ORACLE OF REASON No. 1.] Or, Philosophy Vindicated EDINBURGH) ECULAR UNION "FAITH'S EMPIRE IS THE WORLD; ITS MONARCH, GOD; ITS MINISTERS, EDITED BY CHARLES SOUTHWELL. INTRODUCTION. A SOBER and humble distinction, says Lord Bacon, must be made betwixt the oracles of Sense and Faith; unless mankind had rather choose absurd religions, with fictitious and romantic philosophies. Now, as by an Oracle of Faith is meant, something delivered by supernatural wisdom, or above nature: this paper will not pretend to teach such unteachable things, i laying no claim to supernatural wisdom; O by "ORACLE of Sense, or REASON," is meant something delivered by natural wisdom; that busies itself with the comprehensible, or as Dr. Chalmers expresses it, the knowableand leaves the incomprehensible, alias, unknowable, to shift for itself: all your mysterious, or hidden somethings, belonging, as Hobbes well observed, to the kingdom of darkness. So much by way of explanation as to name and general character of the work; its PRINCIPLE cannot be so shortly disposed of, -for this fine word principle, though upon the tip of every tongue, passed from mouth to mouth with wonderful glibness, so thrust forth in every page that familiarity has almost bred contempt for it, yet what it means or involves few seem to know or care. Voltaire said of Rosseau, that he talked so much about truth and virtue, that at last no one knew what truth and virtue were; it may, with a keener eye to truth, be affirmed that our modern liberals have written and talked O much about principle, that no one knows what a principle really is-they have written and declaimed the people out of it; so magnified and glorified it in theory, and so illustrated it by example, that, as some one has paradoxically observed, the principle now a-days is to have no principle. Those who admire their artful conduct, will sneer at this paper, the object of which is to illustrate the truth, and abide by it at all hazards; not in season and out of season, for that would be folly; but, in these columns truth never will be out of season: like the evergreen, its leaves will know no winter., The right to preach and publish truth without mystery, mixture of error, or fear of man, like many other grandiloquent phrases, has been much used, but not conscientiously acted upon, or its value fully understood. All the world ought to know, that when we speak of practical rights, we include the idea of practical powers, for power as necessary to the establishment of a right to the maintainance of it; hence it follows, 1 [PRICE 1d. those only have the right to teach truth, who dare do it in the teeth of fanatic prejudice, and public odium. Every man has a right to do what he will with his own," said my Duke of Newcastle, and he might have added, with anybody else's own, could he enforce it. All abstract rights being pure chimeras; the question of actual rights resolves itself into that of actual powers, as it is evident that all are at perfect liberty, and have clearly the right-to fly in the air, if they can. Lord de Warren proved his title to certain broad lands by an appeal to his sword, a very sensible kind of appeal; for pens, tongues, and swords, are, and have been, the originators and maintainers of rights-in short, powers, physical or mental. Whether this paper, that will give all kinds of speculation as speculation, all sorts of realities as realities, and deal out Atheism as freely as ever Christianity was dealt out to the people; whether a paper in which there will be no attempt to gloss over, evade, or slide from the whole truth; in which the abandonment of a high position, that a present evil may be avoided at the expense of future good, will be disdained as unworthy of an honest mind; whether a paper that shall cast off the swindling kind of morality, that frames itself to all occasions, including all the abominations of Jesuitry, without its character, grandeur, or consistency; whether such a paper will be permitted by the authorities of this country, time alone can determine. If it meet with public support, such support will not be the wages of dishonesty, paid for want of principle, or its abandonment. Starting with the axiom, that every human being should be at liberty to express fully and freely his honest conviction, the letter of the text will be adhered to, the battle of philosophy fought inch by inch with its opposers, and the right to publish any and every kind of speculative opinion, coolly but determinedly maintained. If men have not yet known, they should now be taught, that it is neither creditable nor discreditable, honourable nor dishonourable, to be an Atheist, a Christian, or a Mussulman. One man's speculations are just as good and no better than any others; and none but the mere lunatic would think of esteeming equally a dishonest believer in the existence of a god, with an honest disbeliever in such existence. Society has not, never had, never can have any right, founded on justice, to dictate to individuals [SECOND EDITION.] what they shall believe or disbelieve; and in principle it is just as vile to frown as to rack men into professions of orthodoxy. a symbol of things, called Syrinx, was held to be even more precise and accurate, as copying with exactness the lessons of nature. Philosophy must gain by simplicity and clearness, while Fiction will lose in equal proportion, for if the supernatural or fictional be likened to the kingdom of darkness, philosophy may fairly be to the kingdom of light; it deals with realities, and has no other basis than things known. And whether the rationalist It is hardly necessary to add, that all articles admitted into these columns will be studiedly plain and simple, for as the subject matter to be treated will involve highly important considerations, growing out of questions at best sufficiently abstruse and difficult, pains will be taken to be intelligible. The least reflection I will make it obvious that to convey knowledge, seek to determine the existence