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Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures 3e (Gaddis and Muganda)
Chapter 6 A First Look at Classes

6.1 Multiple Choice Questions

1) One or more objects may be created from a(n):

A) field
B) class
C) method
D) instance
Answer: B

2) Class objects normally have ________ that perform useful operations on their data, but primitive
variables do not.
A) fields
B) instances
C) methods
D) relationships
Answer: C

3) In the cookie cutter metaphor, think of the ________ as a cookie cutter and ________ as the cookies.
A) object; classes
B) class; objects
C) class; fields
D) attribute; methods
Answer: B

4) Which of the following are classes from the Java API?

A) Scanner
B) Random
C) PrintWriter
D) All of the above
Answer: D

5) When you are working with a ________, you are using a storage location that holds a piece of data.
A) primitive variable
B) reference variable
C) numeric literal
D) binary number
Answer: A

6) What is stored by a reference variable?

A) A binary encoded decimal
B) A memory address
C) An object
D) A string
Answer: B

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
7) Most programming languages that are in use today are:
A) procedural
B) logic
C) object-oriented
D) functional
Answer: C

8) Java allows you to create objects of this class in the same way you would create primitive variables.
A) Random
B) String
C) PrintWriter
D) Scanner
Answer: B

9) A UML diagram does not contain:

A) the class name
B) the method names
C) the field names
D) object names
Answer: D

10) Data hiding, which means that critical data stored inside the object is protected from code outside the
object, is accomplished in Java by:
A) using the public access specifier on the class methods
B) using the private access specifier on the class methods
C) using the private access specifier on the class definition
D) using the private access specifier on the class fields
Answer: D

11) For the following code, which statement is NOT true?

public class Sphere

{
private double radius;
public double x;
private double y;
private double z;
}
A) x is available to code that is written outside the Circle class.
B) radius is not available to code written outside the Circle class.
C) radius, x, y, and z are called members of the Circle class.
D) z is available to code that is written outside the Circle class.
Answer: D

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
12) You should not define a class field that is dependent upon the values of other class fields:
A) in order to avoid having stale data
B) because it is redundant
C) because it should be defined in another class
D) in order to keep it current
Answer: A

13) What does the following UML diagram entry mean?

+ setHeight(h : double) : void

A) this is a public attribute named Height and is a double data type
B) this is a private method with no parameters and returns a double data type
C) this is a private attribute named Height and is a double data type
D) this is a public method with a parameter of data type double and does not return a value
Answer: D

14) Methods that operate on an object's fields are called:

A) instance variables
B) instance methods
C) public methods
D) private methods
Answer: B

15) The scope of a private instance field is:

A) the instance methods of the same class
B) inside the class, but not inside any method
C) inside the parentheses of a method header
D) the method in which they are defined
Answer: A

16) A constructor:
A) always accepts two arguments
B) has return type of void
C) has the same name as the class
D) always has an access specifier of private
Answer: C

17) Which of the following statements will create a reference, str, to the String, "Hello, World"?
A) String str = "Hello, World";
B) string str = "Hello, World";
C) String str = new "Hello, World";
D) str = "Hello, World";
Answer: A

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
18) Two or more methods in a class may have the same name as long as:
A) they have different return types
B) they have different parameter lists
C) they have different return types, but the same parameter list
D) you cannot have two methods with the same name
Answer: B

19) Given the following code, what will be the value of finalAmount when it is displayed?

public class Order

{
private int orderNum;
private double orderAmount;
private double orderDiscount;

public Order(int orderNumber, double orderAmt,

double orderDisc)
{
orderNum = orderNumber;
orderAmount = orderAmt;
orderDiscount = orderDisc;
}
public int getOrderAmount()
{
return orderAmount;
}
public int getOrderDisc()
{
return orderDisc;
}
}

public class CustomerOrder

{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
int ordNum = 1234;
double ordAmount = 580.00;
double discountPer = .1;
Order order;
double finalAmount = order.getOrderAmount() —
order.getOrderAmount() * order.getOrderDisc();
System.out.printf("Final order amount = $%,.2f\n",
finalAmount);
}
}
A) 528.00
B) 580.00
C) There is no value because the constructor has an error.
D) There is no value because the object order has not been created.
Answer: D

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
20) A class specifies the ________ and ________ that a particular type of object has.
A) relationships; methods
B) fields; object names
C) fields; methods
D) relationships; object names
Answer: C

21) This refers to the combining of data and code into a single object.
A) Data hiding
B) Abstraction
C) Object
D) Encapsulation
Answer: D

22) Another term for an object of a class is:

A) access specifier
B) instance
C) member
D) method
Answer: B

23) In your textbook the general layout of a UML diagram is a box that is divided into three sections. The
top section has the ________; the middle section holds ________; the bottom section holds ________.
A) class name; attributes or fields; methods
B) class name; object name; methods
C) object name; attributes or fields; methods
D) object name; methods; attributes or fields
Answer: A

24) For the following code, which statement is NOT true?

public class Circle

{
private double radius;
public double x;
private double y;
}
A) x is available to code that is written outside the Circle class.
B) radius is not available to code written outside the Circle class.
C) radius, x, and y are called members of the Circle class.
D) y is available to code that is written outside the Circle class.
Answer: D

25) It is common practice in object-oriented programming to make all of a class's:

A) methods private
B) fields private
C) fields public
D) fields and methods public
Answer: B

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
26) After the header, the body of the method appears inside a set of:
A) brackets, []
B) parentheses, ()
C) braces, {}
D) double quotes, ""
Answer: C

27) In UML diagrams, this symbol indicates that a member is private:

A) *
B) #
C) -
D) +
Answer: C

28) In UML diagrams, this symbol indicates that a member is public.

A) /
B) @
C) -
D) +
Answer: D

29) In a UML diagram to indicate the data type of a variable enter:

A) the variable name followed by the data type
B) the variable name followed by a colon and the data type
C) the class name followed by the variable name followed by the data type
D) the data type followed by the variable name
Answer: B

30) When an object is created, the attributes associated with the object are called:
A) instance fields
B) instance methods
C) fixed attributes
D) class instances
Answer: A

31) When an object is passed as an argument to a method, what is passed into the method's parameter
variable?
A) the class name
B) the object's memory address
C) the values for each field
D) the method names
Answer: B

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
32) A constructor is a method that:
A) returns an object of the class.
B) never receives any arguments.
C) with the name ClassName.constructor.
D) performs initialization or setup operations.
Answer: D

33) The scope of a public instance field is:

A) only the class in which it is defined
B) inside the class, but not inside any method
C) inside the parentheses of a method header
D) the instance methods and methods outside the class
Answer: D

34) Which of the following statements will create a reference, str, to the string, "Hello, world"?

