. He was apprenticed to a brushmaker, but he hated the work and drifted about until, at the age of nineteen, he took the Queen’s shilling and became a private in a line regiment. In the Army he educated himself; he studied Cobbett’s Grammar, acquired shorthand, read widely. Six years later he took his discharge with the Army’s Certificate of Education.

Loss of Religious Faith

He became a journalist, and one of his first contacts was with the late Alex M. Thompson, then on the Manchester Sporting Chronicle. The two men became life-long friends. It was when Blatchford was working in a junior capacity for Bell’s Life, before he became a humanist, that he refers to his religious belief in a letter to Thompson.

‘For me’, he wrote, ‘Christianity is all embodied in the words “I am the resurrection and the life. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart; and thy neighbour as thyself. Do ye unto others as ye would that they should do unto thee”. These are the things I believe. I seldom go to church. I do not love parsons. I do not love Sunday schools. I hate formality and I detest cant. Sin, folly, ignorance, vice and crime excite in me deep feelings of pity, but no hatred for the victims.’

Experience of poverty in Manchester and London turned Blatchford’s attention to social evils, and presently he began to question the role of the Churches and the truth of what they taught. Already, as his letter to Thompson hints, he was on the way to becoming a determinist; for of all types of evil-doers he uses the word ‘victim’. There must be, he propounded, a new religion, one purged of legend and less preoccupied with a hypothetical loving heavenly father—for whom he could find no evidence in experience—and an equally hypothetical heaven in the hereafter.

Blatchford had read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and he became a socialist. But he was not in sympathy with the brand of socialism advocated by H. M. Hyndmann. His socialism was more a general attitude of forbearance and compassion than a thought-out political system.

Side by side with this developing social consciousness and awareness of the evils of poverty grew Blatchford’s critical attitude towards Christianity. He read Frazer’s monumental compilation of the world’s legendary lore, The Golden Bough, and it became the turning-point of his spiritual growth. ‘Belief and unbelief’, he wrote, ‘are not matters of moral excellence or depravity; they are questions of evidence.’

In 1903, when he was fifty-two years of age, Blatchford published God and My Neighbour. It was a statement of where he stood and the most uncompromising and forthright attack on Christianity made available to the great public for a mere threepence. (Though, of course, Voltaire had done a similar job a good deal earlier.) In this famous book, which was translated into many languages, sold over a million copies in England, and was extensively pirated in the United States, Blatchford denounced Christianity as untrue and an obstacle to social reform.

‘I oppose Christianity , he wrote, ‘because it is not true. But it may be asked why I say that Christianity is not true, and that is a very proper question which I shall do my best to answer… I cannot believe that any religion has been revealed to Man by God. Because a revealed religion would be perfect, but no known religion is perfect; and because history and science show us that the known religions have not been revealed, but have been evolved from other religions… All the rites, mysteries and doctrines of Christianity have been borrowed from older faiths. I cannot believe in the existence of Jesus Christ, nor Buddha, nor Moses. I believe that these are ideal characters constructed from still more ancient legends and traditions.’

There is nothing here of hair-splitting, nothing attenuated by sophistry or qualification. He is clear and forthright, and he follows truth, as Socrates counselled, wherever it may lead. In Blatchford’s case the road began in a simple unsophisticated Nonconformity; it ended in a total rejection of revealed religion.

Target for Abuse

Naturally this book, considered by many as blasphemous, provoked counterblasts from the Churches. But, as the record shows, there was more abuse than argument. The term ‘infidel’ was cast at him. He received many letters of abuse. He damaged his career as a writer. He had nothing to gain: yet he did it. ‘If you wish to lose caste, to miss preferment, to endanger your chances of gaining money or repute, turn infidel and turn socialist.’ He reminded his readers and critics that the history of civilization is the history of successions of brave ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’ who have denied false dogmas or brought new truths to light, only to be persecuted or murdered by the Church.

Blatchford was denounced as an atheist; but he always denied this. ‘I do not say there is no God,’ he wrote, ‘I do not say there is no “Heaven”. There is not enough evidence to justify me in making such assertions. I only say, on those subjects, that I do not know.’

God and My Neighbour had been published first in serial form in the lively, if eccentric weekly he founded and edited, The Clarion. Very soon the letters of protest began to pour into the editorial office. Blatchford not only published many of these letters attacking him, but he abstained from replying, putting an embargo on defence. G. K. Chesterton who, as a converted Catholic, weighed in with a spirited piece, called this embargo a gesture of unparalleled generosity. It was characteristic of the man.

There was also a humorous side to the controversy. Stated a Methodist Times leading article: ‘When attacked, God’s answer to Robert Blatchford—twenty thousand converted in South Wales!’

As a working journalist, dependent for his livelihood on popular publications, Blatchford was frequently in conflict with his employers, and in his time he served some strange masters. When he was writing features as a staff writer on the Weekly Despatch, with a salary of £2,000 a year, he made no secret of the fact that he considered Lloyd George a bit of a wind-bag. This did not fit in with the paper’s policy and Northcliffe directed the editor to let his famous contributor know that ‘Lloyd George is our man now’. ‘Dear Sir,’ wrote Blatchford in reply, ‘I note that Lloyd George is your man now. Will you please note that Robert Blatchford is his own man, and begs to remain, Yours faithfully, R. Blatchford.’

Though there were periods of his life when acute financial distress had to be faced, Blatchford’s pen was never for sale. His sympathies were always for the bottom dog, as his books Merrie England and Not Guilty, a Defence of the Bottom Dog make plain. In Britain for the British he pleaded for socialism in the literary form of a series of letters addressed to, ‘John Smith, of Oldham, a Practical Working Man’.

Love of Mankind

These books reveal a man rather than a mind. They sprang from the heart and their dynamic was hatred of suffering, and a warmth of feeling more Latin than British. To say that is not to gainsay Blatchford’s intellect. His force as a controversialist was proof enough of his intellectual capacity; and it was harnessed to a complete honesty of purpose.

Blatchford had shifted by logical steps towards the determinist position. He felt that moral choice had no part in the actions of men, these being pre-determined by heredity and environment; every act, good or bad, being the end-product of external environmental agencies and the resolution of internal impulses and desires. Believing this, he saw all men as victims to be pitied rather than condemned; though how determinism accounts for the phenomenon of remorse raises a somewhat thorny point.

Through all he wrote one finds abundant evidence of Blatchford’s love of his fellow man and a deep consciousness of the tragedy of life. Even those who were most bitterly opposed to his hostility to Christianity held him in high esteem.

For example, G. K. Chesterton, a convert, and more Catholic than the Pope, wrote, after crossing swords with him: ‘Very few intellectual swords have left such a mark on our times, have cut so deep, or remained so clean. His triumphs were the triumphs of a strong style, native pathos and picturesque metaphor; his very lucidity was a generous sympathy with simple minds.’

Bernard Shaw said of him: ‘There are few men who can write as Nunquam [his pseudonym] does, with conscious and strong feeling; and yet without malice. Above all, he has that power of getting people’s point of view which enables him, when he is not writing persuaders to socialism, to follow the trade of Shakespeare and Dickens.’

Without bitterness, Blatchford wrote on one occasion, following an onslaught of criticism from clerical sources: ‘I have been called an Infidel, a Socialist and a Fatalist. Now I am an Agnostic or Rationalist, and I am a Determinist, and I am a Socialist. But if I were asked to describe myself in a single word, I should call myself a Humanist. Socialism, Determinism, and Rationalism are factors in the sum: and the sum is Humanism.’

Blatchford’s private life was innocently happy. He married very young, on thirty shillings a week. His wife, Sarah Crossley, had little education, but she made her man an ideal mate, and there is something touching about the terms Blatchford used of her as an old man and a widower. It is reminiscent of Dr Johnson’s long and loving memory of a dead wife. It is often said that Blatchford recanted in old age, abandoning his life-long position as a materialist. He gives his own version of the matter in his autobiography, My Eighty Years.

W. T. Stead, the once-celebrated editor of the Review of Reviews, who perished in the Titanic disaster, had become a convinced spiritualist. He persuaded Blatchford to ‘sit’ for Mrs Leonard, a well-known medium. Stead for long had been a great admirer of Blatchford, dubbing him ‘The People’s Plato’. He would be a great catch for the spiritualist movement, if converted.

Stead had at first suggested an experiment with automatic writing, but Blatchford could make nothing of it. He sat for Mrs Leonard. The result of this séance was more rewarding. It took place shortly after Mrs Blatchford’s death in 1921, when Blatchford was emotionally conditioned by grief.

Emotion versus Reason

That séance left Blatchford almost certain that his late wife had communicated; and further séances that followed reinforced a new-found belief in the survival of bodily death.

‘And yet’, he wrote, ‘does it not seem too good to be true? Oh, believe me, I cannot shake nor ignore the evidence. My doubt is quite illogical and therefore quite human.’ It is a sort of ambivalence in which emotional longing pulls against reason, and produces the mental conflict of mutually incompatible ideas.

In somewhat similar circumstances Sir Oliver Lodge, grieving the loss of a beloved son in war, wrote in Raymond of his conviction that his son had communicated. And similarly today, Lord Dowding reports communication with pilots killed in action.

Such conversions to spiritualism occur frequently in the old. They may be worthy of serious examination as cracks in that door which divides the world we know from the world invisible. On the other hand, these conversions may belong to the realm of psychopathology, to those strange changes which occur in old age.

Here the point is that Blatchford’s old-age conversion to spiritualism, while it raises another issue, does not in any way impair his devastating destructive criticism of orthodox Christianity. Nor does it invalidate all that he wrote over the long years of his active life as a humanist propagandist, for in that autobiography in which he mentions the coming of this late hope he does not recant anything he preached throughout the long years of his intellectual vigour. And his attitude towards the problems of life remained to the end what it had always been, that of a humanist.

by F. H. Amphlett Micklewright

After freeing his father’s negro slaves Conway fought to free men’s minds from superstition

IT is curious that, like several other humanists of the more recent past, the name of Moncure D. Conway should be so often forgotten by the present generation. Outside rationalist circles he is probably little remembered, yet it would be difficult to name a personality in later Victorian London who stood more consistently for humanism and all that it implies. Popular as a lecturer, he was also the author of numerous books. The minister of South Place Chapel, bearded and with a slight American accent, was a well-known figure wherever freedom of thought was valued, and he certainly deserves to be recalled today.

Moncure Conway came of old Virginian stock and was reared strictly in the Methodist faith of his fathers. To the end of his days he always retained a high regard for the memory of John Wesley, and it was the example of the evangelist which led him, when little more than a schoolboy, to set out on the life of a Methodist circuit Preacher. But the anti-slavery cause caught his imagination and his theological views broadened. Conway deserted Methodism to graduate at Harvard and to enter the Unitarian ministry.

It was the period when Theodore Parker and many of the more distinguished American Unitarians had taken up the anti-slavery battle and Conway was in the forefront of it from the start. His first act upon inheriting the family plantation was to free the slaves. During the civil war, he came to London as a propagandist for the Northern cause and drifted into South Place Chapel, a famous liberal centre. Conway was invited to become the minister, a position which he combined with a good deal of writing and journalism. Retiring in 1888, he accepted the post again in 1892 and remained until Mrs Conway was stricken in 1897 with a fatal illness, when he took her home to die in New York among her own people. Conway himself still wrote and appeared occasionally in public but his main tasks were now over and he died in 1907 in Paris. With his death a whole chapter seemed to close.

During his early years at South Place, Conway had abandoned his Unitarian theism for humanism pure and simple, severing the last links which gave him contact with the Unitarian denomination. He faced London as the preacher of faith in man and in human achievement. As was natural at the period of Darwin and of Huxley, both of whom were known to Conway, he set forth an evolutionary and optimistic gospel tinged with the ethical fervour of Emerson.

Writing in 1874 in his series, Unorthodox London, Dr Maurice Davies named Conway as among the most outstanding figures in the unorthodox ranks. Many of his books, such as Idols and Ideals or Lessons for the Day, were made up from his South Place addresses and still repay reading. They set out, in a clear literary style, his faith in man as a breaker of idols and as capable of reaching new heights in thought and in civilization.

He stressed the earthward side of his message. An Earthward Pilgrimage is a delightful parallel and answer to the pilgrimage of John Bunyan and seeks to guide the mind and spirit of man through the age of Victorian science. Nor did Conway lack an exactness of scholarship. His works on demonology and on the legend of the Wandering Jew were pioneering studies of folklore and of its significance.

American citizenship debarred Conway from an active part in English politics, but he was an outspoken radical by conviction. The public executions which he witnessed outside old Newgate during his early days in London had confirmed him in his radicalism; his antipathy to negro slavery had broadened into a passionate hatred of anything repressive, of hereditary privilege, and of class distinction.

Writing of the radical figures of some ninety years ago, Morrison Davidson had no hesitation at including Conway in his volume, Eminent Radicals. Indeed, Conway’s early book, Republican Superstitions, was a plea for a thoroughgoing republican and democratic government set over against trenchant criticism of prevailing American methods.

He was opposed to ‘second chambers’ or to anything which made against fully democratic ends in government. In the troubled years of the Bradlaugh controversy, Conway took his place at once at the side of the great iconoclast just as he supported G. W. Foote when he was indicted for blasphemy. His own methods of controversy were of a very different type to either Bradlaugh’s or Foote’s, but, on at least one occasion, he had no hesitation in taking the chair at a debate between Bradlaugh and a notoriously unscrupulous Christian opponent.

When Mrs Besant was deprived of the custody of her child, it was Conway and his wife who stood by her in public throughout her troubles. Charles Voysey, the expelled heretic, and other Anglican modernists had his sympathy. In Lessons for the Day Conway devoted a chapter, ‘The Scapegoat’, to the battle waged by Bradlaugh over the parliamentary oath. Indeed, his own unique Autobiography teems with accounts of his struggles for freedom in the social as well as in the religious sphere.

Of his later works it is only necessary to say that they display the ripeness of both scholarship and of experience. A standard biography of Thomas Paine rescued a great figure in the history of human freedom from the slanders which generations of untruthful opponents had heaped upon his memory.

Conway had compiled for South Place his Sacred Anthology, a collection taken from the great scriptures of the world. He was the pioneer in a method which has since been copied by more than one Christian writer. In old age, he complemented this collection with his Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, a work in which he both shows his wide knowledge of Eastern religions and also of the fraudulent methods of Madame Blavatsky. Solomon and Solomonic Literature was a valuable study of tendencies which were coming to be examined as the fourth Gospel took its proper place in the study of Christian origins. Nor should his Travels in South Kensington be forgotten. It was in this work that Conway showed himself to be at home in the art movements of his day.

As was natural in one so devoted to the highest in man, Conway gave his last years to the struggle for international arbitration as the means of settling disputes between States and nations. He was horrified by the vulgar jingoism of the Boer War period. It is possibly this fact which has done so much to erase his memory and to make him seem to be out of place in the years which have followed 1914. But Conway’s faith was based upon a sound instinct that man, if he is to achieve anything at all, must erase from his mind the barbarities of superstition, must strive to be a civilized individual, and must seek to permeate society as a whole with his own high principles.

Conway was essentially an individualist of the older school. He showed little understanding of the new socialism which was arising at the end of his career. But his individualism always came down on the side of humanity and of the struggle for progress. Even though he believed in an optimistic view of human development, he never overlooked the fact that his basic faith required for its fulfilment the cooperation of human effort with goodwill.

Indeed, Conway’s attitude is still relevant today in a world where much of the progressive battle is against oppression or where men’s hearts too often fail them for fear and they seek refuge in the escapism of reactionary creeds. He was essentially a pioneer in thought, and his work, though necessarily carried on with the weapons of his own time, is yet far from out of date and discarded.

It was once remarked of Conway that having started his career by freeing his father’s slaves, he continued it in a struggle to free men’s minds.

Perhaps there could be no higher tribute to one who was in many ways an ideal humanist. The struggle for intellectual and moral freedom is not over any more than is the struggle for international arbitration. Conway’s books are out of print, but his name is borne by the well known hall in Red Lion Square, London, where the South Place Ethical Society meets. A generation which is struggling towards the glimmerings of a practical humanism at a time when the older supernaturalisms are fading away for large numbers of people should pay tribute to Conway’s memory. We can glean lessons for our own day from one who was in many ways the most outstanding humanist teacher in Victorian London.

by Frederick Vanson

In this centenary year tribute is paid to a great liberator of the human mind

IT is a hundred years since the birth of Henry Havelock Ellis, one of the great modern liberators of the human spirit, a man who was in the highest and best sense of the word a humanist, and one for whom humanism took the place of a religious faith.

