Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

§ 1. Origin and Meaning of the Word

I did not expect

To meet an infidel, much less an atheist,

Before “deism” came into English vogue, the names for unbelief, even deistic, were simply “infidelity” and “atheism”—e.g., Bishop Fotherby’s Atheomastix (1622), Baxter’s Unreasonableness of Infidelity (1655) and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667), passim. Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677) appears to be the first published attack on deism by name. His Origines Sacræ (1662) deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers in general “atheists.” Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (written 1671, published 1678), does not speak of deism, attacking only atheism, and was himself suspected of Socinianism. W. Sherlock, in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (2nd ed., 1682), attacks “atheists and infidels,” but says nothing of “deists.” That term, first coined, as we have seen, in French, seems first to have found common currency in France—e.g., on the title-pages of the apologetic works of Marin Mersenne, 1623 and 1624. The term “atheist” was often applied at random at this period; but atheism did exist.

When the orthodox Boyle pushed criticism in physical science under such a title as The Sceptical Chemist, the principle could not well be withheld from application to religion; and it lay in the nature of the case that the name “freethinker,” like that of “skeptic,” should come to attach itself specially to those who doubted where doubt was most resented and most resisted. At length the former term became specific.

In the course of the eighteenth century the term was adopted in other languages. The first French translation (1714) of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking is entitled Discours sur la liberté de penser; and the term “freethinkers” is translated on the title-page by esprit fort, and in the text by a periphrasis of liberté de penser. Later in the century, however, we find Voltaire in his correspondence frequently using the substantive franc-pensant, a translation of the English term which subsequently gave way to libre penseur. The modern German term Freigeist, found as early as 1702 in the allusion to “Alten Quäcker und neuen Frey-Geister” on the title-page of the folio Anabaptisticum et Enthusiasticum Pantheon, probably derives from the old “Brethren of the Free Spirit”; while Schöngeist arose as a translation of bel esprit. In the middle of the eighteenth century Freidenker came into German use as a translation of the English term.

A plausible objection may, indeed, arise on the score that such a term as “freethought” should not be set up by thinkers who almost invariably reject the term “freewill”—the rationalistic succession having for two hundred and fifty years been carried on mainly by determinists. But the issues raised by the two terms are on wholly different planes; and while in both cases the imperfection of the instrument of language is apparent, it is not in the present case a cause of psychological confusion, as it is in the discussion of the nature of will. The freewill fallacy consists in applying universally to the process of judgment and preference (which is a process of natural causation like another) a conception relevant only to human or animal action, as interfered with or unaffected by extraneous compulsion. To the processes of nature, organic or inorganic, the concepts “free” and “bond” are equally irrelevant: a tiger is no more “free” to crave for grass and recoil from flesh than is water to flow uphill; while, on the other hand, such “appetites” are not rationally to be described as forms of bondage. Only as a mode distinguishable from its contrary can “freedom” be predicated of any procedure, and it is so predicated of actions; whereas the whole category of volitions is alleged and denied by the verbal disputants to be “free.” Some attempt to save the case by distinguishing between free and alleged “unfree” volitions; but the latter are found to be simply cases of choices dictated by intense need, as in the case of deadly thirst. The difference, therefore, is only one of degree of impulse, not in the fact of choice.

The term “freewill,” therefore, is irrational, as being wholly irrelevant to the conception of volition. But “freethought,” on the other hand, points to an actual difference in degree of employment of the faculty of criticism. The proposition is that some men think more “freely” than others in that they are (a) not terrorized by any veto on criticism, and (b) not hampered, or less hampered, by ignorant pre-suppositions. In both cases there is a real discrimination. There is no allegation that, absolutely speaking, “thought is free” in the sense of the orthodox formula; on the contrary, it is asserted that the rationalist’s critical course is specifically determined by his intellectual structure and his preparation, and that it is sometimes different structure, but more often different preparation, that determines the anti-critical or counter-critical attitude of the believer. Change in the preparation, it is contended, will put the latter in fuller use of his potential resources; his inculcated fear of doubt and docility of assent being simply acquiescences in vetoes on his attention to certain matters for reflection—that is to say, in arbitrary limitations of his action. It is further implied that the instructed man, other things being equal, is “freer” to think than the uninstructed, as being less obstructed; but for the purpose of our history it is sufficient to posit the discriminations above noted.

