THE GOSPEL OF " FREETHOUGHT."
PROFESSOR KARL PEARSON has provided not exactly very fruitful, still less very cheerful reading for Christmas, in his "Positive Creed of Freethought, with Some Remarks on the Relation of Freethought to Socialism," which he delivered as a lecture at South Place Institute a few months ago, and has now published as a pamphlet.* Still, to the present writer at least, it is instructive reading, being evidently the production of a keen and energetic mind which (for the present at least) manages to exult in the most arid and, as it seems to him, the most absurd of creeds. Why he regards it as especially the creed of Freethought, we cannot very well make out. Freethought, he says, "rejects super- stition and obscurity of all kinds." We should have called that thought " true " rather than " free " which rejects super- stition of all kinds, and neither specially true nor specially " free " which rejects obscurity of all kinds. The only free- dom to which thought can lay claim, so far as we can judge, is the free resolve not to make free with facts, but to reflect reality as adequately as it is possible to reflect it. But the freedom there, is in the resolve which governs the intellect, not in the intellect itself. The great merit of the intellect is Pablinhed by William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street.
to be true, not free, just as the great merit of a mirror is to reflect accurately, and not to distort the real world of which it presents an image; or, rather, as the great merit of the eye is to see accurately, and not what the imagination prefers that it should see. The very name " Freethought " has a capricious flavour about it, a flavour of self-will. No true man wants his thought to be released from the yoke of fact, and yet that is what the idea of freedom as applied to thought suggests. We do not for a moment accuse Professor Karl Pearson of meaning to give this significance to the word, for he rejects it as strenuously as we do. But he has no busi- ness with so misleading a term at all. Freethought is an ambitious and delusive term which, so far as it suggests any- thing, suggests a Will-of-the-Wisp, instead of a mind zealous to see what is, and to refrain from seeing what is not.
Professor Karl Pearson makes an effort in this lecture to sketch a portion of "the positive creed of Freethonght " which he thinks likely to prove fruitful of guidance to those who share his absolute denials of all superhuman teaching. Sometimes his hearers must have felt very despondent as to the existence of any such body of fruitful teaching,—for instance, when they heard the Professor explain with commend- able candour how little there is on which they can rely for the guidance of their conduct in life :—" The Freethinker must relentlessly sacrifice one and all of these old tribal pre- judgments, useful enough while ignorance justified men in strengthening moral law by a supersensuous action. Yet to throw off these last comforting bits of self-delusion, is, perhaps, the hardest sacrifice of all. And then being cast away what is left ? A few disconnected laws of physical and human de- velopment, and a complete negation of the tribal faith of centuries. Yet the Freethinker to be reborn, to see man in his true light, must cut away all the old delusions, must start from the disconnected laws and the half-solved problems of modern research and thereon build up his positive creed." That does not sound very encouraging. And yet Professor Pearson claims that the true freethinker, with this meagre apparatus upon which to raise his creed, "has reached a depth of happiness and a richness of activity which the holder of no other creed can approach." We should ourselves have sup- posed that the first duty of a freethinker, in Professor Pear- son's sense of the term, would be to guard himself against the assumption that there is any necessary happiness at all in holding the truth, and still less any necessary access of energy. It is intelligible enough why a believer in God should think that to reach the truth,—to be inspired by God with any portion of his higher light and purposes,—must involve both fresh happiness and fresh energy ; for to share in however small a degree the creative knowledge and the creative power, is an assurance of constant advance in knowledge and power. But if the human intelligence be, as Professor Karl Pearson holds, the highest in our world, why need it necessarily be anything but misery to know the fact ? And why should it involve anything but a stroke of paralysis to human energy to realise the desolation of man's position here, placed as he is among a crowd of physical forces to which he possesses hardly any available key, and no key at all which enables him to feel secure either of his own future or of the future of his race ? Is it not borrowing an assumption, and a tremendous assumption, from the opposite camp, the camp of faith, to take for granted that knowledge must deepen happiness and stimulate activity ? For our own parts, if we held with Professor Pearson, we should say that knowledge is quite as likely to promote misery as happiness, and certain to paralyse rather than to stimulate energy. We cannot in the least understand why the freethinker, as Professor Pearson calls the rejector of all belief in superhuman guidance, should be encouraged, as Professor Pearson encourages him, to be fearless,"—fearlessness being of all qualities in the world the very last which we should think legitimate in a creature who has to grope his way without guidance through such a forest of bewildering phenomena as that in which we live. And yet Professor Pearson discards the word and thought "agnostic," and wishes the freethinker to found his whole life and action on the little he can know. "Good as it is," he says, "to bear in mind the magnitude of our ignorance, it is still better to accentuate our knowledge. The Agnostic may accept the motto of Du Bois-Reymond, Ignorabimus,—We shall be ignorant —always ; but the freethinker cries with Haeckel, Impavidi progrediamur,—Let 'US advance fearlessly,—some day we may know." Doubtless, even on Professor Pear- son's assumptions, some day we may know, or may not know ; that is as it may be. But is this a good reason for advancing fearlessly at the time when we do not know ? We should say that there could be no better reason for advancing fearfully rather than fearlessly. To say, We are ignorant whether we are going straight to the edge of a precipice or not; therefore let us advance fearlessly,—some day we shall know,' is surely language almost as foolish as human lips could utter. If we only come to know when we are well on our way to the bottom of the precipice,—which is as soon as we can expect to know if we advance fearlessly,— we shall, if we have time for it, regret having adopted so absurd a motto as Impavidi pro grediamur when we had no knowledge of the precipice in our path, and no knowledge that it was not in our path. The soldier who has faith in his General, and knows that that General has well explored before- hand the path of his advance, may advance fearlessly ; but the man who has neither explored his own way, nor obeys any commander who has explored it for him, is a very great goose if he does not advance with the fear in his heart that he may at any moment come upon a chasm of which he has had no notice. The distinguishing characteristic of "freethinkers," in Professor Karl Pearson's sense of that most absurd term, ought, we think, to be timidity rather than fearlessness. Freethonght, even if it adds to the depth of human happiness,—and we see no reason at all why it should, and much why it should not,—ought assuredly to check, and check very sharply, instead of to stimulate, that human activity the richness of which Professor Karl Pearson expects it to increase. In our view, the freethinker should be the first to admit that Free- thought may very possibly indeed diminish the happiness of man, and that an illusion might increase it ; and next, that whether it diminishes that happiness or not, it must certainly diminish, and diminish enormously, the energy which faith, and faith alone, can justify.
