Liberty in the Nineteenth CenturyHolland, Frederic May
Philosophy
Liberty in the Nineteenth Century
Holland, Frederic May
Liberty; Social history
Voltaire's chief grievance was the intolerance of Christianity. Paine
and Bradlaugh complained that there was much immorality in the Old
Testament. The most damaging of recent attacks have been made in the
name of science. Genesis and geology had been found irreconcilable
before the appearance of Darwinism; but the new system widened the
breach. The most serious offence to the theologian, however, was that
he could not longer point without danger of contradiction to beneficial
peculiarities in the structure of plants and animals, as marks of the
divine hand. The old argument about design was met by a demonstration
that such peculiarities were apt to arise spontaneously, and become
permanent under the pressure of the struggle for existence. The
theologian has had to retreat to the position that Darwinism has not
accounted for the soul, the intellect, and especially the intuitions.
III. Whether Darwin succeeded or not in this part of his work is not so
important as the fact that, several years before he announced his great
discovery, an elaborate account of the process by which the powers of
thought and feeling have been developed gradually out of the lowest
forms of consciousness was given by Herbert Spencer. The first edition
of his _Principles of Psychology_, published in 1855, carried the
explanation so far as to show the real origin and value of the
intuitions. Their importance had been almost ignored by thinkers who
relied entirely on individual experience, and greatly overrated by the
Transcendentalists; but neither set of philosophers could explain
these mysterious ideas. The infallibility of conscience is not to be
reconciled with such facts as that Paul thought it his duty to persecute
the Christians, or that Garrison, Sumner, John Brown, and Stonewall
Jackson were among the most conscientious men of the century. The
ancient Greeks agreed in recognising justice, but not benevolence, among
the cardinal virtues; precisely the opposite error was made by Kant
and Miss Cobbe; and a tabular view of all the lists of fundamental
intuitions which have been made out by noted metaphysicians might
be mistaken for a relic from the Tower of Babel. Emerson's religious
instincts were not so much impressed as Parker's with the personality of
God and immortality; but the difference seems almost insignificant when
we remember what ideas of theology arose spontaneously in New Zealand.
How widely the intuition of beauty varies may be judged from the
inability of aesthetic Chinamen to admire the white teeth and rosy
cheeks of an English belle. Intuition is plainly not an infallible
oracle; but is it merely a misleading prejudice?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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