CHAPTER VIII

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF CIVILIZATION IN THE AGE OF RATIONALISM

The Mentality and the Achievements of the Ethical Belief in Progress

THANKS to the fully worked out optimistic-ethical world-view with which the belief in progress surrounds itself in the course of the eighteenth century, these generations prove capable of thinking out the ideals of civilization and advancing towards their realization. The fact that all attempts to give ethics a foundation in reason have turned out on the whole unsatisfactory does not move them, if indeed they give the point any consideration at all. By the conviction that they have formed a rational conception of the world which gives it an optimistic-ethical meaning, they are carried on over all the inner problems of ethics. The alliance which belief-in-progress and ethics have in the course of modern times contracted with one another is sealed by means of their world-view, and now they set to work together. Rational ideals are to be realized.

The ethical and the optimistic come into power, therefore, in the world-view of the eighteenth century, although they have not yet received any real foundation. Scepticism and materialism range around the fortress like hordes of unconquered enemies, though at first without being dangerous; as a rule they have themselves absorbed no small amount of belief-in-progress and of ethical enthusiasm. Voltaire is an example of the sceptic who stands under the restraint exercised by the prevalent optimistic and ethical thought.

So far as its elements are concerned the world-view of rationalism hides itself under the optimistic-ethical monism [pg 091] of Kungtse (Confucius) and the Later Stoics, but the enthusiasm which supports it is incomparably stronger than any felt by them. The circumstances, too, amid which it appears are far more favourable, and so it becomes an elemental power throughout a whole people.

In a world-view which springs from a noble faith, but is remarkable also for the extent of its knowledge, the men of the eighteenth century begin to think out ideals of civilization and to realise them in such measure that the greatest epoch in the history of human civilization now dawns.

The great feature of the mentality of this belief in progress which is ever showing itself in works is its magnificent want of respect for all existing things, whether belonging to the past or the present. These are to it in all their various forms the imperfect, which is destined to be replaced by a perfect.

The eighteenth century is thoroughly unhistoric. In what is good as in what is bad it cuts itself loose from whatever was or is, and is confident of being able to put in its place something that is more valuable, because more ethical or more in accordance with reason. In this conviction the age feels itself so creative that it has no understanding for creations of original genius. Gothic buildings, early painting, J. S. Bach’s music, and the poetry of earlier ages, are felt by these generations as art which was produced at a time when taste had not yet been purified. Activity which follows rules in accordance with right reason will, they think, introduce a new art which will be superior in every respect to any that has preceded it. Full of this self-confidence, a mediocre musician like Zelter in Berlin works over the scores of Bach’s Cantatas. Full of this self-confidence, honourable poetasters re-write the texts of the wonderful old German chorales and replace the originals in the hymn books with their own wretched productions.

That they so naïvely push forward right into the sphere [pg 092] of art the boundaries of the creative faculties with which nature endowed them is a mistake made by these men for which they have often been laughed at. But mockery cannot do them much harm. In those departments of life in which the important matter is the shaping of things according to ideals given by reason—and work done upon such things means for the establishment of civilization very much more than any work spent in the promotion of art—they are as creative as any generation ever has been, and as scarcely any will be in the future. They are frightened by nothing which has to be undertaken in this sphere, and in every department they make the most astonishing advance.

They venture also to deal with religion. That religion should be split up into various antagonistic confessional bodies is to them an offence against reasonable reflexion. Only a relative, not any absolute authority, they maintain, can be allowed to the belief which is handed down in historical formulas. Finding expression in so many and such varied forms it can, of course, be nothing but a more or less imperfect embodiment of the ethical religion taught by reason, which must be equally intelligible to all men. The right thing is, therefore, to strive after the religion of reason, and to accept as true only such parts of the various confessions as are in harmony with it.

The churches, naturally, put themselves on the defensive against this spirit, but against the strong general convictions of the age they are unable in the long run to hold out. Protestantism succumbs first, because the elements already within it allow such considerations to find easy access. It carries within itself impulses to rationalism, inherited from Humanism, from Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) and from the Italians Lælius (1525-1562) and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), and these impulses, hitherto suppressed, now find themselves set free._(_30_)_

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Catholicism shows itself more capable of resistance. Nothing in its past makes it inclined to enlist under the banner of the spirit of the age: its strong organization serves as a protection against this. Yet it, too, has to yield considerably, and to allow its doctrines to pass, so far as may be, for a symbolic expression of the religion of reason.

