Rationalism Part 2

Evidently, by his own definitions, his whole political life is lived outside it. Alike his generalisations from past history, and his predictions of the future, are such as afford 'no ground for believing them to be even approximately true': those of his opponents, of course, coming for him under the same category. He would, perhaps, hold himself to be in the sphere of Reason when following a proposition in mathematics; but he does not admit himself to be there even when he consents to believe that he will die, and that he had better avoid prussic acid. 'No experience, however large,' he insists (p. 75), 'and no experiments, however well contrived and successful, could give us _any reasonable a.s.surance_ that the co-existences or sequences which have been observed among phenomena will be repeated in the future.' Not 'certainty,' be it observed, but 'any reasonable a.s.surance.' That is to say, we have no reasonable a.s.surance that we shall die.

Obviously the extravagance of this proposition is calculated. The point is that no belief whatever concerning life and death and morality and the process of nature can be justified by 'reason'; and that accordingly no religious belief whatever can be discredited on the score of being opposed to reason or 'unreasonable.' If not more reasonable than the most carefully tested or the most widely accepted belief in science, or the belief that the sun will rise or fire burn to-morrow, or that we shall all die, it is not less reasonable than they. Therefore, believe as your bias leads.

It is only fair to Mr. Balfour to say that there is nothing new in his position, though probably it has never before been quite so violently formulated. The Greek Pyrrho (fl. 300-350 B.C.) argued that almost all propositions were doubtful; and some of his followers are said to have been consistent enough to doubt whether they doubted. In the dialogues of Cicero we find the skeptical method employed, with supreme inconsistency, by the official exponents of unbelieved doctrines, to discredit competing doctrines. Among the pagans it was also turned, with no special religious purpose, against all forms of dogmatic doctrine by s.e.xtus the Empiric (fl. 200-250 A.C.); and in the early Christian dialogue of Minucius Felix a pagan is presented as turning it against Christianity. In the later Middle Ages it is resorted to by Cornelius Agrippa, previously a great propounder of fantastic propositions in science, against the current science of his time, and in favour of a return to the simplicity of the early Christian creed. Still later, it was much resorted to, after the Reformation, by Catholics for the purpose of discrediting Protestantism; and Pascal and Huet, the latter in particular, sought to employ it against 'unbelief.' Huet left behind him, as his legacy to his church and generation, what Mark Pattison has termed 'a work of the most outrageous skepticism'; and Pascal's use of the method has left a standing debate as to whether he himself was a 'skeptic.' In England, on the Protestant side, Bishop Berkeley put forth an argument to the effect that the Newtonian doctrine of fluxions involved the acceptance of unproved 'mysteries,' and that those who applied it had accordingly no excuse for rejecting the mysteries of Christianity.

Finally, it is fair to note that Mr. Balfour's nihilistic treatment of reason has a surprising sanction in Hume, to say nothing of the other writers who have practically limited reasoning to mathematical deduction. That great thinker, with his frequent great carelessness, wrote that

'Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding'

(_Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding_, Sect. iv. Part ii., par. 2).

'All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning' (Sect. v., par. 3).

'All these [spontaneous feelings] are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning _or process of the thought and understanding_ is able either to produce or to prevent' (_Ib._ par.

6).

But Hume, be it noted, would in his earlier life have recoiled from Mr.

Balfour's religious Irrationalism, for in his deistic period he wrote that the belief in Deity is 'conformable to sound reason.' And, what is more important, he in effect cancelled his own remarks on reason, above cited, by writing as follows in Note B on the _Inquiry_ cited:--

'Nothing is more usual than for writers, even on moral, political, or physical subjects, to distinguish between reason and experience, and to suppose that these species of argumentation (_sic_) are entirely different from each other. The former are taken for the mere result of our intellectual faculties, which, by considering _a priori_ the nature of things, and examining the effects that must follow from their operation, establish particular principles of science and philosophy. The latter are supposed to be derived entirely from sense and observation, by which we know what has actually happened from the operation of particular objects, and are thence able to infer what will for the future result from them....

But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in the active and speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to p.r.o.nounce that it is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.'

