The Superstitions of the Sceptic

I PROPOSE to start my rambling discourse by taking whatever has lately been said by Mr. Bernard Shaw and say the opposite. You will forgive me therefore if in this very disconnected discourse the starting point, and in a sense the text, is found in the recent work of my old friend and enemy. I suppose everybody here has heard of, and most people have probably either read or seen, the very interesting play called St. Joan; and I am not going to take up the function of the hundreds of young dramatic critics that I see before me by attempting to deal with it as a play, because my concern with it is only in one particular; but I will say by way of indicating my own general view of the subject that when I had read and seen it I wrote to my friend Bernard Shaw to ask him when his play on the subject of Joanna Southcott was coming out. That is a taunt which may appear to you somewhat cryptic and obscure, but it is really I think very relevant. You know that all sorts of things have been said about St. Joan of Arc at various periods. Shakespeare unfortunately represented her as a repulsive female adventurer; Voltaire, as something indescribable; Lord Byron said she was a fanatical strumpet; and Bernard Shaw has said that she was a Protestant progressive, and the founder as it were of the modern world. You will notice that it

I is only that last insult which is represented as having made her turn in her grave and rise indignant from the dead. None of the other descriptions of St. Joan, as far as I know, ever concerned themselves with the ghost of St. Joan returning to the earth—it required a further and terrible accusation to stir those sacred bones even in imagination; and the suggestion that she was responsible for the modern world was too much for anybody. But there is one particular passage in that play which will serve very well as a starting point for the little that I want to suggest this evening, and that is the fine passage of that very fair argument on the subject of persecution, in which the inquisitor, if I remember right, says, very truly as I think, that errors grow with an astonishing rapidity and with a bizarre variety that nobody could expect, and that some movement that began with an apparently well-meaning and simple man suggesting certain apparently more or less harmless things, will rapidly end with people committing some crime like infanticide, or insisting on going about without clothes. Now the only reason I am not going to discuss all the very interesting questions that are raised on that point in the argument is that it seems to me—and that is the point of my reference to Joanna Southcott—it seems to me that Bernard Shaw proves too much, I mean he proves too much for his own purpose, because he succeeds, I think, in convincing a fair and reasonable reader that if it was true that Joan of Arc stood for individualism in religion, and the right of each person to oppose his voice or his voices to the general sense of Christendom, if Joan of Arc meant that then she was wrong, and that is all.

I do not mean that I think she was wrong, but that Bernard Shaw thinks that she was wrong. There is nowhere in the whole of the play anything of the nature of a real answer to the Inquisitor or the Archbishop upon the common sense of the question. Joan of Arc does not prove that it would be a good thing for everybody to follow a purely individualistic religion; she does not attempt to. The argument really remains on the other side. In other words, if she did maintain that view, she was wrong, and if she maintained the view that anyone who has a psychical experience must trust that against common sense and against civilisation, to say nothing of any other authority—if she maintained that, she was wrong, wrong by the consensus of common sense people everywhere. Because as we all know there are a large number of people by this time hearing voices which sometimes say very singular things, and a great many of those people do so far illustrate the general subject that I am attempting to suggest this evening, that they were a great many of them at one time sceptics of the most complete sort. It is not specially of them that I want to speak this evening, but it is well to note as we pass that in the ordinary literal sense of the words we have seen a great many very great sceptics pass into what a good many of us at any rate would call very great superstitions. We have seen great men of science, for instance, who were agnostics or materialists, telling us things for which certainly the rationalists of the nineteenth century and still more of the eighteenth century could have found no term except raving madness. I mean men who doubted a great deal more than I ever doubted have come to

B believe more than I could possibly believe. We have seen people who thought it fantastical to believe that there could be a resurrection of a glorified body come to tell us of the resurrection of glorified niblicks and brassies for the purpose of playing a game of glorified golf. We have seen people who could not believe in the Sacramental mystery that was symbolised by the old legend of the Holy Grail, gravely tell us that people in the world of happy souls still have whiskies and sodas. It seems to me, by the way, rather characteristic of the rather third-rate character of that sort of religion, that they do say whiskies and sodas when they might at least be poetical and traditional and say ale or wine. But that is an unimportant point. I say merely in passing that we know the theory that each person should trust his psychical experience as an absolute, and ask for no other view and allow nothing to balance it or to moderate it at all; that view has developed very fully in the modern world, and most of us when we see it do not like it. It developed of course in a great many ways; apart from the present development of things like spiritualism it developed in a great many sects and leaders of various sorts; and that was what I meant when I asked Bernard Shaw why he shows this coldness, this neglect amounting almost to indifference, of the greatness of Joanna Southcott. Joanna Southcott is surely a far better example of pure individualism of religion, of a person who listens solely to her own voices, of a person who would not let any priest or council come between her and God; and she is, moreover, a person much nearer to us, our fellow country-woman, and we are not obliged in honouring her to do what

