BOOKS.

THE ETHIC OF FREE-THOUGHT"

AN Y one who takes up this volume in the hope of finding what sort of ethical creed Mr. Karl Pearson thinks justified by "Free- Thought," will be greatly disappointed. He will discover, indeed, that a passionate love of truth is Mr. Pearson's first ethical axiom, and probably the only one in which the larger number of his readers would agree ; "that the pleasures of sense, though to be renounced as purpose, are to be welcomed as means to retain the body in health, and so the mind in full energy ;" that the keen feeling of man for his own personality which is im- plied in the belief that his individuality is independent of his bodily existence, and will be immortal, is full of mischief, and has brought untold evils upon us ; and further, that morality consists in socialising the actions of men, though what socialising the actions of men involves, except in the direction of controlling the distribution of property, the increase of the population, and dissolving the present law of marriage, Mr. Pearson does not explain. We have not the least hint of the new ethic in its relation to any inward motives of the individual life, except the love of truth and the reverence for the social organisation as a whole. Indeed, nothing is said to indicate respect for the culture of any personal affections that are not strictly spontaneous. Nor has Mr. Pearson discussed the basis of any of the virtues, such as courage, purity, self- sacrifice, patience, fortitude, and the rest, all of which must take an entirely new aspect in the system of a man who despises theology, and who is inclined to regard the human intellect as the true source of the order in the universe. In one word, the volume before us-corresponds very faintly indeed to the promise of its title, since, far from discussing the basis of ethics as the free-

thinkers regard it, the author throws out only here and there a brief hint even of his ethical standard, and hardly makes so much as an attempt to deduce that standard from first principles. We should have been very curious to know, for instance, on what he would ground that obligation to mutual service the rapid growth of which in the past he recognises,—a growth due, how-

• The Ethic of Free-Thought. A Selection of Essays and Lectures by Karl Pearson, M.A. London : T. Fisher Unwin.

ever, for the most part, not to principles which he accepts, but to principles which he repudiates. How would he deal with men who denied the existence of any wish in themselves to serve others,—men who agree apparently with Mr. Pearson in thinking the sense of moral obligation nothing but the survival of " an hereditary predisposition, the outcome of racial experience in the past," after the power of creating this hereditary predisposi-

tion in the present has been lost to us P Mr. Pearson is quite alive to the difficulty, though he gives us no solution of it. He

tells us in one of the most remarkable passages of this volume :—

" We can free ourselves by study from our predispositions, but may we not thus be opposing the interests of the race by eliminating certain factors of its permanency ? As in the days of early Christianity, mankind may again come to look upon intellect as prejudicial to its welfare. A movement akin to the Salvation Army may carry society over a critical period when its very existence hangs in the balance, and humanity may again believe with Luther that intellect is the devil's archwhore. Herein lies one of the deepest and most momentous problems of renunciation, and one which the philosophers of renunciation have but lightly touched upon. This is the secret of our modern pessimism and optimism,—they are involved in the impossi- bility or the possibility of permanent intellectual progress for all classes. The answer given to this problem will determine the value to be placed upon a life of intellectual activity and the wisdom or folly of those who attempt to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge. Does the human mind, as the centuries roll by, tend to free itself from irrational belief, and grasp things in their true relation to their surroundings ? Does it more and more succeed in casting off phenomenal slavery by reducing its sensations to an intelligible sequence ? Do human predispositions tend to take the firmer basis of intellect, or must the individual ever be ultimately sacrificed to all which may, regardless of its intellectual truth or falsehood, contribute to the preservation of the race ? Does or does not surviving belief approximate more and more to rational law ? "

We should say that, in Mr. Pearson's sense of the term "rational law," not only is there no approximation, but no pro- bability of any approximation. And we should argue this even from the doctrine of the present volume. Mr. Pearson,—himself a great mathematician,—is also a great believer in the unproved

and unprovable doctrine of Determinism, a doctrine which, as Mr. Cotter Morison, himself also a strong believer in it, has shown, makes such havoc of all the notions attaching to the word "responsibility," that he even proposes to sweep away the use of the word as misleading. Mr. Pearson gives us as vivid a demonstration of his own confidence in Determinism as it is possible for a thinker to give, in the following striking passage :—

" Suppose the highly developed reason of some future man to start, say, with clear conceptions of the lifeless chaotic mass of 60,000,000 years ago, which now forms our planetary system, then from those conceptions alone he will be able to think out the 60,000,000 years' history of the world, with every finite phase which it had passed through ; each will have its necessary place, its necessary course in this thought system—And this total history he has thought out ?—It will be identical with the actual history of the world ; for that history has evolved in the one sole way conceivable. The universe is what it is, because that is the only conceivable fashion in which it could be, —in which it could be thought. Every finite thing in it, is what it is, because that is the only possible way in which it could be. It is absurd to ask why things are not other than they are, because were our ideas sufficiently clear, we should see that they exist in the only way in which they are thinkable. Equally absurd is it to ask why any finite thing or any finite individual exists—its existence is a logical necessity—a necessary step or element in the complete thought-analysis of the universe, and without that step our thought- analysis, the universe itself, could have no existence."