The essential thing to be realized is the fact that from its earliest stages humanity has suffered from conventional or traditionary hindrances to the use of judgment. This holds good even as to the early play of the simple inventive faculty, all innovations in implements being met by the inertia of habit; and when men reached the stages of ritual practice, social construction, and religious doctrine, the forces of repression became powerful in proportion to the seriousness of the problem. It is only in modern times that freedom in these relations has come to be generally regarded as permissible; and it has always been over questions of religion that the strife has been keenest.

For practical purposes, then, freethought may be defined as a conscious reaction against some phase or phases of conventional or traditional doctrine in religion—on the one hand, a claim to think freely, in the sense not of disregard for logic, but of special loyalty to it, on problems to which the past course of things has given a great intellectual and practical importance; on the other hand, the actual practice of such thinking. This sense, which is substantially agreed on, will on one or other side sufficiently cover those phenomena of early or rudimentary freethinking which wear the guise of simple concrete opposition to given doctrines or systems, whether by way of special demur or of the obtrusion of a new cult or doctrine. In either case, the claim to think in a measure freely is implicit in the criticism or the new affirmation; and such primary movements of the mind cannot well be separated, in psychology or in history, from the fully conscious practice of criticism in the spirit of pure truth-seeking, or from the claim that such free examination is profoundly important to moral and intellectual health. Modern freethought, specially so-called, is only one of the developments of the slight primary capacity of man to doubt, to reason, to improve on past thinking, to assert his personality as against sacrosanct and menacing authority. Concretely considered, it has proceeded by the support and stimulus of successive accretions of actual knowledge; and the modern consciousness of its own abstract importance emerged by way of an impression or inference from certain social phenomena, as well as in terms of self-asserting instinct. There is no break in its evolution from primitive mental states, any more than in the evolution of the natural sciences from primitive observation. What particularly accrues to the state of conscious and systematic discrimination, in the one case as in the other, is just the immense gain in security of possession.

§ 2. Previous Histories

The latest and freshest sketch of the kind is Professor J. B. Bury’s brief History of Freedom of Thought (1913), notable for the force of its championship of the law of liberty. The useful compilation of the late Mr. Charles Watts, entitled Freethought: Its Rise, Progress, and Triumph (n. d.), deals with freethought in relation only to Christianity. Apart from treatises which broadly sketch the development of knowledge and of opinion, the nearest approaches to a general historic treatment are the Dictionnaire des Athées of Sylvain Maréchal (1800: 3e édit., par J. B. L. Germond, 1853) and the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers by the late Joseph Mazzini Wheeler. The quaint work of Maréchal, expanded by his friend Lalande, exhibits much learning, but is made partly fantastic by its sardonic plan of including a number of typical religionists (including Job, John, and Jesus Christ!), some of whose utterances are held to lead logically to atheism. Mr. Wheeler’s book is in every respect the more trustworthy.

In excuse of Maréchal’s method, it may be noted that the prevailing practice of Christian apologists had been to impute atheism to heterodox theistic thinkers of all ages. The Historia universalis Atheismi et Atheorum falso et merito suspectorum of J. F. Reimmann (Hildesiæ, 1725) exhibits this habit both in its criticism and in its practice, as do the Theses de Atheismo et Superstitione of Buddeus (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1716). These were the standard treatises of their kind for the eighteenth century, and seem to be the earliest systematic treatises in the nature of a history of freethought, excepting a Historia Naturalismi by A. Tribbechov (Jenæ, 1700) and a Historia Atheismi breviter delineata by Jenkinus Thomasius (Altdorf, 1692; Basileæ, 1709; London, 1716). In the same year with Reimmann’s Historia appeared J. A. Fabricius’s Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum qui veritatem religionis Christianæ adversus Atheos, Epicureos, Deistas, seu Naturalistas ... asseruerunt (Hamburghi), in which it is contended (cap. viii) that many philosophers have been falsely described as atheists; but in the Freydenker Lexicon of J. A. Trinius (Leipzig, 1759), planned as a supplement to the work of Fabricius, are included such writers as Sir Thomas Browne and Dryden.