(1) String str = new String("Hello, world");

(2) String str = "Hello, world";
A) 1
B) 2
C) 1 and 2
D) neither 1 or 2
Answer: C

35) Overloading means multiple methods in the same class:

A) have the same name, but different return types
B) have different names, but the same parameter list
C) have the same name, but different parameter lists
D) perform the same function
Answer: C

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
36) Given the following code, what will be the value of finalAmount when it is displayed?

public class Order

{
private int orderNum;
private double orderAmount;
private double orderDiscount;

public Order(int orderNumber, double orderAmt,

double orderDisc)
{
orderNum = orderNumber;
orderAmount = orderAmt;
orderDiscount = orderDisc;
}

public double finalOrderTotal()

{
return orderAmount - orderAmount *
orderDiscount;
}
}

public class CustomerOrder

{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Order order;
int orderNumber = 1234;
double orderAmt = 580.00;
double orderDisc = .1;
order = new Order(orderNumber, orderAmt, orderDisc);
double finalAmount = order.finalOrderTotal();
System.out.printf("Final order amount = $%,.2f\n",
finalAmount);
}
}
A) 528.00
B) 580.00
C) 522.00
D) There is no value because the object order has not been created.
Answer: C

37) A class's responsibilities include:

A) the things a class is responsible for doing
B) the things a class is responsible for knowing
C) both A and B
D) neither A nor B
Answer: C

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
38) Instance methods do not have this key word in their headers:
A) public
B) static
C) private
D) protected
Answer: B

39) Which of the following is NOT involved in finding the classes when developing an object-oriented
application?
A) Describe the problem domain.
B) Identify all the nouns.
C) Write the code.
D) Refine the list of nouns to include only those that are relevant to the problem.
Answer: C

40) This is a group of related classes.

A) archive
B) package
C) collection
D) attachment
Answer: B

41) Quite often you have to use this statement to make a group of classes available to a program.
A) import
B) use
C) link
D) assume
Answer: A

42) Look at the following statement.

import java.util.Scanner;

This is an example of
A) a wildcard import
B) an explicit import
C) unconditional import
D) conditional import
Answer: B

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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
43) Look at the following statement.

import java.util.*;

This is an example of:

A) a wildcard import
B) an explicit import
C) unconditional import
D) conditional import
Answer: A

44) The following package is automatically imported into all Java programs.
A) java.java
B) java.default
C) java.util
D) java.lang
Answer: D

6.2 True/False Questions

1) An object can store data.

Answer: TRUE

2) A class in not an object, but a description of an object.

Answer: TRUE

3) An access specifier indicates how the class may be accessed.

Answer: TRUE

4) A method that stores a value in a class's field or in some other way changes the value of a field is
known as a mutator method.
Answer: TRUE

5) Instance methods should be declared static.

Answer: FALSE

6) A constructor is a method that is automatically called when an object is created.

Answer: TRUE

7) Shadowing is the term used to describe where the field name is hidden by the name of a local or
parameter variable.
Answer: TRUE

8) The public access specifier for a field indicates that the attribute may not be accessed by statements
outside the class.
Answer: FALSE

9) A method that gets a value from a class's field but does not change it is known as a mutator method.
Answer: FALSE
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Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
10) Instance methods do not have the key word static in their headers.
Answer: TRUE

11) The term "default constructor" is applied to the first constructor written by the author of a class.
Answer: FALSE

12) When a local variable in an instance method has the same name as an instance field, the instance field
hides the local variable.
Answer: FALSE

13) The term "no-arg constructor" is applied to any constructor that does not accept arguments.
Answer: TRUE

14) The java.lang package is automatically imported into all Java programs.
Answer: TRUE

11
Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith was apparent
to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall, of whom the former
lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment from nearly all the
successful fiction even of his day;199 and the latter avowed the pain with
which he noted that Miss Edgeworth, whom he admired for her style and
art, put absolutely no religion in her books,200 while Hannah More, whose
principles were so excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and
Dickens, indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith, both
being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious romance; but
with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other way, her
sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little as against her
known rationalism. At the end of the century almost all of the leading
writers of the higher fiction were known to be either rationalists or simple
theists; and against the heavy metal of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr.
Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose sympathetic handling of religious
motives suggests the influence of Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs.
Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can but claim artists of the third or lower
grades. The championship of some of the latter may be regarded as the last
humiliation of faith.

In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was Dark, wherein was
said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture of what would happen in the event of a
general surrender of Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book
excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The preface to Miss
Marie Corelli’s Mighty Atom may serve to convey to the many readers who
cannot peruse the works of that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates
her faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the late Mr. Seton-
Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a romance with a Russian plot,
entitled The Sowers. Referring to the impressions produced by great scenes of
Nature, he writes: “These places and these times are good for convalescent
atheists and such as pose as unbelievers—the cheapest form of notoriety” (p.
168). The novelist’s own Christian ethic is thus indicated: “He had Jewish blood
in his veins, which ... carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the
blood; it is part of that which the people who stood without Pilate’s palace took
upon themselves and their children” (p. 59). But the enormous mass of modern
novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith, as well as many manifestoes of
agnosticism. One of the works of the late “Edna Lyall,” We Two, was notable as
 the expression of the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady
with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.

10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-writers and
essayists of the last generation of the century was Richard Jefferies (d.
1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883) has told how “the last traces
and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood” finally
passed away from his mind, leaving him a Naturalist in every sense of the
word. In the Eulogy of Richard Jefferies published by Sir Walter Besant in
1888 it is asserted that on his deathbed Jefferies returned to his faith, and
“died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book.”
A popular account of this “conversion” accordingly became current, and
was employed to the usual purpose. As has been shown by a careful student,
and as was admitted on inquiry by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no
conversion whatever, Jefferies having simply listened to his wife’s reading
without hinting at any change in his convictions.201 Despite his
biographer’s express admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the
Spectator, have burked the facts; one, the Christian, has piously charged
dishonesty on the writer who brought them to light; and a third, the
Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action “the basest form of
chicanery and falsehood.”202 The episode is worth noting as indicating the
qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.

11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his own clay, his
fame and standing steadily rose in the generations after his death. Nor has
the balance of English poetry ever reverted to the side of faith. Even
Tennyson, who more than once struck at rationalism below the belt, is in his
own despite the poet of doubt as much as of credence, however he might
wilfully attune himself to the key of faith; and the unparalleled optimism of
Browning evolved a form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic
creed.203 In Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive
record of surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, Swinburne put into his
verse the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved for prose; and
the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson (“B.V.”) was no less
definitely though despairingly an unbeliever. Among our later poets, finally,
the balance is pretty much the same. Mr. Watson has declared in worthily
noble diction for a high agnosticism, and the late John Davidson defied
orthodox ethics in the name of his very antinomian theology;204 while on
the side of the regulation religion—since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid—
can be cited at best the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of
trumpet and drum; the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late Francis
Thompson; the declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes; and the Godism of W.
E. Henley, whereat the prosaic godly look askance.