I know is always very painful to the friends of the international friendship of nations—pay a compliment to France. We are not obliged to go back a great many more years in the past than the life of Methusaleh in the future, and we have not reached things so remote or so obscure or so alien. We can find quite within our own time a great prophetess who stood up and declared with absolute clarity certain oracles of spiritual sources, and who has actually left her testament behind her; I believe there are some boxes or something that nobody has opened yet and they may contain news of prodigious spiritual value to the world. Why, in other words, if Bernard Shaw’s ideal is the modern ideal, why does he have to go back to the medieval world to get it? And why does he describe in the play of Methusaleh infinite ages stretching forward into conditions that seem to me to be full of more and more depression, and have to go back 500 years to find inspiration and hope? The reason, I take it, is that all common sense people are really now agreed that the mere individual mysticism that relies upon the internal voices and nothing else is certainly wrong ninety-nine times that it is right once, and is when left to itself an anarchical and insane element in society. But I do not speak specially of those cases like that of Joanna Southcott, except in passing, because the thing I have to deal with this evening is not the ordinary excesses or extravagances of belief, but a certain element of credulity that strangely enough seems to me to come with and to a large extent to arise out of the mode of scepticism. As I say, it is illustrated sufficiently well in actual fact in the case of the remarkable appearance of scientists as spiritualists. But I am not dealing with that, but with something that is considerably more difficult to describe; and I must ask your indulgence if I do not make it as clear as I should wish to, because it is a rather large question and one that covers several centuries, and requires something like a little historical imagination, I think, to see it as a whole. When St. Joan was dead and the medieval order broke up, we all know that for good or evil there did come into the world an intellectual and religious disruption, whether we call it variety or anarchy, or by the language of praise or blame—call it if you like individualism; and to a very great extent it was not only individualism, but scepticism. Now when the Inquisitor in Bernard Shaw’s play, whose words I have taken as a text, says that if you allow people spiritual individualism, without sang froid as it were, and without anything to balance it, you will have wild things like people walking about without clothes; he said something that has been illustrated often enough in human history. It seems to me in a certain sense he rather understates the case, because the thing that I wish to point out to you this evening is that when you leave everything in a more or less sceptical and undecided condition, what happens is not necessarily, or perhaps even generally, extravagance and madness, but in a sense the very opposite. What happens is constraint and servitude, that is to say, that one of the immediate results of cutting loose is, for some reason that I do not understand, that you chain yourself up again and chain yourself much more completely. In other words, whatever the old system of Christendom may have been and whatever we think of it, it is historically true that when people broke away from it they showed a most mysterious disposition for rushing, apparently of their own free will, into prisons and lunatic asylums, especially lunatic asylums, but lunatic asylums are prisons; and it is that aspect of them I am thinking of especially at the moment. It is as if one were to write a story about a man who had the rather nervous job of leading along on some journey a companion who had a morbid mono-mania for going to prison. One could imagine rather an amusing story made out of it, how you had to get him past police stations as they get drunkards past public houses. Something of that mysterious impulse seems for some reason or other to exist in the human intellect when it is emancipated or made sceptical or detached, or whatever phrase you may use; and I want very rapidly, if it does not bore you, to point out how curiously that has happened again and again in the last two or three centuries of our era.

Of course the first and most obvious example is that when the intellect was as it were left floating loose— and it must always be remembered that I have no intention of going into it in any detail—it must always be remembered as a historical fact that the interregnum of the Renaissance and of the general system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was very much of an intellectual interregnum. That is to say, there was a considerable period before the formation of a possible new system like the Puritan system, a period during which large numbers of people were floating about very much as they are floating about in the world to-day, people whose spirit I suppose was represented by