His fame has perhaps dimmed a little since his death in 1939, but we need not fear that this is more than a passing phase, for so great a spirit cannot for long sink into obscurity, nor can works be forgotten which have so much to say of the splendours and miseries of the human condition. Poet, essayist, man of letters, doctor, psychologist, eugenist, and above all lover of mankind, Havelock Ellis was a man of many-sided genius and of powerful originality.

The Banned Book

Born in Croydon, Surrey, in February 1859, Havelock Ellis was descended from a family of Suffolk sea-captains. This may well account for his love of travel and adventure. He had little formal education, and attended various academies for boys in Surrey before going to Australia at the age of seventeen. There, in a remote part of New South Wales, Ellis took a post as a country schoolteacher, remaining for four years. From this time date his earliest known writings—some sonnets which were later published in a now-rare edition. (For an account of this poetry I may perhaps refer the reader to an essay I contributed to this journal in January 1958.)

On the eve of his majority, Havelock Ellis returned to England resolved to make his future career in medicine. He entered St Thomas’s Hospital, but not being good at examinations he did not qualify for eight years. This period, however, was not spent in continuous study, for at the same time Ellis began his career as a literary man. He became editor of two celebrated series of books, The Mermaid Series of English Dramatists and the Contemporary Science Series. In this capacity he met many leading men of letters and of science, some of whom, like Arthur Symons, became his life-long friends.

Havelock Ellis married Edith Lees, a remarkable and gifted woman in her own right, and he was also a passionate friend of the South African novelist, Olive Schreiner. For an account of his very interesting and unusual relationship to these two talented women the reader can do no better than consult Ellis’s autobiography, My Life, published in 1940.

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis’s magnum opus, began to appear in 1897. When the first volume was published an anarchist bookseller (‘respectable’ booksellers refused to handle it) was prosecuted for selling it. The cry of obscenity was soon raised in an attempt to suppress this great work of scientific inquiry, the influence of which in liberalizing our whole outlook on sexual psychology and morals was greater perhaps than that of any similar work. A committee of defence was soon formed, but the case went against the bookseller, and Ellis was left in the uncomfortable position of being liable to prosecution but not yet prosecuted. The work went on and occupied a great part of his energies until 1910. On the publication of the final volume, Ellis said that he felt like Gibbon completing his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Whole Man

Scientific interests represented only one side of his genius. Quite apart from his psychological studies, he had published books on literature and the arts, beginning in the ’nineties with The New Spirit and culminating in his splendid The Dance of Life (1923), a series of essays on the arts and humanities which should be compulsory reading for the humanist. More discursive but equally brilliant are his three volumes of Impressions and Comments (1914, 1921, 1924). In these short pieces, the marginal notes, as it were, of his life-work, all the manifold gifts of Ellis’s mind, his catholicity and versatility, are displayed. They are an astonishing record of a uniquely gifted man and their profusion and variety recall the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

It is the peculiar distinction of Havelock Ellis to have attempted to bridge the widening gulf, which in his (and our) time seemed to separate scientific knowledge and method on the one hand from the arts on the other. In the Dance of Life he wrote

As Ellis pointed out, the activities, both of the scientist and the creative artist, involve the exercise of the basic faculty of imagination. The reinstatement of imagination to its rightful place in our thinking was one of his cardinal concerns. In discussing the philosophical ideas of Vaihinger (to whose work Ellis was the first to draw attention in England) he remarks

The higher ends for Havelock Ellis, indeed his whole conception of human destiny, is the realization of man’s highest potentialities—a development not of the spiritual at the expense of the sensual, not of the intellect at the cost of imagination and emotion, not the elevation of any one part of human nature to a supreme place, but a fulfilment of them all in a spirit of gaiety, adventure, and charity. Not the artist, nor the saint, nor the philosopher is the highest man. For Ellis the highest man is he who in his own life and person is artist, saint, philosopher, lover, and scientist. How few of us can live up to that ideal!

So long as the human spirit is bound by economic forces, by political expediency, by educational prejudices, by psychological inhibitions, by all direct and indirect restraints, such a fulfilment seems a Utopian dream. Man may yet, by an over-development of one part of his nature at the cost of the rest, destroy the greater part of his species. Ellis knew this as clearly as we in the atom-haunted ’fifties. But he did not despair.

It is Havelock Ellis’s honour and distinction to have been one of the supreme examples in our time of the undying unconquerable spirit of man. No defender of organized religion, he could have claimed with Paine ‘The world is my country and my religion is to do good’. We do well to salute his memory in this centenary year. We would do better still to read his books and absorb the wisdom of his heart. He has much to teach us.

by Royston Pike

‘WELL, my little man, and how do you spell dog?’ ‘Please sir, D-O-G.’ ‘Capital, very good indeed,’ says the tall figure, at once graceful and stately, with his eye-glass held out questioningly before him, ‘I couldn’t do better myself. And now let us go a little further, and see if you can spell cat.’ By now the children are quite at their ease, and the young teacher’s anxious looks have been exchanged into a relieved smile. C-A-T! chorus the children excitedly. ‘Now this is really excellent,’ remarks the Inspector to the teacher; ‘you have brought them on wonderfully in spelling since I was here last. You shall have a capital report. Good-bye.’

A parody? Not at all, it is how Matthew Arnold—eminent poet, essayist, and literary critic in the golden age of Victoria—was remembered, with an amused affection, by some of those who came in contact with him in his professional capacity as an Inspector of Schools. The easy affability, the personal courtesy, the sympathetic understanding—and the quick get-away—are all in character, as characteristic of the man as the play with the monocle. His demeanour before the class of boys and girls drawn from the pinched homes of the poor was not so very different from the way in which he behaved at the dinner-tables of the rich and cultured and influential.

All his life, wherever he might find himself, he was the pedagogue, who lectured men (and women) for what he was quite convinced was their good. To the society of the high flower of Victoria’s reign he was such a gadfly as Socrates was to the Athenians of old. Not too profound, using a style which was often uncomfortably free, condescending but not toppling over into pomposity, gifted with a sense of humour which enabled him to laugh even at himself, he was never—or hardly ever—dull. No wonder the children liked him; no wonder his mantelpiece was always cluttered with invitations to dine and stay a long week-end.

Arnold of Rugby

Doubtless heredity had a good deal to do with his irrepressible urge to act the schoolmaster, for he was the son of ‘Arnold of Rugby’, the man who was the principal founder of the public school system of today and the only headmaster whose name most people can call to mind. Yet after his own days of pupilage at Rugby and Oxford were over, he seems never to have contemplated becoming a professional teacher at Rugby or anywhere else, nor did he take holy orders and slide away into a comfortable curacy with the prospect of substantial gains in the future.

Boredom and Safety

What decided his choice may have been nothing more than an accident of circumstance. He was serving as private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who was Lord President of the Council and as such responsible for the miserable infant of national education that had not long come into being. In 1851 the Marquess offered Arnold an inspectorship of schools, and Arnold accepted the offer. He was in his thirtieth year, and wanted to get married; the job was reasonably well paid and there was a decent pension at the end of it. Three months after he signed the roll he married his Lucy. He held the position for thirty-five years, until two years before his death in 1888.

Everything goes to show that he was an excellent man for the job. He found it tiresome and horribly boring at times. The schools he was required to inspect were scattered over a vast area extending across the Midlands from Lincoln to Gloucester, all South Wales and most of North Wales. For seven years he and his wife never had a settled home, but whenever possible she accompanied him on his journeyings. During term time it often meant getting up in the dark and rumbling across London in a musty cab to take a train to some place where there was not a chance of getting a decent meal. In his letters he mentions the bun he has had in a station waiting-room buffet, the egg which he had for lunch and was all he had to keep him going until late at night.

Dislike of Dissenters

Nor was the company particularly congenial. Since the Church of England schools could be inspected only by clergymen, and the Roman Catholic ones by Catholics, he was left with the schools set up and maintained by the Dissenters, the Wesleyans in particular, and the ‘British’ schools sponsored by Joseph Lancaster’s British and Foreign School Society. ‘We must never forget,’ wrote Professor Saintsbury, ‘that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked under the shadow not of Barchester Towers but of Salem Chapel,’ a fact which helps us to understand the very obvious dislike of Dissenters that is often found in Arnold’s writings: if he criticized the Dissenting mentality it was because he knew Dissenters only too well. In 1870 he was appointed chief inspector in the Metropolitan Division, and his travels were reduced in consequence. Three years later he was able to give up his London house and take a ‘cottage’ at Cobham, in Surrey, on the banks of the Mole.

But although the hours of work were long and the duties often unpleasing, the holidays were good, and even when he was on his courses of inspection he could often avoid the hotels by accepting an invitation to stay at the home of a friend in the country—and there were plenty of such friends, since he inherited a host of goodwill from his father’s admirers, he had married a judge’s daughter and sometimes acted as his father-in-law’s marshal, and he was himself looked upon by hostesses as a most desirable catch, because of his unfailing good nature and powers of good conversation. If you want to know what sort of conversation, then you will find an admirable report in that undeservedly forgotten book of W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic, in which Arnold appears under the thin disguise of Mr Luke.

Education for All

As an inspector he was not exacting. ‘If he saw little children looking good and happy,’ wrote one of his colleagues, ‘and under the care of a kindly and sympathetic teacher, he would give a favourable report, without inquiring too closely into the percentage of scholars who could pass the “standard” examination.’ And even when he had been moved to criticism, it was not resented. In one of his letters he mentions as the sort of thing he liked best to see, a letter in the files of the office which he had come across by chance and was not supposed to see ‘from a teacher defending his school against a severe report of mine; he finished by saying that he had not a word against the inspector, whom he would rather have than any other he had ever come in contact with, “as he was gentle and patient with the children”. The great thing [Arnold concludes his note] is humanity, after all.’

Volumes have been written on Arnold as a principal figure in the literary scene of the last century, and doubtless most of the good opinions were thoroughly deserved. But I am not at all sure that he himself may not have derived a greater satisfaction from the encouragement that he was able to give to young men of parts, to struggling schoolteachers to persevere in their working for a degree, to the youngsters whose heads he patted and urged to seek after and obtain for themselves something of what he styled culture—‘knowing the best that has been said and thought in the world’.

He resisted as strongly as he could the abominable system of ‘payment by results’ in the mastery of the three Rs. Years before Balfour’s Education Act he urged the importance of establishing a system of secondary education under the aegis of the State. He advocated the establishment of university colleges in the principal towns of the provinces. Devoted son though he was of Oxford, whose ‘dreaming spire’ he wrote of so lovingly, and though his critics threw the gibe at him that he was persuaded that the Almighty had a marked preference for men with a university education, he was no academic recluse, but a man of the world, who rejoiced in the great gifts of literature and the arts and strove that they should be made available to all who were capable of taking advantage of them.

Why Gladstone Shuddered

‘Above all I am a believer in culture’, he affirms in the introduction to Culture and Anarchy, and under the heading of ‘Sweetness and Light’ he describes the harmonious expansion of all our distinctively human powers as being the objective of our search. His version of Christianity made Gladstone shudder, and in his most widely-read book, and the one still most worth reading, Literature and Dogma, he protested against ‘our mechanical and materializing theology, with its insane licence of affirmation about God, its insane licence of affirmation about a future state’.

To Arnold the object of religion was Conduct, and his famous definition of God—a definition far more satisfying than most and perhaps as reasonable as any—is ‘the Eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness’. The supernatural was outside his scheme of things, and ‘miracles do not happen’. What he was concerned about was the creation of the conditions, and in particular the intellectual conditions, which would make for the living of the good life here and now, on this earth that we have inherited as our home. ‘The great thing after all is humanity.’

by John Gillard Watson

George Meredith had no more use for the parson’s theology than a duck for an umbrella

IN the thirty years that have passed since Mr Forster wrote, Meredith has not been raised more than the ‘bit’ prophesied. Now, fifty years after Meredith’s death, he remains pretty low down as a novelist, and even lower as a poet. Nevertheless, he has his place in the evolution of humanist thought.

It happens this year to be the centenary of the publication of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which first showed Meredith’s quality, although it was not a great success. Indeed, it was another twenty years before The Egoist brought him success and fame, after half a century of struggle. Feverel is an excellent introduction to Meredith’s novels, showing both his potential strength and his potential weakness.

Like several others, this novel has the theme of the upbringing of a well-born young man until he arrives at manhood. Feverel is brought up under a narrow and rigid ‘system’ devised by his father, against which he rebels. There is an interesting parallel here with John Stuart Mill’s education, and that described in Dickens’ Hard Times.

Feverel’s opposition takes the form of marrying the niece of a local farmer. But his father’s opposition weakens the marriage, and he yields to dissipation. Even the remorse and despair which overwhelm him are fundamentally based on self-pride; but in his voluntary exile to the Rhineland he receives news of the birth of his child, and this brings about the change of heart for which he is ripe.

Meredith tried to indicate the emotional and inarticulate states of mind of his characters by the use of external symbols. This is difficult, because a writer is apt to make out that natural objects and events possess feelings which can only belong to human beings. Ruskin called this the ‘pathetic fallacy’, and Meredith was unable to free himself from it. Here is where Richard and Lucy betroth themselves:

A Prose Browning

To mention a few points: the moon disrobing conveniently, just as Lucy’s soul is disrobed; it surveying heaven when Richard presumably surveys Lucy; the parallel with the lovers in Paradise, the flushed sky, the sky itself as the nuptials of the two; in all these Nature is being used to describe a human encounter. The lovers are inarticulate, but the coincidence with Nature is too apt; it appears the author has no more to say than they have. It is a commonplace situation tricked up.

Nevertheless, when Meredith tries to explore inner consciousness he can do much better, and in this he has been compared with Browning, if not necessarily in the words of Wilde, ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’. Wilde admired Meredith, and in a passage like this we can see why:

This shows Meredith’s irony and his romanticizing; actually, even in The Egoist, he never quite brought his detestation of egoism to terms with his admiration for the aristocratic.

Meredith’s radicalism has not dated in itself, but its application to the political and social interests of his time is now outworn. Nevertheless, his novels, for those who can make the effort to tackle them, offer rewards, though whether those rewards are worth the effort is sometimes doubtful; we can see why Diana of the Crossways stood beside Mill’s Subjection of Women in the esteem of Victorian feminists, but now that battle is won the book has lost much of its appeal.

Running through the novels, and conspicuous in his poetry, is Meredith’s pagan view of Mother Earth, shown in these lines from his ‘Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn’:

This is a simple cheerfulness based on the pathetic fallacy. But Meredith could do better; in the sequence Modern Love he told the story of a marital breakdown and eventual suicide of the wife in a manner exciting in its time, though not now. Basically his philosophic attitude remained that of the lines just quoted. And it is an attitude that must always have sympathizers.

Meredith zestfully accepted the picture of the world resulting from the discovery of evolution, and showed that the pessimism of Tennyson was unnecessary. Nature is not, as Tennyson called it, ‘red in tooth and claw’, neither is it benevolent; it is neutral, and the individual projects into it his own feelings. Tennyson would have found evidence for gloom in any universe, and Meredith would have found evidence for cheerfulness.

Temperamentally inclined to accept the universe joyfully, Meredith expounded a calm paganism in his works. He had not lost faith ; he never had any. Mother Earth is the god of his religion, and man must understand the spirit of Earth. The goal of man’s life is spiritual courage, tempered in love and friendship and patriotism. In his Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, A Reading of Earth, and Last Poems, evolution is embraced with enthusiasm, and this life is all:

Meredith is not the figure that even Mr Forster thought he might possibly become again; but he still has his interest. His pretentious theory of the Comic Spirit means little today, much of his fiction and most of his verse is hardly worth the effort to read it; but he still deserves his place in the pantheon of humanist prophets, with his insistence on the equality of women especially. ‘And anyway’, as T. A. Jackson put it in Old Friends to Keep,‘ he had no more use for parson’s theology than a duck has for an umbrella.’ Instead he gives us:

by John Gillard Watson

Truth is the watchword to release man from his self-made prison

WHEN H. G. Wells died in 1946, sighs of relief went up in many quarters. After eighty years, this incorrigible man was safely out of the way. His books would be forgotten, his dreams and Utopias would fade away, and the world could go on as before. And it is true that his reputation has faded, as always when a popular writer dies. Nevertheless his books still sell, and the young read his books. His work still affects thought and action throughout the world. He was a prophet and a guide, pointing to a new world, and for that he is read and loved and hated still.

To be all this, Wells had to be both more and less than a novelist. Although friendly with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Hueffer, he refused to cultivate the art of the novel; he said he was a journalist, using fiction as his medium:

Whether one accepts this point, argued at length in his Experiment in Autobiography, or not, Wells himself acted on it, and used the novel as a vehicle for ideas. The trouble with the novel or play of ideas is that its interest fades as the ideas date. This can be seen with much of Wells; only where, despite his creed, he was an artist does his work live, and also where his ideas have not dated. Wells knew this, and did not care: he looked forward with equanimity to his Outline of History being forgotten, replaced by a better educational work, together with his Science of Life and Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. As the new education he wanted is still far off, these books have not dated as he hoped.

