Part 1 (2/2)

To believe in something besides nature--is Theism.

To believe in the consciousness of nature--is Pantheism.

The explanation of Affirmative Atheism* here given, involves many considerations which I am not going to discuss. It is not my province here to defend, but to state the case. A definition is a map, but it is not the journey. A definition is a high road through a subject, and a high road should be a straight road: it may run out of the way of some populous towns and beautiful scenes, but it gives the means of quickest transit through a territory, from which the country can be viewed, and the traveller determine its general features.

* This might stand for a definition of Cosmism, which term I employ at substantially reciprocal with Affirmative Atheism, and as its subst.i.tute, if I may employ it in its modern and wider sense than defined by Pythagoras.

If we have said enough for this purpose, we may attempt to trace the limits of our subject. The road through every high question lies over precipices. Every great question has its Mont Blancs. The higher you climb the deeper the chasms on the right hand and on the left. The Roman Catholic makes wors.h.i.+p an art, and abject submission a duty. To relieve you of anxiety he deprives the mind of initiation and freedom. The Protestant concedes you private judgment, and surrounds you by a social despotism lest you should use it. He subst.i.tutes a creed for the Church.

The Church is a cell, and the creed is a cage. The cage is lighter, more airy, and less repulsive than the cell, but the imprisonment is complete in both.

Mere Atheism inculcates freedom and intrepidity of the understanding, but may land you in negation, in dogmatism, in denunciation, in irreverence. These are the chasms that lie in the path of mere Atheism.

The traveller who pa.s.ses into these is lost. To avoid this danger we must keep within the limits naturally prescribed to Affirmative Atheism, which are:--

1. Positivism in Principle.

2. Exactness in Profession of Opinion.

3. Dispa.s.sionateness in Judgment.

4. Humanism in Conception.

1. The Positivist conception of Atheism exhibits the limits which modern thought has impressed upon it. Affirmative Atheism a.s.serts the realism of Nature; Theism denies it. Theism refuses to recognise the self-existence, the self-action, the self-subsistence, eternity, and infinity of the universe. Theism is the negation of Nature. It is a species of impiety towards nature, and supplants, by an artificial superst.i.tion, the instinctive reverence of the human heart.

Modern Atheism is falsely regarded as a mere negation, as a species of criminal vacuity of the understanding. To correct this idea is to win for these opinions attention if not a.s.sent. The negation of any error is useful, but it should be followed by its complement of positive truth.

All mere negative subjects are like the lime and pebbles swallowed by farm fowl to a.s.sist digestion, but it fares ill with the fowl if they get nothing but stones to digest; if no corn or barley follows to be operated upon. Now, questions of Atheism and Scepticism are the digestive stimuli of the mind; positive principles supply the corn and barley which sustain the mental system and preserve its life. If we give ourselves up to negative subjects merely, we come to resemble the theologians who, as Talleyrand said, 'pick a great many bones for very little meat.'

Old Atheism shows that the alleged proofs of the existence of a Deity are inconclusive, untenable, or self-refutatory. As a discipline of the intellect, as a questioning of that theistical speculation which has always been arrogant and tyrannical towards dissentients, there is good in negative Atheism. But it is more important if made to subserve practical objects. Mere negative Atheism has no ulterior objects it untenants the mind, and this may not be in all things beneficial. The slave may be more healthy who is forced to take exercise, and he may have more physical enjoyment of life than the indolent freeman, who is sedentary by choice, and diseased through inactivity and overfeeding.

You may pluck up weeds, and the rank herbage be more fruitful of miasma than the weeds; or if the plucked up weeds produce no harm, the ground may be left useless until crops are made to grow upon it. So of the weeds of wors.h.i.+p which spring up in the priest-ridden mind. Reverence may be cultivated by superst.i.tion, good conduct maybe enforced by terror; if superst.i.tion and terror be exploded, the reverence and good conduct must be cared for and be better directed. Freethought is no half work, it has much to do.

It is delusive to pull down the altar of superst.i.tion and not erect an altar of science in its place. To pack up the household G.o.ds of superst.i.tion and leave the fireside bare, will hardly do.. Affirmative Atheism must teach that nature is the Bible of truth, work is wors.h.i.+p, that duty is dignity, and the unselfish service of others consolation.