Montaigne or by some of the Italian cultured sceptics of the time; and therefore you did have a period when there was a great deal of what one may call scepticism in the air, and the final form of modern Europe had by no means been yet taken. What happened for instance in the countries like our own and in Scotland and in parts of Germany and in Holland, was a very extraordinary thing, which Matthew Arnold, you remember, summed up by saying the English people entered the prison of Puritanism and had the key turned on them for 200 years. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say the English people entered it, and it is perhaps an exaggeration to say they were there for 200 years. But it may be stated, broadly speaking, as true. You will notice that Matthew Arnold, who was certainly detached and in many ways in sympathy with the change, used also the word “‘prison,’’ which is the key of what I am insisting on. A large mass of people became so extraordinarily interested, for some reason that I have never quite understood, in one particular thin thread of argument, the logical argument from the omnipotence of God to the full Calvinist doctrine of predestination—became so extraordinarily interested in that one particular piece of Calvinistic logic, that they did to a very great extent transform the whole of social life as far as they could with a new atmosphere and a new spirit, and put upon themselves all kinds of very real and very rigid limitations. I will not go into all those, because it raises rather an old controversy which is not really relevant; but it is enough to say that it is quite obvious that the people did feel the bonds as bonds. I am not sneering at them for that.

Every man who has a religion feels some of its bonds as bonds at certain moments. But I am pointing out that these people had drifted into a system of which the bondage was very severe indeed. Nobody can read any of the great Puritans like Milton, etc., without feeling that there is a distinct resistance or struggle of Puritan humanity against the limits of the new system. But all I am concerned to point out in connection with this argument is that what had landed them in that severe and gloomy system overshadowed a vast part of our people until a very short time ago. If you read almost all of the great nineteenth century humanitarians, people like Dickens or Hood, or any of the hundred others who lived to preach a more generous and liberal conception of human pleasure, you will almost always find that they talk of the last generation as having been practically Calvinistic. They talk of the life of the old home or the family traditions, as if they were Puritanical in the most gloomy degree. Therefore I say that that influence—a very restricting influence—was (and that is the point which I am concerned with here) the direct immediate result of breaking loose, and what was called thinking for yourself. It was their religious liberty that created their social slavery.

Now the time came towards the end of the seventeenth century when it became increasingly obvious that this gloomy and grinding creed was not going to be permanently borne, and people began to break away from it in various ways, to break out of the prison into which they had entered voluntarily, to break with great difficulty out of the prison they had built for themselves; and you get at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth the full growth of modern scepticism in the ordinary sense of the word, the spirit that applies—as it is conceived—the humane and rational test to everything, and refuses superstitions and arbitrary doctrines and all the rest of it. Now I am going studiously to refrain in this discussion as far as I can from any terms that can be called terms of abuse as distinct from terms of history. I could say a vast deal about the Puritans, and the sort of things that a great many people said about the Puritans when they were there, the kind of things that Ben Jonson said; but I am not abusing any of these people; I am trying to trace the course of what always seemed to me a rather curious course of events. In the same way as I am not attacking the Puritans, so I am not attacking the Deists or the Sceptics of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, it always seems to me that there was something rather beautiful and touching about that brief interlude of contented Paganism, during which men thought for a very short time indeed that they could be wholly satisfied with this earth and this life. Bitter as Voltaire was, and foul as he often was, there is about some of his utterances also the suggestion of a curious innocence. When he said, “After all, a man must cultivate his garden,” it always gives me a certain feeling as if it was the garden of Eden—that curious interlude when man believed that this earth was Eden, and that by being ordinarily humane and reasonably logical and practical, all problems would solve themselves. As I say, there is something beautiful about it, beautiful because it is dead and dead for ever. I heard a story the other day about a little boy who was

SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SCEPTIC i & asked to give an account of the story of the Garden of Eden, and said, “Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden, and they were perfectly happy until the servant came.’ That seems to me to be one of the few stories of children’s blunders that sounds as if it was really made by a child, and it happens in this case to be something of a parable, because one of the many reasons that that optimistic interlude, which might truly be called the age of reason, one of the reasons why that - optimistic interlude was after all an illusion, and therefore a fleeting thing, was that it was really in its social and economic aspect an aristocratic thing. The great Republican Deists of the eighteenth century— many of them in my opinion very fine men indeed—were most of them, among other misfortunes, gentlemen, and they were gentlemen of the sort who lived in a considerable degree of ignorance of the condition of the rest of the world. And you will generally find that their philosophy implies a great deal of leisure and not infrequently a great deal of learning. In short, that interlude which may he called the age of reason is in its best and most dignified aspect something like a kind of romance of youth, a romance of happiness; one may say I think that the only thing to be said against the age of reason is that it comes before the age of discretion. And that brief interlude of happy scepticism was followed by something else that arises out of its aristocratic character, and its quality of leisure and of learning and not infrequently of pedantry, and that was of course the gradual emergence of the tremendous popular problems of to-day. The problems appeared even to the men of the French Revolution as very much more simple than they are—they appeared to them as we all know rather as political than as economic, and though they stood in many cases for very great truths, the broader truth I think is that it was impossible to maintain, to go on maintaining, that detached and dignified attitude of the philosophical gentlemen of the early and middle eighteenth century. What followed was something else again. The mind was apparently quite detached and emancipated again. It was perfectly open to it to do anything or to do nothing, and what it did once more was to build a prison; it set to work to create out of that very rationalism that had been its sort of holiday and romance—to build up that extraordinary structure, the full individualistic commercial theory. It has many names; it was called at its earliest stage Utilitarianism; it afterwards came to be called the Manchester School. But the peculiarity of it that I wish to point out was that it was very, very hard in its dogmas indeed, that it limited men on all sides, that it repressed all kinds of impulses that they would naturally have, such as the impulse of pity, not to mention the impulse of social indignation; and all objections to it were answered exactly as Calvinists would have answered objections to their creed, with the repetition of an iron dogma. Everyone knows the way in which good and honest men like Cobden and Bright found it impossible upon their principles to do so simple a thing as to forbid little children to be tortured in factories. They said—and again I am not despising the rigidity of the man who professes these dogmas— he is in many ways an object of respect—they said, “We have this fixed principle; the State must not interfere

SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SCEPTIC TS a in these things,” and they therefore refused an action which I think would have been consonant to them and all other decent people as far as their instincts were concerned. In other words, you have again the same paradox, as it were, appearing; that which was constraining them, which was preventing them from doing ordinary things such as saving a child from torment or giving a penny to a beggar in the street—what was preventing them from doing this was not an ancient tradition or creed, but the cast-iron new system which they had made themselves, the last discovery of economic science. It was their free thought that forbade them free action. Therefore twice you have exactly the same thing repeating itself—a people supposed to be free and independent in the intellect, elaborately constructing a system that constrained themselves and constrained them far more inhumanly and harshly than had any older system in the remote past—something that restrained ordinary impulsive natural virtues. It was not religion that constrained Cobden and Bright; it was not even their Bibles and their Bible type of religion; on the contrary, their Bibles must have been a considerable embarrassment to them in that particular problem, because by a curious coincidence one of those very doctrines that they had inherited from the last prison, the last cast-iron system, the Puritan system, one of the very things they had inherited from that, the doctrine of the Sabbath, was itself an illustration of the thing of which they disapproved. It wasa limitation of hours of labour. So that leaving on one side such trifles as the idea of being just to the poor or loving your neighbour, or unimportant things of that sort, even the sacred principle of the Sabbath really contradicted the theory of the Manchester Schoo]. But they remained true to that theory, and a great many other people did too. Now since that time we have seen possibly a still more extraordinary thing. First of all you have the gloomy unworldly religion of Puritanism established by people as a prison for themselves. Those people escaping from that, proceeding to build another prison, staying for a little while in rationalistic optimism, and then building for themselves another prison of which the whole system was that this world and material money considerations were the key to everything, and above all that that prosperity was to be obtained by ruthless competition and by an absolute refusal of anything like social authority. I may remark, because it is often forgotten, that the full doctrine of the Utilitarians was something much more extraordinary than many people now imagine, much more extraordinary than any tradition of old-fashioned radicalism to-day, because very great men indeed, like Adam Smith, laid down in effect the doctrine that if everybody followed his own self-interest the net result would be some degree of social happiness; that is to say, they preached a curious kind of cynical optimism whereby if everybody was for himself, God and not the Devil would in some way look after all the rest. That theory was preached as a philosophy and a hard and fast philosophy, and had all the stringency of a religion as we see when we find people refusing to do ordinary benevolent actions because they are against that religion.

Since then we have seen a still more extraordinary thing. We have seen the whole of that process reversed entirely; the Manchester School theory, the theory of Utilitarianism, or whatever you call it, broke down somewhere about the time when I was a child, and in the world in which I grew up people had already got used to saying that that was all nonsense, and they were therefore for the moment for a third time in that intermediary position of intellectual independence. They were no longer frightened of factory acts and charity, and they were to a certain extent free to maintain what they liked. What they did was to react to the opposite extreme and immediately to erect that into a new system which was made of iron and could not be altered, and which was full of dogmas. We call it the system of Karl Marx; broadly speaking, just as I am not abusing the Puritans or the Deists or the Utilitarians so I am not going to abuse the Bolshevists, but just to describe them and to say that everybody who has ever met a real Bolshevist or Socialist of the real Marxian tradition will agree with me in saying that he has again that same characteristic of an iron rigidity and a refusal to do anything whatever, however apparently humane, generous or natural or instinctive, which conflicts with the few fixed dogmas of his economic system. Therefore as I say, you have had three or four times (many more times, no doubt, if you went into detail)—at least three times we have had that curious experience of people who, by all, in the religious sense were supposed to be perfectly free and independent, laying upon themselves superstititions and slaveries, tying themselves up in knots that nobody had put upon them, like a man who whenever he was let out of the front door immediately tied himself to a tree or chained himself to the railings.

