Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2)

PART II

BY JOHN M. ROBERTSON

CHAPTER I.
PHILOSOPHY AND SECULARIST PROPAGANDA

It may here be well to give a general view of Bradlaugh's teaching on the great open questions of opinion and action, taking separately the old provinces of religion and politics. When he came most prominently before his countrymen he had a very definite repute on both heads, having spoken on them in nearly every town of any size in the country; but neither then nor later could it be said that anything like the majority of the public had a just or accurate idea of his position. The obstacle was and is partly prejudice, partly incapacity.

§ 1

To begin with, even the distinct title of "Atheist" may mean any number of things for any number of persons. Ill-informed and even some well-informed people commonly describe an Atheist as one who says "There is no God," and that "Things happen by chance." To say to such persons – as has been said a thousand times – that for an Atheist both phrases are meaningless, seems to give no help: we must begin at the beginning, and show how the dispute arose. And it is useful to keep in view that Bradlaugh's Atheism, in the evolution of English Freethought, is only a generation removed from the Deism of Thomas Paine, which is much the same as the Deism of Voltaire. Deism or Theism is to-day reckoned a quite "religious" frame of mind; but it was the frame of mind of men who in their day were hated and vilified by Christians as much as Bradlaugh in his. Explicit Atheism is only in our own day become at all a common opinion. The men so described in former ages, so far as we know (if we set aside the remarkable developments of the Italian Renaissance), have nearly always been Deists or Pantheists, of whom the latter of course tend logically to coalesce with Atheism, but who have in their own names alike professed to repudiate Atheism. Thus Hobbes and Spinoza, who last century were constantly called Atheists by Christians, always professed to have a God-idea; and the Freethinkers who showed head in England in the first half of the eighteenth century were all professing Deists. Systematic Atheism began to arise among the more penetrating or more trained thinkers of the latter half of the century. Thus Hume, after professing Deism throughout his life, left for posthumous publication his "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," which amount to the surrender of all forms of Theism. Of Voltaire in his latter years, when he strongly attacked the Atheism of Holbach, it was said by the more high-flying talkers of the Paris drawing-rooms: "Why, he is a bigot; he is a Deist." But even Voltaire, as Mr Morley has shown, was somewhat less of a Deist after the earthquake of Lisbon; and "Candide" is not a good Theistic tract.⁷⁰ Diderot, again, reached explicit Atheism; and his friend Holbach wrote, in the "Système de la Nature," the first systematic and straightforward Atheistic treatise of modern times.⁷¹ In England the movement was less rapid. Bolingbroke went pretty far towards a Lucretian or Agnostic Theism; and the upper-class Deism which on his lines held out against the opportunist orthodoxy of Butler, necessarily tended to make its Deity a very remote and inaccessible Power. But Freethought, to get any hold on the general mind in the thickening populations of the latter half of last century and the first half of this, had to begin again, and more effectively, on the lines of the first Deists. The incredibility of the sacred books had to be made clear before more abstract issues could be settled. In this task Voltaire, the pupil of the English Deists, was the great performer for all Europe. It was Paine however who first, in the turmoil of the Revolution, brought home to thousands of English artizans and other plain men the incredibility of what had so long passed as divinely-revealed truth. He could do this the better because of the power and fame of his work in politics, and because of his constant profession of a devout belief in a beneficent God, on whom he declared the Bible narratives to be a libel. It probably needed this element of popular religion to keep up any continuous current of popular Free-thinking in England throughout the great reaction which followed on the French Revolution. But the argument of Butler held good against Paine as against the earlier Deists. If the Bible stories were irreconcilable with the idea of a "good," omnipotent God, equally so are the operations of Nature. And though there are many people who can be led by that argument to believe or make-believe in the Bible (though it makes no more for the Bible than for the Koran), there were others who felt bound to take the logical alternative, and decide that the "good God" of popular half-faith is a dream.

