Rationalism Part 1

Rationalism.

by John Mackinnon Robertson.

-- 1. THE TERM

The names 'rationalist' and 'rationalism' have been used in so many senses within the past three hundred years that they cannot be said to stand quite definitely for any type or school of philosophic thought.

For Bacon, a 'rationalist' or _rationalis_ was a physician with _a priori_ views of disease and bodily function; and the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school were named _rationalistas_ about the same period by their opponents. A little later some Continental scholars applied the name to the Socinians and deists; and later still it designated, in Britain, types of Christian thinkers who sought to give a relatively reasoned form to articles of the current creed which had generally been propounded as mysteries to be taken on faith. The claim to apply 'reason' in such matters was by many orthodox persons regarded as in itself impious, while others derided the adoption of the t.i.tle of 'rationalist' or 'reasonist' by professing Christians as an unwarranted pretence of superior reasonableness. Used in ethics, the label 'rationalism' served in the earlier part of the eighteenth century to stigmatise, as lacking in evangelical faith, those Christians who sought to make their moral philosophy quadrate with that of 'natural religion.'

Later in the century, though in England we find the status of 'rational'

claimed for orthodox belief in miracles and prophecies as the only valid evidence for Christianity,[1] rationalism became the recognised name for the critical methods of the liberal German theologians who sought to reduce the supernatural episodes of the Scriptures to the status of natural events misunderstood; and several professed histories of modern 'rationalism' have accordingly dealt mainly or wholly with the developments of Biblical criticism in Germany.

New connotations, however, began to accrue to the terms in virtue of the philosophical procedure of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, though his _Religion within the Bounds of Simple [blossen] Reason_ went far to countenance the current usage; and when Hegel subsequently proceeded to identify (at times) reason with the cosmic process, there were set up implications which still give various technical significances to 'rationalism' in some academic circles. In the brilliant work of Professor William James on _Pragmatism_, for instance, the term is represented as connoting, in contrast to the thinking of 'tough-minded'

empiricists, that of a type or school of 'tender-minded' people who are collectively--

'Rationalistic (going by "principles") Intellectualistic Idealistic Optimistic Religious Free-willist Monistic Dogmatical.'

Yet it is safe to say that in Britain, for a generation back, the name has carried to the general mind only two or three of the connotations in Professor James's list, and much more nearly coincides with his contrary list characterising 'the tough-minded':--

'Empiricist (going by "facts") Sensationalistic Materialistic Pessimistic Irreligious Fatalistic Pluralistic Skeptical'

--though here again the item 'pluralistic' does not chime with the common conception, and 'pessimistic' is hardly less open to challenge.

'Intellectualistic' appears to be aimed at Hegelians, but would be understood by many as describing the tendency to set up 'reason' against 'authority'; and Professor James's 'rationalists,' who would appear to include thinkers like his colleague Professor Royce, would not be so described in England by many university men, clergymen, or journalists.

The name 'rationalist,' in short, has come to mean for most people in this country very much what 'freethinker' used to mean for those who did not employ it as a mere term of abuse. It stands, that is to say, for one who rejects the claims of 'revelation,' the idea of a personal G.o.d, the belief in personal immortality, and in general the conceptions logically accruing to the practices of prayer and wors.h.i.+p.

Perhaps the best name for such persons would be 'naturalist,' which was already in use with some such force in the time of Bodin and Montaigne.

