02.03 - Part 2, Chapter 3

CHAPTER III PHILOSOPHY AND RATIONALISM

BRIEFLY, if not adequately, I have now endeavoured to indicate the weaknesses which seem to me to be inseparable from any empirical theory of the universe, and almost equally to beset the idealistic theory in the form given to it by its most systematic exponents in this country. The reader may perhaps feel tempted to ask whether I propose, in what purports to be an Introduction to Theology, to pass under similar review all the metaphysical systems which have from time to time held sway in the schools, or have affected the general course of speculative opinion. He need, however, be under no alarm. My object is strictly practical; and I have no concern with theories, however admirable, which can no longer pretend to any living philosophic power which have no de facto claims to present us with a reasoned scheme of knowledge, and which cannot prove their importance by actually supplying grounds for the conviction of some fraction, at least, of those by whom these pages may conceivably be read. In saying that this condition is not satisfied by the great historic systems which mark with their imperishable ruins the devious course of European thought, I must not be understood as suggesting that on that account these lack either value or interest. All I say is, that their interest is not of a kind which brings them properly within the scope of these Notes. Whatever be the nature or amount of our debt to the great metaphysicians of the past, unless here and now we go to them not merely for stray arguments on this or that question, but for a reasoned scheme of knowledge which shall include as elements our own actual beliefs, their theories are not, for the purposes of the present discussion, any concern of ours.

Now, of how many systems, outside the two that have already been touched on, can this even plausibly be asserted? Run over in memory some of the most important. Men value Plato for his imagination, for the genius with which he hazarded solutions of the secular problems which perplex mankind, for the finished art of his dialogue, for the exquisite beauty of his style. But even if it could be said which it cannot that he left a system, could it be described as a system which, as such, has any effectual vitality? It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to sum up our debts to Aristotle. But assuredly they do not include a tenable theory of the universe. The Stoic scheme of life may still touch our imagination; but who takes any interest in its metaphysics? Who cares for the Soul of the world, the periodic conflagrations, and the recurring cycles of mundane events? The NeoPlatonists were mystics; and mysticism is, as I suppose, an undying element in human thought. But who is concerned about their hierarchy of beings connecting through infinite gradations the Absolute at one end of the scale with Matter at the other?