Such progress is a question of time. Atheism in a psychological sense began with the beginning of physical science. Pure Theism, in its early form of polytheism, saw in all natural movements and forces the expression of a personal power or powers, analogous to man; and its gods were and are simply magnified projections of humanity. Thus the sun, moon, and planets, the winds, the thunder, the lightning, the rivers, the fountains, the seas, were all figured as ruled and moved by personal deities. As soon, however, as astronomy made certain the perfectly regular movements of the sun and stars, Theism was to that extent logically limited, and Atheism to that extent logically possible. Astronomy was strictly godless in so far as it showed the universe to move by undeviating law. Of course this perception is but a small part of human consciousness and daily life; and the habit of theising, so to speak, easily overrode the habit of atheising. But every advance in exact knowledge of Nature, and in the capacity for exact thought, tended to encourage the atheistic view, and to discredit the theistic. Hence the spread of Atheism and Agnosticism among the Greeks in their progressive and scientific period. It needed the constant reform and modification of theistic doctrine, and later the complete arrest of all scientific thought, to keep the theistic view of things in power and place. And there had to be a revival of science and exact thinking before there could again be talk of Atheism.

It follows, however, that all early Atheism, so-called, was only the rejection of theistic ideas from some part of the business of life. The Christians were "Atheists" for the Pagan multitude, because they rejected the only God-ideas which the Pagan multitude harboured. In the same way the Christians who later scouted the worship of images of God (as Persians and Jews had done long before) were Atheists for those Christians who could only conceive of an imaged God. Prejudice has its own logic. When again medical men rested more and more on inductive method and rational (even if mistaken) procedure, and less and less on sorcery and invocation, they were naturally called Atheists, because they excluded "God" from an important and perilous province of action. Logically, the more a man is a Theist, the more of "God's" intervention he sees in life. No man is a Theist in all things; but in the ages of ignorance men were theistic in most matters. The kingdom of God, in a practical sense, is a sphere in which man is confessedly ignorant or impotent. "God's will" is the name for the forces which man cannot control, and does not understand. It covers a storm, a pestilence, a good or bad harvest, a stroke of luck, but not an indigestion, or the breaking of coal when struck by a hammer. Thus it is that every new advance of science, every new explanation of a body of facts in terms of law and innate tendency, is at first denounced as Atheistic. After the physicians came the physicists. The great Kepler, in keeping with his idealistic method, was so steeped in Theism as to fancy that the planets were kept up to time by guiding angels. Newton, however, was flatly accused of Atheism for explaining the universe in terms of the law of gravitation. He had driven God out of the world, it was said; and so far as his physics went, it was true. Yet he himself was an ardent Theist; and he even sought to make good his Theism by the theory that "matter" was first without gravitation, and that God added the attribute. With or without this safeguard, however, Newton's generalisation was sufficiently abstract to leave popular religion intact; and practical Theism even assimilated and gained by his science. It was not till geologists began to explain the formation of the earth in terms of law and tendency that the great shock came. God had hitherto been generally conceived as shaping the earth, were it only because there was no other explanation at hand; and, above all, geology clashed with Genesis. Hence a much more serious resistance, and a much more general imputation of Atheism; though the first geologists were mostly Deists, and believers in the special creation of animal life. The next and the most serious shock was that given by Darwinism, which removed "the divine idea" from biology. Over this came the loudest outcry of all; and the odium would have been overwhelming were it not for the number of naturalists who took up the new doctrine as a matter of special science. "God" is now for scientific people practically removed from the sphere of all the "natural" sciences; and the results attained in this connection by educated people are slowly being attained by the ill-educated; the mass of the clergy having gradually assimilated the conclusions of biology as their predecessors did those of geology and physics.

The inevitable next step is the reduction to scientific order of the lore of human affairs. This step was taken in a large part by Buckle, somewhat out of the due order of time, just before Darwin issued the "Origin of Species;" and Buckle has had on the whole more of religious enmity than even Darwin, though, significantly enough, he expressly insisted on Theism while Darwin kept it vaguely in the background. Buckle's Theism so plainly leaves his Deity nothing to do in human affairs that his belief, however fervid, could avail nothing to propitiate the class whose function is to explain history in terms of divine interference. Buckle, a professed Theist, is for all practical purposes in the position of an Atheist, save in respect of his personal and emotional belief in a future state. A God who in no way comes in contact with men, for good or for ill, is too thin a conception to count for much.