Kant, it may be remembered, distinguished between 'rationalists,' as thinkers who did not deny the possibility of a revelation, and 'naturalists' who did. But though 'natural_ism_,' has latterly been recognised by many as a highly convenient term for the view of things which rejects 'supernaturalism,' and will be so used in the present discussion, the correlative 'natural_ist_' has never, so to speak, been naturalised in English. For one thing, it has been specialised in ordinary language in the sense of 'student of nature,' or rather of what has come to be specially known as 'natural history'--in particular, the life of birds, insects, fishes, and animals. And, further, the term 'naturalism,' like every other general label for a way of thinking, is liable to divagations and misunderstandings. Some thinkers (known to the present writer only through the accounts given of them by others) appear to formulate as a philosophic principle the doctrine that the best way to regulate our lives is to find out how the broad processes of 'Nature'

is tending, and to conform to it alike our ideals and our practice. The notion is that if, say, Nature appears to be making for the extermination of backward races, we should try to help the process forward. It is doubtful whether more than a very small number of instructed men have ever entertained such a principle. It is certainly not the expression of the philosophy of those ancients who sought to 'live according to Nature'; and it would certainly not have been a.s.sented to by such modern 'naturalists' as Spencer and Huxley and Mill. But if the principle is current at all, it makes the name of 'naturalist' as ambiguous philosophically as 'rationalist' can be.[2]

And similar drawbacks attach to another set of terms which have much to recommend them--'positive,' 'positivist,' and 'positivism.' They stand theoretically for (1) the provable, (2) the att.i.tude of the seeker for intelligible proof in all things, (3) the conviction that the rights of reason are ultimate and indefeasible. But here again, to say nothing of the equivoque of 'positive,' we are met by a claim of pre-emption, the claim of Comte to a.s.sociate the 'ism' specifically with his system, theoretic and practical. And for the majority of men with positivist proclivities, the gist of the 'practical application' of Comte is incompatible with the positive spirit. Positivism with a capital P is thereby made for them, as it was for Littre, something alien to positivism as the free scientific spirit would seek to shape it. And a wrangle over the owners.h.i.+p of the word would be a waste of time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See _A Full Answer to a late View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, in a Dialogue between a Rational Christian and his Friend_. London, 1777. The orthodox writer deals severely with some lines of Christian apologetics which have since had vogue.

[2] The somewhat awkward term 'naturalistic,' which is sometimes useful, is hereinafter used in relation to the sense above given for 'naturalism.'

-- 2. THE PRACTICAL POSITION

The usages being so, most of us who can answer to the term 'rationalist'

may reasonably let its general force be decided for us by the stream of tendency in ordinary speech; and, recognising the existence of other applications, one may usefully seek to give a philosophic account of what its adoption seems to involve. That is to say, the present treatise does not undertake to present, much less to justify, all the views which have ever been described as 'rationalistic,' but merely to present current rationalism in the broad sense indicated, as on the one hand an outcome of tendencies seen at work in the earlier movements so named, and on the other hand as apparently committing its representatives to a certain body or cla.s.s of conclusions. For there is this capital element in common for all the stirrings known by the name of rationalism, that they stand for 'private judgment' as against mere tradition or mere authority. Early 'rationalists' might indeed seek to put a quasi-rational form upon tradition, and to give reasons for recognising authority. But in their day and degree they had their active part in the evolution of the critical faculty, inasmuch as they outwent the line of mere acquiescence; and views which to-day form part of uncritically accepted creeds were once products of innovating (however fallacious) reasoning. There is no _saltum mortale_ in the evolution of thought. The very opponents of the rationalist often claim to be more rational than he, and must at least use his methods up to a certain point. This is done even by the quasi-skeptical school, of whom some claim to subordinate reason to some species of insight which they either omit to discriminate intelligibly from the process of judgment, or do not admit to need its sanction.

'Rationalism,' then, is to be understood relatively. To be significant to-day, accordingly, it should stand first and last for the habit and tendency to challenge the doctrines which claim 'religious' or sacrosanct authority--to seek by reflection a defensible theory of things rather than accept enrolment under traditional creeds which demand allegiance on supernaturalist grounds.