Stäudlin’s later work, the Geschichte des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus (1826), is a shorter but more general history of the strife between general freethought and supernaturalism in the Christian world and era. It deals cursorily with the intellectual attitude of the early Fathers, the early heretics, and the Scholastics; proceeding to a fuller survey of the developments since the Reformation, and covering Unitarianism, Latitudinarianism, English and French Deism, and German Rationalism of different shades down to the date of writing. Stäudlin may be described as a rationalizing supernaturalist.

Like most works on religious and intellectual history written from a religious standpoint, those of Stäudlin treat the phenomena as it were in vacuo, with little regard to the conditioning circumstances, economic and political; critical thought being regarded purely as a force proceeding through its own proclivities. Saisset is at very much the same point of view. Needless to say, valuable work may be done up to a certain point on this method, which is seen in full play in Hegel; and high praise is due to the learned and thoughtful treatise of R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (2 vols. 1850), where it is partially but ably supplemented by the method of inductive science. That method, again, is freshly and forcibly applied to a restricted problem in W. A. Schmidt’s Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums (1847).

Later come the Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus (1853–62) and Geschichte des Rationalismus (1865) of the theologian Tholuck. Of these the latter is unfinished, coming down only to the middle of the eighteenth century; while the former does not exactly fulfil its title, being composed of a volume (2 Abth. 1853, 1854) on Das akademische Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, and of one on Das kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts (2 Abth. 1861, 1862), both being restricted to German developments. They thus give much matter extraneous to the subject, and are not exhaustive as to rationalism even in Germany. Hagenbach’s Die Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (2 Th. 1848, 1849), a series of lectures, translated in English, abridged, under the title German Rationalism in its Rise, Progress, and Decline (1865), conforms fairly to the latter title, save as regards the last clause.

Of much greater scholarly merit is the Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, vom Ende des achten Jahrhunderts bis zum Anfange des vierzehnten, by Hermann Reuter (1875, 1877). This is at once learned, judicious, and impartial. Its definition of “Aufklärung” is substantially in agreement with the working definition of Freethought given above.

Among other surveys of periods of innovating thought, as distinguished from histories of ecclesiastical heresy, or histories of “religious” or theological thought which only incidentally deal with heterodox opinion, should be noted the careful Geschichte des englischen Deismus of G. F. Lechler (1841); the slighter sketch of E. Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le Christianisme (1882); the somewhat diffuse work of Cesare Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia (3 tom. 1865–67); the very intelligent study of Felice Tocco, L’Eresia nel medio evo (1884); Schmidt’s Histoire des Cathares (2 tom. 1849); Chr. U. Hahn’s learned Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter (3 Bde. 1845–50); and the valuable research of F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie siècle (1896). A similar scholarly research for the eighteenth century in France is still lacking, and the many monographs on the more famous freethinkers leave a good deal of literary history in obscurity. Such a research has been very painstakingly made for England in the late Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1881), which, however, ignores scientific thought. One of the best monographs of the kind is La Critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs, des origines au temps de Plutarque, by Professor Paul Decharme (1904), a survey at once scholarly and attractive. The brilliant treatise of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (1912), sketches on more speculative lines the beginnings of Greek rationalism in Ionia. The Geschichte des Monismus im Altertum of Prof. Dr. A. Drews (1913) is a wide survey, of great synthetic value.

Contributions to the general history of freethought, further, have been made in the works of J. W. Draper (A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 2 vols, 1861, many reprints; and History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, 1873, many reprints), both full of suggestion and stimulus, but requiring thorough revision as to detail; in the famous Introduction to the History of Civilization in England of H. T. Buckle (2 vols. 1857–61; new ed. in 1 vol. with annotations by the present writer, 1904); in the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe of W. E. H. Lecky (2 vols. 1865; R. P. A. rep. 1910), who was of Buckle’s school, but fell below him in point of coherence; in the comprehensive History of the Warfare of Science with Theology of Professor Andrew D. White (2 vols. 1896—a great expansion of his earlier essay, The Warfare of Science, 2nd ed. 1877); and in the essay of Mr. E. S. P. Haynes, Religious Persecution: A Study in Political Psychology (1904; R. P. A. rep. 1906), as well as in many histories of philosophy and of sciences.

