The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 01/Book 2/Chapter 6

by Theodore Parker

CHAPTER VI.

THE RATIONALISTIC VIEW, OR NATURALISM.

This allows that the original powers of Nature, as shown in the inorganic, the vegetable, and the animal world, all came from God at the first; that he is a principle either material or spiritual, separate from the world, and independent thereof. He made the World, and all things, including Man, and stamped on them certain laws, which they are to keep.^[1] He was but transiently present and active in Nature at creation; is not immanently present and active therein. He has now nothing to do with the world but—to see it go. Here, then, is God on the one side; on the other, Man and Nature. But there is a great gulf fixed between them, over which there passes, neither God nor Man.

This theory teaches that Man, in addition to his organs of perception, has certain intellectual faculties by which he can reason from effect to cause; can discover truth, which is the statement of a fact; from a number of facts in science can discern a scientific law, the relation of thing to thing; from a number of facts in morals, can learn the relation of man to man, deduce a moral law, which shall teach the most expedient and profitable way of managing affairs. Its statement of both scientific and moral facts rests solely on experience, and never goes beyond the precedents. Still further, it allows that men can find out there is a God, by reasoning experimentally from observations in the material world, and metaphysically also, from the connection of notions in the mind. But this conclusion is only to be reached, in either case, by a process that is long, complicated, tortuous, and so difficult that but one man in some thousands has the necessary experimental knowledge, and but one in some millions the metaphysical subtlety, requisite to go through it, and become certain that there is a God. Its notion of God is this—a Being who exists as the Power, Mind, and Will that caused the universe.^[2]

The metaphysical philosophy of this system may be briefly stated. In Man, by nature, there is nothing but man; there is but one channel by which knowledge can come into man, that is sensation; perception through the senses. That is an assumption, nobody pretends it is proved. This knowledge is modified by reflection—the mind's process of ruminating upon the knowledge which sensation affords. At any given time, therefore, if we examine what is in Man, we find nothing which has not first been in the senses. Now the senses converse only with finite phenomena. Reflection—what can it get out of these? The Absolute? The premise does not warrant the conclusion. Something “as good as Infinite?” Let us see. It makes a scientific law a mere generalization from observed facts which it can never go beyond. Its science, therefore, is in the rear of observation; we do not know thereby whether the next stone shall fall to the ground or from it. All it can say of the universality of any law of science, is this, “So far as we have seen, it is so.” It cannot pass from the Particular to the Universal. It makes a moral law the result of external experience, merely an induction from moral facts; not the affirmation of Man's moral nature declaring the eternal rule of Right. It learns Morality by seeing what plan succeeds best in the long run. Its Morality, therefore, is Selfishness verified by experiment. A man in a new case, for which he can find no precedents, knows not what to do. He is never certain he is right till he gets the reward. Its moral law at present, like the statute law, is the slowly elaborated product of centuries of experience. It pretends to find out God, as a law in science, solely, by reasoning from effect to cause; from a plan to the designer. Then on what does a man's belief in God depend? On man's nature, acting spontaneously? No; for there is nothing in man but man, and nothing comes in but sensations, which do not directly give us God. It depends on reflection, argument, that process of reasoning mentioned before. Now admitting that sensation affords sufficient premise for the conclusion, there is a difficulty in the way. The man must either depend on his own reasoning, or that of another. In the one case he may be mistaken, in an argument so long, crooked, and difficult. It is at best an inference. The “Hypothesis of a God,” as some impiously call it—may thus rest on no better argument than the hypothesis of Vortices, or Epicycles. In the other case, if we trust another man, he may be mistaken; still worse, may design to deceive the inquirer, as, we are told, the Heathen Sages did. Where, then, is the certain conviction of any God at all? This theory allows none. Its “proof of the existence of God” is a proof of the possibility of a God; perhaps of his probability; surely no more.