Of such thinkers the number is daily increasing. There are now, probably, tens of thousands of more or less instructed men and women in this country who would call themselves rationalists in the broad sense above specified as now generally current. They are all, probably, Darwinians or evolutionists, mostly 'monists' in Spencer's way, 'determinists' in the philosophic sense of that term if they have worked at the 'free-will' problem at all, and non-believers in personal immortality. Very few, at least, bracket the term 'rationalist' with 'spiritualist' in describing themselves: the two tendencies nearly always divide sharply, though it cannot be said that in strict logic they are mutually exclusive. Of most, the philosophic att.i.tude approximates broadly to that of Spencer, though many recognise and avow the inexpertness of Spencer's metaphysic. Only a few, probably, if any, could properly be termed 'skeptics' in the strict philosophic sense of doubters of all inferences. That is a mental att.i.tude more often professed by defenders of 'revelation,' as Pascal and Huet, who seek to make the judgment despair of itself in preparation for an act of a.s.sent which is already discredited by such despair. Yet it belongs to the rationalistic att.i.tude to be ready, in consistency, to a.n.a.lyse all one's own convictions and listen candidly to all negations of them. A belief in the possibility of rational cert.i.tude is implicit in every process of sincere criticism; but the discrimination or gradation of cert.i.tudes is the task of rational philosophy.

As we shall see, quasi-rational cert.i.tude as regards the process of evolution is challenged from two points of view by professed believers in the reality of that process. One school argues that scientific conclusions are all uncertain because the ultimate a.s.sumptions of science are unverifiable, and that, accordingly, religious a.s.sumptions, being neither more nor less rational than others, may 'reasonably'

stand. Others argue that the process of judgment or reasoning which is held to establish scientific truth is not adequate to any theory of interpretation; and that, accordingly, some species of divination--which in the terms of the case eludes judgment--is to be relied on. Such thinkers ostensibly profess to 'reason' to the effect that reasoning is invalid. Against them, those who claim to hold by reason as the totality of judgment may fitly call themselves by the name 'rationalist.'

Given such a general att.i.tude, then, to what philosophic form is it justifiably to be reduced? Those who have longest meditated the question will perhaps be the least quick to give a precise and confident answer.

If training in the scrupulous use of reason sets up any mental habit in face of large problems, it is the habit of tentative approach; and the rationalist of to-day should be a much less readily self-satisfied thinker than the former claimants to the name. Professor James, indeed, is able to reconcile an ostensible certainty of rightness of method and result with much experience in investigation. 'A pragmatist,' he tells us, 'turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.' One is delighted to hear it; but it is perhaps the course of prudence for most of us to doubt our power of getting entirely clear of inveterate habits.[3] Scrutiny of philosophic literature fails to reveal any one who entirely succeeded in it, even slowly. A constant concern for revision, then, would seem to be forced upon the professed rationalist, who knows how often the appeal to reason has yielded mere modifications of error, one unjustifiable credence ousting another. 'Knows,' one says, because the error is provable to the satisfaction of the judgment which seeks certainty.

Such negative knowledge is the promise of positive.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] 'Pragmatism' soon becomes 'she' in Professor James's hands. Mr.

Schiller seems to prefer 'it'; but he too makes much play with pragmatism as an ent.i.ty. Whatever be the amount of 'abstraction'

involved, the verbal method savours of very old-established malpractices.

-- 3. THE RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE

It is fitting, then, at the very outset to make a critical scrutiny of the implications of our term. Rationalism, broadly, implies the habitual resort to reason, to reflection, to judgment. The rationalist, in effect, says, 'That which I find to be incredible I must disbelieve, whatever prestige may attach to its a.s.sertion; that which I find to be doubtful or inconceivable I will so describe. Finding the practice of prayer to be incompatible not only with any sincere belief in natural law, but with the professed religious beliefs of the more educated of those who resort to it, I will not pray. Seeing all religions to be but halting manipulations of the guesses and intuitions of savages, to be still as uncritically credulous in their affirmations as they are blind in their denials, and to be thus mere loose modifications of older beliefs felt to be astray, I will go behind them all for my own theory of things, getting all the help I can alike from those who have reasoned most loyally on the deeper problems involved, and from those who have striven most circ.u.mspectly to understand the process of causation in the universe.'