There is nothing wholly bad. Superst.i.tion has in it some elements of good. I no more believe in perfect error than in perfect truth. Error, like truth, is hardly ever found pure; error is mixed with good, and truth alloyed by evil. The mind must have something to feed upon, and if it cannot have truth, it will have superst.i.tion; and though superst.i.tion, like some diet, is very hard of digestion, and very innutritious, it is better to feed upon that than die. True, it keeps the mind thin, but it keeps it alive, and it is better to be a skeleton than a corpse. Now it is true that some intellects, like some animals, eat by instinct the right kind of food, but being healthy are not fastidious, and if you give them bad food they don't object to it and don't care for it. If they take it, their digestion is so good that it does not hurt them. But there are other people who pine for the knowledge of nature, and cannot subsist unless a large proportion of their mental aliment consists of definite principle. When these are not supplied by religious teachers, and Christianity by any intolerance prevents it being supplied by others, such natures expire in an intellectual sense, and Christianity ought to be regarded as guilty of wilful murder. And in the case of Atheism, those persons who are accustomed to take superst.i.tion, and are deprived of that, and no attempt is made to supply its place by more wholesome sustenance, are no doubt injured. Negative Atheism guilty of this neglect may be said to be guilty of manslaughter, and it would be murder were the neglect accompanied, as in the case of Theism, by intolerance. Beware of reckless iconoclasticism.

Mere negations give all advantage to superst.i.tion; error seems wisdom and wealth when truth is silent.

2. The logic of Affirmative Atheism begins in self-confession. Not to see anything where there is nothing to be seen is the sign of the true faculty; and not to say that you do see when you do not is the first sign of veracity of intellect.

Man is forgiven who believes more than his neighbours, but he is never forgiven if he believes less. If he believes more than his neighbours, there is the presumption that he may have made some discovery which may become profitable one day to join in. It may be that he who believes most, may merely possess a more industrious credulity, or possess a greater capacity for hasty a.s.sumption. But this is seldom probed. He who believes less may have abandoned some important item of justifiable belief. But when he who believes less than the mult.i.tude, confesses to the fact in the face of public disapproval, the probability is that he has inquired into, and sifted evidence which others have taken for granted, and discovered some error which they have accepted. His greater accuracy of mind and exactness of speech are an offence, because a reproach to the careless or unscrupulous intellects of those who conduct life on secondhand opinions. Yet austerity of intellect and austerity of speech is as wholesome in character, as austerity of morals. I hope, says Mr. Grote, in his great history of Greece, in a memorable pa.s.sage that ought not to die out of recollection, 'I hope, when I come to the lives of Socrates and Plato, to ill.u.s.trate one of the most valuable of their principles, that conscious and confessed ignorance is a better state of mind than the fancy without the reality of knowledge.' And in a pa.s.sage which I cannot now recall, Lord Brougham has said that 'a mind uninformed is better than a mind misinformed.' In a state of ignorance we do nothing, in a state of error we do wrong. The popular condemnation of the Atheist--which we have lately heard as ignorantly echoed in the House of Commons as in some Conventicles--is not always uttered, because the Atheist does not know more than others, for none know anything certain concerning the existence of G.o.d,* but because the Atheist does not profess more.

* In his remarkable work ent.i.tled 'First Principles,' now in course of publication, Mr. Herbert Spencer has shown that certain terms of Cosmism are as incapable of ultimate explanation as certain terms of Theism. This shows how unwise is dogmatism, how unjustifiable is intolerance, on either side.

Cosmism, a thoughtful name, which ought to supersede Atheism in the future, neither denies nor affirms the existence of Deity. It waits for explanation and proof. It admits there is evidence of something, but what that something is, does not appear. There is evidence of more than we know, but what that is we do not know, and it is dishonesty to use a term respecting it, which pretends that we do know. Why should it not be honourable to observe a scientific reservation in the exposition of opinion? In science it is a sign of cultivation to understate a case and keep within the limits of fact and proof. The reservation of Cosmism, which so many regard as an offence, arises from a love of exact truth, from an endeavour to attain to it in expression, and from an honourable unwillingness to employ words which do not represent to him who uses them, definite ideas.

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