While utilitarian ethics are on the whole the product of the English spirit, the whole of Europe takes part in the expounding of the religion of reason. Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648), John Toland (1669-1722), Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Matthew Tindal (1655-1733), David Hume (1711-1776), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Voltaire (1694-1778), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Christian Wolff (1679-1754), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), and a host of others, whether standing nearer to or further from the Church, and whether or not going further than others in systematic criticism, all bring stones for the erection of the great building in which the piety of illuminated mankind is to live._(_31_)_ The researches in the history of religion made by the Germans, like Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), and Johann August Ernesti (1707-1781), provide scientific data which throw light upon the division between eternal truths and the time-conditioned convictions of religion.

The creed of the religion of reason is simply the optimistic-ethical world-view reproduced in a Christian phraseology, that is in one preserving within it the Christian theism, and the belief in immortality. An all-wise and wholly benevolent Creator has produced the world, and he upholds it in [pg 094] corresponding fashion. Men are endowed with free will, and discover in their reason and their heart the moral law which is meant to lead individuals and mankind to perfection, and to accomplish in the world God’s highest purposes. Every man has within him an indestructible soul, which feels his moral life as the highest happiness, and after death enters a state of a pure, spiritual existence.

This belief in God, in virtue, and in immortality was held to have been taught in its purest form in previous ages in the teaching of Jesus, but it was acknowledged that elements of the same beliefs were to be found in all the higher religions._(_32_)_

If the eighteenth century attained to an optimistic-ethical world-view which preached itself so confidently and was so widely accepted, the reason is that it was able to re-interpret Christianity—which had by that time got rid of the world- and life-denial that was originally inherent in it—in that sense. Jesus was to it a teacher who even in his own age and then through all the intervening centuries had been misunderstood, and was now first rightly accepted as a revealer of the religion of reason. Let anyone read a rationalistic Life of Jesus, such as those of Franz Volkmar Reinhard (1753-1812) or Karl Heinrich Venturini (1768-1849)._(_33_)_ They hold Jesus up to admiration as the champion of enlightenment and of blessings for the common people. This transformation of the historical picture is made easier for them by the fact that the chief component element of the Gospel narrative is ethical teaching, while the late-Jewish pessimistic world-view which it presupposes is hardly more than hinted at.

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As an immediate result of the wiping out of confessional differences the middle of the eighteenth century sees the beginning of a period of tolerance in place of the persecution of all rejecters of orthodoxy which had been common till then. The last serious act of confessional intolerance was expulsion of all evangelicals from the Salzburg district by the Archbishop of that town, Count von Firmian, in the years 1731 and 1732.

About the middle of the century there begins also the movement of opposition to the Jesuits, who were recognized as the enemies of tolerance, and this led to the suppression of the order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV._(_34_)_

But the religion of reason fought superstition as well as intolerance. In 1704 the philosopher and jurist of Halle, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), published his essays condemning trial for witchcraft,_(_35_)_ and about the middle of the century the law courts in most of the States of Europe refused to concern themselves any longer with the crime of magic. The last death sentence on a witch was passed in 1782 at Glarus, in Switzerland.

About the end of the century it became good form to detest anything which had even a remote connexion with superstitious convictions.

Again, the will-to-progress of the eighteenth century deals with nationalist prejudices in the same way as it deals with religious ones. Above and beyond individual nations it points to mankind as the great object towards which ideals are to be directed. Educated people accustom themselves to see in the State not so much an organ of national feeling as a mere organization for legal and economic purposes. Cabinets may carry on war with each other, but in the thought of the common people there grows up a recognition of the brotherhood of nations.

In the sphere of law, too, the will-to-progress acquires [pg 096] strength. The ideas of Hugo Grotius get accepted. The law of reason is exalted in the convictions of the men of the eighteenth century to a position above all traditional maxims of jurisprudence. It alone is allowed to have permanent authority, and legal decisions have to be in harmony with it. Fundamental principles of law, but principles equally indisputable everywhere, have to be deduced from human nature. To protect these and to ensure to every human being a human value with an inviolable measure of freedom of which he can never be robbed, is the first task of the State. The proclamation of “the Rights of Man” by the States of North America, and the French Revolution, do no more than give recognition and sanction to what, in the convictions of the time, had already been won.