12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that of England,

the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable Hawthorne,
whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought
inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold; Poe, though
he did not venture till his days of downfall to write his Eureka, thereby
proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist; and Emerson’s poetry, no
less than his prose, constantly expresses his pantheism; while his gifted
disciple Thoreau, in some ways a more stringent thinker than his master,
was either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all
churches.205 The economic conditions of American life have till recently
been unfavourable to the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the
unique figure of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view
of life;206 Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James
has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism of their no
less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men of letters since the
Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel Wentworth Higginson,
have been avowedly on the side of rationalism, or, as the term goes in the
States, “liberalism.” Though the tone of ordinary conversation is more often
reminiscent of religion in the United States than in England, the novel and
the newspaper have been perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than
here; and in the public honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late
Dr. Moncure Conway at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson
College, West Virginia, may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of
his youth has disappeared from the region of his birth.

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe, finally,
a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern Italy,
Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well as one of the
greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci, the greatest of his
successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and despite all the claims of the
Catholic socialists, there is little modern Catholic literature in Italy of any
European value. One of the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars,
Professor A. de Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica
(1874) explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we
have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism; and of
Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) an orthodox historian declares that his
“religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of which now deism,
then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to come forth.”207 The
naturalistic line is found to be continued in Heinrich von Kleist, the
unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest
geniuses of his time; and above all in Heine, whose characteristic
profession of reconciling himself on his deathbed with the deity he imaged
as “the Aristophanes of heaven”208 serves so scantily to console the
orthodox lovers of his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a
sufficient clue to his serious convictions; and that “God is all that there
is”209 is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport of
his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany
(1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit of freethinking,
which constitutes for Germany at once a literary classic and a manifesto of
rationalism. As he himself said of the return of the aged Schelling to
Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that a deathbed reversion to early beliefs
is a pathological phenomenon.

The use latterly made of Heine’s deathbed re-conversion by orthodoxy in England

is characteristic. The late letters and conversations in which he said edifying
things of God and the Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the
context, and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised the Bible in
1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on Börne—Werke, vii, 160). To the
reader of the whole it is clear that, while Heine’s verbal renunciation of his former
pantheism, and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a “timid
atheism,” might have been made independently of his physical prostration, his
profession of the theism at which he had formerly scoffed is only momentarily
serious, even at a time when such a reversion would have been in no way
surprising. His return to and praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during
years of extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way of
physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty was never
extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated that his religious talk was a
half-conscious indulgence of the overstrained emotional nature, and substantially
an exercise of his poetic feeling—always as large a part of his psychosis as his
reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a Jew nor a
Christian, his language being that of a deism “scarcely distinguishable in any
essential element from that of Voltaire or Diderot” (Strodtmann, Heine’s Leben
und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii, 386). “My religious convictions and views,” he writes in
the preface to the late Romancero, “remain free of all churchism.... I have abjured
nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I have parted in love and
friendship.” In his will he peremptorily forbade any clerical procedure at his
funeral; and his feeling on that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend
Meissner in 1850. “If I could only go out on crutches!” he exclaimed; adding:
“Do you know where I should go? Straight to church.” On his friends expressing
disbelief, he went on: “Certainly, to church! Where should a man go on crutches?
Naturally, if I could walk without crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards
or the Jardin Mabille.” The story is told in England without the conclusion, as a
piece of “Christian Evidence.”

But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and poetically a
believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about “God” and “the Gods,” declaring he
will not offend the lieber Gott, whose vultures he knows and respects. “Opium is
also a religion,” he writes in 1850. “Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for
the sick it is a very good religion.” “If the German people in their need accept the
King of Prussia, why should not I accept the personal God?” And in speaking of
the postscript to the Romancero he writes in 1851: “Alas, I had neither time nor
mood to say there what I wanted—namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither
religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands
very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of Philosophy;
but neither the religious gentry nor those of philosophy will ever understand the
Poet.” A few weeks before his death he signs a New Year letter, “Nebuchadnezzar
II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer.” At this time he was taking
immense doses of morphia to make his tortures bearable. A few hours before his
death a querying pietist got from him the answer: “God will pardon me; it is his
business.” The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute irony; and his
alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes quoted seriously, are purely
humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the
Romancero, that “the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema” over him
—that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak turncoat—it needed
only the publication of his Life and Letters to enable freethinkers to take an
entirely sympathetic view of his case, which may serve as a supreme example of
“the martyrdom of man.” On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372
sq., and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier written
 fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110), where there are some
significant variations in statements of fact.

Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence in
Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse, are
well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age; and the
Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause of faith has
been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents, counts for nothing in
the critical scale.210

14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres, of the
predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found in the literary
history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The Russian development
indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian literatures had well
begun. Already in the first quarter of the century the poet Poushkine was an
avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his art suffer from his preoccupations
with the new humanitarian ideas; while the critic Biélinsky, classed by
Tourguénief as the Lessing of Russia,211 was pronouncedly rationalistic,212
as was his contemporary the critic Granovsky,213 reputed the finest
Russian stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every form
of intellectual influence in Russia,214 and all educated thought was
moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the fiction of the
freethinker Tourguénief,215 the Sophocles of the modern novel. His two
great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, count indeed for
supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of the former was
something apart from his philosophy, which was merely childlike; and the
latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous artist of the three, made his
religious converts in Russia chiefly among the uneducated, and was in any
case sharply antagonistic to orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that
the younger writer, Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his
extremely sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still
younger Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.

15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any exceptions to the
freethinking tendency among the leading living men of letters. In the person
of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) a new force of
criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting out as a theologian, Kierkegaard
gradually developed, always on quasi-religious lines, into a vehement
assailant of conventional Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal,
somewhat in that of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper
recalling now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of
his teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen,
who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen’s Brand, of which the
hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard.216 Ibsen, though his Brand was
counted to him for righteousness by the Churches, showed himself a
thorough-going naturalist in all his later work; Björnson was an active
freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg Brandes, early avowed
himself to the same effect; and his brother, the dramatist, Edward
Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in 1871 despite his
declaration that he believed in neither the Christian nor the Jewish God.
Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and Sweden seem to be of the
same cast of thought.
Section 4.—The Natural Sciences

1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved among the
majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth century, a notion of
deity either slightly removed from that of the ancient Hebrews or ethically
purified without being philosophically transformed, though the astronomy
of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic
conception of the physical universe. We have seen that Newton did not
really hold by the Christian scheme—he wrote, at times, in fact, as a
pantheist—but some later astronomers seem to have done so. When,
however, the great Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis, previously
guessed at by Bruno and outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit
was rudely shaken as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like
every other previous advance in physical science this was denounced as
atheistic217—which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply
to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed in
essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace’s system widens immensely
the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism of the Christian
era; and the subsequent concrete developments of astronomy, giving as they
do such an insistent and overwhelming impression of physical infinity, have
made the “Christian hypothesis”218 fantastic save for minds capable of
enduring any strain on the sense of consistency. Paine had brought the
difficulty vividly home to the common intelligence; and though the history
of orthodoxy is a history of the success of institutions and majorities in
imposing incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on
this side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the
French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change; and
as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a Scotch
clergyman a very plain indication219 of disbelief in the Hebrew story of the
stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of the rotation of the earth.
It is typical of the tenacity of religious delusion that a quarter of a century
later this among other irrational credences was contended for by the Swiss
theologian Gaussen,220 and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for
all scientifically trained men they had become untenable. And that the
general growth of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific
men the old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable
in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814 (No.
46), and was “universally attributed to Prof. Leslie,”221 the distinguished
physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace’s essay, Sur les probabilités,
it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume that miracles cannot be proved
by any testimony.