The so-called History of Rationalism of the American Bishop J. F. Hurst, first published in 1865, and “revised” in 1901, is in the main a work of odium theologicum, dealing chiefly with the evolution of theology and criticism in Germany since the Reformation. Even to that purpose it is very inadequate. Its preface alleges that “happily the vital body of evangelical truth has received only comparatively weak and timorous attacks from the more modern representatives of the rank and rabid rationalism which reached its climax near the close of the eighteenth, and has had a continuous decline through the nineteenth, century.” It urges, however, as a reason for defensive activity, the consideration that “the work of Satan is never planless”; and further pronounces that the work of rationalism “must determine its character. This work has been most injurious to the faith and life of the Church, and its deeds must therefore be its condemnation” (Introd. p. 3). Thus the latest approximation to a history of theological rationalism by a clerical writer is the most negligible.

§ 3. The Psychology of Freethinking

It is another way of stating the same fact to point out the fallacy of the familiar assumption that freethinking represents a bias to “negation.” In the nature of the case, the believer has to do at least as much negation as his opponents; and if again we scan history in this connection, we shall see cause to conclude that the temperamental tendency to negation—which is a form of variation like another—is abundantly common on the side of religious conservatism. Nowhere is there more habitual opposition to new ideas as such. At best the believer, so-called, rejects a given proposition or suggestion because it clashes with something he already believes. The new proposition, however, has often been reached by way not of preliminary negation of the belief in question, but of constructive explanation, undertaken to bring observed facts into theoretic harmony. Thus the innovator has only contingently put aside the old belief because it clashes with something he believes in a more vital way; and he has done this with circumspection, whereas his opponent too often repels him without a second thought. The phenomena of the rise of the Copernican astronomy, modern geology, and modern biology, all bear out this generalization.

Nor is the charge of negativeness any more generally valid against such freethinking as directly assails current doctrines. There may be, of course, negative-minded people on that side as on the other; and such may fortuitously do something to promote freethought, or may damage it in their neighbourhood by their atmosphere. But everything goes to show that freethinking normally proceeds by way of intellectual construction—that is, by way of effort to harmonize one position with another; to modify a special dogma to the general run of one’s thinking. Rationalism stands not for “skepticism” in the strict philosophic sense, but for a critical effort to reach certainties. The attitude of pure skepticism on a wide scale is really very rare—much rarer even than the philosophic effort. So far from freethinkers being given to “destroying without building up,” they are, as a rule, unable to destroy a dogma either for themselves or for others without setting a constructive belief in its place—a form of explanation, that is; such being much more truly a process of construction than would be the imposition of a new scheme of dogma. In point of fact, they are often accused, and by the same critics, of an undue tendency to speculative construction; and the early atheists of Greece and of the modern period did so err. But that is only a proof the more that their freethinking was not a matter of arbitrary volition or an undue negativeness.

The only explanation which ostensibly countervails this is the old one above glanced at—that the unbeliever finds the given doctrine troublesome as a restraint, and so determines to reject it. It is to be feared that this view has survived Mr. A. S. Farrar. Yet it is very clear that no man need throw aside any faith, and least of all Christianity, on the ground of its hampering his conduct. To say nothing of the fact that in every age, under every religion, at every stage of culture from that of the savage to that of the supersubtle decadent or mystic, men have practised every kind of misconduct without abandoning their supernatural credences—there is the special fact that the whole Christian system rests on the doctrine of forgiveness of sins to the believer. The theory of “wilful” disbelief on the part of the reprobate is thus entirely unplausible. Such disbelief in the terms of the case would be uneasy, as involving an element of incertitude; and his fear of retribution could never be laid. On the other hand, he has but inwardly to avow himself a sinner and a believer, and he has the assurance that repentance at the last moment will outweigh all his sins.

On the other hand, it need not be disputed that unbelief has been often enough associated with some species of libertinism to give a passing colour for the pretence of causal connection. The fact, however, leads us to a less superficial explanation, worth keeping in view here. Freethinking being taken to be normally a “variation” of intellectual type in the direction of a critical demand for consistency and credibility in beliefs, its social assertion will be a matter on the one side of force of character or degree of recklessness, and on the other hand of force of circumstances. The intellectual potentiality and the propagandist purpose will be variously developed in different men and in different surroundings. If we ask ourselves how, in general, the critical tendency is to arise or to come into play, we are almost compelled to suppose a special stimulus as well as a special faculty. Critical doubt is made possible, broadly speaking, by the accumulation of ideas or habits of certain kinds which insensibly undo a previous state of homogeneity of thought. For instance, a community subsiding into peace and order from a state of warfare and plunder will at length find the ethic of its daily life at variance with the conserved ethic of its early religion of human sacrifice and special family or tribal sanctions; or a community which has accumulated a certain amount of accurate knowledge of astronomy will gradually find such knowledge irreconcilable with its primitive cosmology. A specially gifted person will anticipate the general movement of thought; but even for him some standing-ground must be supposed; and for the majority the advance in moral practice or scientific knowledge is the condition of any effective freethinking.