The first State in which torture was abolished was Prussia, and this was secured by an administrative order of Frederick the Great’s in 1740. In France a certain amount of torture was practised down to the Revolution— and somewhat later, for the thumb-screw was used under the Directory during the examination which the royalist conspirators had to undergo._(_36_)_

Side by side with the fight against absence of law and the existence of inhuman laws, go efforts to adapt law to circumstances. Bentham raises his voice against laws which tolerate usury, against senseless customs duties, and against inhuman methods of colonization.

There dawns an age in which the purposive and the moral are the ruling authorities. Officialdom acquires during these generations familiarity with the notions of duty and honour, which later become natural to it. Far-reaching beneficial reforms are introduced into administration without any outcry.

The education of mankind in citizenship makes splendid progress. The general good becomes the criterion of [pg 097] excellence both for the commands of rulers and the obedience of their subjects, while at the same time a beginning is made of securing that everyone shall be educated in a manner corresponding to his human dignity and the needs of his personal welfare. The war against ignorance is begun.

The way is prepared, too, for a more rational method of living. Houses are built so as to be more comfortable, and the land is better cultivated. Even the pulpit uses its influence to promote improvements of this kind. The theory that reason has been given to man to be used consistently and in every department of life plays at this time an important and beneficent part in the preaching of the Gospel, even if the way in which this is done often makes queer demands on our belief. Sermons, for example, often treated incidentally of the best methods of manuring, irrigating, and draining the fields. That Jenner’s discovery of vaccination was so readily adopted in many districts was due to the enlightenment which was spread abroad by the clergy.

Characteristic of the age of rationalism are the private societies formed to promote the moral and utilitarian progress of mankind. In 1717 members of the higher ranks of society in London reorganize as “The Order of Freemasons” the brotherhood which in earlier times had been built up by the union in a single body of the members of the mediæval building-lodges, but was now in a state of decay, and to this new organization was assigned the duty of labouring to build up a new humanity. About the middle of the century this order had spread all over Europe, and reached the zenith of its success. Princes, officials, and intellectuals alike joined it in great numbers, and were inspired by it to the achievement of a huge amount of reform.

Similar aims were pursued by the “Order of the Illuminate” (or enlightened) which was founded in Bavaria in 1776, but was suppressed in 1784 by the reactionary Bavarian Government, which was still under the influence [pg 098] of the Jesuits. It is said to have been the intellectual counterpart of the Jesuit order, on the model of whose organization it was formed.

That private societies aiming at the rational and moral perfecting of mankind should work effectively seemed to the men of the eighteenth century so much a matter of course that they assumed them to have existed in earlier times. In a series of rationalist descriptions of the life of Jesus it is assumed that the sect of the Essenes, near the Dead Sea, of whom we learn from Josephus, the Jewish writer of the first century A.D., was such an order, and that it was in touch with similar brotherhoods in Egypt and India. Jesus, it is said, was trained by them, and then helped by them to carry through the _rôle_ of the Messiah, in order that with the authority given by a holy yet popular personality he might work to spread true illumination. The famous _Life of Jesus_ by Karl Venturini carries this assumption out in complete detail. According to him, the miracles of Jesus were staged by brothers of this secret association.

Be that as it may, the fact that the will-to-progress of the eighteenth century created for itself in these private societies organizations which spread throughout Europe, contributed much to its ability to influence the age.

It must be admitted indeed that the men of the rationalistic period were smaller than their achievements. True, they all possessed personality, but it did not reach very deep. It was produced by the enthusiasm which they found in the mentality of the time and which they shared with all their contemporaries. The individual imbibed personality through the taking over of a ready-made world-view, which gave him firm standing-ground together with ideals. His own contribution was really nothing more than the capacity for enthusiasm. That is why the men of this age are so remarkably like one another. They all graze side by side in the same nourishing pasture land.

Nevertheless, the ideas of the purposive and the ethical [pg 099] have never exercised so much influence over reality as they did among these men of shallow optimism and sensitive morale. No book has been written yet which fully describes their achievements, doing justice to their origin, their character, their number, and their significance. We can then only really comprehend what they accomplished when we recognize the tragic fact that the most valuable part of it is lost to us, while we do not feel in ourselves any ability to reproduce it. They were masters of the facts of life to an extent which we are to-day quite unable to realize.

Only a world-view which accomplishes all that rationalism did has a right to condemn rationalism. The greatness of that philosophy is that its hands are blistered.

