FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Reaction
All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the
French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political
reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in
those countries in which there had been previously the largest
measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous
than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately
and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo:
in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable
witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be
wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the
civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church
rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days
of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since
the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal
to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of
fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with
the establishment to promote orthodoxy.
The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be
gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively
speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In
1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various
measures of religious strategy in addition "to the just, necessary,
and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau,
Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to
atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with
such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their
fellow creatures." [1663] That this was not jesting may be gathered
from his daughter's account of his indignation when a publisher sent
him "a work of irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted
"irreligious opinions" to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he
writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited
in me by a man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey:
"Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel
principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all
connection with it." [1664] All the while any semblance of "infidelity"
in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.
In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less
violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The
rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press
as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of
conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism,
the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious
orders and confiscating their property. [1665] All this counted
for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the
springs of vital thought--to wit, the spirit of political liberty;
and in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did
all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism
of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples
alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns,
20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence
had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents. [1666] At Florence
the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the
translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral;
and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work
a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul. [1667]
It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not
to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission;
but this veto was not seriously treated. [1668] All native energy,
however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly,
the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the
culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings
of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor
in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.
Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the
very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible;
but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government
found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero
sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral
philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers,
but good and obedient subjects. [1669]
In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of
the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful
than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously
at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and
the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the
political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In
Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause
of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement
for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon, [1670] the religious
reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it
had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart
from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new
Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical; [1671] and on those
lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated
classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the
intellectual life was least directly associated with the political,
and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very
separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored
by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for
freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of
universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled
in any other country. [1672] What may be ranked as the most important
effect of the reaction in Germany--the turning of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy
with religion in the interests of social order--was in itself a
rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in
other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of
Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces
in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only
its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class,
prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had
done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular
and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence
was held at bay like others.
But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most
decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle
for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance
thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On
the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848,
which were followed in the Germanic world by another political
reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a
few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again
fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.
The Forces of Renascence
As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the
forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the
check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking
progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous
centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity
of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible,
within the scheme of a "Short History," to treat it on even such
a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A
detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards
would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a
scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition
of international influences such as had never before been evolved,
save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read
and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon
which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and
philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope
and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of
broad and general views of the past century's work, leaving adequate
critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings. [1673]
The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of
the main movements and forces that during the century affected
in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2)
of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of
the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of
rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may
then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological
order, as follows:--
I.--Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly
on religious beliefs.