THE IDOL OF THE POSITIVISTS.
SOME of the Positivists are able men,—Mr. Frederic Harrison is in many respects a man of genius,—but certainly of all men who have proclaimed to the world that of which the world at once acknowledges the truth, namely, the great need that men now have for a religion, and a religion they can utterly believe, the Positivists are the most wonderfully credu- lous of their power to satisfy that need. Here, iu the Nineteenth Century for October, is Mr. Frederic Harrison passing the most eloquent, and often the most powerful, criticisms on the various phases of modern creed or no-creed, and then ending his criticism with the enunciation of the Gospel that what the human heartcries out for is " a new synthesis," a " human synthesis " to explain " whatever belongs to man, and from man's point of view." Even the Ephesians of the first century, who continued for the space of two hours to cry out, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! " might pity us, if they could know that the result of more than eighteen hundred years of moral evolution had been to render it quite feasible for one of the most effective writers of his time, after demonstrating the void in the religious cravings of that time, to propose seriously to fill that void by
a new "human synthesis." And it is not as if Mr. Harrison were a mere critic. Nothing can be finer than his invective against the "toy humanism" of the day, as he finely calls it, " with its unmanly whinings, and feminine eagerness about the very fringes of human life, the furniture of our rooms, or the cut of our clothes." Nor, again, can any- thing be more manly than Mr. Harrison's description of what a real Theism must be, to be worth anything at all. " Let no man imagine," he says, "that to have a definition of God like `the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,' is to have a religion." " To have a religion resting on the belief in God, you must have a deep sense of the reality of his being, an inward consciousness that you can understand his will, and can rest in peace and love upon his heart." No doubt it is. Mr. Harrison could not express that truth with greater vigour. But then he declares it impossible for true and wide-minded men to have such a religion, and so he proposes in its place a religion not resting on the belief in God at all, but on something very different,—the belief in man. And he hopes to get such a religion out of a well-con- sidered " synthesis " of all such elements in the various reli- gions of the ages as do not involve any belief in God. And yet, this " synthesis " of all those elements in religion which do not involve belief in God at all, is to produce all the best results of the elements in those religions which were really religious, which really did rest on the fear and hope and love of a divine Being.
This synthesis is, Mr. Harrison tells us, to do away with the anarchy which, on his view, " Protestantism " has introduced into the relations of the sexes,—to control the disorderly raptures of im- pulsive humanism exulting in its new sense of liberty from divine control,—and to reduce to obedience the rampant ignorance of the rising democracies. The very critic who is so merciless in exposing the emptiness of the new culture, who remarks with the most effective sarcasm that "to speak of leaving human life to Freedom, or to Science, or to Progress, is to speak of leaving human life to itself," goes on to say that his hope is in a new system, a new "synthesis" of the teaching of the past which may still succeed, though " all the religions, philosophies, systems, such as in two thousand years man has attempted, have all (us we acknowledge) failed." For our own parts, we fully acknow- ledge that no mere " system " ever yet succeeded appreciably in even modifying materially the life of man ; perhaps the Stoic " system " was the least of a complete failure of any Western system we could name. But we wholly deny that all religions have failed. On the contrary, most religions that have been really believed have moulded the people that believed them more or less into the likeness of their own ideal. No one can say that the Jewish faith did not produce the most marvel- lous results on the history of the Jewish race, though not, in the end, such a result as Moses would have approved. No one can say that the various forms of the Christian faith have not moulded the lives of millions into shapes more or less near to the Christian ideal held before them. And probably the same may be said with equal truth of some of the religions of the East. The difference between a religion and "a system" is that the one is the source of living affections, good or bad, and is efficient iu proportion as it is the source of living affections ; while the other is a " theory," " a synthesis," as Dir. Harrison prefers to call it, of the results of experience, and, like all syntheses of the results of experience, does not in the least affect a man who prefers to make his own experience for himself, and not to fashion it on the supposed results of the experience of his fathers, as doubtfully interpreted by the Solomons who, having done as they listed when they were young, amused themselves with " syntheses " for the benefit of others when they were old. What Mr. Harrison seriously expects is this, — that by picking out for his synthesis of all former religions just those elements which, being abstract and impersonal and independent of faith in God, have exerted very little influence on human life, if they have exerted any at all, he shall be able to create a new "system," vivid with all the practical authority which even the most potent and impressive of those religions lacked. Was ever a dream more extravagantly hopeless than this ? Does not every man who indulges such hopes write himself down at once as one " that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind ?"