Obstacles to the reform movement. The French Revolution

The great work of reform is never completed, partly because external circumstances arise which check it, but also because the world-view of rationalism becomes convulsed from within. In its confidence in the enlightening power of all that is in accordance with reason the will-to-progress was inclined to underestimate the resisting power of the traditional, and to wish to carry through reforms where minds had not been sufficiently prepared for their reception. On these unsuccessful advances followed reaction which permanently injured the work. This was the case in south-eastern Europe. Joseph II. of Austria, who was emperor from 1764 to 1790, is the type of the reforming prince. He discontinued the use of torture, opposed the infliction of the death penalty, abolished serfdom, gave the Jews full civic rights, introduced a new method of legislation and a new system of legal administration, took away all class privileges, contended for the equality of all before the law, protected the oppressed, founded schools and hospitals, guaranteed the freedom of the Press and freedom of domicile, abolished all State monopolies, and promoted the development of agriculture and industry.

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But he is a ruler in the wrong place. He decrees these reforms and then similar shocks, one after another, in countries which, being in spiritual things still wholly under the dominion of the Catholic Church of that time, are not prepared for them, and moreover in other things as well display a specially backward attitude, because they belong to the zone in which the Europe of that day passed over into Asia. The Emperor is therefore unable to count upon either any willingness to make sacrifices in the classes which are to give up their privileges, or upon any understanding of his ideas in the common people. In his attempts to organize the monarchy as a unity and in an effective way for practical purposes, he comes into conflict with the nationalities themselves of which it is composed. The reduction in the number of the religious houses, which he undertakes out of economic considerations, with the introduction of the freedom of the Press and of a system of State education, bring on him the hostility of the Church. Finally, because he is a ruler in the wrong place, this noble reforming emperor dies of a broken heart, while Europe, because the will-to-progress in Austria can accomplish nothing even at the time of its greatest strength, owing to unfavourable circumstances, is condemned to a period of the deepest misery over the problems of that huge State, which have in this way been rendered insoluble, and over the portion of Asia beyond it along the southern Danube.

In France, too, the wrong men are in control. There the spread of the new ideas prepares the way splendidly for reform, but the reforms are not undertaken, because its rulers cannot understand the signs of the times, and allow the State to collapse in ruin. Consequently the reform movement has to take the road of violence, whereby it slips away from the guidance of the educated, and falls into the hands of the mob, from which it is taken by the powerful genius of Napoleon. Native of an island in which the Europe of that day passed over into Africa, and lacking all [pg 101] deeper education, he is uninfluenced by the valuable convictions of his time. Guided solely by the force of his own personality, he decides what is to happen in Europe, and hurls it into wars through which it sinks into misery. Thus from East and from West alike disaster overtakes the work of the will-to-progress.

The French Revolution is a snowstorm falling upon trees in blossom. A transformation which promises great things is in progress, but everywhere softly and slowly. Extraordinarily valuable results are being prepared in the thoughts of men. Provided that circumstances remain even tolerably near the normal, there stands before humanity in Europe an extraordinarily desirable development. But in place of that there sets in a chaotic period of history in which the will-to-progress has to cease more or less completely from its work, and becomes a bewildered spectator. The first stage of the advance of reforming thought, thought bent with full consciousness of its aims on securing the practical and the ethical, comes to a complete stop.

An experience for which it was in no wise prepared now falls to the lot of the will-to-progress. Up to this time it had always been a more or less obsolescent reality with which it had had to come to terms. In the French Revolution, however, and in the following period, it becomes familiar with a reality which has at its disposal elemental forces. Up to this time the only factor to be reckoned with had been the force of originality exercised by rational thought. In Napoleon it has to learn to recognize as power a personality with creative genius of its own.

By his reorganization of France, a magnificent work but concerned only with the technical matters of administration, Napoleon creates a new State. His work, too, has had the way prepared for it by the labour of rationalism, so far as this upset the equilibrium of the old and made current the idea of something new but necessary. But the new State which now comes into existence is not the State [pg 102] which is ethical and in harmony with reason, but merely the State which works well. Its achievements compel our admiration. In the nursery garden which the will-to-progress was laying out in order to plant it with noble flowers an individual ploughs for himself a piece of ordinary arable land which at once produces an excellent crop. With the elemental creative forces of reality revealing their power in so imposing a fashion, the noble but unoriginal spirit of the age, with all its higher aims, finds itself in a state of instability from which it never completely recovers. Hegel, who saw Napoleon ride past after the Battle of Jena, tells us that he then saw the World-spirit on horseback. In these words we can hear all the confused spiritual experience of that time expressing itself.