Wells first gained real success as a writer of scientific romances, but he did not stop there:

It was the variety of his work, he observes in his Autobiography, that saved him from being a second anybody. But the scientific romances were his great success; something of their spirit was with him to the end: The Shape of Things to Come contains sketches within the sociological discussion written in the old manner. But in the early work his scientific story-telling is beyond anything that the painstaking Verne could achieve, and quite removed from present-day ‘scientifiction’. Take, for an example, the opening of The War of the Worlds:

Few readers can ignore that opening, and doubtless half a century and more ago, before the complacency of Western man was shaken, it cut even deeper than today. Throughout the scientific romances there is this uncanny sense of as yet unrealized possibilities in the world we know. This is the real imaginative quality which makes (he stories readable for the intelligent reader, whereas most Science Fiction is tedious by its lack of imagination and is mere fantasy.

The sociological bent, though, comes out in the early stories; The Time Machine gives an analysis of man’s future, still not irrelevant: it may seem absurd to think of the workers becoming horrible morlocks in the depths of the earth, but such a trend exists in our civilization. Wells knew the dangers inherent in the misuse of science; The Island of Dr Moreau shows the results of using science without humanity, and the chapter on the Sayers of the Law has an imaginative horror not equalled until Huxley’s Brave New World, which indeed is Dr Moreau’s Island, as also is Animal Farm. Wells believed that science could save the world, and knew it could destroy it.

Although Wells was in a sense a second Dickens, his criticism of society was different. Dickens was satisfied with society, provided it was reformed and people were benevolent, but Wells knew that society needed changing completely. He was not the complete optimist, like Dickens; he knew there was evil in mankind, but thought there was enough intelligence to bring about the necessary revolution. In The Salvaging of Civilization in 1921 he said that his new world was only the other side of the door, but added ‘I do not know—I do not dare to believe—that I shall live to hear that key grating in the lock’. When at the end of his life, in Mind at the End of its Tether, he despaired: ‘My own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt… that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life through to the end.’ That final despair was only the despair of an old man —and an impatient one.

As time passed, Wells brought more sociological discussion into his novels. Sometimes it is brilliant, as is his description of New York in The War in the Air, but more often it is pedestrian. All the time the newspaper reviewers were lamenting that he did not write more like The History of Mr Polly; they wanted him to settle down to writing the same novel fifty times over, like Farnol and Deeping. For the trouble was that, with his immense public, he was using his novels to spread quite scandalous ideas of social and moral reform. Look at that dreadful book Ann Veronica; and the cry for revolution and socialism! The man was positively dangerous: take The Outline of History, which the old-fashioned teachers and parsons and gentry ignored, but which ordinary people were reading all over the world, giving them all sorts of ideas that made the established correct views seem so much poppycock. And as they couldn’t ignore him, they began a system of derogatory criticism, which lasts to this day. This contends that the sort of things Wells wrote that really mattered were his Dickensian novels, of which Mr Polly was the best; some of his short stories were ‘good. entertainment’; and his sociological ideas are completely out of date and are best forgotten.

World Government

There is no doubt that Wells’s hopes for a new world have not been realized; but this does not mean that his ideas of what was needed were wrong. They boil down to three imperatives, stated in Phoenix as follows:

If these imperatives are accepted as facts, then it is necessary to readjust political activities accordingly. Wells gave way to despair because few people did accept them as facts. It was his sense of the urgency of the human situation which impelled him to thrust aside impatiently all talk of the art of the novel; that sort of thing could wait—get the revolution over first!

Wells had many deficiencies, and knew it; but the training in biology of his early years gave a consistent point of view to his thought which enabled him to evade many of the traps into which the more conventionally educated fall. He was never deceived by legalistic or economic modes of thought. He saw all the constitutions and institutions of mankind as transitory things, to be changed whenever human intelligence demanded a change. He was philistine in his attitude to tradition, but, even though he disposed of the arts in a section headed ‘The Surplus Energy of Mankind’ in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, he did not think that art did not really matter. He believed there was a world of beauty behind the world we see, and he wanted his world state to be one where everyone would be free and healthy and educated, and one where every man and woman could enter into the real world of beauty.

Truth the Watchword

Wells was not a great novelist like James or Conrad; he had neither the subtlety of mind nor the desire to be so. But he, sought the truth, and was humble about his abilities. Any idea of artistic immortality he sacrificed for his work of trying to save the world. The task was urgent, and throughout his life he repeated the fundamental common sense of his beliefs, and he did not much care how he did it or whom he hurt in the process.

In spite of this attitude he wrote some books which will not be forgotten even when the changes for which he fought all his life have come about. And if those changes are not brought about it will not matter, for there will be no one to read them anyway. As he passes into history, Wells can be viewed more calmly, and the humanist of today will do well to look through the immense pile of Wells’s writings again and see how much has already been accepted, without acknowledgment, as part of the new world which is struggling into being (for example, Wells is the ‘only begetter’ of the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations; he initiated this in the early days of the war). But he will also see how much remains to be brought into effect; above all in the field of education. How vital this is can best be shown by what Wells wrote in The Salvaging of Civilization, reminding us of how little has been achieved in the thirty-eight years since:

by Humphrey Skelton

Freud believed that religion is an illusion and that the path to truth lies in scientific method

‘THIS physician-psychologist’, wrote Thomas Mann, ‘will, I make no doubt at all, be honoured as the pathfinder towards a humanism of the future, which we dimly divine and which will have experienced much that the earlier humanism knew not of. It will be a humanism standing in a different relation to the powers of the lower world, the unconscious, the id; a relation bolder, freer, blither, productive of a riper art than any possible in our neurotic, fear-ridden, hate-ridden world.’

There is nothing far-fetched in this tribute to Sigmund Freud, and it comes significantly from a great novelist. Copernicus and Darwin effected just as profound a revolution in thought as Freud, but it remained within the sphere of science and philosophy. Its impact on other aspects of life was slight.

The early years of the present century were marked by further revolutions in our conception of the physical world. But no great writer or artist could have written about the Quantum theory or Relativity in the way that Mann referred to psycho-analysis. It may or may not be good science — opinions are still divided — but it touched the very roots of personal life. What Freud accomplished was to change the perspective in which man saw himself.

Some of the details of Darwin’s theory of evolution have had to be modified. He wrote, for example, in ignorance of genetics. But the broad structure remains. For the layman what matters is that he demonstrated beyond doubt that the human body had evolved from lowly forms in the animal kingdom.

The storm that blew up a century ago over that challenge to religious orthodoxy has died down because theologians discovered a loophole. They now agree, apart from a few Fundamentalists, that man’s body may well have had an ape-like ancestry. But what, they ask, of the soul? Can science disprove that at some stage in that slow ascent the animal body was endowed with an immortal soul?

Science can no more disprove it, of course, than the statement that the moon is inhabited by fairies. But the attributes which are supposed to belong to the soul — the power of reason and moral judgment — can be studied scientifically. And that was what Freud attempted to do.

Religion an Illusion

He refused to admit that moral values called for a supernatural explanation. He searched for the origins of our ideas of good and evil as objectively as the palaeontologist looks for the origins of fossils. He believed they were to be found in childhood and that they were implanted by the parents. Social ideals and mores were transmitted as a rule by the father, the symbol of authority, and in this way the child formed an image of a Heavenly Father, or God.

There was no evidence, according to Freud, of any instinct impelling man towards higher moral, ethical, or spiritual aims. This widespread belief in an innate moral sense, which had been used as a proof of the existence of God, was dismissed as ‘a benevolent illusion’. He wrote: ‘The present development of human beings requires, it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.’

It is important to grasp that when Freud speaks of ideas of right and wrong coming to the child via the parents he is not referring merely to an external code of conduct. The process is far more complex. It is the end of animal innocence and the beginning of the distinctively human emotions of guilt and shame.

The child is not aware of why he is really guilty or ashamed. The truth is repressed — the tension that has arisen because of the desire for the monopoly of the love of one parent and the consequent jealousy and aggression towards the other.

This is the famous Oedipus situation which some psychologists still regard as being as mythical as the Garden of Eden. How much truth there is in it has yet to be determined, but it was one of those bold, imaginative insights which go far beyond available evidence yet point the direction in which the quest should be pursued.

Its practical fruitfulness can hardly be disputed. Today it is a commonplace that the child-parent relationship has more fateful consequences than were ever considered before Freud’s time. There is a period in childhood when the emotional structure tends to be fixed. The over-indulgent mother, the harsh father, the deprivation of love, the broken home, are like the forces of destiny. They may make a happy marriage impossible or render a man sexually impotent or homosexual.

Freud did not invent the unconscious, but he refined and elaborated the concept, bringing it down from mere philosophical speculation so that it could be used as an instrument in clinical practice. He devised a new model of the mind which betrays the influence and the limitations of the type of materialism then fashionable in scientific circles.

It was both mechanistic and dualistic. The developed personality was seen as an outgrowth of blind primitive impulses, seeking only immediate gratification and turning to aggression when frustrated. It was difficult for sentimentalists to accept the idea that a new-born babe was a selfish, aggressive little animal instead of an innocent cherub. The pill was still harder to swallow when a young child’s activities were given a sexual colouring.

Freud rather defiantly and misleadingly used such terms as sexuality and incest with an unusual meaning which was missed by the horrified public. It was a tactical mistake to make childish behaviour wear the labels of Oedipus and Electra, which immediately suggested an adult relationship.

The doctors were as outraged as the lay public. At a medical congress in Hamburg in 1910 one professor banged his fist on the table and shouted: ‘This is not a topic for discussion at a scientific meeting; it is a matter for the police.’

Medical journals refused to publish papers on psycho-analysis and some of its practitioners were brusquely sacked from hospitals. Freudianism was denounced as pornography, dangerous nonsense, a source of corruption. Explosive, near-hysterical abuse was showered on Freud from all parts of the world. He fortified himself with the reflection that such violent resistance confirmed the truth of his theory. It was what should be expected.

Today we have grown accustomed to ideas that were novel and shocking before the 1914 war. The various technical terms which Freud introduced — libido, projection, introjection, displacement— are part of the literary stock-in-trade, if not quite household words. From this distance the more bizarre of the theories may seem a pretty tall story, but they do not make us hot under the collar.

What seems of permanent value is Freud’s perception of the duality of mental activities — the opposition between wishful thinking and reality thinking. Freud exposed the tremendous strength of those irrational forces of which we are not conscious and which cause us to deceive ourselves by supplying false motives for our behaviour.

This was not welcome news for those Victorian rationalists who thought that all you had to do to get rid of superstitious fears was to prove that they were silly. The neurotic who suffers from claustrophobia knows quite well it is silly to dread being in a lift, but he sweats all the same.

There are still rationalists who have got as far as Darwin without having caught up with Freud. They do not understand that many people — thanks to the emotional tensions of childhood — positively desire to be punished. They punish themselves and then take it out on other people. They demand a scapegoat — the Jews or Negroes, Fascists or Communists, atheists or Jesuits, as the case may be.

Freud had never believed in the supernatural world and never seems to have had any religious experience. As early as 1904 he wrote: ‘I believe in fact that a great part of the mythological view of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions is nothing other than psychological processes projected into the outer world.’

Again, in 1910: ‘Psycho-analysis has made us aware of the ultimate connection between the father-complex and the belief in God, and has taught us that the personal God is psychologically nothing better than a magnified father; it shows us how young people lose their religious faith as soon as the father’s authority collapses. We thus recognize the root of religious need as lying in the parental complex.’

He was aware, however, of the sense of helplessness in face of manifold dangers which is a further impulse to construct religious beliefs as a protection. This, too, originates in childhood.

‘Man’s helplessness remains, and with it his father-longing and the gods. The gods retain their three-fold task: they must make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed on man.’ Our increased knowledge of the laws of Nature has weakened the first and the promise of immortality is an attempt to deal with the other two.

Absurd attempts have been made by recent religious apologists to extract crumbs of comfort from Freud’s attitude to religion. Thus his stress on irrational forces, both sexual and non-erotic (i.e. aggression), has been taken as scientific support for the dogma of Original Sin. Even more shameless is the use made of his statement that

‘An illusion is not the same as an error, it is indeed not necessarily an error’.

The fact that the human father is projected as God is, of course, logically compatible with the existence of God, and it is conceivable that the latter proposition could be independently proved. But Freud did not think it had been proved and the onus of establishing such a remarkable coincidence must rest on the believer.

Sixteen Years of Pain

‘In the long run’, he wrote, ‘nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable.’ The only safe avenue to knowledge of reality is science. ‘Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.’

That is the authentic voice of humanism. Legitimate criticisms may be made of Freud’s flight into metaphysics. He was a system-builder and succumbed to the temptation to multiply entities without necessity. His model of the mind will not last — but even models of the atom have been created only to be scrapped again and again in our own century.

He tried too hard to keep it intact and his attitude to the defections of Jung, Adler, and Stekel laid him open to the charge of imposing a rigid orthodoxy. Psycho-analysts are too ready to take the easy line of finding psychological reasons for disagreement rather than answers to arguments.

Freud was in the line of Hebrew prophets from Moses to Marx. He laid down the law. But his integrity was beyond question and his stoical humanism sustained him through years of bitter struggle and physical pain. During the last sixteen years of his life he underwent thirty-three operations for cancer of the jaw. Despite his great suffering he continued to work and he was over eighty when the Nazi invasion of Austria forced him to take refuge in England.

When his agony became such that it seemed pointless to go on — since his life’s work was done — he said to his doctor: ‘My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me that you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.’ Schur gave him an injection of morphia. He died just before midnight the next day, September 23, 1939.

by Humphrey Skelton

Faith in reason and a passionate concern for human happiness form the basis of Russell’s philosophy

Biographers of Earl Russell will have reason to be grateful to him for the generous information he has supplied about his early background in Portraits from Memory (1956) and his recent book, My Philosophical Development (Allen & Unwin, 16s). Like other philosophers in the great tradition he has led a stormy life and known persecution and imprisonment. He was mobbed and subsequently gaoled for his opposition to World War I. In World War II he was deprived of his post at the College of the City of New York after a lawsuit and a campaign of unbridled virulence.

Bishop Manning of the Protestant Episcopal Church opened fire by denouncing Russell as ‘a man who is a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality’. But this was a mere signal to the barrage that followed from the . Catholic press. ‘A professor of paganism’, declared The Tablet, adding that ‘his defence of adultery became so obnoxious that one of his “friends” is reported to have thrashed him.’

‘Quicksands threaten!’ wrote another correspondent. ‘The snake is in the grass! The worm is busy in the mind! Were Bertrand Russell honest even with himself he would declare, as did Rousseau, “I cannot look at any of my books without shuddering; instead of instructing, I corrupt; instead of nourishing, I poison. But passion blinds me, and with all my fine discourses, I am nothing but a scoundrel”.’

Rejection of Religion

The Jesuit weekly America described Russell as ‘a desiccated, divorced and decadent advocate of sexual promiscuity… ostracized by decent Englishmen’. But the alleged ostracism did not prevent the Jesuit philosopher, Father F. C. Coppleston, from debating urbanely with Russell on the existence of God in the BBC Third Programme in 1948. In a world completely dominated by Rome events might have followed a less agreeable course.

The whole of Russell’s public career has been a passionate fight for intellectual liberty. Hence his detestation of dictatorship, whether of the Right or Left. Many people called ‘progressive’ between the two wars were attracted by Russell’s views on free thought and sex but often bewildered by his implacable anti-communism. Equally, traditionalists who applauded his anti-communism were repelled by his atheism and unorthodox morality.

He is, of course, too independent a thinker to be neatly labelled and far too complex a personality to make the task of a biographer as easy as it might at first appear. It is not his logic but his temperament that is contradictory as he himself has shown in his recent books.

Both his parents died in his infancy and he was brought up in the pious, puritanical tradition of aristocratic liberalism by his grandparents. His youth was spent in the house in Richmond Park which Queen Victoria gave his grandfather, promoter of the 1832 Reform Bill. Cold baths, hard chairs, and rice pudding typified a regimen in which only virtue was prized, and mathematics— his first love—was suspect because it had no ethical content.

He describes the various stages of his rebellion in My Philosophical Development, which contains a revealing extract from a schoolboy essay trying to prove the existence of God. For a time he felt he had succeeded, but at the cost of disproving the immortality of the soul—a hint of the original thinker in the making.