Leslie’s own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery of
progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the chair of
Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in 1805 was bitterly
resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was a disbeliever in miracles
and an “infidel” of the school of Hume, who had been his personal friend.
Nevertheless he again succeeded Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819,
and was knighted in 1832. The invention of the hygrometer and the
discovery of the relations of light and heat had begun to count for more in
science than the profession of orthodoxy.

2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling of

biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this case was the
physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737–1808), the colleague of Laplace in the
School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of the Revolution,
Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius, d’Holbach, Diderot,
D’Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Volney, Franklin, and
Jefferson, and became the physician of Mirabeau. His treatise on the
Rapports du physique et du morale de l’homme (1796–1802)222 might be
described as the systematic application to psychology of that “positive”
method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been
tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French
writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis, the
psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their
ignorance of physiology;223 and he easily put aside the primary errors, such
as the “equality of minds” and the entity of “the soul,” which they took over
from previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most searching
and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology that had
yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has not been
exhausted.

But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and Condillac. Not
content with presenting the results of his study in the province in which he
was relatively master, he undertook to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics
and philosophy, in which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he
lays down an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes:
“ignorance the most invincible,” he declares, is all that is possible to man
on that issue.224 But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely
generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical problem:
he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes premières,
addressed to Fauriel,225 in which the aging intelligence is seen reverting to
à priori processes, and concluding in favour of a “sort of stoic
pantheism”226 with a balance towards normal theism and a belief in
immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least affect the argument of the
earlier, which was simply one of positive science; but the clerical world,
which had in the usual fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the
score of any attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its
incompatibility with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the
mystical,227 and accorded its framer authority from that moment.

As for the conception of “vitalism” put forward in the Letter to Fauriel by

way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but a reversion to the
earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had been a partisan in his
youth.228 The fact remains that he gave an enduring impulse to positive
science,229 his own final vacillation failing to arrest the employment of the
method he had inherited and improved. Most people know him solely
through one misquotation, the famous phrase that “the brain secretes
thought as the liver secretes bile.” This is not only an imperfect statement of
his doctrine: it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates
from pure “sensationalism.” What he taught was that “impressions,
reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite
it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper to the
first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to
combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from them
judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to act on
nutritive substances,” etc.230 It is after this statement of the known
processus, and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in
the one case as in the other, that he concludes: “The brain in a manner
digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought” and
this conclusion, he points out, disposes of the difficulty of those who
“cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever be anything
else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one recognizes, in these
different operations, the action of the brain upon the impressions which are
passed on to it.” The doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of
psychological science, as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego
considered as an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound;
and his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The
attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to
emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his final
“vitalism” was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines, insisted upon a
distinction between “soul” and “vital force”; on the other hand, those who
sought to make a philosophic case for theism against him made the usual
plunge into pantheism, and were reproached accordingly by the
orthodox.231 All that remained was the indisputable “positive” gain.

3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology was seen

even more clearly than that of the great generalization of Laplace. Professor
William Lawrence (1783–1867), the physiologist, published in 1816 an
Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, containing some
remarks on the nature of life, which elicited from the then famous Dr.
Abernethy a foul attack in his Physiological Lectures delivered before the
College of Surgeons. Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of
French physiological skeptics whose aim was to “loosen those restraints on
which the welfare of mankind depends.”232 In the introductory lecture of
his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians, Lawrence severely
retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but reasserting that the
dependence of life on organization is as clear as the derivation of daylight
from the sun. The war was adroitly carried at once into the enemy’s territory
in the declaration that “The profound, the virtuous, and fervently pious
Pascal acknowledged, what all sound theologians maintain, that the
immortality of the soul, the great truths of religion, and the fundamental
principles of morals cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason; and
that revelation alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties which
perplex those who inquire too curiously into the sources of these important
principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other remedy can be so perfect
and satisfactory as this, no other can be necessary, if we resort to this with
firm faith.”233 The value of this pronouncement is indicated later in the
same volume by subacid allusions to “those who regard the Hebrew
Scriptures as writings composed with the assistance of divine inspiration,”
and who receive Genesis “as a narrative of actual events.” Indicating
various “grounds of doubt respecting inspiration,” the lecturer adds that the
stories of the naming of the animals and their collection in the ark, “if we
are to understand them as applied to the living inhabitants of the whole
world, are zoologically impossible.”234 On the principle then governing
such matters Lawrence was in 1822, on the score of his heresies, refused
copyright in his lectures, which were accordingly reprinted many times in a
cheap stereotyped edition, and thus widely diffused.235

This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of Sir T. C.

Morgan’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the physiological
materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed, and a typical
sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The method is strictly
naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the philosophic side; and
“vitalism” is argued down as explicitly as is anthropomorphism.236 As a
whole the book tells notably of the stimulus of recent French thought upon
English.
4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the science of
geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the nineteenth
century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth century, Werner and Dr.
James Hutton (1726–1797), the latter and more important237 is known
from his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794) to have been
consciously a freethinker on more grounds than that of his naturalistic
science; and his Theory of the World (1795) was duly denounced as
atheistic.238 Whereas the physical infinity of the universe almost forced the
orthodox to concede a vast cosmic process of some kind as preceding the
shaping of the earth and solar system, the formation of these within six days
was one of the plainest assertions in the sacred books; and every system of
geology excluded such a conception. As the evidence accumulated, in the
hands of men mostly content to deprecate religious opposition,239 there was
duly evolved the quaint compromise of the doctrine that the Biblical six
“days” meant six ages—a fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On the
ground of that absurdity, nevertheless, there gradually grew up a new
conception of the antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular work on geology
such as The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847), could begin with the
proposition that “long before the human race had been introduced on the
earth this world of ours existed as the habitation of living things different
from those now inhabiting its surface.” Even the thesis of “six ages,” and
others of the same order, drew upon their supporters angry charges of
“infidelity.” Hugh Miller, whose natural gifts for geological research were
chronically turned to confusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so
assailed, when in point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts
to salve the Scriptures.240 Of all the inductive sciences geology had been
most retarded by the Christian canonization of error.241 Even the plain fact
that what is dry land had once been sea was obstinately distorted through
centuries, though Ovid242 had put the observations of Pythagoras in the
way of all scholars; and though Leonardo da Vinci had insisted on the
visible evidence; nay, deistic habit could keep even Voltaire, as we saw,
preposterously incredulous on the subject. When the scientific truth began
to force its way in the teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the
“Mosaic” doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked; and whether or
not the suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on
perception of the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with Genesis,243
the scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism for many. What
helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation on the scientific side was
the attitude of men like Professor Baden Powell, whose scientific
knowledge and habit of mind moved him to attack the Judaism of the
Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity, and in the name of truth to declare
that “nothing in geology bears the smallest semblance to any part of the
Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to what extent we may.”244 In
1857 this was very bold language.

