left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics
was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social
sciences; Hartley's Christian Materialism making small headway
as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian
Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have
evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from
the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at
Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable
contrast to what was going on in Germany; [1979] and in Scotland in
the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level. [1980] It was over
practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of
the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the
personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied
rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James
Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active
freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and
orthodoxy; [1981] while the latter, no less pronounced in his private
opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology
in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism
was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been
more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in
the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural
Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker
than George Grote, was published in 1822. [1982] Pseudonymous as
that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution
by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the
influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another
matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of
the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on
contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay
on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been
a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.
But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems
of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any
of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school
was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought
by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had
been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists,
such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered
naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence
on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence
as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear
of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty
of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured
champions of orthodoxy, [1983] to the great advantage of critical
discussion.