The Contemporary Review, January 1883: Vol 43, No. 1Various
Science
The Contemporary Review, January 1883: Vol 43, No. 1
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
it challenges the investigation of the psychologist. The practical
result of these inquiries must be allowed to be, to a large extent,
negative. In many quarters, where thirty or forty years ago we should
certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received
religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less
far-reaching, about "revealed religion" altogether, and, at the best,
"faint possible Theism," in the place of old-fashioned orthodoxy. And
earnest men, content to bear as best they may their own burden of doubt
and disappointment, do not dissemble to themselves that the immediate
outlook is dark and discouraging. Like the French monarch they discern
the omens of the deluge to come after them; a vast shipwreck of all
faith, and all virtue, of conscience, of God; brute force, embodied in
an omnipotent State, the one ark likely to escape submersion in the
pitiless waters. A world from which the high sanctions of religion,
hitherto the binding principle of society, are relegated to the domain
of old wives' fables; a march through life with its brief dream of
pleasure and long reality of thought to lie deeper than _all_ systems.
Those current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the
philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. Mind and
matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honour and interest,
virtue and vice--all these words, which seemed once to express
elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which,
thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus
not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and
popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it appears,
instead of being the sterling product of plain experience, is the
overflow of an immature philosophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled
speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific method"
(p. 8). And then, moreover, there is that great political movement which
has so largely and directly affected the course of events and the
organization of society on the Continent of Europe, and which in less
measure, and with more covert operation, has notably modified our own
ways of thinking and acting in this country. Now the Revolution in its
ultimate or Jacobin phase, is the very manifestation, in the public
order, of the tendency which in the intellectual calls itself
"scientific." It bitterly and contemptuously rejects the belief in the
supernatural hitherto accepted in Europe. It wages implacable war upon
the ancient theology of the world. "It delights in declaring itself
atheistic"[28] (p. 37). It has "a quarrel with theology as a doctrine.
'Theology,' it says, even if not exactly opposed to social improvement,
is a superstition, and as such allied to ignorance and conservatism.
Granting that its precepts are good, it enforces them by legends and
fictitious stories which can only influence the uneducated, and
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