Joseph McCabe

“ And for that I stand before the world branded as a criminal by the Church of Rome. My dearest friends have abandoned me as though I were stricken with leprosy, if they did not indeed turn upon me with bitter and insulting language, for I was an apostate, and my word availed nothing against my calumniators. And this is an age of light and freedom and Christian charity. May the days soon come in which men will agree to differ on intellectual questions, and unite in social activity; when social ostracism will not be the inevitable consequence of honesty. ”

“ A theologian would say that God has provided a mysterious power, called faith, that links securely the minds of the unthinking majority to their belief. A more matter-of-fact observer would see either that they never reflect on the fact that they take this traditional doctrine with little or no proof, or that, from an instinctive feeling of the difficulty of the problem, they readily acquiesce in the most superficial arguments, or, from a confusion of the provinces of faith and reason, they consider it unlawful to indulge in speculation on the problem at all. ”

“ If there is no satisfactory evidence of the spirituality of the soul, the question of its immortality is superfluous. To entertain the thought seriously, we must admit in man an incorruptible substance, capable of thought and volition, without the co-operation or instrumentality of a brain. I do not for a moment consider that thought and volition are, as yet, satisfactorily explained as cerebral functions; no one can expect it of a science still in its infancy. But I see no proof that thought and volition have any intrinsic character evidently demanding a spiritual agency. ”

“ It is easy and impressive to speak of the issue of an omnipotent Fiat, and the obedient movement and development that brought order out of chaos; but remember that obedience is a metaphor taken from the moral world. How can this dull, dead, inert matter we have so much depreciated carry out so faithfully the decree of its maker? How can unconscious atoms realize so sublime a conception? ”

“ Finally, looking back over the whole scheme of evidences I have criticized, I cannot think that an all-merciful God would have devised such a labyrinth through which men must pass to a knowledge of himself. The problem is hopelessly beyond the majority of men; if they believe, it must be on the authority of their religious guides. And when we remember the gross philosophical ignorance of those guides, and the brilliant galaxy of modern thinkers who stand against them, such an act of faith cannot reasonably be demanded. ”

“ On the other hand there is the law of evolution—the most brilliant discovery of the century—which has shed so marvellous a light on the past history of the world, and which now only encounters serious opposition when it deals with the origin of human intelligence. To show that a mechanical or monistic view of the universe and an acceptance of evolution cannot include man, it is necessary to point to certain of his characteristics, which reveal the presence in him of a new and specifically distinct principle ”

“ The metaphysician has ever been inclined to objectify his mental images and their connections; and if I had not indulged largely in the study of historical and physical science, there is every probability that I should have continued to rest my belief in a real, objective, spiritual world, on the subjective play of thought which it represented in the metaphysical argument. It contains just the same fallacy as the popular way of thinking: “The world must have a cause; there must be an infinite being somewhere.” ”

“ Remember that the last step is the spirituality of the human soul.
For many years it seemed to me that such a criterion was available. The properties of mind are very different from those of matter. If we are logical, and if we remember a little controversial history, we shall not infer forthwith that mind must be the manifestation of spirit, not an outgrowth of matter. But if we can show that the properties of mind are not merely different, but contradictory, entirely opposed to those of matter, we may defy the progress of the Materialist. ”

“ But, if there is one point on which science has shaken the confidence of men in traditional teaching, it is on this question of the possession by man of an immaterial soul. Metaphysics is, from the nature of the case, the ultimate court of appeal in such a question; the crude assertion that scientists reject the soul because the microscope, the skiograph, or the scalpel has never revealed it, is one of the choice expressions invented by theologians, who never read scientists for the satisfaction of their people, whom they will not allow to read them. ”

“ Each wave that breaks in seeming impotence has inflicted an irreparable injury upon it, and prepared the way for its successor; each tide that gently murmurs at its feet is weakening its foundations. And the days will come when its worn and enfeebled structure will yield, and the fairest lands become a prey to the devouring waves. ”

“ The expectation of a positive revelation, which prepares the way to a large extent for its reception on indifferent evidence, is based upon two fundamental propositions of natural religion—the existence of God, and the spirituality and immortality of the soul. Once the material world comes to be regarded as a translucent veil that hangs for a time between a personal God and a human spirit vaguely conscious of a high destiny, the search for some positive message from behind the veil is natural and hopeful. ”

“ I am aware that the spirituality of the soul may not be regarded as an essential point of rational theology—we may accept it from revelation, which does not necessarily pre-suppose it. Still, it is for most men a doctrine to be substantiated by human reason, and in point of fact the Church of Rome authoritatively declares it to lie within the province of pure philosophy. If we cannot rebut the materialistic conception of man, a positive revelation has little chance of acceptance. ”