These, however, it may be said, were systems belonging to the ancient world; and mankind have not busied themselves with speculation for these two thousand years and more without making some advance. I agree; but in the matter of providing us with a philosophy with a reasoned system of knowledge has this advance been as yet substantial? If the ancients fail us, do we, indeed, fare much better with the moderns? Are the metaphysics of Descartes more living than his physics? Do his two substances or kinds of substance, or the single substance of Spinoza, or the innumerable substances of Leibnitz, satisfy the searcher after truth? From the modern English form of the empiricism which dominated the eighteenth century, and the idealism which disputes its supremacy in the nineteenth, I have already ventured to express a reasoned dissent. Are we, then, to look to such schemes as Schopenhauer’s philosophy of Will, and Hartmann’s philosophy of the Unconscious, to supply us with the philosophical metaphysics of which we are in need? They have admirers in this country, but hardly convinced adherents. Of those who are quite prepared to accept their pessimism, how many are there who take seriously its metaphysical foundation? In truth there are but three points of view from which it seems worth while to make ourselves acquainted with the growth, culmination, and decay of the various metaphysical dynasties which have successively struggled for supremacy in the world of ideas. The first is purely historical. Thus regarded, metaphysical systems are simply significant phenomena in the general history of man: symptoms of his spiritual condition, aids, it may be, to his spiritual growth. The historian of philosophy, as such, is therefore quite unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of the opinions whose evolution he is expounding. His business is merely to account for their existence, to exhibit them in their proper historical setting, and to explain their character and their consequences. But, so considered, I find it difficult to believe that these opinions have been elements of primary importance to the advancement of mankind. All ages, indeed, which have exhibited intellectual vigour have cultivated one or more characteristic systems of metaphysics; but rarely, as it seems to me, have these systems been in their turn important elements in determining the character of the periods in which they flourished. They have been effects rather than causes; indications of the mood in which, under the special stress of their time and circumstance, the most detached intellects have faced the eternal problems of humanity; proofs of the unresting desire of mankind to bring their beliefs into harmony with speculative reason. But the beliefs have almost always preceded the speculations; they have frequently survived them; and I cannot convince myself that among the just titles to our consideration sometimes put forward on behalf of metaphysics we may count her claim to rank as a powerful instrument of progress. No doubt and here we come to the second point of view alluded to above the constant discussion of these high problems has not been barren merely because it has not as yet led to their solution. Philosophers have mined for truth in many directions, and the whole field of speculation seems cumbered with the dross and lumber of their abandoned workings. But though they have not found the ore they sought for, it does not therefore follow that their labours have been wholly vain. It is something to have realised what not to do. It is something to discover the causes of failure, even though we do not attain any positive knowledge of the conditions of success. It is an even more substantial gain to have done something towards disengaging the questions which require to be dealt with, and towards creating and perfecting the terminology without which they can scarcely be adequately stated, much less satisfactorily answered. And there is yet a third point of view from which past metaphysical speculations are seen to retain their value, a point of view which may be called (not, I admit, without some little violence to accustomed usage) the (esthetic. Because reasoning occupies so large a place in metaphysical treatises we are apt to forget that, as a rule, these are works of imagination at least as much as of reason. Metaphysicians are poets who deal with the abstract and the super-sensible instead of the concrete and the sensuous. To be sure they are poets with a difference. Their appropriate and characteristic gifts are not the vivid realisation of that which is given in experience; their genius does not prolong, as it were, and echo through the remotest regions of feeling the shock of some definite emotion; they create for us no new worlds of things and persons; nor can it be often said that the product of their labours is a thing of beauty. Their style, it must be owned, has not always been their strong point; and even when it is otherwise, mere graces of presentation are but unessential accidents of their work. Yet, in spite of all this, they can only be justly estimated by those who are prepared to apply to them a quasi-aesthetic standard; some other standard, at all events, than that supplied by purely argumentative comment. It may perhaps be shown that their metaphysical constructions are faulty, that their demonstrations do not convince, that their most permanent dialectical triumphs have fallen to them in the paths of criticism and negation.

Yet even then the last word will not have been said. For claims to our admiration will still be found in their brilliant intuitions, in the subtlety of their occasional arguments, in their passion for the Universal and the Abiding, in their steadfast faith in the rationality of the world, in the devotion with which they are content to live and move in realms of abstract speculation too far removed from ordinary interests to excite the slightest genuine sympathy in the breasts even of the cultivated few. If, therefore, we are for a moment tempted, as surely may sometimes happen, to contemplate with respectful astonishment some of the arguments which the illustrious authors of the great historic systems have thought good enough to support their case, let it be remembered that for minds in which the critical intellect holds undisputed sway, the creation of any system whatever in the present state of our knowledge is, perhaps, impossible. Only those in whom powers of philosophical criticism are balanced, or more than balanced, by powers of metaphysical imagination can be fitted to undertake the task. Though even to them success may be impossible, at least the illusion of success is permitted; and but for them mankind would fall away in hopeless discouragement from its highest intellectual ideal, and speculation would be strangled at its birth. To some, indeed, it may appear as if the loss would not, after all, be great. What use, they may exclaim, can be found for any system which will not stand critical examination? What value has reasoning which does not satisfy the reason? How can we know that these abstruse investigations supply even a fragmentary contribution towards a final philosophy, until we are able to look back upon them from the perhaps inaccessible vantage ground to be supplied by this final philosophy itself? To such questionings I do not profess to find a completely satisfactory answer. Yet even those who feel inclined to rate extant speculations at the lowest value will perhaps admit that metaphysics, like art, give us something we could ill afford to spare. Art may not have provided us with any reflection of immortal beauty; nor metaphysics have brought us into communion with eternal truth. Yet both may have historic value. In speculation, as in art, we find a vivid expression of the changeful mind of man, and the interest of both, perhaps, is at its highest when they most clearly reflect the spirit of the age which gave them birth, when they are most racy of the soil from which they sprung.

