MacDonald and Herbert Burrows to discuss matters of immediate moment with passionate ex-peace men like J. M. Robertson and W. P. Reeves. While the Circle was carried on for many years longer, it never quite recovered its early equanimity, and though fed by much younger blood did not develop the earlier sense of camaraderie. The belief in man as a rational and thoughtful being was shaken almost to destruction by the War, and all societies and organizations based upon this belief suffered accordingly.
It may come to be recognized that amid all the material and moral havoc which the War brought about, it performed one extremely salutary though disconcerting lesson, or perhaps two related lessons. Formerly we thought of civilized man as 80 per cent rational. We have now halved the percentage.
Again, it has, I think, been a misfortune that terms like rationalism and free-thought have been so tightly annexed by opponents of orthodox religion.[1] For
- ↑ It is true that the formal definition adopted by the Rationalist Press Association provides a wider field for Rationalism. “Rationalism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority.” But there has been no attempt to establish any code of social or political ethics or to assert independence of authority in the economic field. The contents of the Literary Guide (the organ of the Rationalist Press) contain articles upon philosophical and literary topics but avoid any serious attention to Socialism, Communism, or Democracy in its economic bearing.
