J. M. Robertson

“ 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? ”

“ No man of science, surely, holds that all statements of the laws of phenomena are equally well ‘proved’ by observation and experiment. They do hold that such a proposition as that of ‘the uniformity of nature,’ considered as a ‘law of phenomena,’ is founded on observation and experiment, as fully as any proposition of natural mode can be. ”

“ For rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty, equality, fraternity, ‘the giving and receiving of reasons,’ the complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master, proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such, can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle because struggle has yielded progress ”

“ 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 it must be granted him that herein he is theoretically at par with the man of science—physical or moral—who, having spontaneously framed a hypothesis, seeks to find that facts conform to it. Every man with a hypothesis, broadly speaking, wants to find that facts are so-and-so.
The rationalist, then, has his bias like another. Though it takes in part a critical or negative form, it is fundamentally as positive as another. He has come to crave for coherence and consistency in narratives, statements, explanations, arguments, propositions, and systems of thought ”

“ The time is for him even in sight, as it were, when most men will recognise and live by that law; and when that day comes there will be no more need to profess rationalism than to profess, as a creed, any of the daily reciprocities by which society subsists. But till that day comes he marks himself, and is marked—to his frequent discomfort, it may be—by his insistence, in the deepest matters, on that law of truth which so many still persistently subordinate to pleas or preferences of authority or habit, convention or subjective taste. ”

“ The anti-rationalist position is thus reduced to ‘Pascal’s wager’—at once the most childish and, from the standpoint of other and nobler 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. ”

“ Certainty, on the other hand, attaches in the highest degree to certain beliefs that, in the nature of the case, are ‘incapable of proof,’ that [Pg 29] is, of being tested. No belief is more certain for all men than the belief that they will all die, though the event, posited as future, cannot as such be ‘tested.’ In this case, the connotation of the word ‘proof,’ nevertheless, is by common consent transferred to the concept of mortality: the invariable dying of all previous men is allowed to be ‘proof,’ or decisive evidence, that all living men will die to the last generation. ”

“ The more philosophic assailant of the rationalist, we assume, professes after all to stand or fall by reasoning. That is to say, he claims to hold his supernaturalist positions in logical and moral consistency with his historical positions, his practice as a judge or juror, as a man of science, as a critic in politics, as a man of honour, as a player of cricket by the rules of the game. As a matter of fact, however, he at times goes about the task by way of an undertaking to show, not that his beliefs are well founded in reason, but that no beliefs are ”

“ Since there is no ‘reasonable assurance’ for the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow, and politicians have no ground in reason for anything they say as such, the mass 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is a mental attitude 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 assent which is already discredited by such despair. Yet it belongs to the rationalistic attitude to be ready, in consistency, to analyse all one’s own convictions and listen candidly to all negations of them. A belief in the possibility of rational certitude is implicit in every process of sincere criticism; but the discrimination or gradation of certitudes is the task of rational philosophy. ”

“ And therein, of course, lies the secret of the gradual historic dissolution of traditional credence in the minds of those who come at all within the range of the argument. Every act of reasoning—as priesthoods are more or less clearly aware—is a concession to the rationalist position to begin with; and only superior skill in fence can ostensibly countervail the advantage thus given to the disputant who claims that reason must determine beliefs. Reasoning against the validity of reason is recognisable as suicidal by all who can reason coherently. ”

“ The rationalist avows a moral bias—an attitude towards his fellows, a moral ‘taste,’ let us say—which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds ‘revelation’ frequently repellent and the popular ‘God’ a chimera; even as the believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to his moral and speculative bias, and he has been brought up to pretermit judgment beyond those limits. ”

“ All debate presupposes agreement on something. As antagonists in religion appeal either to God-idea or to Bible, to probability or to usage, to expediency or to authority, or to historic evidence for one revelation as against another, so antagonists upon the fundamentals of religion appeal to accepted laws of proof, measures of evidence, consistency of reasoning. ”

“ 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 assertion; 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. ”

“ Precisely because he is, so to say, the latest outcome of the universe, the rational determinist will insist upon ‘pulling his weight’ and having things go, as far as may be, in the way he prefers. No one’s right is better! And he can confidently claim that here, where he is philosophically at one with the thorough-going theist, he has all the possible moral gain from his determinism without an iota of the theist’s perplexity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A man of science or of critical research may be dull to new refinements of æsthesis where an unscientific emotionalist may be sensitive to them.
Recognising all this, the balanced rationalist will shun as a special sin of religion the ritualising of his joys, the sectarian extension of his differences of credence to the field of æsthetics. His rationalism as such implies no one of the special ‘isms’ of the arts; though there he may be an ‘ist’ like another. For him all art, all literature, all beauty, is so much of Nature’s fruitage ”

“ The Moslem could retort that if his creed succeeded more rapidly than the Christian with special marks of anomaly upon it, [Pg 53] those were presumably the right anomalies! By the Butlerian analogy 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? ”

“ But the theistic determinist is open always on the one hand to the paralysing thought that if he should err he is resisting God, and on the other to the equally deadly instigation of the thought that those who resist him are God’s enemies. To escape both snares he must turn thorough pantheist=non-theist. And the upshot is that the theistic determinist is never merciful, whereas the rational determinist is at least under a logical compulsion to be so, however he may resist or divagate. He is free to defend himself, and to defend society ”

“ 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 God, the belief in personal immortality, and in general the conceptions logically accruing to the practices of prayer and worship. ”

“ 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 attitude, 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 ”

“ 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’ class alike all religious persons and all scientific persons, unless, possibly, mathematicians as such. ”

“ Neither the ignorant nor the ungifted man makes the valid new hypothesis.
There remain for use by the theist only the old reproaches that a non-theistic philosophy is ‘desolate,’ ‘negative,’ ‘materialistic,’ and incapable of explaining the universe. The last is a mere ignoratio elenchi, for the very essence of the non-theistic challenge is that every ‘explanation of the universe’ is an imposture, exposed as such either by its self-contradictions or by its evasions. ”

“ The morally valid element in M. Bergson’s insistence on ‘creative evolution’ (again an old term, by the way) is the vindication of personality as a creative form. But this was not necessary as regards the rational determinist, whose position really assumed it, though possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in assuming that the determinist view of things, mostly accepted by the rationalist, impairs character by reducing will to a ‘mechanism.’ But that is a calculated obscuration of the doctrine. ”

“ 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 endorsement of ‘natural’ morality. ”