Atheism, then, is only a development of a process of thought that began ages ago under Polytheism. It has been reached in the past by isolated thinkers; there seem to have been Atheists at the time of composition of parts of the Vedas; and each one of the great steps of scientific generalisation has been anticipated by men who were not able to bring the idea home to their own age. It is the giving the step its name that creates the greatest shock. And when a reformer does not even wait to have his position named for him, does not merely undermine Theism by a new scientific treatment of a province of fact, but goes to the logical root of the matter and declares that the latest Theism is at bottom no more true than the oldest, though stripped of certain crudities – then it is that the maximum of odium is evoked. The Atheist, in reality, does but carry negation a step further than does the Theist himself. As Bradlaugh used to point out, the modern Theist denies the existence of any type of "God" save his own. Whatever he may see fit to argue about the folly of denying the possibilities of the unknown, he is quite confident that there is in the universe no Being even remotely resembling the fabled Zeus, or Moloch, or Osiris, or Venus, or Huitzlipochtli. He is sure that these are only imaginary existences. Similarly, he begins in these days to be sure that the conception of Jahweh is as purely a dream as that of Bacchus – the mere projection of man's own image (however magnified or even idealised) on the background of nescience. Nay, the latter-day Theist begins to repudiate the conceptions of the "Deists" of last century: he will have no "Great Artificer," no "Overruling Providence." The latest treatises expressly reject the arguments of the earlier for proving the "existence of God." Thus the Theist himself "denies the existence" of a thousand Gods.⁷² The Atheist, as Mr Bradlaugh put it, merely denies a thousand and one.⁷³ He argues that the most advanced Theism (as distinguished from mere Pantheism) is only a modified form of the oldest; merely a civilised fancy instead of an uncivilised; it is always a male person in the image of man, with passions, emotions, limitations, qualities; loving, hating, planning, punishing, rewarding; always the "magnified non-natural man" of the primeval worshipper: a conception flatly and absurdly opposed to the first philosophic requirements of the very doctrine which embodies it. The God of Theism must always be the analogue of the Theist. Hume, passing out of Theism, concluded that the "Power" of the universe could only have a faint and remote analogy to human personality. Further reasoning forces the conclusion that it can have no conceivable analogy.

This very conclusion has actually been reached by many professed Theists and professed Christians. Professor Max Müller has collected instances in his lectures on "Anthropological Religion." But those thinkers, like Dr Müller himself, have always in practice relapsed into the personal conception which they philosophically affect to repudiate. As Dr Müller puts it, the abstract Theism which allows to Deity no human attributes whatever is too "cold" for popularity; and Dr Müller is not ashamed, after smoothing the way with a trivial fallacy, to recur to the doctrine and terminology of the multitude, giving the Deity male sex because "we" cannot think of "Him" otherwise than as male. The Atheist simply stands honestly to the conclusions which such Theists have avowedly come to and then feebly let go.

This is so obvious to steady-minded people that in all philosophic ages there have been some who, shunning the name rather than the reality of Atheism, have formulated the doctrine and name of Pantheism. Between logical Pantheism and Atheism, however, it cannot be too strongly affirmed, there is no difference save in name. An Atheist believes in a "going" and infinite universe, the totality of which he cannot pretend to understand; and which he flatly refuses to pretend to explain by the primitive hypothesis of a personal "Spirit." He calls the universe "infinite" by way of avowing that he cannot conceive of its coming to an end, in extension or in duration. This recognition of endlessness represents for him the limit of thought: and he declines to proceed to give further attributes to that, the very naming of which leads him to the verge of the capacities of rational speech. He declines to give to the going universe the name of "God," because that name has always been associated by nearly all men with the primitive conception of a Personal Being, and it is a mere verbal stratagem to make it identical with Universe. So irresistible is the effect of the immemorial association of the name that it serves to carry nearly every professing Pantheist back chronically into mere Theism and Deism, even if he so formulates his Pantheism to begin with as to make it answer to the name. A logically consistent Pantheist, using the name, would be hard to find. Hence the necessity, on all grounds, of repudiating Pantheism as distinctly as Theism. The only consistent course is to use the privative "a," and stand to the term which means "without Theos, without God-idea."