Hume, it will be observed, is not here bent on vindicating the rational character of direct inference from observation: he had set out in the text by disparaging customary thinking as non-rational; and he is now claiming for the 'reasoning' man that experience goes a long way to generate his reasoning processes. 'The truth is,' he says in his final paragraph, 'an inexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely inexperienced.' It is a fragmentary note to a hasty pa.s.sage; but at least it concedes that reasoning _is_ largely a matter of inference from experience, and thus decisively gainsays the a.s.sertion in the text that no inference from experience is an 'effect of reasoning,' inasmuch as it says such inference is reasoning; that reasoning is a working of the mind on the facts of life; and that the common distinction between reasoning and [beliefs derived direct from]

experience 'is at bottom erroneous, or at least superficial.'[12] If, he says in the fourth paragraph of the Note, 'If we examine those _arguments_ which, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed to be the _mere_ effects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found to _terminate_ at last in some general principle or conclusion for which we can a.s.sign no _reason_ but observation and experience.' If an argument be not a process of reasoning, neither word is intelligible. If an argument terminates (=has one end) in a conclusion founded on observation, and if that observation be a 'reason' for a proposition, then arguing is reasoning.

If not, what is Mr. Balfour's book? By his own definition, _that_ is 'outside the sphere of Reason,' inasmuch as it is a series of negative propositions which, like their denied contraries, must be 'incapable of proof.' What term, then, would he apply to his argument, if he admits that he is arguing?

The philosophic skeptic, it would appear, has logically overreached himself--a very usual consummation. There is little sign that any of the religious skeptics above named ever made any converts to religion; and there is much 'reason' to think that they turned many to unbelief. Mr.

Balfour from time to time speaks of 'reasonable people' and of 'absurdity.' But he leaves us in the dark as to what absurdity means, and his thesis excludes from the 'reasonable' cla.s.s alike all religious persons and all scientific persons, unless, possibly, mathematicians as such. Since there is no 'reasonable a.s.surance' for the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow, and politicians have no ground in reason for anything they say as such, the ma.s.s of the ordinary beliefs of educated mankind are not reasonable or rational; and since we have no 'reason'

for believing in either mortality or immortality, we can have no reason for believing (whether we do or not) in Mr. Balfour, who avowedly believes in both without reason. His book, by implication, is not an appeal to reason, is not a process of reasoning, and can give no 'reasonable a.s.surance' of anything, positive or negative, to anybody.

All this by his own showing.

The rationalist, it should seem, has small cause to deprecate such antagonism. He could hardly have a more comprehensive clearing of the field of dialectic for the formulation of his own conception of reason and reasoning, and his own appeal to the reason of reasonable people. As thus:--

1. _Reason_ is our name for (_a_) the sum of all the judging processes; (_b_) the act of reflex judgment; (_c_) 'private judgment' as against obedience to authority; and (_d_) the state of sanity contrasted with that of insanity; and '_a_ reason' is a fact or motive or surmise which we judge sufficient to induce us or others to believe or do (or doubt or not do) something without much or any danger of error, failure, or injury.

2. _Reasoning_ is our name for the process of comparing or stating 'reasons why' certain propositions or judgments should be believed or disbelieved, or certain acts done or not done.

3. We are emphatically 'in the sphere of Reason' when we are reflecting and reasoning, as distinct from merely feeling, sensating, desiring, or hating; but even the feelings are, as it were, part of the stuff of Reason. Strictly speaking, we are in the sphere of Reason even when we believe what we are told to believe on matters outside the knowledge of our instructors (in so far as we credit them with greater wisdom than our own), or try to believe that what we would like to be true must be true because we would like it (inasmuch as we are proceeding reflectively on a 'reason why'); though in these cases we are reasoning fallaciously--that is, in a way which can lead to manifold error and injury.

4. _Reasonable_ is our approbatory epithet for an action, course, or person that is guided by reasoning which we see to exclude most risks of error and injury--save of course where the taking of risk of injury is a.s.sumed.

Every one of these definitions is justified by the dictionary to begin with, though the dictionaries, of necessity, note further conflicting meanings, as when reason is indicated as 'the faculty or capacity of the human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the lower animals,' or hazily distinguished, on philosophic authority, from 'the understanding.' But the lexicographer loyally notes that _a_ reason is 'a thought or consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion'; and that _to_ reason means, among other things, 'to reach conclusions by a systematic comparison of facts,' 'to examine or discuss by arguments.' These senses are implicit in daily usage.

The concept of Reason, in short, must include the whole factory of beliefs. The judging faculty, the judging propensity, is a complex of instincts, experiences, inferences, and necessities of thought. It originates at an animal stage, and conserves to the last animal elements--as when, without any process of calculation, you infer, as it were through the muscular sense, that a top-heavy omnibus is likely to overbalance, or that in riding your bicycle round a sharp corner you must incline your body inwards. It deals with diet and medicine, art and industry, no less than with theology and science and politics. In the former, its accepted procedure is obviously a set of survivals of more or less tested ideas from among an infinity of detected mistakes; and the moral law of the intellectual life for the rationalist, the principle which best justifies his a.s.sumption of that name, is that every belief or preference whatever is fitly to be tried by all or any of the tests by which beliefs have been sifted in the past, or may more effectually be tested in the future. We are to do with both our religion and our science in general what we have done in the past and are still doing with our medicine, our sanitation, our education, our physics, our historiography.