“ It is the history of a mind that has traversed painfully the whole field of religious controversy, having moved from the most dogmatic of existing sects to a purely negative or agnostic attitude; of one, moreover, who has been placed in a particularly advantageous position for surveying the field of controversy, and whose only ambition it was, for years, to become an apologist for the creed he has been forced to abandon. ”

“ Nothing is more persistently depicted in literature than the wrestling of a strong soul with a vanishing belief; nothing, we may infer, touches more deeply the great heart of humanity that loves to see itself reflected in literature. However, the purpose of the following pages is not so much to survey and summarize the results of modern thought in its bearings upon the religious question as to trace out the progress of an individual mind in its long search after truth on religious matters. ”

“ Now, consciousness itself is not a phenomenon of this character. There is, indeed, a vast gulf between the movements of the molecules of the brain and the states of consciousness which accompany them; but we have no satisfactory reason for asserting that the gulf will never be traversed. No Theist will deny that matter could have been endowed with consciousness, like Leibnitz’s monads, if the Creator so willed; in point of fact, unorganized matter is not, but it is strange to infer that, therefore, organized matter cannot be the subject of consciousness. ”

“ We have now before us, in every form, from the ponderous tome of the mediæval theologian to the penny tract, a curious and extensive collection of arguments for the existence of God—as strange and conflicting a group as the forms which that higher power has successively assumed in the changeful consciousness of men. ”

“ It may be said that the impossibility of honest agnosticism is not an article of faith defined by the Church of Rome, but it is practically equivalent to one; it is a point on which there is a clear consensus of its theologians, and its manuals of theology emphatically promulgate it. The heretic may be piously trusted to be in good faith, but the Agnostic bears the mark of reprobation on his brow, more surely than the painted face under the street-lamp. ”

“ On the one hand, we have the inherited experience of innumerable ancestors and the deeply impressed associations of our early training pointing out certain lines of conduct as moral; on the other hand, we have the consciousness of our connection with a society from which our life derives half its happiness, the knowledge that each immoral act and habit tends to undermine a state of society which it is our supreme interest to support and develop. ”

“ It is not surprising, then, that thousands in every land are quietly abandoning all hope of finding peace and permanence in any religious establishment, and are devoting themselves to more solid and tangible work in moral and social science—the sciences that deal with those aspects of human life which do unquestionably demand our regulation. ”

“ Philosophical criticism, armed as it now is with the thoughts of the great minds of every age and every clime, has thrown so powerful a light on the weakness of the traditional philosophy, which must necessarily form the basis of any structure of faith, that able men are found to spend all their time in making an irrational theology acceptable—in making morals or sentiment, tradition or authority, a plausible approach to an act of faith. ”

“ The growth of Christianity has formed the study of some of our ablest and deepest historians, and their suggestions, founded upon an accurate and extensive knowledge of their science, throw sufficient light upon the phenomenon to prevent us from indulging in the hypothesis of a supernatural influence. Unfortunately, here again eagerness to retain traditional ideas, and the mere spirit of controversy, stand in the way of a calm and judicious discussion of the question. ”

“ From the earliest ages thinkers have devoted themselves to the task of providing a rational basis for that belief in a Supreme Being which, in more or less attenuated form, history shows to be co-extensive in time and space with human intelligence. The majority of men, little addicted to introspection, can give no reason, or only mutter a few superficial and crudely assimilated phrases, when asked for the motive of this, their fundamental belief. ”

“ Catholic philosophers are indeed abandoning it as a distinct proof, but preachers (who are rarely thinkers) still linger affectionately over the venerable argument, and poets and novelists with a taste for apologetics are ever putting our materialism to shame by their appeals to the glorious procession of worlds across the darkened stage of the heavens, to the thrilling panorama of earthly scenery, to the monuments of constructive wisdom in the organic worlds. ”

“ The “must” is a psychological phenomenon, and nothing more—a mental impulse or craving is construed into an objective necessity. So it is in the philosophical elaboration of the same thought: self-existence, or necessary existence, and contingency is an antithesis of thought transferred illegitimately into attributes of things; the principle of sufficient reason is the expression of a law, or, rather, a strong tendency of thought, which has been projected into the real world in the day-dream of the metaphysician. ”

“ First we find an analysis of conscience, which is purely naturalistic, and which is entirely at variance with the popular tendency to make of conscience an isolated, supernatural gift—an echo of the voice of God in man’s heart; it is described as human reason pronouncing certain actions to be out of harmony with our rational nature, and prejudicial to the welfare of society. Sin or immorality is analyzed in like fashion; an act is forbidden because it is immoral, not immoral because God forbids it ”