II To this point I may have to return. But my more immediate business is to bring home to the reader’s mind the consequences which may be drawn from the admission supposing him disposed to make it that we have at the present time neither a satisfactory system of metaphysics nor a satisfactory theory of science. Many persons perhaps it would not be too much to say most persons are prepared contentedly to accept the first of these propositions; but it is on the truth of the second that I desire to lay at least an equal stress. The first man one meets in the street thinks it quite natural to accept the opinion that sense-experience is the only source of rational conviction; that everything to which it does not testify is untrue, or, if true, falls within the domain, not of knowledge, but of faith. Yet the criticism of knowledge indicated in the two preceding chapters shows how onesided is such a view. If faith be provisionally defined as conviction apart from or in excess of proof, then it is upon faith that the maxims of daily life, not less than the loftiest creeds and the most farreaching discoveries, must ultimately lean. The ground on which constant habit and inherited predispositions enable us to tread with a step so easy and so assured, is seen on examination to be not less hollow beneath our feet than the dim and unfamiliar regions which lie beyond. Certitude is found to be the child, not of Reason, but of Custom; and if we are less perplexed about the beliefs on which we are hourly called upon to act than about those which do not touch so closely our obvious and immediate needs, it is not because the questions suggested by the former are easier to answer, but because as a matter of fact we are much less inclined to ask them.

Now, if this be true, it is plainly a fact of capital importance. It must revolutionise our whole attitude towards the problems presented to us by science, ethics, and theology. It must destroy the ordinary tests and standards whereby we measure essential truth. In particular, it requires us to see what is commonly, if rather absurdly, called the conflict between religion and science in a wholly new aspect. We can no longer be content with the simple view, once universally accepted, that whenever any discrepancy, real or supposed, occurs between the two, science must be rejected as heretical; nor with the equally simple view, to which the former has long given place, that every theological statement, if unsupported by science, is doubtful; if inconsistent with science, is false.

Opinions like these are evidently tolerable only on the hypothesis that we are in possession of a body of doctrine which is not only itself philosophically established, but to whose canons of proof all other doctrines are bound to conform. But if there is no such body of doctrine, what then? Are we arbitrarily to erect one department of belief into a law-giver for all the others? Are we to say that though no scheme of knowledge exists, certain in its first principles, and coherent in its elaborated conclusions, yet that from among the provisional schemes which we are inclined practically to accept one is to be selected at random, within whose limits, and there alone, the spirit of man may range in confident security?

Such a position is speculatively untenable. It involves a use of the Canon of Consistency not justified by any philosophy; and as it is indefensible in theory, so it is injurious in practice. For, in truth, though the contented acquiescence in inconsistency is the abandonment of the philosophic quest, the determination to obtain consistency at all costs has been the prolific parent of many intellectual narrownesses and many frigid bigotries. It has shown itself in various shapes; it has stifled and stunted the free movement of thought in different ages and diverse schools of speculation; its unhappy effects may be traced in much theology which professes to be orthodox, in much criticism which delights to be heterodox. It is, moreover, the characteristic note of a not inconsiderable class of intelligences who conceive themselves to be specially reasonable because they are constantly employed in reasoning, and who can find no better method of advancing the cause of knowledge than to press to their extreme logical conclusions principles of which, perhaps, the best that can be said is that they contain, as it were in solution, some element of truth which no reagents at our command will as yet permit us to isolate.

III That I am here attacking no imaginary evil wilt, I think, be evident to any reader who recalls the general trend of educated opinion during the last three centuries. It is, of course, true that in dealing with so vague and loosely outlined an object as ’ educated opinion ’ we must beware of attributing to large masses of men the acceptance of elaborate and definitely articulated systems. Systems are, and must be, for the few. The majority of mankind are content with a mood or temper of thought, an impulse not fully reasoned out, a habit guiding them to the acceptance and assimilation of some opinions and the rejection of others, which acts almost as automatically as the processes of physical digestion. Behind these half-realised motives, and in closest association with them, may sometimes, no doubt, be found a * theory of things ’ which is their logical and explicit expression. But it is certainly not necessary, and perhaps not usual, that this theory should be clearly formulated by those who seem to obey it. Nor for our present purpose is there any important distinction to be made between the case of the few who find a reason for their habitual judgments, and that of the many who do not.