Without more ado, then, we may proceed to ask how reasons for beliefs are ultimately to be appraised by reasonable and consistent people--in other words, how beliefs are honestly to be justified.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] So Kant: 'Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions are blind' (_Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, ed. Kirchmann, 1870, p. 100); and Comte: 'There is no absolute separation between observing and reasoning' (_Politique Positive_, 1851, i. 500).

-- 7. THE TEST OF TRUTH

It may have been observed, with or without perplexity, that Mr. Balfour specified a 'need for religious _truth_' as his ground for holding his unspecified 'theological beliefs,' this after bracketing Religion and Science as alike 'unproved systems,' consisting (by implication) of a body of propositions as to which we have not 'any ground for believing them to be even approximately true.' The skeptico-religious conception of truth being thus found to be as nugatory as that of 'reason' put forward from the same quarter, we are compelled to posit one more conformable to common sense, common usage, and common honesty. For the generality of instructed men, truth in secular affairs means not merely 'that which is trowed,' but (_a_) that which we have adequate 'reason'

to trow, and (_b_) that of which our acceptance is consistent with our way of testing credences of any or all other kinds. The ultimate criterion of our beliefs, in short, is the consistency with which we hold them.

By this test the ground is rapidly cleared of skeptico-religious literature. That puts a spurious problem to mask a real one. The question for us is not and cannot be whether, seeing that by inference from experience some of the beliefs we now hold are likely to be found false by posterity, we have any right to accept one belief and discredit another. The skeptic is himself doing so in this very argument, and all the time. His whole intellectual life is one of judgments and preferences. There is no intellectual life without them. The question is whether we have applied to any one belief or set of beliefs the tests we have applied to others: whether, for instance, we can honestly profess to believe in prayer or the doctrine of the Trinity or heaven and h.e.l.l as we believe in Gresham's Law or the effects of quinine or the roundness of the earth; whether we have criticised the religion in which we were brought up as we criticise Mohammedanism or any other; whether we have scrutinised the legends of our creed as we have scrutinised the legend of King Arthur and his Knights; or whether, on the other hand, we hold the atomic theory or faith in vaccination by mere authority, while we dispute about religious teaching in the schools.

This does not mean that we are to apply the same kind of test to every kind of proposition; that we are to ask for evidence of immortality as we ask for evidence of the Darwinian theory. The test is one of consistency. Does the belief in immortality, we are to ask, consist with either our knowledge or our imagination? Do we hold it critically and coherently or as a mere congeries of irreconcilable propositions? Do we ask ourselves what we mean by 'meeting again'? Is it anything more than a fantasy which we affirm for our own comfort or the supposed comfort of others, or for the sake of mere conformity with popular sentiment? No thoughtful man, perhaps, will deny that he holds some of his opinions by some such easy tenure; were it only for the reason that consistent ascertainment is often laborious, and that common consent has to be allowed to take its place in regard to many beliefs of plainly inferior importance. But religious beliefs are not so cla.s.sed by those who seriously debate them; and here, if ever, the challenge to scrutiny and consistency is imperative.

And so disturbing is the challenge that for centuries past the higher religious consciousness has been engaged in an unceasing effort to persuade itself and its antagonists of the secular or mundane reasonableness of its supernaturalist creed. Religious life is seen going on at two widely removed standpoints: one that of the emotional believer who knows no conceptual difficulties, and is concerned only to maintain in himself and others the quasi-ecstatic state of faith; the other that of the would-be reasoner who is concerned to secure peace of mind by arguing down his own misgivings and the positive antagonism of unbelief. Between those extremes, probably, is lived the ma.s.s of religious life so-called, untouched either by ecstasy or by conceptual unbelief as distinguished from pa.s.sive conformity. But the conflict of the thinking minority is unceasing; and orthodox professions of triumph deceive no one who is really engaged in the struggle.