Only at very slight moments, passing moments, has there been anything resembling a really independent scepticism. The sceptics themselves have always turned something else into a sacred object, into a superstition, and when that thing was examined it was always found to be far narrower than the older traditions that had been rejected.

In conclusion, I should like to say that there is yet another development in that curious state of things. When people emerge in this fashion in the modern world, after all this succession of building their own prisons and destroying their own prisons, and then building more prisons—when they emerge from that they emerge in a curiously chaotic state of mind in many ways, and nothing is more notable about it than the fact that they continue to hold a large number of doctrines some of them quite true, but to hold them as superstitions, that is to say, in the strict sense, to hold them without reason. I alluded at the beginning of my remarks to that phrase of Bernard Shaw’s of people going about without clothes. You will see a good deal of discussion in the newspapers nowadays about people who are going about with very few clothes, and nothing I think is more remarkable in that discussion than to notice the fact that nobody has the slightest idea of what he really holds on the subject. The whole argument is a chaos of sentimentalism. Some people say, if it is natural it is beautiful; other people say if it is beautiful it is right if it is ugly it is wrong, and the argument as used would lead, in the hands of any logician, in ten minutes to the obvious conclusion that nobody ought to wear any clothes at all. We all know that the vast mass of us would never go in for, let us say, individual moral emancipation to that extent or in that form; something constrains us, and I think it would be fair to say that it is a tradition—in ninety-nine people out of a hundred it is a tradition; in the strictly intellectual sense it is a superstition. It is a superstition because the modern world does not know why it keeps up these old same traditions of society. I know, for instance, why J believe in wearing clothes; I believe in it because I believe in the fall of man, which does not mean merely the story of Adam and Eve, but the highly practical and profound philosophy which teaches us that in man what is natural is not necessarily beautiful, and certainly not necessarily good; that there are all sorts of elements and potentialities in man that can no more be trusted than Bengal tigers or storms at sea. I am only pointing out to you that I who hold certain doctrines have reasons for my conventions and decencies (so far as I observe conventions and decencies)—but such as I have, I have reason for. Now the vast mass of the sceptical modern world has no reason at all for its conventions. Suppose I suddenly say, “What is the matter with cannibalism?” most of you will simply say that it isn’t nice—and you will be quite right. I am not sneering at tradition, I am not sneering at it even when I call it superstition; but I say that to the vast majority of people in a modern civilised state, cannibalism is in more senses than one a matter of taste. It is at bottom the fact that you do not fancy a slice of missionary. Now there again the whole human race, because of its sanity, its instincts, its traditions, which embody that sanity in these things, does in fact know in practice that it is not going to be cannibal; but in a strictly intellectual sense the attitude is superstitious, because in nine cases out of ten it does not know why it disapproves of cannibalism. I know why I disapprove of it—I disapprove because I believe that man is the image of God, and that he is different from the brutes in a fundamental and real sense and that his dignity must be preserved by a separation. But how many thousands of people nowadays have mixed up men and animals past any separation or any distinction. How many of them have anything like a religious dogma or even a clear ethical dogma distinguishing man from the other creatures. Yet all of them have the instinct that a man is different from a brute, and therefore that they do not propose to eat their grandmother in the economical manner of the Sandwich Islands. But the thing upon which that idea rests is, believe me, in almost all of you a tradition; I do not say of you, because no doubt this room is filled exclusively with clear-headed logicians who have thought out all their first principles; but shall we say people in the street outside—many of them do not know why they believe in wearing clothes, and do not know why they do not believe in eating men. And the reason is that they inherited from these old dogmatic systems that they have thrown away, various fragments, most of them true but inherited from the old systems they have cast aside; they no longer know what their own foundations are, and if they trace back all those noble and honourable prejudices to their really logical origin, I think in nine times out of ten they will find that they were rooted in the Christian Faith.

THE CORRESPONDENCE between