The Passionate Sceptic

Note how the word ‘passion’ recurs. The American Jesuits were right off the target when they described him as ‘desiccated.’ He was to react as strongly against the plain living, high thinking, and monumental dullness of a certain type of Victorian agnostic as against the power-intoxicated puritanism of so many Christians and communists.

Delightful as he found the intellectual atmosphere of pre-War Cambridge, one cannot imagine him settling permanently in a tranquil academic backwater. There was a fiery, poetic element in his nature which at times came into conflict with the relentless pursuit of truth for its own sake. He came to feel that knowledge was valuable because its right use could increase human happiness.

The horror of war shook his ivory tower to its foundations and he realized that it was no habitation for a humanist. He opposed World War I because he thought it unnecessary and its consequences deleterious. As he was not a pacifist on purely ethical grounds, he was able to support World War II because of his hatred of Hitlerism.

Many of his admirers were disturbed by the extreme to which his anti-communism drove him when he declared himself in favour of threatening Russia with war if necessary. When he wrote to this effect, a global war with H-bombs, with its dire possibilities for the human species, had not become a practical possibility. No man has crusaded more tirelessly against this total catastrophe. Unless one is a pacifist it is logically possible to defend the limited use of the atomic bomb (now euphemistically demoted to a conventional weapon) and yet oppose a world holocaust.

There is a difference between logical and emotional consistency. After abandoning religion Russell became a ‘full-fledged Hegelian’—which is hard to believe for those who know only his later writings. A strain of mysticism, which was sternly repressed, is evident in what he wrote about mathematics in 1907.

Looking back on that youthful rhetoric, Russell dismisses it as ‘largely nonsense’. Obviously he was too full-blooded, too interested in human beings, to desire for long to escape from the actual world or to find his sojourn dreary. It certainly proved lively enough.

A similar note is struck in an essay ‘My Mental Development’ in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Evanston & Cambridge, 1944)—the emotional appeal of mysticism and its intellectual rejection, a kind of asceticism of the mind but not of the body.

But in his final summing-up Russell reveals that the mystical and idealist mood was extinguished. ‘I can no longer find any mystical satisfaction in the contemplation of mathematical truth.’ Again: ‘In this change of mood, something was lost, though something also was gained. What was lost was the hope of finding perfection and finality and certainty. What was gained was a new submission to some truths which were to me repugnant.’

It is a quality of greatness to be courageous enough to change one’s mind. In My Philosophical Development we are given an absorbing picture of a powerful and lucid intelligence adjusting itself to the revolution in thought through which he has lived and to which he has made a major contribution.

He believed—and still does—that philosophy should take account of the uncommonsense of science and not merely the commonsense of ordinary speech. Consequently he is out of sympathy with the modern Oxford school. This is clear from the inclusion of articles in his latest book which were previously published in learned journals and deal in trenchant style with his younger critics.

As he wrote elsewhere: ‘Philosophy, as conceived by the school I am discussing, seems to me a trivial and uninteresting pursuit. To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important.’

His rationalism has never wavered, even though he has been assailed—and who is not?—by the temptations of wishful thinking. His humanism is expressed by his passionate insistence that happiness is good and should be pursued with all the means in our power. But it involves the whole man—emotions and imagination and not just the intellect. It is not necessary to have a theory of life in order to be happy. Many people, he believes, could increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.

by Robert Greacen

Scepticism about belief combined with love and loyalty in human relationships is what humanism means to E. M. Forster

A VERY delightful story — probably apocryphal, but no matter — is told about E. M. Forster, novelist, critic, and humanist. It seems that at a party he was accosted by a lion-hunting woman, who demanded hopefully, having overheard someone call him Morgan, ‘You are Charles Morgan, aren’t you?’ Mr Forster assured the lady he was someone else, adding ‘My name’s Morgan Forster’. She had never heard of a Morgan Forster, which did not sound at all the same as E. M. Forster, so off she went to seek other literary big game, blissfully unaware that she was leaving behind a highly amused (and relieved!) celebrity. In a recent interview with Mr Forster the critic Philip Toynbee described him as ‘a diffident man but a friendly one’. Pretentiousness and vulgarity of the kind displayed by the woman in the story violate the Forsterian canon; they set up barriers between people and lead to insincere relationships. The people of whom Mr Forster approves, and who may come from any social class, are those (like Margaret Schlegel in Howards End) who really want ‘To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged…’ These are the people who know how to ‘connect the prose in us with the passion’.

E. M. Forster, who last January 1 celebrated his eightieth birthday, was born in London and educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge, where he formed a friendship with the philosopher G. Lowes Dickinson, whose Life he wrote in 1934. Having lived in Italy for a time, he published two novels with Italian backgrounds, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908). Returning to England in 1907, he lectured for a time at the Working Men’s College. His well-known Howards End came out in 1910, just before his first visit to India. A Passage to India, perhaps his most important work, won the Femina Vie Heureuse and Tait Black Memorial Prizes in 1925, since when Mr Forster has published other books but not a novel. In 1927 he delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, and these later appeared under the title, Aspects of the Novel. In 1942 he brought out a biography of his friend and fellow writer Virginia Woolf. Two collections of short stories have appeared, The Celestial Omnibus (1923) and The Eternal Moment (1928). The Hill of Devi (1953) records his early Indian experiences. In 1937 E. M. Forster was awarded the Benson medal of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1953 was made a Companion of Honour.

The Famous Formula

Mr Forster has had an eventful, travelled life. He likes ‘abroad’. During the First World War he did civilian work in Alexandria. While there, he contributed to the Egyptian Mail and collected material for his Alexandria: A History and Guide. Back in London in 1918, he began to work as a book reviewer for the New Statesman, Spectator, and several daily newspapers, acting for a time as literary editor of the Daily Herald. He has continued to produce reviews and articles ever since. Unlike the average novelist he has excelled in the essay form, always writing lightly, wittily, readably, yet never without a very definite and serious intent. His intimate, conversational style, so free from any hint of cant or pedantry or stuffiness, has been just ‘right’ for broadcasting. The grand manner may impress a crowd but it sounds absurd in the living room; and above all Mr Forster wants to speak to us as individual beings, as persons, not as a collectivity of any kind.

In 1946 Mr Forster moved into King’s College, Cambridge, from Abinger, the family house in Surrey where he had lived a great part of his life. At King’s he is an Honorary Fellow, not a don. In inviting him to live there the College not only honoured one of its most outstanding former undergraduates, but added to its own distinction. Philip Toynbee tells us that ‘the atmosphere of family piety remains, and there are portraits and sketches of Mr Forster’s ancestors on the walls of his large and comfortable room’. Although he has a unique position at King’s, he is very much a participant in College life, usually dining in hall and keeping in touch with the successive generations of undergraduates.

Mr Forster is a master of the aside, the almost whispered observation. In his novels neither plot nor character is the first consideration. One may say in a certain sense that he is not a pure novelist at all. What he does most successfully is to put across his own attitude to life; and this he does with irony and tenderness and directness. The words his sympathetic characters use might well have been said by him in his own person, as these quotations from Howards End will show: ‘How inconceivable it would be if the Royal Family cared about Art’; and, ‘I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness’.

How little different he sounds when speaking in his own narrative voice, as when he caustically exclaims in passing: ‘The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation.’

Howards End contrasts two middle-class Edwardian families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. Mr Forster champions the Schlegels, since they respect human personality and put personal relationships above all other claims on their loyalty, whereas the solid Wilcoxes believe in things, in money-making and marriage settlements. The Schlegels think music and poetry are important in themselves, while the Wilcoxes merely ask that they shall strengthen the character. Yet brilliant — and brilliantly quotable — as Howards End undoubtedly is, it never quite succeeds as a novel. In it we do not so much ask ‘What happens now?’ as ‘What will this clever and original author say next?’ But the delights of Howards End, which introduced the public to the famous Forsterian motto, ‘only connect’, are as real now as in 1910 when the book first appeared. That some of its lessons have been learnt may be traced in part to the impact on the literate consciousness of writers like E. M. Forster.

Little need be said about Mr Forster’s greatest novel, A Passage to India, since it has been so widely discussed in the thirty-four years since it came out. In it, too, he drives home the lesson he has never tired of teaching: the invincibility of love. Mr Forster sees India, like life itself, as a muddle, not a mystery. How much better everything might have been, he suggests, had the British in India tried to establish human relationships with the Indians. Once again we must note pain­fully the results of the failure to ‘connect’. If only it had been possible for the Englishman Fielding and the Indian Aziz to have been friends! Each wanted friendship with the other, but the political complex in which they were caught up would not permit it. The separateness of each man is wonderfully outlined in the novel’s con­cluding paragraph, with its intermingling of real­istic description and symbolism. This book will stand as one of the great reminders of the last phase of the British Raj.

Two Cheers for Democracy

‘One can rely on English life to produce these personal voices’, writes V. S. Pritchett, ‘a Samuel Butler, a Mary Kingsley, a Forster… Their voices are direct, natural, distinct, and disengaged, malignly flat.’ Certainly E. M. Forster said pretty openly and clearly what he meant right at the beginning of What I Believe, first published as a sixpenny pamphlet in 1939. The words are ‘I do not believe in Belief’, and he goes on to say that his law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. He considers that since Christianity became more and more institutionalized, its original impulse has vanished. He said to Philip Toynbee not long ago: ‘As a matter of fact, my absence of religious views developed rather slowly, but since the age of twenty-four I’ve had more or less the same attitude. What I do see more clearly than I did is that reason can’t solve everything, but I want it to solve as many things as it can.’ It was in this What I Believe essay, incidentally, that Mr Forster put the cat among the pigeons by stating bluntly that if he had to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country.

As for Democracy (whether or not with a capital ‘D ’), Mr Forster absolutely refuses to give the usual three cheers for it; he will give two only, saying that because it is ‘less hateful’ than other contemporary forms of government it therefore deserves our support. He likes Democracy for what it does not do. It does not divide its citizens into the bossers and the bossed in the same rigid way as totalitarian systems; and it does not panic and hand over its affairs to bullying ruffians in military uniform. Above all, Democracy allows criticism. E. M. Forster believes in the Press ‘despite all its lies and vulgarity’; he believes in Parliament for the uncommon reason that it is a Talking Shop; and he believes in the MP who refuses to toe the party line. Positively, his faith rests in the love and loyalty that one individual can give to another, in ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’. What I Believe ends in a typically down-to-earth way: ‘Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And. a very good thing, too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.’

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) reprints ‘What I Believe’, as well as numerous essays and broadcast talks. Among the diverse subjects are anti-Semitism, Nazism (and what a Hitler victory would have meant in Britain), Cambridge, and authors as different as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Forrest Reid, and André Gide. He includes a delightfully shrewd analysis of Jan Struther’s rather smug heroine, Mrs Miniver: ‘Mrs Miniver is beyond doubt a lady. But she is equally certainly not an aristocrat.’ Here we have what at a first glance seems another bedside book, full of bits and pieces gently and persuasively written; but there is an underlying unity in the work which at core is rock-hard, commonsensical, and in the most true sense moral.

To read and re-read E. M. Forster’s novels and essays is to come into touch with a rare humanist spirit and to realize that for all the honours and birthday congratulations that showered in on him last New Year’s Day Mr Forster cannot easily be deceived. His aim is Love, his method scepticism. He knows that people find it easier to award a distinguished author the C.H. or send him a birthday telegram than to learn anything from his pages. And yet, for all his scepticism and insight into the human condition, E. M. Forster refuses to despair, but goes on hoping that more and more of us will take to heart that motto of his, ‘only connect’.

by Robert Greacen

The founding father of independent and democratic India has been a lifelong humanist

IT is not easy to realize that Jawaharlal Nehru, second only to Gandhi in the affections of the Indian masses and the undisputed leader of the various peoples of that great sub-continent we just call ‘India’, is now approaching his seventieth birthday. Jawaharlal — the name means ‘the red jewel’— Nehru was, in fact, born in Allahabad on November 14, 1889, the son of a highly successful and Westernized lawyer who came of Kashmir Brahmin stock, that élite group in Hindu society. ‘Indian by birth yet Western by education’, writes Dr Michael Brecher of McGill University in his scholarly and very readable Nehru: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press, 42s), ‘modern in outlook yet influenced by the heritage of his native land, a staunch patriot yet a man with international vision, he was the symbol of a new society — liberal, humanist, and equalitarian. Indeed, he was the embodiment of an itelligentzia constantly in turmoil as it sought to reconcile its goals with the alien environment in which it grew to maturity’.

Until Nehru was three he lived with his parents in Allahabad proper, near the ‘chowk’ or market, amidst the congestion so typical of urban India. It is a measure of the prosperity of his family that they were soon able to afford a move to the exclusive European area. In 1900 Nehru’s father purchased a luxurious house which he named ‘Abode of Happiness’, and it was here that the young Nehru spent his formative years. From pre-school age until the time he left for England, at fifteen, he was educated by private tutors, mostly British. Learned Brahmins were engaged to teach him Hindi and Sanskrit. Luxury and security were characteristic of the Nehru household. Even at that early date the ‘Abode of Happiness’ had two swimming pools, one in the large garden and the other in the house itself. Nehru was being cast in the image of an English gentleman if not indeed an English aristocrat, and this early conditioning still exerts a certain pull on the seventy-year-old statesman.

Attitude to Religion

Nehru has vivid recollections of his Harrow schooldays. Dr Brecher researched into the Harrow archives and interviewed some of Nehru’s contemporaries there, but finds that the boy Nehru did not make a strong impression on his fellows, despite the fact that he once won a half-mile race in the Headmaster’s House competition. He was twice top of his form in term examinations. Going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1907, he spent three idyllic years reading for the natural science tripos. After that, he departed for London where he entered the Inner Temple. Called to the Bar in 1912 he returned to India after seven largely happy and stimulating years in the country against whose successive Governments he was to struggle for a great part of his life. The polished Kashmir Brahmin had yet to discover Mother India.

The awakening of Nehru’s feeling for India was partly due to his own recognition of the appalling poverty of the masses, whose lot did not seem to be improving under a foreign administration, and partly thanks to the influence of Mahatma Gandhi. Despite Gandhi’s influence, however — and it was both great and enduring — Nehru has never been a religious man. Here are his own words on religion — and they by no means constitute an isolated utterance — written to his friend Dr Mahmud:

Here is another quotation that will surely drive the point home:

Nehru has been a lifelong humanist. This humanism led him to socialism. True, he has flirted with Communism, especially as a young man and after his first visit, in 1927, to the Soviet Union. Like many other Indians, and indeed most Asians, he was impressed by the apparent lack of a colour-bar in Russia; he feels, too, that Asia, with all her urgent problems of food shortage, over-population and industrial under-development, cannot afford to dissipate energy in taking sides in the East-West ideological struggle. Nor can he see Communism, for all its obvious faults and over-simplifications, in a truly imperialistic aspect, certainly not the way he can see Britain or France or even smaller Western powers like Holland. Nehru, fully aware of the attractions of Communism, knows that it at least gets things done, but Communist practice repels him. Just before the last War he remarked:

In the last two sentences one notices the impact of Gandhi’s teaching.

Although Nehru has been frequently concerned with the theory of politics, resembling in this respect the typical Western intellectual, he has time and again proved himself a leader in practical affairs. His English education strengthened his willingness to learn from experience as much as from text-books. Some of this experience was bitter, for the pampered youth grew into the man who often went to prison for his anti-British activities. He had travelled a long way since winning that half-mile race at Harrow! One of Dr Brecher’s chapters bears the revealing title: ‘Prison Becomes a Habit’. Dr Brecher’s moving words may be quoted:

Once Nehru was released because of the illness of his devoted wife Kamala, who died so long ago as 1936. Her death aged and saddened Nehru, who has a deeply emotional nature. Prison must have been a torment to a person of such eager individuality, and one accustomed, moreover, to giving orders rather than obeying them. Fortunately Nehru is a big enough man not to have been permanently embittered by his prison experiences. Still, without Gandhi’s gentle but powerful influ­ence, and his gospel of not striking back violently at opponents, the story might well have been different, and Nehru would most likely have taken his chance of pulling India out of the Commonwealth.

The Test of Statesmanship

The 1939-45 War was a period of great difficulty and strain in Anglo-Indian relations. Some Indians went so far in their hostility to British rule as to support the Japanese. Nehru of course had no more use for the Japanese militarist expansionism than for British imperialism; and in any case he considered it dishonourable to strike the British Raj in the back in its hour of difficulty. No doubt the quick decision of the Attlee Government, following the end of hostilities, to give the Indian sub-continent self-government averted a major clash between the two countries. What a miracle it was that the division of the immense land-mass into Pakistan and India did not result in an even greater loss of life than was actually the case! Could it have been so but for the urging of restraint by Gandhi and his right-hand man, Nehru? Nor should we under-rate the necessary role played by Lord Mountbatten during the transition period. Nehru and Mountbatten, men not dissimilar in outlook — aristocrats with liberal democratic convictions — worked together harmoniously to accomplish the switch-over of power.