But the case is yet worse. In any argumentation there must be no more expressed in the conclusion than is logically and confessedly implied in the premises. When finite phenomena are the only premises, whence comes the Idea of Infinite God? It denies that Man has any Idea of the Absolute, Infinite, Perfect. Instead of this, it allows only an accumụlative notion, formed from a series of conceptions of what is finite and imperfect. The little we can know of God came from reasoning about objects of sense. Its notion of God is deduced purely from empirical observation; what notion of a God can rest legitimately on that basis? Nature is finite. To infer an infinite Author is false logic. We see but in part, and have not grasped up this sum of things, nor seen how seeming evil consists with real good, nor accounted for the great amount of misery, apparently unliquidated, in the world; therefore Nature is imperfect to men's eyes. Why infer a perfect Author from an imperfect work? Injustice and cruelty are allowed in the world. How then can its Maker be relied on as just and merciful? Let there be nothing in the conclusion which is not in the premises.

This theory gives us only a finite and imperfect God, which is no God at all. He cannot be trusted out of sight; for its faith is only an inference from what is seen. Instead of a religious sentiment in man, which craves all the perfections of the Godhead, reaches out after the Infinite “first Good, first Perfect, and first Fair,” it gives us only a tendency to reverence or fear what is superior to ourselves, and above our comprehension; a tendency which the Bat and the Owl have in common with Socrates and Fenelon. It makes a man the slave of his organization. Free-will is not possible. His highest aim is self-preservation; his greatest evil death. It denies the immortality of Man, and foolishly asks “proofs” of the fact—meaning proofs palpable to the senses. Its finite God is not to be trusted, except under his bond and covenant to give us what we ask for.

It makes no difference between Good and Evil; Expedient and Inexpedient are the better words. These are to be learned only by long study and much cunning. All men have not the requisite skill to find out moral and religious doctrines, and no means of proving either in their own heart; therefore they must take the word of their appointed teachers and philosophers, who “have investigated the matter;” found there is “an expedient way” for men to follow, and a “God” to punish them if they do not follow it. In moral and religious matters the mass of men must rely on the authority of their teachers. Millions of men, who never made an astronomical observation, believe the distance between the Earth and the Sun is what Newton or Laplace declares it to be. Why should not men take moral and religious doctrines on the same evidence? It is true, astronomers have differed a little—some making the Earth the centre, some the Sun—and divines still more. But men must learn the moral law as the statute law. The State is above each man's private notions about good and evil, and controls these, as well as their passions. Man must act always from mean and selfish views, never from Love of the Good, the Beautiful, the True.

This system would have religious forms and ceremonies to take up the mind of the people; moral precepts, and religious creeds, “published by authority,” to keep men from unprofitable crimes; an established Church, like the Jail and the Gallows, a piece of state-machinery. It is logical in this, for it fears that, without such a provision, the sensual nature would overlay the intellectual; the few religious ideas common men could get, would be so shadowy and uncertain, and men be so blinded by Prejudice, Superstition, and Fancy, or so far misled by Passion and ignorant Selfishness, that nothing but want and anarchy would ensue. It tells men to pray. None can escape the conviction that prayer, vocal or silent, put up as a request, or felt as a sense of supplication, is natural as hunger and thirst, or tears and smiles. Even a self-styled Atheist^[3] talks of the important physiological functions of prayer. This theory makes prayer a Soliloquy of the man; a thinking with the upper part of the head; a sort of moral gymnastics. Thereby we get nothing from God. He is the other side of the world. “He is a journeying, or pursuing, or peradventure he sleepeth.” Prayer is useful to the worshipper as the poet's frenzy, when he apostrophizes a Mountain, or the Moon, and works himself into a rapture, but gets nothing from the Mountain or the Moon, except what he carried out.

In a word, this theory reduces the Idea of God to that of an abstract Cause, and excludes this cause both from Man and the World. It has only a finite God, which is no God at all, for the two terms cancel each other. It has only a selfish Morality, which is no Morality at all, for the same reason. It reduces the Soul to the aggregate functions of the flesh; Providence to a law of matter; Infinity to a dream; Religion to priestcraft; Prayer to an apostrophe; Morality to making a good bargain; Conscience to cunning. It denies the possibility of any connection between God and Man. Revelation and Inspiration it regards as figures of speech, by which we refer to an agency purely ideal what was the result of the Senses and Matter acting thereon. Men calling themselves inspired, speaking in the name of God, were deceivers, or deceived. Prophets, the religious Geniuses of the world, mistook their fancies for revelation; embraced a cloud instead of a Goddess, and produced only misshapen dreams. Judged by this system, Jesus of Nazareth was a pure-minded fanatic, who knew no more about God than Peter Bayle and Pomponatius, but yet did the world service, by teaching the result of his own or others' experience, as revelations from God accompanied with the promise of another life, which is reckoned a pleasant delusion, useful to keep men out of crime, a clever auxiliary of the powers that be.