5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of zoology, as
placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles Darwin. Here again
steps had been taken in previous generations on the right path, without any
general movement on the part of scientific and educated men. Darwin’s
own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated
many of the positions of the French Lamarck, who in 1801 began
developing the views he fully elaborated in 1815, as to the descendance of
all existing species from earlier forms.245 As early as 1795 Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire had begun to suspect that all species are variants on a
primordial form of life; and at the same time (1794–95) Goethe in Germany
had reached similar convictions.246 That views thus reached almost
simultaneously in Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French
Revolution, should have to wait for two generations before even meeting
the full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of the general
reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828, was officially
overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England, indeed, so late as
1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the Nebular Hypothesis:
“that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An omnipotent arm was
required to give the planets their position and motion in space, and a
presiding intelligence to assign to them the different functions they had to
perform.”247 And Murchison the geologist was no less emphatic against
Darwinism, which he rejected till his dying day (1871).

6. Other anticipations of Darwin’s doctrine in England and elsewhere came

practically to nothing,248 as regarded the general opinion, until Robert
Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience, incurring bitter
hostility not only from the clergy but from some specialists who, like
Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist view on Darwin’s persuasion.
Chambers it was that brought the issue within general knowledge; and he
improved his position in successive editions. A hostile clerical reader,
Whewell, admitted of him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his
profession, that, “as to the degree of resemblance between the author and
the French physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not
be tolerated in England”; adding: “You would be surprised to hear the
contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the
Vestiges.”249 Hugh Miller, himself accused of “infidelity” for his measure
of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of greater intellectual
rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists of his day “vermin” and
“reptiles,”250 and classifying as “degraded and lost”251 all who should
accept the new doctrine of evolution, which, as put by Chambers, was then
coming forward to evict his own delusions from the field of science. The
young Max Müller, with the certitude born of an entire ignorance of
physical science, declared in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution
from lower types “can never be maintained again,” and pronounced it an
“unhallowed imputation.”252

7. “Contempt and abhorrence” had in fact at all times constituted the

common Christian temper towards every form of critical dissent from the
body of received opinion; and only since the contempt, doubled with
criticism, began to be in a large degree retorted on the bigots by instructed
men has a better spirit prevailed. Such a reaction was greatly promoted by
the establishment of the Darwinian theory. It was after the above-noted
preparation, popular and academic, and after the theory of transmutation of
species had been definitely pronounced erroneous by the omniscient
Whewell,253 that Darwin produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of
arguments and facts, the Origin of Species, expounding systematically the
principle of Natural Selection, suggested to him by the economic
philosophy of Malthus, and independently and contemporaneously arrived
at by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous; and the Church,
as always, arrayed itself violently against the new truth. Bishop Wilberforce
pointed out in the Quarterly Review that “the principle of natural selection
is absolutely incompatible with the word of God,”254 which was perfectly
true; and at a famous meeting of the British Association in 1860 he so
travestied the doctrine as to goad Huxley into a fierce declaration that he
would rather be a descendant of an ape than of a man who (like the Bishop)
plunged into questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to
obscure them and distract his hearers by appeals to religious prejudice.255
The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare of ignorance; but the battle was
practically won within twenty years. In France, Germany, and the United
States leading theologians had made the same suicidal declarations,
entitling all men to say that, if evolution proved to be true, Christianity was
false. Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig, took up the same position as Bishop
Wilberforce, declaring that “the whole superstructure of personal religion is
built upon the doctrine of creation”;256 leading American theologians
pronounced the new doctrine atheistic; and everywhere gross vituperation
eked out the theological argument.257

8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an originating

deity—the conception which virtually united the deists and Christians of the
eighteenth century against the atheists—was at length scientifically
exploded. The principle of personal divine rule or providential intervention
had now been philosophically excluded successively (1) from astronomy by
the system of Newton; (2) from the science of earth-formation by the
system of Laplace and the new geology; (3) from the science of living
organisms by the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception
should be further excluded from the human sciences—from anthropology,
from the philosophy of history, and from ethics—to complete, at least in
outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that the process was
complete in detail even as regarded zoology. Despite the plain implications
of the Origin of Species, the doctrine of the Descent of Man (1871) came on
many as a shocking surprise and evoked a new fury of protest. The lacunæ
in Darwin, further, had to be supplemented; and much speculative power
has been spent on the task by Haeckel, without thus far establishing
complete agreement. But the desperate stand so long made on the score of
the “missing link” seems to have been finally discredited in 1894; and the
Judæo-Christian doctrine of special creation and providential design
appears, even in the imperfectly educated society of our day, to be already a
lost cause.

As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class that resisted
the new truth: the men of science themselves were often disgracefully
hostile; and that “class” continued to give a sufficiency of support to
clericalism. If the study of the physical sciences be no guarantee for
recognition of new truth in those sciences, still less is it a sure preparation
for right judgment in matters of sociology, or, indeed, for a courageous
attitude towards conventions. Spencer in his earlier works used the
language of deism258 at a time when Comte had discarded it. It takes a rare
combination of intellectual power, moral courage, and official freedom to
permit of such a directly rationalistic propaganda as was carried on by
Professor Clifford, or even such as has been accomplished by President
Andrew White in America under the comparatively popular profession of
deism. It was only in his leisured latter years that Huxley carried on a
general conflict with orthodoxy. In middle age he frequently covered
himself by attacks on professed freethinkers; and he did more than any
other man of his time in England to conserve the Bible as a school manual
by his politic panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists
were striving to get it excluded from the State schools.259 Other men of
science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by more or
less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of the universe; so
that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are able to cite from them
many quasi-scientific phrases260—taking care not to ask what bearing their
language has on the dogmas of the Churches. Physicists who attempt to be
more precise are rarely found to be orthodox; and the moral and social
science of such writers is too often a species of charlatanism. But the whole
tendency of natural science, which as such is necessarily alien to
supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of the religious tradition; and the real
leaders of science are found more and more openly alienated from the creed
of faith. We know that Darwin, though the son and grandson of freethinkers,
was brought up in ordinary orthodoxy by his mother, and “gave up common
religious belief almost independently from his own reflections.”261 All over
the world that has since been an increasingly common experience among
scientific men.
Section 5.—The Sociological Sciences