The struggle for independence was painful but relatively straightforward. With the achievement of that goal, what next? Nehru has tried hard to build up Indian industry and increase agricultural output; and these less romantic tasks have proved exceedingly difficult. Indian peasants, bound still in the straight-jacket of the caste system, deeply conservative in all their ways, mostly illiterate and not even having the advantage of a commonly spoken language, are strongly resistant to change. How is India to feed her immense population? In order to cope with these internal problems Nehru had to look away from the outside world of international affairs, yet he remains at heart an internationalist with a strong desire that India should play a worthy role in such organizations as the United Nations.

Now and then Nehru speaks his mind on international events. Quick to denounce the Suez adventure, for example, he hesitated before criticizing Soviet intervention in Hungary; and this hesitation lost him considerable support in India, where the number of his critics has been increasing in recent years. Faced with Chinese aggression in Tibet, Nehru again hesitated. Some people have hinted that his grip is less sure than formerly. In the Indian province of Kerala the Communists have won control, and this may indeed indicate the way things will go in India when Nehru quits the scene. If no strong successor can be found, will Indian democracy crumble before the onslaught of the well-organized Communists or, alternatively, that of the powerful Hindu Right-wing authoritarians?

Much depends on the length of time Nehru’s mental and physical resources will last. While they have admittedly been enormous, it must be remembered that he will shortly reach his seventieth birthday, and that he has worked relentlessly for many years. (Unlike perhaps the majority of Indians, Nehru knows the meaning of time, and his quick temper is apt to be lost when he comes across time-wasting and unpunctuality.) It is anyone’s guess as to what will happen when eventually Nehru reliquishes power. Only time will tell whether this founding father of an independent and democratic India has built on sure foundations. Speaking of the future, Nehru once proposed an epitaph for himself that could hardly be bettered:

by John Gillard Watson

The Puritan passion for education gave rise to Harvard University and thus planted the seeds of humanism

A ‘HIDEOUS and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and men’. Such was the condition of Cape Cod, as described by one of the Pilgrim Fathers, William Bradford, when the first colonists of New England landed there in 1620. In such dreary surroundings, colonized by religious fanatics, one would not expect the importation, let alone the survival and growth, of any kind of humanism. Yet, strangely enough, it is there that we can see the origins of American humanism, not in the comparatively prosperous and easy-living colonies further south.

Actually, the early Puritans were not so narrow-minded as they are popularly imagined to have been, otherwise humanism could not have survived as it did. That it faded elsewhere on the American continent is the more remarkable when we think of the ultimate reasons for the discovery of America. The idea of America preceded its actual discovery; it was one of the many strands of the European Renaissance.

The Renaissance was marked by two characteristics profoundly different from those of the preceding Middle Ages: it sought to discover man and the world, and believed in the potentialities of man instead of his subservience to God and Church. Given that man was capable of development and achievement, what better theatre for him than a new world across the Atlantic?

The Puritan Paradox

It was a natural consequence of the new outlook that the Spanish and the Portuguese should discover and conquer South and Central America. The English were late in this work, and so concerned more with piracy than settlement. Yet even the incredible explorations and conquests of the Spanish left vast tracts unaccounted for in the North American continent, so that their claim to the whole continent was unreal. Nevertheless, the first and unsuccessful attempt by the English to colonize Virginia was not made until 1587; it was another twenty years before the colony was established. To the north still lay untouched territories. Nor was it surprising that so much of the Atlantic seaboard remained unsettled, in view of its inhospitable climate and inadequate resources.

The Pilgrim Fathers sailed for Virginia, but were blown off course; hence their settlement in Plymouth. But this colony was not important; the true foundation, in effective terms, of New England, was that of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay ten years after the Pilgrim Fathers, in 1630. Followed by Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Haven, in a few years the population had grown enough to show that stable colonization of the stony soil of New England was definitely possible.

Yet the population was small: in 1640 New England numbered only 17,800 people, and by 1700 had risen to only 106,000; in 1690 Boston itself numbered only 7,000 people. New England was both small and poor, a group of struggling colonies, clinging to the coast of an immense continent, penetrating only slowly into the great American wilderness. How remarkable it was, then, that so much of Renaissance humanism was successfully transplanted there.

Paradoxical as it may appear, the religious motive that drove the Puritans to America, with the aim of building up a model Christian community, turned out to be the foundation of humanism. If it had not been for the discipline and high ideals of Puritanism, the colonists would have relapsed into the condition of crude materialism which is characteristic of colonial countries in their early days.

The country was as wild and inhospitable as Bradford described it, stony and comparatively infertile, and threatened by Indian wars which sometimes became real: the colonists themselves were poor in material goods and practical skills. Their first few years were arduous in the extreme. The elements of higher civilization are usually scrapped in a colony, driven out either by the sheer struggle to live or by an overwhelming desire for material prosperity in more congenial lands. This is so in hard countries such as Australia or easy countries like the West Indies; in Virginia, which soon achieved some prosperity, humanistic culture died away.

Harvard University Founded

But Puritanism, with its unflinching rules of conduct and its disciplined insistence on high ideals, enabled the New England colonists to maintain humanism, albeit on a religious basis. This humanism was stripped down to its bare essentials, without love poetry, the theatre, or religious music. What remained was the intellectual element, based on the Greek and Roman classics that formed the heart of the Renaissance.

Such an outlook needed an educational system to ensure its maintenance in the future. Hence, only six years after the founding of Massachusetts, Harvard University was originated in 1636, and the first account of it says:

And the charter of 1650 declares the purpose of the college to be ‘the advancement of all good literature, artes and Sciences’, ‘the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature Artes and Sciences’, and ‘all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in knowledge: and godliness’.

‘Good literature’ is a translation of Cicero’s bonae literae. ‘Artes and Sciences’ means six of the seven arts (grammar, rhetoric and logic; arithmetic, geometry and astronomy — music was excluded), and the three philosophies (metaphysics, ethics and natural science), together with Greek, Hebrew and ancient history; the students already knew Latin. This was the same curriculum as the English university of Cambridge. The arts and sciences were of course medieval, but Greek and Hebrew were Renaissance, and so were the classics.

From the curriculum it is clear that the purpose of the college was not primarily to train ministers, but higher education. Less than half of the seventeenth century graduates became ministers; those who intended to do so took divinity as a special subject after they had taken their degrees. The evidence of students’ commonplace books shows that it was customary to read generally in both ancient and modern literature, including poetry of the late Renaissance.

Harvard was small, but did not lose its traditions, and the 130 graduates who emigrated to New England before 1646 were replaced in part by the colony’s own products. But the effort of founding an embryo university would have been useless, a mere grandiloquent gesture, unless it had been accompanied by a general educational drive. The Puritans also founded public elementary and grammar schools, on the English model.

Enthusiasm for Education

The Puritans were more enthusiastic for education than any other group in England, and until the Restoration they pursued an active policy which led to the founding of hundreds of grammar schools afterwards closed. But in New England there was no parallel reaction to that which followed the end of the Commonwealth. England in the earlier seventeenth century had enough grammar schools for any boy to find the education he needed to enter Oxford or Cambridge, although he must first have learned to read and write (some lads of parts did gain admittance while illiterate and picked up enough to begin their Latin).

Most of the schools were free; all had scholarships for the needy. The Long Parliament gave State aid to the schools on a scale not approached again until the nineteenth century. But with the Restoration of 1660, the High Anglicans began a persistent attack on the schools, considering that they unsettled the lower orders. From the blight cast on education England took long to recover. But in New England there was no such reversion, and the continued dominance of the Puritan outlook ensured the continuance of the schools.

In elementary education the colonies were ahead of the old country. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven steps were taken to establish not only grammar schools but elementary schools for all. Within half-a-century of its foundation, New England (except for Rhode Island, for peculiar reasons that cannot be gone into here) had a system of compulsory education, largely free. Consequently literacy in New England, among men at least, was about 95 per cent in the seventeenth century; in Virginia it was only about 60 per cent. The institution of what are still called the ‘public schools’ in America — now, alas, changed beyond recognition under the influence of ‘progressive education’— was an essential part of the establishment of humanism in the United States.

Under great difficulties, the Puritans managed to maintain an educational system which ran from elementary school through grammar school up to university level — for the college, then as now, maintained the highest standards of scholarship. This ensured the continuance in the new world of the Renaissance humanism of the old. Such a humanism was primarily literary, but not opposed to the new science which was about to replace the old medieval science based on Aristotle. The old concept of natural law was interpreted in a new way so as to allow for the discovery by man of the ways in which Nature worked. It was some years before New England was able to catch up with Europe in this respect, but the atmosphere was receptive.

As already quoted, the Baconian expression ‘to advance learning’ was used about Harvard, and from the beginning there were men of science in New England. The ablest was the Governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop, Jnr, the first American to be elected to the Royal Society, and at the first election of 1663. By the end of the eighteenth century eighteen Americans had been elected to the Royal Society, eleven of them New Englanders. But in addition Puritan ministers, such as Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather, made astronomical observations and welcomed the new astronomy of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus.

The colonists showed themselves more receptive to the new sciences than the English universities; Harvard adopted the Copernican system in 1656, when the new astronomy was being resisted by Church and clergy everywhere — except in New England. And the first child of the Royal Society of London was the Philosophical Society of Boston, founded in 1683, a year before that of Dublin. By the end of the seventeenth century the new natural science was generally accepted in New England, even though the amount of scientific work done was small (yet that of other colonies was even less); and the clergy were moving towards deism.

The common impression that the founders of New England were religious bigots with no interest in humanism is a false one. The Puritans, with a strength of character and intellect that was unique among colonists, transplanted the elements of humanism to New England. To ensure the future growth of what they had brought they established schools and a university. The result was that although the Puritan faith faded under the development of prosperity, by then humanism was sufficiently firmly established for it to flower in the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

This led to the American Revolution, founded on rationalism, and itself the inspirer of the French Revolution. Furthermore, there was a second great flowering in literature in New England in the nineteenth century, going back to the same roots. To this day, the best elements of American civilization derive from the humanism so heroically transplanted and nurtured by the New England Puritans of the seventeenth century.

by J. Jourdain

Alfred Loisy’s Biblical criticism led by painful stages to major excommunication and loss of religious belief

ALFRED LOISY (1857-1940) was born in Ambrieres of farming stock. Weak health, an intellectual bent, and an aversion to worldly business gave him an early leaning towards the Church. He was educated at various seminaries and decided to become a priest at the age of sixteen, while emotionally under the spell of the Mass.

He entered the seminary of Châlons-sur-Marne the following year, and during his course there he was mortified to discover grave differences of opinion among his superiors on matters he thought indisputable. Apart from the recent pronouncement on Papal Infallibility, the entire presentation of the moral and dogmatic theology of the Church filled his mind with ‘invincible disquiet’, to use his own words. When his conscience began to say ‘to doubt is a grave sin’ and ‘I am dissatisfied’, the seeds of a mental conflict were germinating.

The Road to Modernism

He could find no solid foundation in the works of Aquinas and the teachers in whom he confided his difficulties were no help. They treated his problems as some curious aberration. For the time being, however, he was sustained by flights of zealous mysticism which deadened his critical faculty. He was ordained priest at the age of twenty-two and served for a couple of years as curé in local villages.

Then in 1881 he went to the Catholic Institute in Paris to read for a theological degree. His progress was so good that he finally became Professor of Assyriology and Hebrew there. But trouble was brewing when he was obliged to undertake the detailed analysis of the primitive documents and origins of his religion. He began to feel that in this study the rational intelligence should be set at liberty, and that this approach, however alarming the conclusions might be, could never upset something called ‘the soul of religion’.

He concluded that the books of the New Testament were not divinely inspired by God, or literally true. They were the product of human minds and bore a strictly natural connection with the circumstances of time and place in which they were produced. He recognized clearly now that to examine this problem to the foundations was his life’s work. He was on the high road to Modernism.

Condemned by the Pope

Loisy has been identified as one of the leading lights of the Modernist Movement. This movement was not an organized body with a common policy or programme. It consisted of a heterogeneous group of Roman Catholics in different countries working in the various fields of literature, philosophy, and theology who saw the intellectual poverty of Catholicism and its increasing dissonance with the findings of modern research, especially Biblical research. They wanted to bring it up to date by discarding obviously false traditions and retaining fhe essence of religion as spirit and symbol. Christ could become sublime rather than divine.

Tyrell defined Modernism as ‘the desire and effort to find a new theological synthesis consistent with the date of historico-critical research… By a modernist, I mean a Churchman of any sort who believes in the possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truth of Modernity’. Which is intelligible when we know what is ‘essential truth’.

Many Modernists were influenced by evolutionary philosophies and the philosophy of Bergson. Notwithstanding their diversities, the Vatican gave them one neck with the label ‘synthesis of all Heresies’, and so decapitated them. In 1907 they were condemned by Pius X in the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi. Clerics were obliged to take an anti-Modernist oath. Some were silenced; others left the Church. The sixty-five theses which were condemned were mostly taken from Loisy’s writings.

The Storm Rages

While at the Institute Loisy had no desire to start a controversy with the Church. He wanted to save it by renovation. He felt that in spite of its show of immutability it had changed in the past and could only survive by further adaptation. He was mistaken. After publishing an article on Biblical Inspiration in his own bi-monthly review in 1892, he was dismissed from his professorship. The review was damned and discontinued after the Bull Providentissimus of Leo XIII. He remained in the Church and retired to seclusion to produce more critical work.

In 1900, The Religion of Israel was condemned by the Pope. Two years later he published The Gospel and the Church. It made him famous internationally, infamous theologically, and the centre of a controversy which was to carry him ultimately out of the Church. The book was a reply to Harnack’s What Is Christianity?, which in Loisy’s opinion made Jesus too much of a Protestant-Liberal theologian. But in attacking Harnack he revealed his own drastic analysis of the New Testament. True, he tried to save the ‘essence’ of the Catholic faith, but without sacrificing scientific exegesis. It aroused much bitterness. One Catholic described it as a hoax. The beautiful defence of spirituality was ignored; the historical admissions were too terrible, and in 1903 it was placed on the Index.

His piety would not let him leave the Church, nor would his intellect submit. ‘Catholic I was; Catholic I remain. Critic I was; critic I remain’, he wrote in 1904.

Major Excommunication

He made a humble submission which was considered unsatisfactory. He wrote to the Pope appealing, in the sincerest terms, to his heart. The Pope sent a chilling reply to Cardinal Richard: ‘I have received a letter from the Abbé Loisy… He appeals to my heart… but the letter was not written from his own heart.’ The tenor of this reply stunned Loisy, but his emotional attachment to the Church still prevented him from leaving it.

In 1904 he was prevented by the Pope’s intervention from lecturing at the School of Higher Studies. He retired to his cottage and in 1907 published his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. As a result a Major Excommunication was pronounced in the following words: ‘It is already known throughout the world that the priest, Alfred Loisy, has been teaching by word of mouth and spreading abroad by writing many things pernicious to the main foundations of Christian faith… and his obstinate defiance (obfirmata contumacia) therein being established without doubt, the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Inquisition, by express orders of our most Holy Lord Pius X, Pope, solemnly pronounces against the priest Alfred Loisy, by name and personally, the sentence of major excommunication… and, that, as a consequence thereof, he is to be shunned (vitandus), and all men are to shun him.’

One minor but interesting result is described in his Mémoires. His cook was told by the curé of the parish that if she fell into mortal illness while living in his house she would not be able to receive the Last Sacraments. Alarmed by this warning, she left and found another situation, but six weeks later she returned to her old master, determined to take the risk.

After his excommunication Loisy felt a sense of relief. He did not become anti-Catholic. Once he was caught listening to the Mass outside the Abbey gates, but no tears were observed. His critical outlook hardened. Fortunately from the point of view of income the College de France employed him from 1909-1932 as Professor of Church History. In recognition of his services to scholarship he was made a member of the Legion d’Honneur. His critical work continued fearlessly and culminated in The Birth of the Christian Religion (1934) and The Origins of the New Testament (1936). Some chief conclusions (probable, as he admits) are summarized thus:

Verdict on Christianity

Jesus had no intention of founding a religion: the idea never entered his head. His message was the imminent end of the present world order by the descent of God from the clouds, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. There would be a resurrection, a judgment, a gathering of the Jews, and consequently an end of sacrilegious foreign rule. Hence, ‘Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’.