Well, if Mr. Pearson can succeed in so far reversing the whole testimony of human history and human nature to the belief in free-will, merit, demerit, guilt, righteousness, and remorse, as to get mankind to accept this doctrine of his in all its wide- reaching consequences, he will undoubtedly extinguish at once the most powerful of all the " predispositions " to unselfish con- duct,—that one of all others which has produced the largest number of victorious battles against the evil grain in human nature. And when we consider that beside this doctrine of his which, if accepted, would extinguish all belief in the power of man to turn the scale against evil in himself, he has opened the flood-gates to various strong passions by proposing to sweep away the great guarantees of existing order created by the belief in a divine ruler of the universe, and has condemned such insti- tutions as marriage and individual property, we can only say that it would take a much more powerful book than Mr. Pearson's to sow again the seeds of new principles equally potent for that socialising of human conduct on which he seems to us to be earnestly bent. His philosophy, if it can be called so, makes a clean sweep of almost everything which has hitherto socialised human conduct, and puts nothing in the place of it, except a pressing injunction to love truth, to divide property more fairly among the labourers of the race, and to set women, and, we suppose, men also, free from the moral laws which have hitherto regalated,—to a very insufficient extent, no doubt, but still to so great an extent that the sweeping away of those laws would be a tremendous and incalculable evil,—the relation of the sexes. To be told that we are to attach a great deal more reverence to the State than we have been accustomed to attach, that the "mismanage- ment of public affairs is a disgrace which, like the sin against the Holy Ghost, can never be condoned," is a poor compensa- tion indeed for striking at the very root of the moral ideas which have prevailed in all at least of those European States which Mr. Karl Pearson's book is alone likely to reach. In- deed, we have not much guidance as to what we should call the root and principle of Mr. Pearson's ethic. But we think we discern that, barring probably the love of truth on which he insists with a passion which seems to indicate that it is in his mind a " predisposition " of a very valuable and pro- foundly rooted kind, Mr. Karl Pearson's ethic would be based much more upon outward consequences than on inward motives ; that he would be much more interested in reconstituting the relations of human beings to each other in respect to the labour they should give, and the number of children they should be allowed to bring into the world without penal consequences, than in laying down for them any code of pure motive or spiritual desire. And if he really thinks that society is likely within the next few hundred years to emancipate itself from all the " predispositions " which have tended most to the side of disinterested self-sacrifice, to ignore God, to explode Christianity and all other religions except science, to reduce marriage to a terminable contract, and nevertheless to throw itself into the enthusiasm of humanity with a new rapture, he is, we think, the most credulously sanguine, as well as the most philosophically incredulous of men.

As a philosopher, we do not think that he is either very original or very impressive, though we suppose that he is original as a mathematician. His apparent disposition to believe that

the laws of thought constitute the external order of the universe, as well as help us to apprehend it, is one of those applications

of Kant's critical system which seems to us, though not, perhaps, abstractly inconsistent with Kant's doctrine, utterly out of sympathy with the main tendencies of that great thinker. And the notion that any sane man will really feel any sort of ex- hilaration in such reflections as the following, seems to us wild in the extreme : —

" We have seen how the disparity between finite and infinite tends to depress man to the lowest depth of spiritual misery, such a depth as you will find portrayed in James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night. This misery is too often the result of the first necessary step towards freedom of thought, namely, the complete rejection of all forms of dogmatic faith. It can only be dispelled by a recognition of the true meaning of the problem of life, the relation of the finite to the infinite. But in the very nature of this problem—as I have endeavoured to express it to-night—lies a strange inexpressible pleasure ; it is the apparently finite mind of man, which itself rules the infinite; it is human thought which dictates the laws of the universe ; only what man thinks, can possibly be. The very immensities which appal him, are they not in a sense his own creations P Nay, paradoxical as it may seem, there is much truth in the assertion, that : It is the mind of man which rules the universe. Freethought in making him master of his own reason renders him lord of the world. That seems to me the endless joy of the freethinker's faith."

That seems very like saying that when a man who wears a pair of blue spectacles sees all the world blue, he makes the world blue by virtue of his blue spectacles. If the laws of man's thought really correspond to the laws of the universe, and help us to understand it, well and good ; but in that case we owe that correspondence not to the laws of thought, but to the power which generated both the laws of the universe and the laws of human thought. But if there is no such correspondence, we are mere victims of an illusion. In neither case can we say that the

immensities which appal man are his own creations. Either they exist, and are only shown to him by his own intelligence, or they do not exist, and he is cheated by that intelligence.

Mr. Pearson makes some very sensible remarks on the calm- ness of the only enthusiasm which is worth anything, and on the folly of purely negative attacks on the faith of others. If he really stands by these remarks, why is he so offensive as to follow Mr. John Morley's unfortunate and now long ago discon- tinued practice of printing God with a little "g," why does he call Professor Stokes's Burnett Lectures on "The Beneficial Effect of Light," the "Prostitution of Science," and quote with approval one of the late Professor Clifford's most monstrous and violent judgments ? This is not calm enthusiasm, it is unjustifiable insult.