When we listen more in detail to Mr. Harrison's anticipa- tions, our wonder grows. Here is his own and his master's notion of the mode of reaching the " synthesis " from which he expects so much :—
" We frankly and consistently accept all the great teachers of mankind,—Theist, Polytheist, Fetichist, or Atheist. We put our whole religions edifice on one uniform basis of history and philosophy, in the entire range of each. We adopt the great heathen, as well as the best Christian moralists ; we accept not only the Bible and David and Paul, but Aristotle and Antoninus, Mahommed and Confucius, Hume and Diderot. We do not narrow down our view of the great Past, nor of the great spiritual and religions movements of the Past, to the theological eras alone. We take the whole of man, the entire range of history, all the great spirits and great brains of the race, all sides of life, the humour, the fancy, the practical skill of man, his power of thought and his genius for command, quite as much as his emotion of veneration and devotion. We do not make a saint of St. Peter and St. Jude, and leave out Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Mozart ; no, nor Aristotle and Cmesar, Gutenberg and Watt, Descartes and Bichat. We take man as he is and history as we find it, and we seek to interpret the whole on one uniform scientific method, as converging towards one great result of human progress."
St. Paul and Diderot, King David and David Hume, in the same " synthesis !" That is very like making a " synthesis " of the giraffe and the panther which clings to it and tears its life out as the creature flies, and then boasting that both contribute to the idea of progress, the giraffe by running, and the panther by inflicting the cruel pangs which spur it on. But seriously, if the object of the Positive Philosophy be, by multiplying its illustrations of the various forms—evil and good—of human energy, to magnify the conception of man, and to puff up humanity on the ground of man's blossoming into so many different shapes, and hues, and aromas, whether fair or foul, we can well understand it, though we should never have dreamed that this was a synthesis meant to guide men in their practical life, and to pat the curb on humanism and its destructive eccentricities. But this is just what we know that Positivism does desire to do. It does not think all forms of human energy equally good. It does not, for instance, glorify Protestantism simply as a form of spiritual energy, but on the contrary, finds very much in it — and still more, we suppose, in such spirits of pure in- tellectual and moral negation as David Hume and Diderot — to reject and condemn. This being so, it is obvious that the principle on which the great synthesis of Positivism is obtained is a principle which selects and omits, which only takes the progressive side of each of its manifold heroes, and detects in each probably more or less of a regressive side. Well, then, what it proposes is this, to say to a distracted world,--- "We have no knowledge of any being higher than man ; we have no knowledge of any life higher than man's earthly life; and if there be any such, it is undiscernible by us. But only come to us, and we will tell you, concerning all men of whose lives we can find sufficient trace, what it was in which they advanced their age, and what it was in which they disgraced it. We will teach you to revere the good in them, and to ignore the evil ; and by teaching you this, we will teach you how to recognise what is evil and what is good in yourselves." That, if it means anything at all, is the modest pretension of this great synthesis, and it is built upon a fanciful key to the philosophy of history, of which hardly anybody, not a Comtist, has ever thought well. Aud yet this pretentious philosophy of history is to supply the place of the old creeds to those who believe that the old creeds bring us light from above, and are the links be- tween that which we now are, and that which, when in fuller sympathy with higher beings, we one day may be. The Posi- tiviste would do better to confess plainly that what they are attempting to do is to find plausible apologies for the religions of the past, and a sort of second-best equivalent for a religion of the future ; but then nobody would think it worth while to listen to them. Without a Being above man, and resolved to lend to man a helping hand in becoming like him- self, there is, and can be, no such thing as religion. Even Hegel's philosophy of history would be more likely to produce an impression on the world, than Comte's new " Synthesis " of the history of humanity ; and yet Hegel's philosophy of history probably never changed one man's heart or life. A " new synthesis !" say, rather, a new fiddlestick. It is strange to find a thinker like Mr. Frederic Harri- son, of something like genius, seriously believing, and even crying aloud, that the music of the world is to be transfigured for ever, because a worthy person, tolerably well known amongst educated musicians, but nowhere else, has invented a new fiddlestick, by the sedulous use of which everybody may hence- forth, if he pleases, play in tune.
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