This Jewish belief, developed in Babylonian captivity and inflamed by Roman domination was asserted with different degrees of intensity; sometimes with violence (Zealots). Judea swarmed with sects. Galilee was a hotbed of Jewish Nationalism producing a succession of armed bands and political Messiahs who expected to usher in the new Kingdom. Roman power crushed them. Jesus and the Baptist were executed because their teaching was judged politically dangerous, not because they were misunderstood. Jesus was not merely a moralist; he considered himself an Envoy of the Kingdom.

The Gospels are the anonymous works of many hands, touched and retouched and reaching their final form in the second century. By then, the memory of Jesus was a legend; his real life and teaching little known. Hence a life and a teaching from various sources were ascribed to him for the edification of the early Church and to enshrine its changes and developments in the pagan world. Nobody had collected the sayings of Jesus. Why should they? The millennium was at hand. He was a wonder-worker (‘nothing more natural in those times’), but the miracles, arranged in types and series for symbolic purposes, are of editorial origin.

The Christian message continued to be eschatological for two or three generations. When the Kingdom failed to come, it was discovered ‘within you’ as a spiritual kingdom. When the Jews rejected and the pagans accepted Christianity, the ‘guilt’ of the crucifixion was transferred from Gentiles to Jews and Pilate was portrayed as the ‘judge in a comic opera’.

After the crucifixion, the Jewish Christians with an Hellenic culture formed a separate body, which was dispersed by the authorities through the violent preaching of Stephen. They carried the message to the synagogues of the Dispersion as far as Rome, their easiest converts being the pagan proselytes. Paul’s role was important, not paramount. The serious rift between the Pauline and Petrine parties on admitting the uncircumcized is successfully reconciled in the Gospels, which both praise and belittle Peter, according to the origin of the tradition. (John the Baptist, to whom Christianity is traceable, is even made to belittle himself.).

The only cardinal certainty is the crucifixion. In entering Jerusalem, Jesus expected the Kingdom, not death. But his disciples may have caused a riot. The final scenes of the Gospels are a ritual drama built on Old Testament texts, especially Psalm 22. The last words ‘My God, My God’, etc, are Ps 22, v I. The disciples thought the soul of Christ was with God waiting to return; the resurrection stories were ‘devised’ long afterwards to answer objectors. Nobody witnessed the execution save the guards. The body was flung into the common ditch for criminals.

Gilbert Murray’s Tribute

Gilbert Murray contributed a preface to L. P. Jacks’ English translation of The Birth of the Christian Religion (Allen & Unwin). He described it as ‘the latest, and, in my judgment, the most masterly of all the attempts to understand and describe according to the normal canons of human history, without prejudice and without miracle, a movement which has shaped the whole subsequent religion of the western world’.

Such was the tribute of one humanist (also born a Catholic) to another. With Loisy the break with the Church came much later in life and was correspondingly slow and painful, but there was no deathbed recantation in either case, despite the efforts to bring this about.

by Philip Greer

Whitman’s passionate faith in the equality of man made him the poet and prophet of American humanism

WALT WHITMAN was the first genuinely American poet. His vision of life was the expression of a passionate belief in democracy, and there could be no better reason for placing him among the poets and prophets of humanism.

What else he believed is of minor importance and somewhat obscure. We don’t go to poetry for a creed, but to extend the range of our imagination and sympathy. There are poets who make our experience of Nature more vivid, but although Whitman is sometimes thought of as an open-air poet he was not primarily concerned with the great open spaces and did not linger in them.

For Whitman it was human nature rather than inanimate nature that was most significant. He was anthropocentric. He did not brood in solitude over the mystery of life at safe remove, but found it in the faces and vital contacts of crowds in the street.

This was a new and even startling note to strike in the mid-nineteenth century. To pity the plight of the industrial workers in big cities was sometimes an emotional luxury indulged in by those poets who remained comfortably in an ivory tower. But to descend into the street and hail the workers as comrades, to welcome them on terms of equality, whether their skins were white, black, or yellow, was a novelty.

Whitman’s real achievement was to demonstrate that a belief in equality must be more than indulgence in rhetoric. He showed that ‘the brotherhood of man’ was an empty abstraction unless it meant the abolition in everyday relationships of class consciousness.

This was not a commonplace attitude in an America torn by civil war on the slavery issue. It is far from commonplace in many parts of the world today — South Africa, for instance. It sprang from an overwhelming conviction of the artificiality and injustice of divisions on lines of race and nationality.

The catalogue goes on, embracing all the peoples of the earth. Sometimes the trick of making long, descriptive catalogues is overworked, but just as often it produces a powerful, cumulative effect. This, one feels, is what democracy means in action. It is not about mere ideas, but actual human beings.

The philosopher creates a concept, the politician a platitude, the poet an image which rivets attention on the concrete fact. It was the social function of poetry, as Whitman conceived it, to provide a fertilizing image so that a truly democratic State, such as he hoped America would become, would have higher values than the pursuit of material wealth and selfish pleasure.

He felt he was preaching a religion of humanity and he regarded these values as spiritual. But the use of such terms as ‘religion’ and ‘spiritual’ must not mislead us into thinking that they are given their conventional meanings. When he speaks of ‘soul’ he does not mean ‘the ghost in the machine’.

The point he is making is that democracy is the best way of enabling individuality to develop, and that is the main reason for regarding him as a humanist. Representative government is not an end but a means to an end. If Whitman were alive today his voice would certainly be raised in protest against what has been called the ‘acquisitive society’ which measures success by the length of the fins on a car.

Cars, refrigerators, TV sets, and all other symbols of prosperity are well enough, but they only touch the surface of life. The electoral system and the economic structure of society are machinery to be tested by their ability to provide the freedom and opportunity for the mass of people to make the most of their lives.

It is often said nowadays that governments need not be concerned with happiness because it cannot be defined. All that an administration can do, in this view, is to provide good houses, adequate food, health services and drains. This is a plausible but highly dangerous doctrine.

Obviously you cannot have a Ministry of Happiness. It is equally obvious that all your material wants can be satisfied and you may still be miserable. Even if you are not positively unhappy your mental and emotional growth may be stunted and your personality disordered. Whitman would have described a highly regimented society, organized solely to provide material comforts, as soulless. We need not jib at his vocabulary because of its metaphysical associations. He was not a metaphysician but a poet. He was saying that without ideals and a goal — or what he would call ‘religion’— a man is only half alive.

Every society has held up a characteristic ideal type for admiration, though it has fallen far short of it in practice. In the past the ideal has inevitably been aristocratic, but Whitman sought to make it democratic.

‘The purpose of democracy’, he wrote in a prose essay, ‘is, through many transmigrations and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in the highest, sanest freedom, may and must become a law, a series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but his relations to all other individuals and to the State; and that while other theories, as in the past histories of nations, have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, this, as matters now stand in our civilized world, is the only scheme worth working from, as warranting results like Nature’s laws, reliable, when once established, to carry on of themselves.’

In short, only a democratic system can produce self-reliant citizens; and when they have attained self-reliance they must be allowed to make their own choices. They must not be pushed around by experts and bureaucrats who think they know what is good for other people.

Some such idea flickered long ago in the brief dawn of Greek humanism. As Thucydides makes Pericles say: ‘If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to capacity, class, considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the State, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive injury.’

Whitman had plenty of experience of ‘anger’ and ‘injurious looks’. His Leaves of Grass raised a storm of abuse only to be expected of the forerunner of Havelock Ellis and D. H . Lawrence. The liberation from a centuries-old distorted attitude to sex we owe to such pioneers confirms the rightness of Whitman’s plea that in a true democracy freedom of expression and minority voices should be respected.

Greek democracy, as everyone knows, rested upon slavery, but it is worth pondering on the fact that Whitman lived through a bitter war to abolish slavery in Christian America. And lest anyone thinks it odd to connect the Good Gray Poet, or Honest Walt, with ancient Greece, it should be noted that Homer, Sophocles, and Epictetus were among his bedside books.

Homer, like the Bible, brought literature into the life of the common people. That was what Whitman thought poets should do, and what he succeeded in doing himself. ‘The trouble is that writers are too literary — too damned literary’, he told W. R. Thayer. ‘Art for art’s sake, think of it! Let a man really accept that — let that be his ruling thought — and he is lost. Instead of regarding literature as only an instrument in the service of something larger than itself it looks upon itself as an end — as a fact to be finally worshipped, adored. To me that’s all a horrible blasphemy, a bad-smelling apostasy.’ Again, ‘really great poetry is always (like the Homeric and Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few’.

He was the mouthpiece of a new, confident Americanism just beginning to attain self-consciousness. He cut the umbilical cord which joined American culture to Europe. In future, American writers must develop their native idiom or become expatriates — Henry James, settling in England behind a wall of literary snobbery, Ezra Pound turning to Italy and Fascism, T. S. Eliot taking to Royalism and High Anglicanism.

Naturally the coteries looked down on ‘the barbaric yawp’ of the outsider. For a short interval, it is true, Free Verse became fashionable, and it was popularly associated with Free Love. But Whitman’s verse was too easy to imitate badly, too utterly personal to become a model. The simplicity was deceptive and the tortured alterations of his MSS show with what blood and sweat it was achieved.

Yet his genius was recognized in unexpected places. Swinburne paid high tribute at first, though he later retracted. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Bridges: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living’. Thomas Mann identified the message of Whitman with the humanitas of Novalis.

Havelock Ellis wrote: ‘Whitman represents for the first time since Christianity swept over the world, the reintegration, in a sane and wholehearted form, of the instincts of the entire man… Here is nothing of creeds and dogmas. Here is no stupefying list of “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots”. To Whitman the Devil is dead, and the forces of good are slowly but surely working for the salvation of all.’

To the early socialist movement Whitman was a modern prophet, a pioneer of the struggle that lay ahead — Bruder Whitman, as he was hailed in Germany, Comrade Whitman to the Russian revolutionaries. One of the first American books officially sponsored by the Bolshevik government was Leaves of Grass.

A legend grew up. Highbrow intellectuals, allergic to his poems, declared that he was a charlatan posing as a proletarian. They dragged out all the dirty linen they could find in his private cupboard and added some guesswork for good measure. For a time it seemed that Whitman was debunked.

He was partly but not wholly responsible for the variety of myths that obscured the real man. The pose of tribal prophet and great lover was forced upon him in his lifetime. Yet, as he protested, he had no formal doctrine, only an attitude to life, and it was one which accepted the diversity of human beings as right and proper, as well as the inconsistencies in every individual.

A writer must be seen in the context of his historical period. With Whitman it is easy to overlook this because he seems so often to be picturing the contemporary world. When he describes a view from a window there are no mountains or woodlands with nymphs and shepherds.

To sum up, Whitman had a vision of humanity in which race and class counted for nothing and comradeship gave an easy tolerance to individual differences and even eccentricities. He saw the dangers, in his own words, of ‘the long series of tendencies, shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like uniform iron castings’.

Emerson helped Whitman in his early years, and although their relationship cooled the words of encouragement once given by ‘the sage of Concord’ were recalled gratefully in the poet’s last illness: ‘The world will come your way in the end because you have put it in your debt, and such obligations are always acknowledged and met.’

A shade optimistic, perhaps, but a fitting epitaph.

by Patrick Cornford

Human nature can be changed by a programme of moral education starting with the child at school

LAST year one of the centenaries that all humanists should have celebrated was that of John Dewey, the American philosopher and educationist. In his old age he came inevitably under that cloud of suspicion which the Cold War attached to liberal thought in politics and religion. ‘Liberal’ it need hardly be said, has not the same connotation in the United States as in Britain.

But even before the McCarthy era Dewey was regarded in many quarters as a dangerous influence. Like Socrates, he was open to the charge of ‘corruption of youth’. He certainly would not have protested at the parallel. He believed that the task of philosophy was to fortify the Socratic quest for the good life with the more sophisticated methods of logic and science. ‘Present day philosophy’, he wrote in 1948, ‘cannot desire a better work than to engage in the act of midwifery that was assigned to it by Socrates twenty-five hundred years ago’ (Problems of Men, Introduction).

As for liberalism, he distinguished it from nineteenth century laissez-faire and from what Americans called radicalism — nowadays identified with communism. In a paper on ‘The Future of Liberalism’ he wrote in 1935 as follows:

One can imagine the cries of anguish this might wring from the Committee of Un-American Activities if faced by the dossier of a professor in one of the greatest universities. It is perilously like Marx’s famous dictum that whereas in the past philosophers have interpreted the world, their task now is to change it.

But there is an important difference. Marx believed the change must Come about by revolution; Dewey pinned his faith on education. He wrote:

This is the humanism of Nehru, not Mao. Dewey accepted the need for fundamental social change, utilizing science to the fullest practicable capacity, but he rejected short cuts as delusive. They may lead to some desirable goals, but the bloodshed is in vain if individuality and liberty are destroyed in the process.

It is, of course, very easy to say that education is better than revolution. What man in his senses would not prefer schooling to the barricades? But Dewey was too honest a thinker to be content with empty platitudes. He worked out a detailed theory of education which has left its mark not only in the United States.

The foundations of his achievement were laid in the School of Education at Chicago and the best statement of his theory is contained in his book Democracy and Education (1913). He became the intellectual leader of all progressive schools in America. He spent two years in China lecturing to teachers and later assisted the Turkish Government to reorganize their national schools.

What is his theory? Briefly it amounts to a method of teaching which combines character building with instruction. Morality is not taught as a separate subject, unrelated to other subjects. The pupil is made aware at every stage of the social significance of what he learns, and so becomes conscious of himself as a member of a community, the responsible citizen of tomorrow.

Art for art’s sake, the distinction between pure and applied science, are anathema. Everything has a use. Individual development cannot take place in an ivory tower. In a true democracy there can be no disengagement from social obligations.

The code of behaviour traditionally inculcated in schools is too narrow to serve in later life. It creates habits of industry, promptness, and regularity which are well enough, but they are distinctly ‘school duties’ rather than ‘life duties’. The average school is isolated from the community, a little world of its own, with rules that seem bound up with its special interests instead of reflecting the standards of the greater adult world outside.

Take the teaching of geography as an example. Together with history and science it is neatly pigeon-holed. The whole experience of man — living in a certain place, behaving in a certain way, mastering certain natural forces — is split up arbitrarily into different subjects and the child does not see how intimately they are related.

In teaching geography the interest should first be aroused by emphasizing that the earth is the home of men acting in relation to one another. ‘The ultimate significance of lake, river, mountain, and plain is not physical but social; it is the part it plays in modifying and directing social relationships.’ This leads on to political geography.

Questions for Teachers

But there can be no sharp line of demarcation between the geographical conditions which determine human action, and history. The past is not ‘dead’ but it is part of a long line of development. Learning about it shows us the chief difficulties and obstructions in live way of progress. Moral instruction should not be reduced to drawing lessons from the life of a particular ‘hero’, but should aim at ‘widening and deepening the child’s imagination of social relations, ideals and means’.

So, too, mathematics is normally presented in such an abstract way that its social use is ignored and it seems boring.

Far too often a pupil leaves school stuffed with facts but deficient in the power of judgment. Dewey lists some searching questions for teachers to answer:

It will be noticed that Dewey’s programme for moral education makes no reference to religion. It is, in fact, morality without religion. Dewey’s ‘religion’ is humanistic in the most thoroughgoing sense — i.e. naturalistic. He is not bothered about the subtle objections which modern philosophers in Britain particularly have brought against a naturalistic morality.

His concern is with the practical job of enabling people to lead satisfying lives and reorganizing the social system in a way that removes obstacles to this end. Logic-chopping about ‘facts’ and ‘values’ leaves him cold. He speaks of ‘progress’, for example, without apology. The increasing use of scientific knowledge for the benefit of mankind seems to him quite obviously progress.

Human nature is not fixed. It can be changed by education. Ugly talk about ‘brainwashing’ was not current when he perceived this truth.

Born in the year which saw the publication of The Origin of Species, he came to maturity when philosophy was deeply influenced by the concept of evolution. His imagination was fired by the spectacle of American expansion and it seemed to move on parallel lines with the expansion of scientific knowledge. Everywhere the horizons were widening, the possibilities seemed endless, there was no finality.

Even the truths of science were not final. New theories superseded old ones, and the process seemed likely to go on indefinitely. The idea of immutable truth belonged to metaphysics and revealed religion; and he had no use for either. It was this consciousness of living in a changing world that gave rise to American pragmatism.

Instead of ‘truth’ Dewey proposed to use the rather clumsy term ‘warranted assertibility’. This brought him into sharp conflict with Bertrand Russell, who feared the consequences of a doctrine which seemed to suggest — though Dewey denied it — that truth is what ‘works’.