On both sides it has long been a question of balancing 'probabilities,'

a conflict of 'reasons.' Bacon, declaring that he would 'rather believe all the fables in the Golden Legend and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind,' opened a door that let in all the forces of doubt. The Koran is the form in which the G.o.d-idea recommended itself to the Moslem mind, as the Bible is the form in which it commended itself to the Christian; and if for each the other is always fabulising in detail, where could be the cert.i.tude of the common doctrine? Was mind any likelier to be the form of the power of the universe than any other of the anthropomorphic characteristics of Jehovah and Allah and Zeus? However that might be, Bacon was appealing to the sheer sense of probability; the 'Evidences' of Grotius were addressed to the same kind of judgment; and Pascal's 'wager' was a blank appeal to the principle of chances plus the instinct of fear. Butler, anxiously striving to reduce the straggling deistic controversy to its logical bases, accepted the test of probability as the guide of life; and Gladstone, his last champion, with all his show of sheer faith, strenuously endorses the doctrine. The vital question is seen to be, then, whether the Butlerian 'believer' or the rationalist is the more loyal to that standard of probability by which each avowedly guides himself.

But Butler, in the very act of professedly basing his case on probability, introduced the contrary principle. Gladstone, gravely reprehending that Jesuit doctrine misleadingly termed Probabilism--which permits of a choice of the less probable course in morals and belief--supposed himself to be upholding a true Probabilism in Butler.

The fact is that Butler, seeking to checkmate the Deists, committed himself to anomaly as a mark of revelation. 'You believe,' he virtually argued, 'in a benevolent G.o.d of Nature, though Nature is full of ostensible cruelty and heartlessness: if these moral anomalies do not stagger your deism, why should anomalies in the Scriptures be for you an argument against their being a divine revelation? Should you not rather expect to find difficulties in the revelation as in Nature?' So that the champion of the standard of probability ends by putting an element of improbability as a mark of divine truth.

It was long ago pointed out that Butler's argument was thus as good for Islam or any other religion as for Christianity. Gladstone framed a futile reb.u.t.tal to the effect that Christianity had marks of truth, in respect of prophecy and miracles, which Islam lacked--a mere stultification of the Butlerian thesis. The Moslem could retort that if his creed succeeded more rapidly than the Christian with special marks of anomaly upon it, those were presumably the right anomalies! By the Butlerian a.n.a.logy of Nature, what sort of anomalies, pray, were to be expected in a divine revelation? Gladstone actually made it a disqualification of Islam that it had succeeded by the sword; this when his own creed had slain more than ever did Islam. But on Butler's principles, his plea was vain even if true. If a divinely ruled Nature be red in tooth and claw, why should not the divine faith be so likewise? What is the lesson, by deistic a.n.a.logy, of the volcano?

The complete answer to Butler, of course, lies in stating the simple fact that a.n.a.logy leads rationally to the conclusion that all the alleged revelations are alike human products. If every one in turn is found to embody cosmological delusion, historical falsity, fabulous narrative, barbarous ethic, and irrational sanctions, all of which are by each believer singly admitted to be the normal marks of human stumbling, the case is at an end. The one salient and sovereign probability is the one that the believer ignores.

When this mountainous fact is realised, the full force of the Butlerian argument is seen to recoil on its premiss no less than on its conclusion. The dilemma that was to turn deists into Christians is simply the confutation of all theism. Upon none of the tested principles of inference now normally acted on by men of science, men of business, and men of affairs, is it rationally to be inferred that the universe is ruled by a superhuman Good Male Person, who loves and hates, punishes and rewards, plans and reconsiders, injures and compensates. As little are we ent.i.tled to infer that it is governed by a Superhuman Bad Person, or a number of Superhuman Persons, male or female, good or bad, or both. The polytheistic and theistic solutions are the natural ones for unreflecting ignorance and priestly policy, and the latter remains the natural one for reverent ingrained prejudice, alias inculcated faith; but it is only so much sophisticated folklore for the student of life, nature, history, philosophy. The latest forms of it are but defecations of the earlier. For Arnold, trained in reverence and avid of reverend sanctions, the deity of his fellows is confessedly but a 'magnified non-natural man'; and his subst.i.tuted 'Something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-righteousness,' in turn, is for his critics but an evasion of the problem of the something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-unrighteousness.

In sum, then, the case for rationalism as against the creeds is that they recognise no rational test for truth, and apply none. They are all, to say the least, grossly improbable in the light of the fullest human knowledge; and the acceptance of them means either pa.s.sive disregard of the principle of sufficient reason or the habitual employment of arguments which upon any other kind of issue would be recognised by all competent men as at best utterly inadequate. Theology is the most uncandid of all the current sciences; its results are the most self-contradictory; its premisses the most incoherent. Upon those theologians, then, who accuse the rationalist of self-will and prejudice, he is forced to retort the charge with a double emphasis.

They are daily disloyal to the Canon of Consistency, which is for him the moral law of the intellectual life. Claiming to propound the highest truth, they override all the tests by which truth is to be known.