Between top and bottom, however, there are all grades of vivacity, earnestness, and courage; and on the side of the normal resistance there are all varieties of political and economic circumstance. It follows, then, that the avowed freethinker may be so in virtue either of special courage or of antecedent circumstances which make the attitude on his part less courageous. And it may even be granted to the quietist that the courage is at times that of ill-balanced judgment or heady temperament; just as it may be conceded to the conservative that it is at times that which goes with or follows on disregard of wise ways of life. It is well that the full force of this position be realized at the outset. When we find, as we shall, some historic freethinkers displaying either extreme imprudence or personal indiscipline, we shall be prepared, in terms of this preliminary questioning, to realize anew that humanity has owed a great deal to some of its “unbalanced” types; and that, though discipline is nearly the last word of wisdom, indiscipline may at times be the morbid accompaniment or excess of a certain openness of view and spontaneity of action which are more favourable to moral and intellectual advance than a cold prudence or a safe insusceptibility.

But cold or calm prudence in turn is not a vice; and it is hardly possible to doubt that there have been in all ages varying numbers of unbelievers who shrugged their shoulders over the follies of faith, and declined to tilt against the windmills of fanaticism. There is much reason for surmising that Shakespeare was a case in point. It is not to be supposed, then, because some freethinkers who came out into the open were unbalanced types, that their psychology is the psychology of freethought, any more than that of General Gordon or Francis of Assisi is to be reckoned typical on the side of belief. There must have been myriads of quiet unbelievers, rational all round, whose unbelief was a strictly intellectual process, undisturbed by temperament. In our own day such types abound, and it is rather in them than in the abnormal types of past freethought—the Brunos and the Voltaires—that the average psychology of freethought is to be looked for and understood.

As for the case of the man who, already at odds with his fellows in the matter of his conduct, may in some phases of society feel it the easier to brave them in the matter of his avowed creed, we have already seen that even this does not convict him of intellectual dishonesty. And were such cases relatively as numerous as they are scarce—were the debauched deists even commoner than the vinous Steeles and Fieldings—the use of the fact as an argument would still be an oblique course on the side of a religion which claims to have found its first and readiest hearing among publicans and sinners. For the rest, the harm done in the world’s history by unbalanced freethinkers is as dust in the balance against the immeasurable evil deliberately wrought on serious religious motives, to say nothing of the constant deviation of the mass of believers from their own professed code.

It may, finally, help a religious reader to a judicial view of the phenomenon of freethought if he is reminded that every step forward in the alleged historic evolution of his own creed would depend, in the case put, on the existence of persons capable of rejecting a current and prevailing code in favour of one either denounced as impious or marked off by circumstances as dangerous. The Israelites in Egypt, the prophets and their supporters, the Gospel Jesus and his adherents, all ostensibly stand in some degree for positions of “negation,” of hardy innovation, of disregard to things and persons popularly venerated; wherefore Collins, in the Discourse above mentioned, smilingly claimed at least the prophets as great freethinkers. On that head it may suffice to say that some of the temperamental qualifications would probably be very much the same for those who of old brought about religious innovation in terms of supernatural beliefs, and for those who in later times innovate by way of minimizing or repudiating such beliefs, though the intellectual qualifications might be different. Bruno and Dolet and Vanini and Voltaire, faulty men all four, could at least be more readily conceived as prophets in early Jewry, or reformers under Herod, than as Pharisees, or even Sadducees, under either regimen.

Be that as it may, however, the issues between freethought and creed are ultimately to be settled only in respect of their argumentative bases, as appreciable by men in society at any given time. It is with the notion of making the process of judicial appreciation a little easier, by historically exhibiting the varying conditions under which it has been undertaken in the past, that these pages are written.