The controversy is too technical to be adequately summarized here. It started with the view of C. S. Peirce, perhaps the most brilliant and original of America’s philosophers, that any statement which claims to be true must have practical consequences. This gave rise to the doctrine of the Logical Positivists that the meaning of a statement resides in its consequences — if you cannot point to any the statement is a mere senseless succession of sounds.

William James, however, had given a dangerous twist to the original formulation by defining truth in terms of fruitful consequences, from which it is easy to justify religious and political myths. For example, James held that if one view of the universe is depressing and another invigorating, we are morally entitled to accept the invigorating view on faith until overwhelming evidence appears to the contrary.

Dewey was not tempted to enter this rather slippery path; and it was abhorrent to the author of A Free Man’s Worship. There are important differences between Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Russell’s form of realism, but Dewey claimed that Russell had misunderstood him.

It is rather ironical that whereas Russell charges the pragmatists with tampering with the concept of Truth, Dewey protests that Russell regards ethical statements as neither true nor false, thereby undermining the basis of morality. This somewhat abstruse quarrel, however, should not be allowed to obscure the essential humanism both thinkers have in common. Both strive to promote a scientific outlook, both reject supernaturalism, both prize liberty and democracy.

When Dewey writes that the traditional problems have lost their meaning for us, that ‘we do not solve them, we get over them’, he strikes a note familiar in contemporary discussions. Again, he is in tune with the modern mood by his insistence that ‘The experimental attitude… substitutes detailed analysis for wholesale assertions, specific inquiries for temperamental convictions, small facts for opinions whose size is in precise ratio to their vagueness’.

On the other hand, he would be out of harmony with the withdrawal of so many modern philosophers from the needs of practical life. ‘The task of future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day’, he wrote. ‘Its aim is to become, so far as it is humanly possible, an organ for dealing with these conflicts. A catholic and far-sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting factors of life is philosophy.’

‘The only way to see the situation steadily and see it whole’, he wrote, ‘is to keep in mind that the entire problem is one of the development of science and its application to life. Morals, philosophy, returns to its first love; love of wisdom that is nurse of the good. But it returns to the Socratic principle equipped with a multitude of special methods of inquiry and tests; with an organized mass of knowledge, and with control of the arrangements by which industry, law an education may concentrate upon the problem of the participation of all men and women, up to the capacity of absorption, in all attained values.

by John Gillard Watson

Despite his intellectual confusions Emerson was a formative influence in the humanist tradition

WHEN, in 1832, the young Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned his pastorate, it was the end of a dreary journey for him. It also announced a new phase in American thought. In eastern Massachusetts the stern Puritanism of the early colonists had decayed under the influence of scepticism and prosperity. Unitarianism, a ‘feather-bed to catch a falling Christian’, as it was dubbed, had taken the place of Calvinism. Emerson’s ancestors were ministers, and he at first took naturally to that profession.

An effective preacher, Emerson took issue over the question of conformity. In his final address to his congregation he explained that he saw no authority for observing the Lord’s Supper, which appeared merely formalistic; Jesus himself had eschewed formalism. Emerson did not object to others observing the rite, but could not administer it himself.

Emerson was strongly affected by the development of science (to a degree only now becoming plain, thanks to the work in progress of Prof R. E. Spiller). But he did not accept eighteenth century rationalism; instead he drew on the European Romantic thinkers, especially Coleridge and Carlyle. He, and others like him, built up a confused, and ultimately too vague, system of thought labelled Transcendentalism. He drew a distinction between understanding and reason; the former was what we usually term reason, the latter intuition. It was by intuition that one could reach the higher truth which transcended experience. He explained:

He asserted that man’s mind and the world were linked together — ‘the laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass’. In his first book, Nature, he expounded this doctrine, after a visit to Europe, where he was much impressed by the great French scientists such as Arago and Gay-Lussac and unmoved — intellectually — by the sublime ceremonies of the Roman Church; sublime as spectacles, and even pathetic, especially the nuns taking the veil, of whom he remarked, ‘youth, beauty, rank, thus self-devoted to mistaken duty’.

Emerson even had glimpses of the theory of evolution; early in his life he wrote:

His theory of correspondence was an attempt to humanize science, then regarded by Romantic thinkers as describing a cold, dead world. But

Yet although such lyricism justified Edgar Allen Poe’s acid comment, ‘Mr Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatsoever — the mystics for mysticism’s sake’, elsewhere Emerson shows that his shrewd Yankee common sense never left him. He tried in fact to reconcile contradictory ideas, and unless one can accept the mystic unity which he intuited his writings must appear confused.

Emerson’s essays are the end-products of a long process. All his life he jotted down his intuitions, gathering them together for lectures, and finally polishing them up as essays. These are not logically developed, but collections of aphorisms. Not only can the essays be read, as he intended, in any order; paragraphs, even sentences, can be changed about without affecting the general impression. They are works of exhortation, detachable from the writer’s own philosophical beliefs. This is at once their strength and their weakness.

Emerson drew his main practical belief, that of the self-reliance of the individual, from his Protestant origins. How much he owed to that background he admitted:

The only duty of man was to be true to himself, and it is this part of his teaching which made him popular then, and is still alive today when Transcendentalism has been forgotten. Thus in his advice to ‘The American Scholar’ he said ‘Books are for the scholar’s idle times’ and ‘only so much do I know, as I have lived’. Scholarly introspection would bring him nearer to his fellow men:

And it is sound advice to the scholar:

His ‘Divinity School Address’ gives an account of Christianity as mythic. Jesus understood that there was one mind and one will active in Nature, and the perception of this awakened the religious sentiment; hence his cry for all men: ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks.’ But mere understanding caught at this and made of Christianity a myth, exaggerating the personal and ritualistic, concentrating on the person of Jesus himself. The remedy was for each student of the Divinity School (at Harvard) to ‘cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity’ (not the Deity).

These were the themes of the secular sermon he preached all his life, expounding the deepest meaning of the Protestant Reformation: that the individual man is the unit of judgment and interpretation and must choose his own calling, guide his own conduct, come to his own opinions, make his own religion, and even his own history. A few sentences from the essay on ‘Self-Reliance’ illustrate his views:

The tragedy of Emerson has been that his doctrines gave material for endless distortion and corruption. He enunciated them at the very time when they could be adopted by people lacking his humanity and conscious only of his tone of almost unctuous optimism. One of his most important ideas, that society was dynamic and experimental and must constantly begin again without being shackled by tradition, was turned into mere contempt for the past. He was opposed to coercion by the State, almost to the extent of anarchism; this was invoked to support economic anarchy and uncontrolled cut-throat competition.

His theory of compensation, that good and evil balance out, was made to excuse injustice and inequality in income and profit. His emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual was made a justification of ballot-box democracy. His extolling of ethical individualism was made a basis for economic individualism. The doctrine of self-reliance became the creed of self-seekers and ruthless business men in an economic anarchy.

Emerson himself saw with grave misgiving what was happening in the expanding America of the nineteenth century, and his optimism was strained at what he saw, so that he wrote sombrely:

But if today we re-read what he himself wrote, we find Emerson is still an inspiration to the humanist. He remains one of the great writers of democracy. De Tocqueville, in his great study of Democracy in America (1835-40), noted that the subjects of a democratic literature would be man, his future, and his own heart; and its problem the tension a man feels at the cleavage between himself and his society. In Emerson, democratic literature is exemplified. His belief in self-reliance, especially in times when there is a drive towards the conformity he detested, is an example to us today. His independence, which he never abandoned, despite (like Voltaire and Gilbert Murray) attempts to make out that he had returned to religion, is a further example.

That his doctrines were watered down and corrupted does not affect their soundness; to return to the source is to find the stream clear. We may say of him what Matthew Arnold, after severe criticism, said:

by Clare Bartlett

Dismissed as Utopian, Morris’s vision may have surprising relevance in the Age of Automation

NONE of the great Victorians is more misunderstood and neglected today than William Morris. He was a humanist through and through. Although he had no religious beliefs himself he should be an object lesson to those who imagine that such a rejection is the most important thing in life and the overall characteristic of humanism.

This negative attitude, frequently intolerant and sometimes pathological, ignores the fact that man’s great problem is how to live. What to believe — or disbelieve — is only important in so far as it has a bearing on the conduct of life.

Pathological unbelievers such as Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade have no place in the humanist tradition for this reason. Their atheism alone will not gain them admission. The way of life they recommended puts them out of court.

Morris did nothing so dreary as to construct a formal system of ethics. But he was profoundly concerned with how individuals should manage their lives and what type of society would enable them to do so satisfactorily.

He believed that socialism offered the best opportunities. And he also believed that for people to be happy they must enjoy their work.

It may seem trite to declare that we must be happy in our work. Isn’t it what everyone wants? What hope is there, it may be asked, for the mass of workers to find any real enjoyment in their means of livelihood? What pleasure can be found at the assembly line — except in anticipation of knocking off? And what can leisure offer except the synthetic recreations of dog track and TV?

Morris faced this problem before it arose in its present acute form. What to do with leisure was not such a headache when he wrote; there was too little of it for most people.

The mills brought huge profits to the lucky few and soulless drudgery for the rest. The factory chimneys besmirched the sky, not only robbing the landscape of all beauty but deadening the taste for it.

Morris, like Ruskin and many others, laid the blame on the machine age. It was a natural enough reaction. But to rail against the machines was all in vain. What was not evident at the time was that machines could be invented to take over drudgery. The Age of Automation was largely hidden in the future. Hence the temptation to look back — the dream that man could recover vanished simplicities.

Unfair Criticisms

Whatever one’s views about the merits of socialism, we know now that it is unthinkable without machines. As Lenin told H. G. Wells when the latter visited Russia, socialism meant a programme of electrification. Today it must include atomic energy, but the principle is the same.

For Marx socialism must be scientific or fail. Because Morris dreamed of a revival of arts and crafts his socialism has been dismissed as Utopian. Yet both were surely right.

Any type of social organization capable of satisfying human aspirations must utilize science to the full. Without it life will be nasty, brutish, and short — as indeed it is for millions in underdeveloped countries. But need this exclude all interest in the beautiful? Must the poets, as in Plato’s rather bleak Utopia, be crowned with garlands and led gently but firmly out of the city gates?

Morris has been unfairly criticized. He did not live in the cloud-cuckoo land to which some of his subsequent admirers — and strange bedfellows — retreated. He was far more realistic than Arthur Penty, for example, who really did believe that the clock could be put back. He was claimed by the Distributists of the Chesterbelloc era, but the chief thing they had in common was an exaggerated opinion of the Middle Ages. Like Cobbett, he felt that the Reformation had lifted the lid of Pandora’s box; but as an agnostic, the religious beliefs of the medievalists left him cold.

Apart from the Icelandic sagas, his great passion was for Gothic architecture. He cared nothing for the theology or the monks. What stirred his imagination was the architecture of the cathedrals and churches of the fourteenth century; and the masons, for whom, he felt, it must have been a labour of love.

Enjoyment in Work

Cold water was poured on this enthusiasm by the scholarly G. G. Coulton, Indeed, the romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages, which brought incense and vestments into the Anglican Church, was sensibly rebuked at the time by Cardinal Manning.

‘We do not live in an exhausted receiver,’ he wrote. ‘We are in the modern world — in the trade winds of the nineteenth century — and we must brace ourselves to lay hold of the world as it grapples with us, and meet it intellect to intellect, culture to culture, science to science.’ Was Morris misled by a mirage? Not so much as many of his contemporaries. Victorian romantics, looking for a better world than their own, thought they had found it in the Middle Ages. Morris supplied a corrective in Socialism, its Growth and Outcome.

There he makes no bones about the ignorance, superstition, and violence of those centuries. He calls them ‘the most superstitious epoch in the world’. He denied that he had any desire ‘to turn the clock back’.

He disliked machine production, but he was careful to say that it was ‘the mechanical principle’ underlying society rather than the ‘tangible steel or brass machine’ that was the trouble. As we might put it today, the mechanization of life, the alienation of man from man, the joyless monotony of the robot’s existence.

No mere airy fairy dreamer would have converted G. D. H. Cole to socialism. Yet that was what happened when Cole read News from Nowhere. What moved him was Morris’s ‘demand for liberty from the tyranny of the machine and of the profit taker, his ideal of the independent craftsman, his revolt against political meliorism’.

We are not concerned here to evaluate Guild Socialism. The point is that Morris pinned his hopes on it, rightly or wrongly, as a means of liberating the hard-pressed worker from an intolerable burden.

The healthiest of all incentives to work is to enjoy it. That is why so many scientists and the creative artists are to be envied. Their rewards cannot be measured in purely monetary terms — which is no excuse, of course, for treating them shabbily.

We cannot all be scientists or artists. Somebody must do the dirty jobs. That was the problem to which no practicable solution was in sight in the mid-nineteenth century. Morris thought that the right approach was to reduce disagreeable tasks by simplifying material needs, and to augment the opportunities of creative work by restoring craftmanship.

The present day multiplication of commodity goods would have shocked him. Wants, artificially stimulated by mass advertising and brought within reach by HP, would have seemed a perversion of life. We are the Utopians, he might have declared, thinking we can flourish indefinitely in never-never land.

Once again he was right — and wrong. Clearly there is more joy felt by the craftsman fashioning a piece of furniture, pottery, tapestry, than in turning out a machine-made article. It is just as clear that the machines make necessities available on a scale with which no craftsman could compete.

Looking ahead, however, we can now see that the dirty jobs will be increasingly taken over by the machine. Tedious as much work will still be, the hours should be short, and the problem of the future will be boring leisure rather than boring work. The message of William Morris, mutatis mutandis, will be sorely needed.

The essence of that message for humanists is that art is as necessary as food, if we are to make the most of our lives. Not Art with a capital A, but the delight found in making things which are beautiful as well as useful. This was known to the Palaeolithic hunters whose cave paintings some 20,000 years ago were believed — however mistakenly — to help to maintain the food supply.

Primitive peoples not only made pots and wove garments because they were useful, but because they were beautiful. The disjunction was the later development of a class-stratified society. Art became a luxury to be enjoyed by the few, a spectacle rather than an activity in which the ordinary man could participate.

The stories of heroes in the Greek Iliad and the Icelandic Sagas were for popular consumption. No wonder Morris found such inspiration in Iceland, though a curious blind-spot made him fail to appreciate Greece.

What he reacted from was a mandarin art without popular roots. Everyone is capable of some kind of artistic expression, whether with spade, chisel, brush or loom. There was little outlet possible in the machine age that Morris knew. But may not a means to satisfy this creative impulse be found in the leisure which a further development of the machine makes possible?

If not, the prospect for civilization is grim. We shall be half-men instead of whole men. It is the expression not the execution that counts. Better to write bad poetry and paint amateurish pictures than merely to gaze at the products of specialists. Morris himself wrote a great deal of poetry and it was not very good. He did so because he enjoyed it.

He will always be associated with the Arts and Crafts movement though he saw the danger that it would fall into a groove and be restricted in appeal to a social class. It might even hinder the social revolution on which he finally set his hopes.

‘You cannot have happy villagers living in pretty houses among trees he wrote, ‘doing pretty looking work in their own houses or in the pleasant village workshop between seedtime and harvest, unless you remove the causes that have made for the brutal slum-dweller and the starveling field labourer.’

The Saint of Socialism

Nevertheless, he showed by example what could be done even as a commercial venture. Starting on a small scale in Red Lion Square, he moved his workshop to Merton Abbey in Surrey. His designs for fabrics, carpets, and wallpapers demonstrated how homely things could be beautiful as well as useful. He mastered the techniques of glassware, tapestry, fine printing.

His own work was touched with genius. But only a privileged class can employ a genius to decorate houses, or indulge their taste for tapestry and exquisitely bound éditions de luxe.

He was forced to realize that art, as generally conceived, must die in order to live again. ‘I am sure’, he wrote, ‘that it will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by the genuine birth of a new art, which will be the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.’

So he turned his great energy to socialism. He was impatient of compromise and Fabian tactics. He wrote in 1883: ‘The aim of socialists should be the founding of a religion, towards which end compromise is no use, and we only want to have those with us who will be with us to the end.’

Shaw called him the ‘Saint of Socialism’. He added: ‘The Church is never so Catholic as when she names her saints. There is room for Aquinas and Francis, for the schoolman and the visionary, and in the Socialist hagiography, for Morris as well as Marx, though one is as far removed from the other as the dream of the poverello from the subtleties of the Dominican.’

by Geoffrey Schofield

Hardy could not justify the ways of God to man and shocked his contemporaries

HUMANISTS are sometimes reproached for clinging to a facile optimism which is also said to be typical of the nineteenth century. Neither charge will hold water. Some humanists are cheerful, others are gloomy. And it is just not true that the Victorians thought everything in the garden was lovely.