The undermining of the rationalistic world-view

There now sets in a development which works against the spirit of the times, and the hitherto unopposed authority of the rational ideal is undermined. Forces in reality which are not guided by it, obtain recognition.

While the will-to-progress remains an amazed spectator of events, respect for what is historical recovers itself, though it seemed to have been banished for ever. In religion, in art, and in law, men begin, though at first only quite shyly, to look again with other eyes on the traditional. It is no longer reckoned as merely something which is to be replaced, but men venture to admit to themselves that it conceals within itself original values. The forces of reality, which had been taken by surprise, now begin everywhere to act on the defensive, and a guerilla warfare develops against the will-to-progress.

The various religious bodies revoke the abdications which they had made before the religion of reason. The law which has grown up in the course of time begins to set itself in opposition to the law laid down by reason. In the atmosphere of passion produced by the Napoleonic wars, [pg 103] national thought takes on a new character, directing on itself, and beginning to absorb, the universal enthusiasm for ideals. The struggles carried on no longer by chancelleries but by whole nations are fatal to the ideals of cosmopolitanism and national brotherhood, and by this awakening of national thought a whole series of political problems affecting the whole of Europe are rendered insoluble. Just as the organization of Austria as a unified modern State has now become impossible, so also has the civilizing of Russia, and the destiny of Europe, viz. to be shipwrecked over these territories which are in it but not of it, begins to reveal itself.

At the close of the Napoleonic era the whole of Europe is in a condition of misery. Far-seeing ideas of reform can be neither thought out nor worked out; only extemporized palliative measures suit the time. The will-to-progress is therefore unable to recover its former vigour.

It is fatally affected, too, by the fact that everybody with any capacity for independent thought feels himself attracted by this new valuation of things and facts, and thereby drawn on to irritation at the one-sided, doctrinaire character of the rationalist way of looking at life.

Nevertheless, the position of the will-to-progress is far from being a critical one. The first attacks are made by Romanticism and the feeling for reality, but are mere outpost-skirmishes, and for a long time yet the will-to-progress remains master of the field. Bentham remains still the great authority. Alexander II. of Russia, Tsar from 1801 to 1825, instructs the legislative commission which he sets up to obtain on all doubtful points the opinion of the great Englishman. Madame de Staël expresses the opinion that the fateful period she has lived through will one day be called by posterity not the Napoleonic age but the Benthamite._(_37_)_

The noblest men of the period still live in the unshaken [pg 104] conviction that nothing can delay the speedy and conclusive victory of the purposive and moral. The philosophically minded mathematician and astronomer, the Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743-1794), though put by the Jacobins upon the list of the proscribed, writes, while living in concealment in Paris in a dismal room in the Rue des Fossoyeurs, his _Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit_._(_38_)_ Then, having been betrayed, he wanders about the Clamart quarries, is recognized by the labourers, in spite of his disguise, as an aristocrat, and while confined in the prison of Bourg la Reine, puts an end to his life by poison. The document in which he gave his exposition of the ethical belief in progress concludes with a forward glance at the time, now soon to appear, when reason, having attained a position of permanent sovereignty, will put every human being in possession of the rights which belong to man as man, and will establish purposive and ethical relations in every department of life.

There is one thing, it must be admitted, which Condorcet and those who share his views overlook. Their belief that the final result will be good might be considered justifiable if the will-to-progress had been endangered only through unfavourable outward circumstances, the revival, that is, of the higher estimation of reality, and the romantic idealizing of the past. But it is threatened far more seriously by something else than it is by them. The assurance displayed by rationalism rests on the fact that it regards the optimistic-ethical world-view as something proved to be correct. But it is not that. It rests like the world-views of Confucius and the Later Stoics on a naïve interpretation of the world. All deeper thought, therefore, even if it is not directed against rationalism, or even if it aims at strengthening its position, must in the long run have a damaging effect upon it. Hence Kant and Spinoza mean doom to it. Kant undermines it by his attempt to [pg 105] provide a deeper foundation for the essence of the ethical. Spinoza, the thinker of the seventeenth century, brings it to confusion when his nature-philosophy begins, a hundred years after his death, to occupy people’s attention.

It is about the beginning of the new century, the nineteenth, just when the pressure exerted by material and spiritual circumstances alike begins to make itself felt, that the optimistic-ethical world-view begins to suspect the existence of the serious problems which are cropping up within it.

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