But let us come to the minute modicum of gospel the publication of which was, we imagine, Professor Pearson's real object in delivering and printing this lecture. Freethinkers, according to Professor Karl Pearson, have been more or less disconcerted by the assertion that the Darwinian law of the selection of species under the stern necessity of going through a conflict for existence, is of aristocratic rather than demo- cratic tendency, that it implies a waste of average men in order to brighten the genius and sharpen the wits of the few who rise either politically, or socially, or professionally to the top of the human organisation. We suppose that if " freethinkers " could see no escape from this conclusion, they would accept it, and become adherents of some sort of aristocratic theory. But Professor Pearson is evidently shocked by such a doctrine, and though he will not avail him- self of any obsolete religious belief, as he thinks it, to counteract this aristocratic tendency of the law of evolution, he endeavours to find a way out of the difficulty consistently with those negations to which he gives the ambitious name of Free- thought. The way is this. Individual selection is not the only consequence of Darwinianism. The same law requires the selection of strong societies by the conflict between societies or States for existence, and in order to get strong societies, you must not only have regard to the selection of the highest individual ability and energy, but to the selection of the highest collective ability and energy in the State as a whole ; and you cannot produce strong States without thinking more of the character and energy of the average citizen than even of the character and energy of the leaders themselves. If you thought only of producing the highest kind of leaders, you would be like a cattle-breeder who thought only of his show cattle, and not of raising the level of his whole stock. Hence, says Professor Pearson, the apparently aristocratic tendency of Darwinian selection is neutralised by the conflict for existence amongst Peoples and States. Those turn out to be the strongest peoples and the strongest States in which there is the most successful selection of the highest average type of character, even though the highest point touched by the leaders of such a people be comparatively low.
Well, if we are to grant Professor Pearson this democratic doctrine of his, we fear that it will be fatal to his arrogant negations as a freethinker, for undoubtedly the highest average character has been produced, and has only been pro- duced, by powerful and diffused spiritual convictions. It is
o le of the curiosities of Freethought, that while it parades its delight in the Darwinian explanation of the development of human character, because that explanation seems to free- thinkers to supersede divine purpose, its proudest claim should be to assert the right to repudiate the guidance of these selected "tribal" instincts, as they are contemptuously called, at the suggestion of any negative thinker who can make out plausible reasons for distrusting the authority of such instincts. This little pamphlet is full of exhortations to throw off absolutely all such tribal prepossessions and prejudices, and yet it accepts Darwin's explanation of the triumphs of man by virtue of the plastic power of tribal instincts to form a, character equal to great feats of fortitude, perseverance, courage, and constancy. Now, is it reasonable to suppose that tendencies which have been, on the received doctrine, a hundred generations or more in maturing, either can be thrown off or ought to be thrown off, on the negative evidence of a generation or so of self- styled freethinkers P The man who believes that God himself is guiding his reason to relax or remodel the old inherited instincts by which his forefathers were made what they were, may reasonably trust himself to that guidance, and become a bold reformer. But the man who believes that the only true creative power is to be found embodied in the organised in- stincts of generations, will trust those instincts and distrust the reasoning by which those instincts are discredited. Sceptics must take their choice between preaching up the doctrine of selection by the conflict for existence, and preaching up the doctrine of the sacredness of Freethought. They must not preach up both in the same breath, for they are quite in- compatible. Professor Pearson wants us to throw off all those "tribal superstitions" which centuries of religious screed and training have implanted ; and yet he wants us to have confidence that the law of natural selection by the conflict for existence of Peoples and of States must develop the best form of popular or average character. That is asking us both to trust and to distrust the same tendency in the same breath. For this law of natural selection has certainly given the palm to nations with a strong national faith in God ;—and this Mr. Karl Pearson thinks a gross superstition. Which are we to trust,—Nature speaking the accumulated experience of centuries, or Mr. Karl Pearson speaking the " freethought " of a single life P It seems almost ridiculous to ask the question. Whether the law of natural selection be aristocratic or democratic, one thing is certain,— that it is not revolutionary because it is evolutionary. Believers in living divine inspiration may be, and may consistently be, eager reformers. But believers in no creative power more active and conscious than the slow teaching of ages of accumulated experience, must be cautious and conservative in the highest degree, if they would command any respect at all. But we do not suppose that Professor Karl Pearson will succeed in commanding for his strange and energetic teaching, any respect worthy of the name.
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