Thomas Hardy represents the darker strands of humanist thought, Meredith the brighter. Both enjoyed excellent health and were highly successful. The difference in their outlook can only be ascribed to temperament.

They were contemporaries in a world that was rapidly changing. The old, apparently solid framework of religion and social order was being shaken to its foundations. To the demand for ‘certainties’ there was only, in Meredith’s phrase, ‘a dusty answer’. This did not unduly depress him, but it was anguish to many Victorians lost in the no-man’s land between blind faith and stoical agnosticism.

How could they justify the ways of God to man? One answer was to put our trust in an inscrutable Providence. The latter seemed a vaguer term than God, eluding the logical difficulties of straightforward theism. Indeed, it could be diluted to no more than Matthew Arnold’s ‘something not ourselves that makes for righteousness’.

Another answer was to depersonalize Providence altogether. Then it became the Law of Progress inexorably leading mankind to a better future. We only had to sit back and wait. This is the metaphysics of laisser faire. God becomes History hypostasized — and History, of course, is on our side.

Hardy was not so sure. He certainly hoped that things would improve and even that the time might come when war would seem ‘absurd’. But there was a deep flaw in the whole cosmic scheme to be recognized if not accounted for. No man could look upon the tragedies that befell so many innocent victims and with his hand on his heart say honestly that all was for the best.

This is not pessimism but realism. It is the resolute facing of facts which inspired Bertrand Russell’s youthful outburst in A Free Man’s Worship. To be completely lacking in the tragic sense of life is to be superficial. Hardy possessed it in full measure.

His two great novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are tragedies. So is his poetic drama, The Dynasts. It is by these three masterpieces that he will be remembered.

Landslide of Unbelief.

Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton in the parish of Stinsford, near Dorchester, on June 2, 1840 — the same year in which Queen Victoria was married, penny postage inaugurated, and the foundations of the Nelson Column laid. The Hardy in whose arms Nelson died was a kinsman. His father was a stonemason.

He was educated at the village school and Dorchester, where he subsequently entered the employment of an architect. He continued to educate himself, mastering Greek and Latin and acquiring an interest in science.

As a young man of twenty he became vividly aware of the intellectual controversy that precipitated the great landslide of Victorian unbelief. We know that he was impressed by a volume called Essays and Reviews in which prominent scholars and theologians daringly argued that religion must come to terms with science. The book appeared a year after the publication The Origin of Species.

Two other influences were at work when he was forming his outlook, and they made strange contrasts. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon came out in 1865, and at the same time Hardy was reading John Stuart Mill. Hardy knew the essay on Liberty almost by heart.

He no longer believed the doctrines of the Church, but to the end of his life he was fascinated by church buildings and supported every effort to preserve their beauty. It was in his capacity as an architect that he visited St Juliot’s Church, near Boscastle, and there he met his future wife. This gave him the background for his first novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and very lovely it is, with the thickly wooded Valency valley running down to the Atlantic.

Breaking the Sex Barrier

But he had a long apprenticeship to serve. An early MS, of which the least said the better, was turned down by Macmillan. Meredith read it for Chapman and Hall, and interviewed the budding author. It is curious Meredith did not perceive that although the work was amateurish here was a diamond that only needed polishing.

The unfortunate result was that Hardy started writing serial stories attuned to the popular magazine public. His earlier books are virtually potboilers. He even prepared a bowdlerized version of Tess.

He attracted the attention of the pundits, nevertheless, and an increasingly sombre note entered his writing, which was not at all what the patrons of Mudie’s Library wanted. He gained the friendship of Edmund Gosse and was highly praised by Coventry Patmore, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Wallace, and Havelock Ellis.

It is not easy today to enter into a state of mind which found Tess shocking. Hardy was the first serious novelist of his time to break through the barrier to a frank acknowledgment of sex. The convention of the period was that woman did not exist below the waistline. As Hugh Kingsmill put it, the atmosphere of the age compelled Hardy to write ‘sometimes like Hall Caine and sometimes like Shakespeare’.

This incongruity makes a good deal of Hardy difficult to read today. The colours are laid on too thick, the style is often clumsy, but the melodrama is touched with genius.

Critics were Shocked

‘A Pure Woman’ is the defiant subtitle of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. To a Victorian public ‘A Fallen Woman’ was the only appropriate description. Henry James wrote to Stevenson: ‘There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds. But you have better ones in Polynesia.’ This should be remembered against the Old Pretender whose subtle trivialities are so venerated in literary coteries today.

But there was worse to come. Jude the Obscure is more stark and outspoken than Tess, and one critic dubbed it ‘Jude the Obscene’. On hearing that the Bishop of Wakefield had burned the book, Hardy retorted that he had done so because he could no longer burn the author.

Mrs Oliphant wrote shudderingly in Blackwood’s Magazine that ‘nothing so coarsely indecent as the whole history of Jude has ever been put into print from the hands of a master’. She conceded that ‘there may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in dark corners of filth and garbage’, etc.

Note the double charge of impiety and obscenity. Hardy was so stung by the abuse of his critics that he decided to write no more novels. He summed up his attitude with dignity and restraint as follows: ‘Tragedy may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as subversive and dangerous; when all the while he may never have questioned the necessity or urged the non-necessity of either.’

There can be no doubt that his philosophy, which was hard to pin down, disturbed the Victorian mind even more than his alleged obscenity, which seemed clear enough at the time, though to us it is invisible. His tales had no moral. They were an indictment of God rather than man.

The Charge of Pessimism

In a well-known passage Chesterton made this point: ‘Hardy went down to botanize in the swamps, while Meredith climbed towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily dressed Walt Whitman; Hardy became a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.’

It is worth remarking that the complacent optimism of which Victorian unbelievers are so often accused is displayed here by a protagonist of the opposite camp. Chesterton lacked the tragic sense. He had little sense of logic, either, or he would have realized that there are plenty of swamps, and that Christianity has always been aware of them.

Hardy could not accept the Christian solution. Nor does he seem to have felt there was much to be hoped for by reforming human institutions. Even if human oppression could be ended, there was still cosmic oppression. Man is born into a pitiless universe — born to die.

This mood is found in all literature from ancient Greece to atheistic existentialism. Without a firm sense of social purpose there seems no meaning in life. There is compassion for suffering, but no armour against fate.

So Hardy turned to an iron determinism. Like Spinoza, he saw the cosmic machine grinding out its chain of cause and effect; but unlike Spinoza he could not feel in harmony with this blind, unending process.

This vision of life is powerfully and movingly stated in The Dynasts. The novelist had become a poet, and it is probable that his poetry will outlive his prose. The novels date, but poetry moves in a timeless world.

Hardy’s humanism is much nearer to that of Lucretius than, say, of Goethe. He had no philosophical training, but we know that he was attracted by the writings of Schopenhauer and repelled by Nietzsche.

‘People call me a pessimist’, he told William Archer, ‘and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that “not to have been born is best”, then I do not reject the designation. I never could understand why the word “pessimism” should be such a red rag to many worthy people; and I believe, indeed, that a good deal of the robustious, swaggering optimism of recent literature is at bottom cowardly and insincere… My pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and that Ahriman is winning all along the line. On the contrary, my practical philosophy is dis­tinctly meliorist.’

Although he is not associated with any political movement which would have given some effect to his practical philosophy, there is a melancholy interest in recalling that in 1911 he signed a protest against ‘the use of aerial vessels in war’. He lived long enough to see the real start of air war and the shattering of many optimistic dreams.

Honours were heaped on him. He received the Order of Merit and became the G.O.M. of English literature.

On January 11, 1928, he knew that the end was near. His wife read some verses from Omar Khayyam aloud:

He motioned her to read no more. He seemed to fall asleep — but it was the sleep from which there is no waking.

by James Plender

Loyalty to truth as he saw it caused Renan to leave the Church

IN 1845, the same year that John Henry Newman entered the Church of Rome, Ernest Renan left it. They were both men of powerful intelligence and solid scholarship. The wrench from the Anglican Church reduced the future Cardinal to tears. So, too, it was with deep emotion that Renan tore himself away from the Seminary of St Sulpice, where he had been training for the priesthood.

The ‘spoiled priest’ is a more familiar phenomenon in Ireland and on the Continent than in England. Sometimes he becomes an unforgiving enemy of his first love, sometimes he looks back on the religion of his childhood with nostalgia, in neither case can he get Catholicism out of his system.

We find this note of wistful looking-backward in the diary of Abbé Houtin, who was also trained at St Sulpice, though he had less pleasant memories of it than Renan. It is characteristic of Renan all through his life — as though his religion had been an early infatuation which came to grief.

Those who were born Protestants or rationalists may find it difficult to understand such an attitude. Never having tasted the sweet poison, they cannot imagine the persistence of the craving. Even such sceptics as Anatole France, very different indeed from Renan, though greatly influenced by him, were ambivalent. There is nothing acrid in France’s irony, though it bites very deep.

Why should a man to whom Catholicism brings such rich emotional satisfactions make life harder for himself by rejecting it? In Renan’s case there were none of the obvious counter-attractions. He was not a sensualist, like Anatole France. He rejected Catholicism because he ceased to believe it was true.

Not for him the long, painful struggle of Houtin and Turmel in a no-man’s land, outwardly priests, inwardly unbelievers. He made a clean break before ordination.

The issue was one of historical truth. The Church held that the Bible was literally the word of God. Everything it contained was true. The books of the Bible were written by the authors whose names they bore. Or, rather, the books were dictated by God, for as the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus affirms ‘Of no human composition, however excellent, can it be said that God is the author.

The Great Choice

Renan was a Hebrew scholar. He was acquainted with German Higher Criticism, then causing such a stir. He did not follow the more extreme views of the Tubingen school, but he accepted too much for his orthodox teachers.

They were learned men, and he speaks of them with respect. But they averted their eyes from the discrepancies that disturbed him. They were, of course, old men, and to give up their religion would have utterly disrupted their lives. He was young, but even so the sacrifice seemed great. Trained for the priesthood, he seemed quite unfit to start afresh and make his livelihood outside the Church.

But he did so. When Renan is so often shrugged off as a sentimentalist it is as well to remember the stark sincerity which made him come out of the Church, face the stigma of apostasy, the reproaches of valued friends, and the uncomprehending grief of his pious mother. He made the Great Choice, as the existentialists would say ; he became authentic. When a brave but bewildered young man went for the last time down the steps of the famous, seminary on October 9, 1845, he had no financial resources beyond the temporary help offered by his sister, Henriette. She had also lost her religious faith and proved a tower of strength to him. He had no idea that he would become a successful writer.

His regret now was that he had studied philology instead of natural science. He tells us in his autobiography that his historical studies brought him face to face with the Bible and the sources of Christianity. ‘I immersed myself in this study and through a series of critical deductions, which forced themselves upon my mind, the bases of my existence, as I had hitherto understood it, were completely overturned.’

His recollections of this crisis are given in one of his books most likely to survive. Contemporary taste cannot accept the honeyed sweetness of his Vie de Jésu, which brought him fame and financial security. Nor will many modern readers work through the seven volumes of the Origins of Christianity. But the fourth volume, The Antichrist, is a classic.

Advances in scholarship have inevitably dated the details of Renan’s work, revolutionary as it seemed to the orthodox of his time. If one wants Biblical criticism, Loisy is a sounder guide, though — to put it mildly — not such a delectable writer. But the basis of Renan’s case against the Church is unchanged.

It is brilliantly stated in the Souvenirs (English translation, Recollections of My Youth) which appeared serially in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1876. That he somewhat dramatized himself is only to be expected of a superb literary artist. It is not quite such fiction as the Vie, but as he said of himself: ’A man cannot write his own biography in the same way that he would of anyone else. What one says of oneself is always poetical.’

He instances Goethe’s Dichtung und Warheit (Poetry and Truth). G. G. Coulton wrote: ‘He was the most learned of all the great autobiographers, even more learned for his age than St Augustine, and Augustine’s equal in literary power; only he had far less “fire in his belly”.

The Church in Error

Why, then, did he leave the Church? The reason he gives is that he could see no escape from a simple syllogism: Whoever has made a mistake is not infallible. The Church made a mistake. Therefore the Church is not infallible.

He applied this to the teachings of the Bible. Trained on strictest Scholastic lines at St Sulpice, he believed, with Aquinas, that Catholic claims rested on the- truth of the Bible — or, at least, that what was there revealed must be the unquestioned premise of theology. He argued as follows: ‘It is no longer possible for anyone to assert that the second part of the book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah. The book of Daniel, which, according to all orthodox tenets, relates to the period of captivity, is an apocryphal work composed in the year 169 or 170 bc. The book of Judith is an historical impossibility. The attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses does not bear investigation, and to deny that several parts of Genesis are mystical in their meaning is equivalent to admitting as actual realities descriptions such as that of the Garden of Eden, the apple, and Noah’s Ark. He is not a true Catholic who departs from any of these theses.’

This was plain speaking. Some Catholics, accustomed to double-talk, urged him not to take such a ‘narrow’ view. He saw with shattering clarity that they were deceiving themselves, but he was not unsympathetic. ‘Only those who have no experience in the ways of religion’, he wrote, ‘will feel any surprise that men of such great powers of application should cling to such untenable positions. In these shipwrecks of a faith upon which you have centred your life, you cling to the most unlikely means of salvage rather than allow all you cherish to go to the bottom.’

There were the Catholic modernists, for example, who vainly hoped to solve their difficulties by regarding what they found as incredible as somehow true in a symbolic sense. The Pope was to make short work of this device. Renan would have none of it.

No; the issue was simple and could not be burked without dishonesty, conscious or unconscious. ‘To abandon a single dogma or reject a single tenet in the teaching of the Church, is equivalent to a negation of the Church and of Revelation. In a Church founded upon divine authority it is as much an act of heresy to deny a single point as to deny the whole. If a single stone is pulled out of a building, the whole edifice must come to the ground.’

He pulled out the stone. He was under the same inner compulsion to do what his conscience demanded as Luther. ‘Ich kann nicht anders— I cannot do otherwise!’

On the ‘Index’

The psychological stress of breaking the conditioned reflexes of a Catholic childhood is movingly described by Renan, Houtin, Tyrell, and many others who have had the courage to go through the ordeal. The mind is fertile in inventing stratagems to ease the pain of estrangement from a corporate body and the entry into a wilderness.

Time and again there is the disturbing echo of ‘the sunset bell’— in Renan’s case the bells of the legendary Breton city of Is. Thus, although he broke with the Church, he retained an emotional attitude towards the founder of a Christianity which was different from Catholicism.

After 1870, when France was savaged by the invader, a somewhat different note entered his writings. The Dialogues Philosophiques are charged with disillusionment. But in the final phase, although sentimentality is not wholly absent, Renan found a serenity which remained until his death in 1892.

To anyone unfortunate enough to be unacquainted with his work, The Antichrist is a ‘must’ book. It gives an unforgettable picture of the dramatic background of the Apocalypse, the destruction of Jerusalem and the terror under Nero. Scholars may cavil at the history, but none can deny that it is literature.

The works of Renan, like those of Loisy, Houtin, and Tyrell, were placed on the Index. The traditional wording of this instrument of the Holy Office, which suppresses books, though it can no longer burn authors, shows the ominous temper of the authorities: ‘The Holy Congregation of the most eminent and revered Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church established and appointed by Our Very Holy Lord, the Pope, and the Holy Apostolic See, for the purpose of cataloguing books of depraved doctrine, for their proscription, expurgation, and permission in the universal Christian republic, has condemned, has proscribed and proscribes the following works… Wherefore let no one, of whatever rank and condition, in whatever place and whatever language, venture in future to publish, read or preserve the aforesaid works, condemned and proscribed under the penalties set forth in the Catalogue of prohibited books.’

From its own point of view, the Church had ample justification. It realized only too clearly that Modernism was a Trojan horse. The movement to which Renan had given such impetus could only have destroyed a Church which held that its voice was as divinely authoritative as if the heavens had opened and God himself had spoken. Either the Church is infallible or it is nothing.’

Subsequent attempts by troubled intellectuals to find a half-way house were bound to fail. The Vatican Council infallibly decreed that it was infallible, and this was followed by a purge of modernist clergy and the notorious syllabus Lamentabilis and the Encyclical Pascendi in 1907.

The logic which forced Renan out of the Church was confirmed by these events. Rome closed its ranks and shut its eyes to the flood of new knowledge which science and Biblical scholarship was releasing.

The tension between the morality of conscience and the morality of submission to authority is concealed by official pronouncements though it is never far below the surface. For Renan, loyalty to the truth, as he saw it, had the first priority. As he so finely expressed it: ‘Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself alone; for he is a free being; that is a moral being.’