The modern defence of 'faith,' whether Christian or theistic, is less and less an attempt to prove truth of doctrine--save as regards the defence of historicity; more and more an attempt to prove its usefulness or its comfortableness. Faith has turned utilitarian, as regards its apologetics. John Mill erred somewhat, indeed, in endorsing the statement that down to his time much had been written on the truth of religion, and 'little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy, concerning its usefulness.' Christian bishops early learned to claim for their creed a gift of prosperity; and in the eighteenth century there was an abundance of utilitarian vindication of the faith. But latterly this has more and more coloured the whole defence. Either as a promise of peace or as one of comfort and stimulus, as a plea for emotional indulgence or for the joy of the sense of deliverance from responsibility for sin, as a guarantee for good government or as a condition of general progress, Christianity is defended on any ground rather than on that of the truth of its narratives or the conformity of its doctrine to good sense, moral or other. And the pleas are entertainingly internecine.

One day we are told that it makes for race-survival; the next, that it is a spiritual stay for races that are dying out, and a great deathbed comfort to ex-cannibals, with a past of many murders. A creed which involves a cosmology is recommended, not by such arguments as may commend a cosmology, but by pleas of subjective agreeableness which in any discussion of historic fact would be felt to savour of trifling.

And this simple and spontaneous sophistry is in a measure kept in countenance by quasi-philosophies such as that of the 'Will to Believe'

and that latterly termed Pragmatism. The former, as brilliantly propounded by the late Professor James, amounts simply to this, that in matters on which there is no good or sufficient evidence either way, we do well to believe what we would like to believe. As the precept comes from the thinker who pa.s.sed on to students the counsel of Pascal concerning the opiate value of religious practices,[13] it is easy to infer how it will tend to be interpreted. And the second philosophy is like unto the first, in so far as it conveys, under cover of the true formula that the valid beliefs are those which affect action, the antinomian hint that if we think we have found any belief a help to action, it is thereby sufficiently certificated as true.

The rationalist comment on Pragmatism, thus applied, is that it really discredits the religious beliefs of most men, inasmuch as they never relate their faith to action in general, would not stake a shilling on a prayer, have no working faith in providence, and do not in the least desire to pa.s.s from this life to another. But these men do not study philosophy; while the emotional believers, who really feel their faith to be a help in life, do not need the pragmatist's precept, and believe without it.

What is true in Pragmatism is of the essence of Rationalism. Our lives at their best are made valid for us by our mutual trust, our reciprocal sincerities; and Rationalism consists in the effort to extend intellectual and moral sincerity to the study of all problems. It may permit, none the less, of some such genial or affectionate glozing of some facts as love and friendship tend to set up in the relations of persons, tolerance taking on the vesture of sympathy; and it no more makes for Gradgrindism, or the belittlement of any of the higher joys, than for concentration on the lower. Its antagonists alternately indict it for 'gloom' and for licence; for coldness and for 'Epicureanism'; for seeking only happiness, and for turning happiness out of doors. The contradictions of the indictment tell of its collective origin in mere hostility of temper. Rationalism, of all codes and modes of life-philosophy, must most seek to make the best of life.

Some professed rationalists, indeed, at times grind in the mills of the Philistines by professing an apprehension lest their fellows, in pursuing truth, should lose sight of beauty; and such misconceiving mentors plead confusedly for some formal a.s.sociation of rationalism with the arts of feeling, with poetry, with music, with drama, with fiction--as if without cultivating these things _in the name of_ Rationalism we should be divested of them or discredited as not possessing them. The fallacy is of a piece with that which identifies Christianity with progress in civilisation. The rationalistic bias is in actual experience found to be as compatible with any aesthetic bias as with the scientific, specially so called; though in point of fact a scientific culture is in itself more conducive to rationalism in respect of historical and ultimate problems than is culture in the arts, which are mostly enjoyed, appraised, and even practised without deliberate resort to critical a.n.a.lysis.

Some rationalists, again, have been found to contend that the critical a.n.a.lysis of things aesthetic is destructive of aesthetic joy--an error of errors, involving blindness to the facts that even a science is in itself ultimately perceptible as an artistic construction, and that all the arts live and renew themselves by the sense of truth. The solution of the verbal conflict lies in recognising that rationalism is after all but a name for considerate consistency in the intellectual life, where consistency is still so sadly little cultivated, and where established habits and inst.i.tutions tend so powerfully to its exclusion; whereas in the arts there is no call for such specific championship. There the very joy of novelty is soon potent to overcome the resistance of habit--which, for the rest, roots in structural or acquired limitations not greatly dependent upon cultivation or neglect of the rationalistic habit. A man of science or of critical research may be dull to new refinements of aesthesis where an unscientific emotionalist _may_ be sensitive to them.