§ 2

This preamble, it is to be hoped, may make it easier to appreciate the technicalities of Bradlaugh's doctrine. He was not the untrained Atheist of the theistic imagination, who may be confounded with a quotation from Kant by one of the personages of Mrs Ward's religious vaudevilles. He knew that Kant, reduced to plain language, gives the whole answer to Kant. Beginning as a boy to defend his Theism in debate, he saw it demolished by one of those born debaters who are found every now and then among the working class, men far superior in native power and intellectual sincerity to those cultured acceptors of other men obscurities who look down on them.⁷⁴ But he did not trust to "mother-wit," his own or another's. He read all the philosophic literature he could lay hands on; in particular he became a close student of Spinoza. A clergyman of my acquaintance maintains that to the end he was a Spinozist. It would be less misleading to say that he employed much of the method of Spinoza to establish the Atheism to which Spinoza's doctrine practically leads,⁷⁵ while always scrupulously recognising that Spinoza formulated Pantheism and professed only to modify the God-idea. Here are Bradlaugh's own words: —

"The logic of Spinoza was directed to the demonstration of one substance with infinite attributes, for which one substance with infinite attributes he had as equivalent the name of 'God.' Some who have since followed Spinoza, have agreed in his one substance, but have denied the possibility of infinite attributes. Attributes or qualities, they urge, are attributes of the finite or conditioned, and you cannot have attributes of substance except as attributes of its modes. You have in this distinction the division line between Spinozism and Atheism. Spinoza recognises infinite intelligence; but Atheism cannot conceive intelligence except in relation, as quality of the conditioned, and not as the essence of the absolute. Spinoza, however, denied the doctrine of freewill, as with him all phenomena are of God; so he rejects the ordinary notions of good and evil."⁷⁶

The position here taken up is frequently met by an outcry against the "denial of intelligence" to the highest power in the universe. The protest is pure irrelevance. Atheism "denies intelligence" to an infinite existence simply as it denies it whiskers and dyspepsia. The point is that intelligence cannot be conceived save as a finite attribute; every process of intelligence implying limitation and ignorance.⁷⁷ Infinitude must transcend the state of "intelligence." The "intelligence" of "omniscience" is a chimæra. And when the Atheist is accused of making himself the highest thing in the universe, the plain answer is that it is precisely the Theist, and nobody else, who does so. That is to say, the Theist makes his own mind and personality the type and analogue of an Infinite and Eternal Power. The Atheist admits that he can form no conception whatever of Infinite and Eternal Power. The Theist rushes in where the Atheist declines to tread. And nothing is more remarkable in the modern history of religion than the retreat of all theistic argument to some form of the sub-rational position so laboriously formulated by Kant – that the God-idea is established, not by any form of reasonable inference from knowledge, but by the moral needs and constitution of human nature. That doctrine is not only the formal bankruptcy of all philosophy, logical and psychological, but is the stultification of every religious system which adopts it, inasmuch as it is equally valid for each against all the rest, besides being finally annihilated by the simple fact of persistent scientific Atheism, which proves that human nature does not need the sustenance of a God-idea, whether in ethics, in politics, or in natural science. The only resource of neo-Kantism against the Atheist is the argumentum ad hominem of imputing to him "atrophy" of the "spiritual" sense; an argument which – not to employ a simple tu quoque– may be sufficiently met either by the answer that the "spiritual sense" which maintains Theism is merely the carnal and self-excited appetite for mental opium, and that the Hindu and the devout Catholic have it in a much higher degree than the mere Theist; or by the reminder that even if there were special intellectual defect behind Atheism, it is, on the Theistic hypothesis, a defect foreordained by Theos, and is as much part of human nature as the docility of the Theist.

All the psychological line of argument, as put by Kant and his adaptors, is fully and patiently met by Bradlaugh in his section of the "Freethinker's Text-Book," which deals in turn with all the main pleas of orthodoxy. At the close of the examination of Kant he writes, with great caution and moderation: —

"We do not feel sure that we have either fairly stated Kant's position or efficiently replied to as much as we have stated. In condensing within the limits of this Text-Book the views of a writer so involved in his expressions as is Immanuel Kant, we may have failed both in exposition and answer, but have the consolation that we at any rate place before our readers the sources of completer knowledge."