1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit or implicit in

the whole literature of Deism; and had been attempted with various degrees
of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mandeville, Hume, Smith,
Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by lesser men.262 So clear had
been the classic lead to naturalistic views of social growth in the Politics of
Aristotle, and so strong the influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is
seen even in the work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as
Bossuet; while in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous
generalizations; and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the
Scotland of the middle and latter parts of the century.263 Here again there
was reaction; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to promote
broader views than his own; Eusèbe Salverte in his essay De la
Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a general view;
and Charles Comte in his Traité de Législation (1826) made a marked
scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As we have seen, the
eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere of natural law equally with
cosmic phenomena. At length, in the great work of Auguste Comte,
scientific method was applied so effectively and concretely to the general
problem that, despite his serious fallacies, social science again took rank as
a solid study.

2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visible in this as in other

fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example of a strictly
naturalistic treatment of history; and the clerical Robertson was faithful to
their method; but Hallam makes a stand for supernaturalism even in
applying a generally scientific critical standard. The majority of historical
events he is content to let pass as natural, even as the average man sees the
hand of the doctor in his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in
his escape from a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at
Legnano, Hallam pronounces that it is not “material to allege ... that the
accidental destruction of Frederic’s army by disease enabled the cities of
Lombardy to succeed in their resistance.... Providence reserves to itself
various means by which the bonds of the oppressor may be broken; and it is
not for human sagacity to anticipate whether the army of a conqueror shall
moulder in the unwholesome marshes of Rome or stiffen with frost in a
Russian winter.”264

But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend such
nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of history. Even the
oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for “special providences” in his
histories, though he leant to that conception; and though Ranke also uses
mystifying language, he writes as a Naturalist; while Michelet is openly
anti-clerical. Grote was wholly a rationalist; the historic method of his
friend and competitor, Bishop Thirlwall, was as non-theological as his;
Macaulay, whatever might be his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most
secular spirit when exhibiting theological evolution; and George Long
indicated his rationalism again and again.265 It is only in the writings of the
most primitively prejudiced of those German historians who eliminate
ethics from historiography that the “God” factor is latterly emphasized in
ostensibly expert historiography.

3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such views, and
at length, in England and America, by the works of Draper and Buckle, in
the sixth and later decades of the century, the conception of law in human
history was widely if slowly popularized, to the due indignation of the
supernaturalists, who saw the last great field of natural phenomena passing
like others into the realm of science. Draper’s avowed theism partly
protected him from attack; but Buckle’s straightforward attacks on creeds
and on Churches brought upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was
unmollified by his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his erratic
attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against his sociological
teaching. Spencer’s Principles of Sociology nevertheless clinched the
scientific claim by taking sociological law for granted; and the new science
has continually progressed in acceptance. In the hands of all its leading
modern exponents in all countries—Lester Ward, Giddings, Guyau,
Letourneau, Tarde, Ferri, Durkheim, De Greef, Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld,
Schäffle—it has been entirely naturalistic, though some Catholic professors
continue to inject into it theological assumptions. It cannot be said,
however, that a general doctrine of social evolution is even yet fully
established. The problem is complicated by the profoundly contentious
issues of practical politics; and in the resulting diffidence of official
teachers there arises a notable opening for obscurantism, which has been
duly forthcoming. In the first half of the century such an eminent
Churchman as Dean Milman incurred at the hands of J. H. Newman and
others the charge of writing the history of the Jews and of early Christianity
in a rationalistic spirit, presenting religion as a “human” phenomenon.266
Later Churchmen, with all their preparation, have rarely gone further.

4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be thoroughly

followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative
conclusions—those of anthropological archæology (including comparative
mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both
lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in
particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional belief. The
lessons of anthropology had been long available to the modern world before
they began to be scientifically applied to the “science of religion.” The
issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses in the eighteenth century were
in practice put aside in favour of direct debate over Christian history,
dogma, and ethic; though many of the deists dwelt on the analogies of
“heathen” and “revealed” religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant
made a vigorous attempt to bring the whole phenomena under a general
evolutionary conception in his work De la Religion.267 But it was not till
the treasure of modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such
students as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859–
71) and Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and
above all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science of
it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic evolution of
humanity began to be decisively superseded.

In 1871 Tylor could still say that “to many educated minds there seems
something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts, wills,
and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion
of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and
animals.”268 But the old repulsion had already been profoundly impaired by
biological and social science; and Tylor’s book met with hardly any of the
odium that had been lavished on Darwin and Buckle. “It will make me for
the future look on religion—a belief in the soul, etc.—from a different point
of view,” wrote Darwin269 to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the
book press home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from
savagery that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet
risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle, began to be
decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.

In the hands of Spencer270 all the phenomena of primitive mental life—

beliefs, practices, institutions—are considered as purely natural data, no
other point of view being recognized; and the anthropological treatises of
Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at the same standpoint. When at
length the mass of savage usages which lie around the beginnings of
historic religion began to be closely scanned and classified, notably in the
great latter-day compilations of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be
sacred peculiarities of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of
universal primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers
was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation—the
supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion—but whether the
central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence is latterly
conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the Unitarian. But an
enormous amount of anthropological research is being carried on without
any reference to such issues, the total effect being to exclude the
supernaturalist premiss from the study of religion as completely as from
that of astronomy.
Section 6.—Philosophy and Ethics

1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new

apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none
the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox positions.
Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling, produced systems of
which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and the other as
pantheistic,271 despite its dualism. Neither seems to have had much
influence on concrete religious opinion outside the universities;272 and
when Schelling in old age turned Catholic obscurantist, the gain to
clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn loosely wrought out a system of
which the great merit is to substitute the conception of existence as relation
for the nihilistic idealism of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling.
This system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies273 by formulating, as
Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining
Christianity as “Absolute Religion” in comparison with the various forms
of “Natural Religion.” Nevertheless, he counted in a great degree as a
disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way anti-Christian.
More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the Aufklärung, the freethinking
movement of the past generation, had made good its case so far as it went;
and though, by the admission of admirers, he took for granted without
justification that it had carried its point with the world at large,274 he was
chronically at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one
hand with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated,275 and on the other
declaring that the common run of them “know as little of God as a blind
man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame.”276 Of the belief
in miracles he was simply contemptuous. “Whether at the marriage of Cana
the guests got a little more wine or a little less is a matter of absolutely no
importance; nor is it any more essential to demand whether the man with
the withered hand was healed; for millions of men go about with withered
and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man heals.” On the story of the marks
made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover
he asks: “Would the angel not have known them without these marks?”,
adding: “This faith has no real interest for Spirit.”277 Such writing, from the
orthodox point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of
Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-
idea and of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of
philosophy and a form of political utilitarianism.