So far, the procedure is one of rejecting demonstrably fallacious beliefs in regard to the general order of things, substantially on the lines on which tested and testable conclusions have been subst.i.tuted for old delusions in what we term 'the sciences.' At every step the rationalist is a.s.sailed, just as were and are the reformers of the sciences; first by angry epithets, then by bad arguments as to 'evidence,' then by cooler attempts to demonstrate that his method will lead to moral harm, whether or not to present or future punishment at the hands of an angry G.o.d. In particular he is a.s.sured that on his principles there can be no restraint upon men's evil proclivities; and that even the most thoughtful man runs endless dangers of wrong-doing when he subst.i.tutes his private judgment for the 'categorical imperative' embodied either in religious codes or in the current body of morality.[4] To such representations the critical answer is that undoubtedly the application of reason to moral issues incurs the risks of fallacy which beset all reasoning in science so-called; but that, on the other hand, every one of those risks attaches at least equally to all acceptance of 'authoritative' teaching. Galileo could not well err worse than ancient Semites or Christian priests in matters scientific; and Clifford could not conceivably div agate more dangerously in morals than did the plotters and agents of the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew.

Even if we put out of the account the overwhelming record of undenied wickedness wrought in the name of G.o.d and faith, there never has been, and there is no prospect of our ever seeing, unanimity of moral opinion among even the most disciplined types of religious believers in 'authority.' Even in the Catholic Church it would be difficult to find any two men of judicial habit of mind who agree in all points as to what is 'right.'

Nor is the rationalist's position a whit more open to utilitarian criticism (for his religious opponents, it will be observed, are narrowly utilitarian even in professing to combat _his_ utilitarianism) when he is challenged upon his acceptance of 'the voice of conscience,'

otherwise the 'categorical imperative.' The Kantian argument on that head is a fallacy of s.h.i.+fting terms. Mental hesitation as to obeying the sense of 'ought' is the proof of the vacillation of the perception of 'oughtness.' When I feel, first, that I 'ought' to forgive a peculator, and then that I 'ought' to give him up to 'justice'; or, alternatively, that I ought to rise earlier, and, again, that I may as well enjoy more sleep, I have reduced the 'categorical imperative' to the last term in a calculation. And exactly the same thing is done by the believer who is perplexed as to the 'voice of G.o.d.' Religious history and biography are full of avowals, on the one hand, of the murderous clash of convictions alike resting on 'revelation' of all kinds, and, on the other hand, of the agonies of zealots 'wrestling in prayer' to know what is really the divine will.[5] Cromwell's life ill.u.s.trates both orders of dilemma, with a sufficiency of resultant moral evil to arrest propaganda on the side of faith. And the philosopher of the 'categorical imperative' miscarries as instructively as does the soldier of divine will. Kant, on the one hand, vetoes even the telling of a lie to a would-be murderer to put him astray, and, on the other hand, commends to 'enlightened' clergymen the systematic preaching of their religion in a double sense, because _populus vult decipi_. The 'categorical imperative,' as propounded by him, is a form of self-deception.

When, again, the psychic facts are critically faced and the 'categorical imperative' is rationally recognised as either the sum of the persisting moral judgments or the mere verbalism that we ought to do what we feel we ought to do, the rationalist is still at no disadvantage, utilitarian or other. It is not there that his tether tightens. Religious morality, as finally ratified by the more thoughtful among religious men, is but the endors.e.m.e.nt of 'natural' morality. There is not one social commandment, as distinguished from religious or ritualist dogma, that did not emerge as a prescription of the natural moral sense, primitive or otherwise--a supererogatory proof that the religious prescriptions are from the same source. All surviving religious ethic is to-day actually accredited as such, precisely because--and only in so far as--it conforms to natural judgment. Without resort to that tribunal, the religionist could not discriminate between the sanction of the sixth commandment and the law of the levirate, which he has cancelled.