Keeping this caution in mind, we may consider without risk of misconception an illustration of the misuse of the Canon of Consistency provided for us by the theory corresponding to that tendency of thought which has played so large a part in the development of the modern mind, and which is commonly known as Rationalism. Now what is Rationalism? Some may be disposed to reply that it is the free and unfettered application of human intelligence to the problems of life and of the world; the unprejudiced examination of every question in the dry light of emancipated reason. This may be a very good account of a particular intellectual ideal; an ideal which has been sought after at many periods of the world’s history, although assuredly it has been attained in none. Usage, however, permits and even encourages us to employ the word in a much more restricted sense: as indicating a special form of that reaction against dogmatic theology which became prominent at the end of the seventeenth century; which dominated so much of the best thought in the eighteenth century, and which has reached its most complete expression in the Naturalism which occupied our attention through the first portion of these Notes. 1 A reaction of some sort was no doubt in-

[’ In spite of this explicit statement I have been supposed by some of my critics to have attacked Reason where I have only been attacking Rationalism. I gather, for instance, that Professor Karl Pearson has fallen into this mistake in a pamphlet published in 1895 which purports to be a review of the present work. It contains a most interesting and curious mixture of bad politics, bad philosophy, and bad temper, and is styled ’ Reaction.’

I have modified in this edition the historic description of Rationalism in deference to a well-founded criticism of Professor Pringle Pattison (A. Seth). See Man’s Place in the Cosmos, p. 256.] evitable. Men found themselves in a world where Literature, Art, and Science were enormously extending the range of human interests; in which Religion seemed approachable only through the languishing controversies which had burnt with so fierce a flame during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; in which accepted theological methods had their roots in a very different period of intellectual growth, and were ceasing to be appropriate to the new developments. At such a time there was, undoubtedly, an important and even a necessary work to be done. The mind of man cannot, any more than the body, vary in one direction alone. The whole organism suffers or gains from the change, and every faculty and every limb must be somewhat modified in order successfully to meet the new demands thrown upon it by the altered balance of the remainder. So is it also in matters intellectual. It is hopeless to expect that new truths and new methods of investigation can be acquired without the old truths requiring to be in some respects reconsidered and restated, surveyed under a new aspect, measured, perhaps, by a different standard. Much had, therefore, to be modified, and something let us admit it had to be destroyed. The new system could hardly produce its best results until the refuse left by the old system had been removed; until the waste products were eliminated which, like those of a muscle too long exercised, poisoned and clogged the tissues in which they had once played the part of living and effective elements. The world, then, required enlightenment, and the rationalists proceeded after their own fashion to enlighten it. Unfortunately, however, their whole procedure was tainted by an original vice of method which made it impossible to carry on the honourable, if comparatively humble, work of clearance and purification without, at the same time, destroying much that ought properly to have been preserved. They were not content with protesting against practical abuses, with vindicating the freedom of science from theological bondage, with criticising the defects and explaining the limitations of the somewhat cumbrous and antiquated apparatus of prevalent theological controversy apparatus, no doubt, much better contrived for dealing with the points on which theologians differ than for defending against a common enemy the points on which theologians are for the most part agreed. These things, no doubt, to the best of their power, they did; and to the doing of them no objection need be raised. The objection is to the principle on which the things were done. That principle appeared under many disguises, and was called by many names. Sometimes describing itself as Common-sense, sometimes as Science, sometimes as Enlightenment, with infinite varieties of application and great diversity of doctrine, Rationalism consisted essentially in the application, consciously or unconsciously, of one great method to the decision of every controversy, to the moulding of every cre.ed. Did a belief square with a view of the universe based exclusively upon the prevalent mode of interpreting sense-perception? If so, it might survive. Did it clash with such mode, or lie beyond it? It was superstitious; it was unscientific; it was ridiculous; it was incredible. Was it neither in harmony with nor antagonistic to such a view, but simply beside it? It might live on until it became atrophied from lack of use, a mere survival of a dead past.