This System has perhaps never been held in all its parts by any one man,^[4] but each portion has often been defended, and all its parts go together and come unavoidably from that notion, that there is nothing in man which was not first in the senses.^[5] The best representatives of this school were, it may be, the French Materialists of the last century, and some of the English Deists. The latter term is applied to men of the most various character and ways of thinking. Some of them were most excellent men in all respects; men who did mankind great service by exposing the fanaticism of the Superstitious, and by showing the absurdities embraced by many of the Christians. Some of them were much more religious and heavenly-minded than their opponents, and had a theology much more Christian, which called Goodness by its proper name, and worshipped God in lowliness of heart, and a divine life. But the spirit of this system takes different forms in different men. It appears in the cold morality and repulsive forms of Religion of Dr Priestley, who was yet one of the best of men; in the scepticism of Hume and his followers, which has been a useful medicine to the Church; in the selfish system of Paley, far more dangerous than the doubts of Hume or the scoffs of Gibbon and Voltaire; in the coarse, vulgar materialism of Hobbes, who may be taken as one of the best representatives of the system.

It is obvious enough, that this system of Naturalism is the Philosophy which lies at the foundation of the popular theology in New England; that it is very little understood by the men, out of pulpits and in pulpits, who adhere to it; who, while they hold fast to the theory of the worst of the English Deists—though of only the worst; while they deny the immanence of God in Matter and Man, and therefore take away the possibility of natural inspiration, and cling to that system of philosophy which justifies the Doubt of Hume, the Selfishness of Paley, the coarse Materialism of Hobbes,—are yet ashamed of their descent, and seek to point out others of a quite different spiritual complexion, as the lineal descendants of that ancient stock.

This system has one negative merit. It can, as such, never lead to fanaticism. Those sects or individuals, who approach most nearly to pure Naturalism, have never been accused, in religious matters, of going too fast or too far. But it has a positive excellence. It lays great stress on the human mind, and cultivates the understanding to the last degree. However, its Philosophy, its Theology, its Worship, are of the senses, and the senses alone.^[6]

1. There is another form of Naturalism which denies the existence of a God separate or separable from the universe. Since this system would annihilate all religion it may be called irreligous Naturalism; with that I have now nothing to do. Some have been, called Rationalists, who deny that God is separate from the world. See above, Book I.
2. Dr Dewey, writing in the Christian Examiner, says the proposition that there is a God “is not a certainty.” See Examiner for Sept. 1845, p. 197, et seq.
3. M. Comte.
4. It is instructive to see the influence of this form of philosophy in the various departments of inquiry, as shown in the writings of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Collins, Mandeville, Hartley, Hume, Priestley, Paley, Horne-Tooke, Condillac, Helvetius, Darwin, Bentham, &c. But this philosophy could never fully satisfy the English mind. So there were such men as Cudworth, More, Cumberland, Edwards, Wollaston, Clarke, Butler, Berkely, Harris, Price, and more recently, Reid, Stewart, Brown, Coleridge, and Carlyle, not to mention the more mystical men like Fox and Penn, with their followers.
5. See the judicious observations of Shaftesbury, eighth Letter to a Student.
6. I have not thought it necessary to refer particularly to the authors representing this system. I have rather taken pains to express their doctrine in my own words, lest individuals should be thought responsible for the sins of the system. One may read many works of divinity, and see that this philosophy lay unconsciously in the writer's mind. I do not mean to insinuate that many persons fully and knowingly believe this doctrine, but that they are yet governed by it, under the modification treated of in the next chapter. Locke has sometimes been charged with follies of this character, but unjustly, as it seems to me, for though the fundamental principles of his philosophy, and many passages in his works, do certainly look that way, others are of a quite spiritual tendency. See King's Life of Locke, Vol. I. p. 366, et seq., and his theological writings, passim.