As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare Hagenbach,

German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte), pp. 364–69; Renan, Études
d’histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406; J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the
Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189–91;
Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135–41, 176; Eschenmenger, Die
Hegel’sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted in Beard’s Voices of the Church,
p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen, 1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der
Philosophie, 2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753–54—also cited by Beard, pp. 9–12.

The gist of Hegel’s rehabilitation of Christianity is well set forth by Prof. A. Seth
Pringle-Pattison in his essay on The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel
(rep. in The Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered in
connection with his demonstration that in politics the Prussian State was the ideal
government, it is seen to be even more of an arbitrary and unveridical
accommodation to the social environment than Kant’s Religion innerhalb der
Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by
which the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence found a
semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for every item in the old
theology. Nothing could be more false to the spirit of Hegel’s general philosophy
than the representing of Christianity as a culmination or “ultimate” of all religion;
and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.

We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel’s process of
adaptation than was taken in the next generation by Haym, who, in his Hegel und
seine Zeit (1857), presented him as always following the prevailing fashion in
thought, and lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel’s
officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant felt driven to do
something for social conservation at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and
 Fichte to shape for his country the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so
Hegel, after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of Jena and
being turned out of his own house by the looting French soldiers, was very
naturally impelled to support the existing State by quasi-philosophico-religious
considerations. It was an abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it
may have been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism was
equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded “demagogy,” and in Schopenhauer, who
left his fortune to the fund for the widows and families of soldiers killed or
injured in the revolutionary strifes of 1848. It came in their case from the same
source—an alarmed memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel
had no real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.

Not only does Hegel’s conception of the Absolute make deity simply the
eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness
indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind,278 but his
abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds;279 and some of the most
revolutionary of the succeeding movements of German thought—as those
of Vatke, Strauss,280 Feuerbach, and Marx—professedly founded on him. It
is certainly a striking testimony to the influence of Hegel that five such
powerful innovators as Vatke281 in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and
Strauss in New-Testament criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of
religion, and Marx in social philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag.
It can hardly have been that Hegel’s formulas sufficed to generate the
criticism they all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must
suppose that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical
and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which
stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as well as for
all forms of the idea of evolution.

2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel’s method,

arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor, with a few
exceptions,282 to his own disciples, some of whom, as Ruge, at length
definitely renounced Christianity.283 In 1854 Heine told his French readers
that there were in Germany “fanatical monks of atheism” who would
willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted deist;284 and Heine himself, in his last
years of suffering and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel’s
system only atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards
went even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while.285
Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to
orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came in due
course the cry of “Back to Kant,” where at least orthodoxy had some formal
semblance of sanction.

Hartmann’s work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity286 is a

stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for “liberal Christianity”
in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal for a “new concrete religion”
of monism or pantheism as a bulwark against Ultramontanism. On this
monism, however, Hartmann insisted on grounding his pessimism; and with
this pessimistic pantheism he hoped to outbid Catholicism against the
“irreligious” Strauss and the liberal Christians—in his view no less
irreligious. It does not seem to have had much acceptance. On the whole,
the effect of all German philosophy has probably been to make for the
general discredit of theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism
being little propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in
spirit or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current religion
which their writings in particular manifest287 must be admitted to stand for
a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And this revolt was bound to
come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel—aiming
at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung as a force that had done its work,
and could find no more to do, however it be explained and excused—was a
mere expression of their own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to
believe that thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression
in religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a stop on
à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an “ultimate” of
philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators, seeking simply for
truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit which, correcting their inevitable
errors, reaches a far deeper and wider comprehension of religious evolution
and psychosis than could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-
satisfied and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed,
did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact, was fatally
shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution, which in their case
took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France and England it worked out
as a crude return to clerical and political authoritarianism.288

3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there emerged

two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804–76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at
Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and
Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic
at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a
Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas
Hegel belonged to the “Old Testament” of modern philosophy, he himself
would set forth the New, wherein Hegel’s fundamentally incoherent
treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an
objective personality on the other) should be cured.289 Feuerbach
accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion
(1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the
positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms
of philosophic as well as historical insight—a statement to which there is no
characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined
sentimentalism of the youthful Renan,290 fundamentally averse alike to
scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.

Feuerbach’s special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic in

which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward
criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They had shown
many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity, and its philosophic
self-contradiction; and the more astute official defenders, leaving to the less
competent the task of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending
the indefensible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-
philosophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible
inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make
shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which
Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through it.
Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of Hegel an
attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a wider concern
than Hegel’s for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge of the actual,
moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: “Two years have I attached
myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy.
Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way: I am going
to study anatomy.”291 It may have been that what saved him from the
Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of conformist
philosophy was the personal experience which put him in fixed antagonism
to the governmental forces that Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility
evoked by his Thoughts on Death and Immortality completed his alienation
from the official side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-
seeker—a career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that
Feuerbach, in the words of Strauss, “broke the double yoke in which, under
Hegel, philosophy and theology still went.”292

For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In a

series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to
Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy,
1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839) he
explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in the light of
moral and historical criticism, before he produced his masterpiece, Das
Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on
the Hegelian defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an
affair of self-consciousness,293 is shown to be in very truth nothing else.
“Such as are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much
worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of
God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge.”294 This
of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect—philosophic atheism;
and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares in his
preface that “atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is the secret of
religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart, in its essence, believes in
nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.” In the preliminary
section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once for all:
“A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the
attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the
first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be
God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held
not to be God, is God—namely the attribute, the quality, whatever has
reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the
Divine Being—for example, love, wisdom, justice—are nothing; not he to
whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.... These have an
intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their
very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they approve, they attest
themselves.... The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of
benevolence....”

This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the
personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his
critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is
one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very
course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic
and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything
“under the rude rule of egoism.”295 Here a philosophic and an aspersive
meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of
Feuerbach’s analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of
“rude egoism” than is the Christian formula of “God’s will” a condonation
of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and
polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have
known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really
contemptible escape from Feuerbach’s criticism, under cover of alternate
cries of “Communism” and “egoism”—a self-stultification which needs no
comment—is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the
time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically
demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. “Max Stirner” (pen-name
of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806–1856) carried the philosophic “egoism” of
Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der
Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than
a force.296

4. Arnold Ruge (1802–1880), who was of the same philosophical

school,297 gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and
light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won a
small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going the way of
many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old fires. His
Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated among its
Reverers298 (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance, proceeding from a
mythological analysis of religion to a cordial plea for rationalism in all
things. The charge of “materialism” was for him no bugbear. “Truly,” he
writes, “we are not without the earth and the solar system, not without the
plants and the animals, not without head. But whoever has head enough to
understand science and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind
(Geist) knows also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in
it, and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are
incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science free
themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial Power erect
their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science, and art.”299

5. On Feuerbach’s Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion

of Büchner’s Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but with
much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain man of his
century what d’Holbach in his chief work sought to do for his day.
Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy, in the exact tone and
spirit of animal irritation which marks the religious vituperation of all forms
of rationalism in previous ages; and constantly misrepresented as professing
to explain an infinite universe when it does but show the hollowness of all
supernaturalist explanations,300 the book steadily holds its ground as a
manual of anti-mysticism.301 Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may
be said to have framed for their age an atheistic “System of Nature,”
concrete and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one
apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur’s protest against the “one-
sidedness” of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen ground of self-
consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner’s study of the objective world and
see whether his cause fares any better.