The religious sanction, therefore, is logically null, in terms of the religious man's own mental processes.[6] There is left him, to discredit the rationalist, only the threat that the G.o.d whom he terms infinitely good will or may punish the unbeliever for not believing on the strength of a Bible packed with incredible narrative and indefensible doctrine.

The anti-rationalist position is thus reduced to 'Pascal's wager'--at once the most childish and, from the standpoint of other and n.o.bler religious thought, the most irreligious argument ever advanced by a competent intelligence on the side of faith. Pascal's thesis is that if the unbeliever is wrong, he runs a frightful risk of future torment; whereas, if he should after all be right, he will be no worse off after death for having believed. So the 'belief' required of him is a simple mindless and faithless conformity to a conditional threat. To such moral perversity can religion persuade.

To Pascal's wager there have been many retorts. Mill declared that if a G.o.d should doom him to h.e.l.l for having been unable to believe in such a G.o.d, 'to h.e.l.l he would go'--glad, by implication, not to be in heaven.

Mansel's sole answer was a puerile attempt at a pious sneer. Clifford, in effect, denounced the Pascalian appeal for what it was, a base appeal to fear.[7] But it is unnecessary to resort to such logical supererogation. There are two obvious and decisive reb.u.t.tals to Pascal's doctrine on purely logical ground. Firstly, his thesis is available to the Moslem or the polytheist no less than to the Christian; and when put from either of these sides it leaves the Christian running the very risk with which he menaces the unbeliever. He may have chosen the wrong G.o.d.

Secondly, the hypothetical Good G.o.d, if in any intelligible sense worthy of the name, would conceivably be as likely to send Pascal to h.e.l.l for dishonouring him as to send the honest atheist there for refusing to make-believe. The pietist has dishonoured himself to no purpose.

The _a posteriori_ argument for religious conformity has thus come to nothing; and the process of argument has revealed the religio-utilitarian champion of morality as traitor to that cause. There is left him, indeed, the plea that religious fears and sanctions are good for the ill-disposed believer, who ought, therefore, not to be disillusioned. As regards the simple dogma of deity, the position has the emphatic support of Voltaire. But Voltaire declined to use the favourite menaces of faith, as do many religionists of to-day; and if those menaces are to be rationally vindicated, there must first be raised the question whether they could not be improved upon for the purpose professed. Leaving that task to those who affect them, the rationalist may claim to be justified in acting on the maxim that honesty is the best policy in the intellectual as in the commercial life. There has been no such historical harvest of moral betterment from the religion of fear as could induce him of all men to employ it as a moral prophylactic.

Thus far he figures as the vindicator of simple veracity against those who, in the name of morals, would make it of no account. He has still to meet, indeed, the challenge: What of the ill-disposed among your own way of thinking? If an unbeliever should see his way to gain by falsehood or licit fraud, what should deter him? Much satisfaction appears to be derived by many well-meaning people from the propounding of this dilemma. They may or may not be gratified by the answer that if a rationalist should not be, by training and bias, spontaneously averse to lying and cheating, or generally unwilling to do otherwise than he would be done by, or sensitive enough to the blame of his fellows to fear it, there is indeed no more security for his veracity or honesty than for that of a typical Jesuit or a pious company promoter. One can but add that, seeing that in the terms of the case he began by unprofitably avowing an unpopular opinion, he is presumably, on the average, rather less likely to lie for gain than those who confessedly find the sheer fear of consequences a highly important consideration in their own plan of life, and who have at the same time the promise from their own code of plenary pardon for all sins on the simple condition of ultimate repentance.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Even Professor F. H. Bradley, the ablest of living English philosophers, is responsible for the proposition that 'to wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality'

(_Ethical Studies_, 1876, p. 180). As the book has not been reprinted, despite much demand, it may be inferred that the author no longer stands to all its positions.