These judgments were not, as a rule, supported by any very profound arguments. Rationalists as such are not philosophers. They are not pantheists nor speculative materialists. They ignore, if they do not despise, metaphysics, and in practice eschew the search for first principles. But they judge as men of the world, reluctant either to criticise too closely methods which succeed so admirably in everyday affairs, or to admit that any other methods can possibly be required by men of sense. Of course, a principle so loosely conceived has led at different times and in different stages of knowledge to very different results. Through the greater portion of the world’s history the ’ ordinary mode of interpreting sense-perception ’ has been perfectly consistent with so-called ’ supernatural ’ phenomena. It may become so again. And if during the rationalising centuries this has not been the case, it is because the interpretation of sense-perceptions has during that period been more and more governed by that Naturalistic theory of the world to which it has been steadily gravitating. It is true that the process of eliminating incongruous beliefs has been gradual. The general body of rationalisers have been slow to see and reluctant to accept the full consequences of their own principles. The assumption that the kind of ’ experience ’ which gave us natural science was the sole basis of knowledge did not at first, or necessarily, carry with it the further inference that nothing deserved to be called knowledge which did not come within the circle of the natural sciences. But the inference was practically, if not logically, inevitable. Theism, Deism, Design, Soul, Conscience, Morality, Immortality, Freedom, Beauty these and cognate words associated with the memory of great controversies mark the points at which rationalists who are not also naturalists have sought to come to terms with the rationalising spirit, or to make a stand against its onward movement. It has been in vain. At some places the fortunes of battle hung long in the balance; at others the issues may yet seem doubtful. Those who have given up God can still make a fight for conscience; those who have abandoned moral responsibility may still console themselves with artistic beauty. But, to my thinking, at least, the struggle can have but one termination. Habit and education may delay the inevitable conclusion; they cannot in the end avert it. For these ideas are no native growth of a rationalist epoch, strong in their harmony with contemporary moods of thought. They are the products of a different age, survivals from, as some think, a decaying system. And howsoever stubbornly they may resist the influences of an alien environment, if this undergoes no change, in the end they must surely perish.

Naturalism, then, the naturalism whose practical consequences have already occupied us so long, is nothing more than the result of rationalising methods applied with pitiless consistency to the whole circuit of belief; it is the completed product of rationalism, the final outcome of using the ’ current methods of interpreting sense-perception’ as the universal instrument for determining the nature and fixing the limits of human knowledge. What wealth of spiritual possession this creed requires us to give up I have already explained. What, then, does it promise us in exchange? It promises us Consistency. Religion may perish at its touch, it may strip Virtue and Beauty of their most precious attributes; but in exchange it promises usConsistency. True, the promise is in any circumstances but imperfectly kept. This creed, which so arrogantly requires that everything is to be made consistent with it, is not, as we have seen, consistent with itself. The humblest attempts to co-ordinate and to justify the assumptions on which it proceeds with such unquestioning confidence bring to light speculative perplexities and contradictions whose very existence seems unsuspected, whose solution is not even attempted. But even were it otherwise we should still be bound to protest against the assumption that consistency is a necessity of the intellectual life, to be purchased, if need be, at famine prices. It is a valuable commodity, but it may be bought too dear. No doubt a principal function of Reason is to smooth away contradictions, to knock off corners, and to fit, as far as may be, each separate belief into its proper place within the framework of one harmonious creed. No doubt, also, it is impossible to regard any theory which lacks self-consistency as either satisfactory or final. But principles going far beyond admissions like these are required to compel us to acquiesce in rationalising methods and naturalistic results, to the destruction of every form of belief with which they do not happen to agree. Before such terms of surrender are accepted, at least the victorious system must show, not merely that its various parts are consistent with each other, but that the whole is authenticated by Reason. Until this task is accomplished (and how far at present it is from being accomplished in the case of naturalism the reader knows) it would be an act of mere blundering Unreason to set up as the universal standard of belief a theory of things which itself stands in so great need of rational defence, or to make a reckless and unthinking application of the canon of consistency when our knowledge of first principles is so manifestly defective.