But the modest deprecation was unnecessary, the main theses of Kant having really been sufficiently stated and met; and the Text-Book goes on to cite and answer the arguments of an able neo-Kantian Theist, who had confessedly found Kant unsatisfying, but who offered in his turn only the vague emotional plea as against Kant's moral plea, backing it up with the old paralogism of the "spiritual sense." That is the best that modern Theism can say for itself; and the argument will never convince anybody who had needed convincing.⁷⁸ It is further repudiated by the orthodox Theism which claims to stand on revelation, and which in turn is dismissed as ill-founded by more philosophic Theism.

The orthodox Theism is in this country represented by Professor Flint, who when challenged by Bradlaugh to defend his position philosophically, took the line of answering that, "for a person possessed of a typically English intellect, Mr Bradlaugh shows, in dealing with Theism, a curious predilection for metaphysical conundrums,"⁷⁹ and proceeded to meet the said "conundrums" in the spirit of a joker dealing with a joke. The argument, "Unless it be nonsense to affirm infinity and Mr Bradlaugh added to it, why should it be nonsense to affirm infinity and the universe added to it?" is a sample of the reasoning with which Dr Flint satisfies the pious, in answer to the Atheistic doctrine that human beings are only forms of the infinite existence. Another of the Professor's expedients is to say that God has reason but does not reason. "No intelligent man thinks or speaks of God as reasoning;" which is a severe attack, from a Scotch Professor of Divinity, on the author of Isaiah i. 18. But more than passing notice is here due to one of the Professor's remarks⁸⁰: —

"There is an impression in some quarters that Atheism is advocated in a weak and unskilful manner by the chiefs of Secularism. It is an impression which I do not share. Most of the writers who are striving to diffuse Atheism in literary circles are not to be compared in intellectual strength with either Mr Holyoake or Mr Bradlaugh."

Such a testimony, from such a source, counts for rather more than the arguments emanating thence.

As to the assertion, again, that Atheists say "there is no God" – an assertion made with surprising frequency by professed Agnostics – it was constantly met by Bradlaugh with the answer that the phrase has no meaning.

"The initial difficulty is in defining the word 'God.' It is equally impossible to intelligently affirm or deny any proposition unless there is at least an understanding, on the part of the affirmer or denier, of the meaning of every word used in the proposition. To me the word 'God' standing alone is a word without meaning."⁸¹

It would have been more exact to say that it has too many meanings to stand for any one in particular. Once defined, the alleged existence can be rationally denied, as may the existence of a race of centaurs, half men half horses, or of dragons who breathe fire, or of a being answering to the description of Neptune, driving a chariot on the sea, or of Apollo, driving the sun. All definitions of God which affirm personality or human attributes are open to immediate stultification by argument. "I have never yet heard," wrote Bradlaugh, "a definition of God from any living man, nor have I read a definition by dead or living man, that was not self-contradictory… But the moment you tell me you mean the God of the Bible, or the God of the Koran, or the God of any particular Church, I am prepared to tell you that I deny that God."⁸² The person who says we have no right to deny the existence of his imagined God until we have been all through the universe, has on his own showing no right to deny the existence of such Gods as are described in the stories of Saturn and Thor. The most paralytic Agnosticism, however, like the most devout Theism, seems content to be as sure that these are imaginary existences, as that Julius Cæesar was never in America.