6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less revolutionary.

Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected by the legitimist
restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the other “classic philosophers”
of the first third of the century orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet
even among these there was no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the
shrinking spirits who passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism
from fear of the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a
philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme
intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism; and this
pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor was this species of
orthodoxy any more successful than the furious irrationalism of Joseph De
Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of faith, as distinct from the cult of
rhetoric and sentiment founded by Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply
distrusted by those who knew him, and at the height of his popularity he
was contemned by the more competent minds around him, such as Sainte-
Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet.302 The latter thinker himself counted for
a measure of rationalism, though he argued for theism, and undertook to
make good the historicity of Jesus against those who challenged it. For the
rest, even among the ostensibly conservative and official philosophers,
Théodore Jouffroy, an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in
the Faculté des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth
up,303 and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the
orthodox. “God,” he wrote,304 “interposes as little in the regular
development of humanity as in the course of the solar system.” He added a
fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he verbally salved in
the usual way by saying that predetermination presupposed individual
liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual, between two stools; but it was not
orthodoxy that would gain. On another line Jouffroy openly bantered the
authoritarians on their appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to
be incapable of pronouncing on religious questions.305

7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period,

however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom
rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé Felice de
Lamennais declaimed warmly against L’indifférence en matière de religion
(4 vols. 1818–24), resorting to the old Catholic device, first employed by
Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against unbelief. Having ostensibly
discredited the authority of the senses and the reason (by which he was to
be read and understood), he proceeded in the customary way to set up the
ancient standard of the consensus universalis, the authority of the majority,
the least reflective and the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a
kind of corporate wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he
marched straight into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a
confirmation of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which
claimed to put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the
thesis was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.

Damiron, writing his Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au

XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than reassuring,
commenting on the “strange skepticism” of Lamennais as to the human
reason.306 For himself, he takes up the parable of Lessing, and declares that
where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had now reached conviction. It was
no longer a question of whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in
terms of fuller intelligence. “In this religious regeneration we shall be to the
Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the
patriarchs: we shall be Christians and something more.” The theologian of
the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher. “We shall study God
through nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary
to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our natural
lights.” Christianity has been a useful discipline; but “our education is so
advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers; and, having no need
of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science.”307 “Prayer is
good, doubtless,” but it “has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote action on
our environment.”308 All this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the
École Normale. Not to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain
ventured to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under the
Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment of
skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne’s, the expression of a
temperament slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a
boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion, he had
shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him up; and later he
read omnivorously among the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau
attracting him in particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis,
slowly covering ground which others traverse early. He did not become a
communicant till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at
twenty-seven; and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.

Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur l’état de
l’église had been suppressed by Napoleon’s police; in 1814 he had written,
along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught mathematics, a treatise
maintaining the papal claims; and in the Hundred Days of 1815 he took
flight to London. His mind was always at work. His Essay on Indifference
expressed his need of a conviction; with unbelief he could reckon and
sympathize; with indifference he could not; but when the indifference was
by his own account the result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same
fashion as the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason.
Yet the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic
was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he came
more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very well to flout
the individual reason in the name of the universal; but to give mankind a
total infallibility was not the way to satisfy a pope or a Church which
claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824 he was well received by the pope;
but when in 1830 he began to write Liberal articles in the journal L’Avenir,
in which he collaborated with Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and
other neo-Catholics, offence was quickly taken, and the journal was soon
suspended. Lamennais and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went
to Rome to plead their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way
home in 1832 received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.

Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with his

friends to his and his brother’s estate in Brittany, and began his process of
intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed mass, and at this
stage he held by his artificial distinction between the spheres of faith and
reason. In May of that year he declared his determination to place himself
“as a writer outside of the Church and Catholicism,” declaring that “outside
of Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside of the Church there is
humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere.”309 Still he
claimed to be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine “fidelity in
obedience with liberty in science.”310 In January of 1834, however, he had
ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d’un Croyant,
published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned as
infidelity.

Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published an

Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true papal
standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an Ishmaelite.
Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else, he was infuriated by the
brutal suppression of the Polish rising in 1831–32; and the government of
Louis Philippe pleased him as little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841
he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le
gouvernement (1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he
had never changed: “I have gone on, that is all.” But he had in effect
changed from a Catholic to a pantheist;311 and in 1848, as a member of the
National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by “an
affectation of impiety.”312 On his deathbed he refused to receive the curé of
the parish, and by his own wish he was buried without any religious
ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and with no cross on his grave.

Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais
never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always emotional
and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour as a Churchman
played a rather sinister part in the matter of the temporary insanity of
Auguste Comte, lending himself to the unscrupulous tactics of the
philosopher’s mother, who did not stick at libelling her son’s wife in order
to get him put under clerical control.313 It was perhaps well for him that he
was forced out of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to
have qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such a
temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and social
grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France, whatever his
philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.

8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new

France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de
Philosophie Positive (1830–42) practically reaffirmed while it recast and
supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism of the
previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism, giving that new
name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte’s direct following was
never large, it is significant that soon after the completion of his Cours we
find Saisset lamenting that the war between the clergy and the philosophers,
“suspended by the great political commotion of 1830,” had been “revived
with a new energy.”314 The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-
ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically
powerless sect; and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic
system by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social
regulation315 is beside the case. A man’s way of thinking may involve
intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte’s did. Positivism
in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any one man’s scheme for
regulating society and conserving “cultus”; and Comte’s was merely one of
the many evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It
belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his mind, the
craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which connect with his
admiration of the medieval Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he
condemned atheists because they mostly contemned his passion for
regimentation. By reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually
dictatorial tone of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from
the religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in
England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading
English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed publicists of
the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a “science of society”
where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms of “providentialism.” In
France the general effect of the rationalistic movement had been such that
when Taine, under the Third Empire, assailed the whole “classic” school in
his Philosophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally
recognized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling
philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite a number of
university professors are explicitly positivist in their philosophic
teaching.316

9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly left
to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics was for a
generation practically overriden by the moral and social sciences; Hartley’s