The relation of Atheism to Agnosticism is thus wholly misconceived by most people who differentiate them. That is to say, the logical form of Agnosticism – by which is not meant the self-styled Agnosticism which resorts to the use of the name "God" – comes to the same thing as Atheism, since it argues that the current God-idea is a mere reflex of humanity, like those which preceded it. Bradlaugh sometimes grew impatient (and small wonder) with people who wrote to him to point out that Atheism was wrong, and Agnosticism right. They never took the trouble to try to understand what he meant by Atheism; and it must with regret be said that more competent Agnostics often make the same omission. The simple-minded Agnostic who candidly remarks, "I do not say there is no God, but I haven't seen any evidence for one," is kept in countenance by the more learned Agnosticism which excludes from its learning the literature of modern Atheism. Bradlaugh had seen the new name readily adopted by men who not only shunned the old but helped to heap on it an ignorant odium. He had seen Atheism strangely misrepresented by Mr Spencer in "First Principles;"⁸³ he pointed out that a mere avowal of ignorance is not worth making, and that Agnosticism is not a philosophy at all, unless it says, not merely, "I do not know of the thing you assert," but "you do not know either" – which are just the statements of Atheism. He might have added that while "Atheist," though a term much abused by Theists, is a good word, and a real doctrine-name, "Agnostic" is a bad word, and in itself no doctrine-name at all, since it says "Don't know," without hinting what it is that is not known. The present writer has heard a Christian Evidence lecturer, a Master of Arts, delight a Christian audience by saying that the nearest English equivalent to "Agnostic" is "Ignoramus." His strategy was characteristic of his cause, but he was dialectically within his rights.

The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant calumny that it is expedient to use a new term which, though in some respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time have a recognised meaning. The case, so stated, is reasonable; but there is the per contra that, whatever the motive with which the name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheist escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from half-hearted and half-minded patronage.

§ 3

Another obstinate misunderstanding arises over the word "Materialism." Bradlaugh did not willingly or often resort to that name. He seems to have preferred the more philosophic term "Monist," or the useful word "Naturist," which latter, however, he did not seek to force into common use.⁸⁴ But he was of course a "Materialist" in the sense in which alone the word is used by those who so name themselves – a sense sufficiently different from those put upon it by most of the writers who assail them, rationalists and supernaturalists alike. The former assailants, of course, do the more harm. Philosophy has in England suffered peculiarly from the tendency of professed thinkers to dissociate themselves anxiously from certain doctrine-names that are ill spoken of, and to join in the vulgar outcry against them, rather than try judicially to estimate their significance and value. Of such bourgeois prudence we have examples in some of our leading modern philosophers. And there is the other trouble that some men with great powers of a certain sort lack the capacity to see or grasp all the parts of a broad problem at once or in relation, and must needs cramply lift and handle only one at a time. Rationalists of this kind do immense harm to the cause of rationalism, as pietists of the same stamp do to the cause of their creed, by elevating a small or verbal difference into a sectarian issue, and representing other rationalists as opposed to them when there is no fundamental difference in the case. When this want of sense of proportion in an able man goes with intellectual vacillation or discontinuity, it works the maximum of frustration. We have a prominent instance in Professor Huxley, who has given countenance to contradictory conclusions on half-a-dozen main questions. He has gratuitously encouraged the enforced use of the Bible in public schools, and he has wearied Freethinkers by tediously strategic combats on worn-out topics with those who hold the very beliefs that the Bible sets up in minds which reverence it. On the question of Materialism he has reinforced reaction by contemptuous language towards men whose teaching is identical with his own so far as that is sound; and on the other hand he has obstructed the spread of logical Materialism by stating crudely and without verbal circumspection a strictly materialistic doctrine.⁸⁵ What is worse, he has written on Materialism as did Lewes – without treating the term historically; and he has at times condemned Materialists in general without specifying any one man's teaching in detail. Another writer in the same category, of whom better things might be expected, is Professor Karl Pearson. That gentleman, after the fashion of Professor Huxley, has at one time pooh-poohed the criticism of theology as an attack on a ruin, and at another has furiously cannonaded the bones of a dead theologian. And recently he has gone out of his way, in his "Grammar of Science" so-called, to asperse Materialism, while teaching practically nothing else of a positive nature. Mr Pearson's account of the Materialism of Büchner and Bradlaugh, superciliously given in a footnote, is in the circumstances the worst misrepresentation of the matter now before the public. He speaks of "the Materialist" and "modern Materialists" as substituting force for the will or spirit of the Spiritists as a "cause" of motion, and goes on to confuse the already much-confused question of "necessity" by playing the bull in that philosophic china-shop.