or non-existwhether by speech or writing, a definite and ence of God, the truth or falsehood of this or fixed meaning should be attached to the words that religion, he takes nothing for granted, save used; for the wretched practice of employing his own existence, as also the existence of that the same words in every kind of sense, breeds universe of which he forms a part. This is the endless confusion, and at least nine-tenths of common ground which each is at liberty to apblunders in philosophy. This, and the sense-propriate the rest can only become the proless affection of cant terms, and a very out-perty of those who search, with an ardent and landish mystical jargon, have gone far to drive unquenchable love of truth, into the nature of the people crazy, to the great regret of honest men, and the glory of knaves. things. As the opinions to be set forth in these columns will be anything but palatable to authority, and perhaps involve consequences of a serious nature, all articles without name or initial attached to them the reader will please to place to the account of the Editor, who is perfectly willing to bear the brunt of the battle, and champion what he conceives to be truth, in defiance of all opposition. IS THERE A GOD? I. The mental foppery above alluded to reduces the art of writing to a mere trade of sentence concocting, where sense lies buried beneath the weight of ornament, and the mind, called off from its proper functions, is attracted by the tinsel and glare of language, whilst the solid gold of idea is neglected. By this it is not meant that no art is to be used in the most sublime of arts, but plainness and force are the essentials; besides, the grandest triumph of art, is not to appear as art, and any laboured attempt to astonish or excite admiration is ever offensive. The happy use of terms is an es"Men believe in God, only upon the word of those sential talent to the orator or writer, for what who have no more idea of any such being than themexpression is to a picture, significant phrases selves. Our nurses are our first theologians." COMMON SENSE. are to writing, which may be called a picture of human ideas; nor can it be denied that the OUR treatment of this question will at least eye of the mind, like the eye of the body, is have one merit, there will not be the shadow of strangely affected by the colouring of the artist. equivocation in it; no attempt at subterfuge; Words being but pictures of human ideas, their no taking refuge behind the coward's defence, right use stamps character and expression upon a loose and mean-anything phraseology. We the production, and where, in the use either of agree with a writer in the Foreign Quarterly, the pen or the brush, genius is displayed, it ex- that an esprit fort (strong mind) should be cites the sense of the sublime, warming the be-fort throughout; and that he ought to have holder into admiration. Even smoothness of no mental weakness, who, like Spinoza and diction and polished phrase, if it want clearness Strauss, can man his heart and say, that he and strength, depraves the taste and weakens the understanding, leaving the mind no firm resting-place, as it were floating on a sea of wordy uncertainty; but to continue our analogy, as in a picture, the roughness of outline or carelessness of filling up is lost or forgotten in admiration of the bold and vigorous touches of a master hand, so nervous and clear writing often seems to acquire additional lustre from sentences which, though conveying a noble idea, are yet, in themselves, rough and rugged. Truth is, or ought to be, the grand object of all teaching, by which word truth should be understood an exact image of things, set forth in speech, or writing; by speech, when the sound is the echo of the sense, echo being elegantly called by the ancients wife of Pan, that is, nature, as repeating its words; but writing, not only imagines but understands the Eternity of the godhead. For ourselves, who see no solid reason to believe in a godhead, or the eternity of anything but matter, our heart is manned to make the declaration, which Spinoza and Strauss, it is more than probable, would have made had they not feared the opinions of the multitude, that three-headed monster, and most hellish Cerberus called public orthodoxy who requires a sop of absurdity, however small, before he will permit any to pass the portal leading to private honours and public respectability. The truth is, Spinoza did not believe in, and, therefore, could not pretend to understand, the eternity of the godhead; but he felt the weight of public prejudice, and bent beneath it. As Voltaire has remarked, "Spinoza did not acknowledge a god; he probably used the * expression, and said that we ought to serve and loose against us; even the noble debauchée, to love god, only that he might not frighten mankind." As to Dr. Strauss, who calls what is written by divines about creation from nothing, a weightless definition for speculative thinkers;" who contends that in eternity there is no fixed point from which a beginning could depart; who labours hard to prove a substantial, material god, and then asserts that the whole root of the supposition which made the real nature of God as the matter out of which he made all things, was destroyed by Spinozism; how far such a philosopher is from being an Atheist, let those judge who please, but certainly the writer in the Quarterly is not far out when he declares, that the author has at once boldly thrown off the mask, and from the Deist, which the " Leben Jesu" (Life of Jesus) demonstrated him to be, he has, by an easy mutation, passed into the Atheist. Thus it is that men intellectually but not morally great suffer all the odium that attaches to an honest declaration of truth, without the reward of conscious integrity; for stopping short in the midst of their career, they cover themselves with the mantle of mystical jargon and absurd conceit, instead of taking the bolder and more honourable course of daring all things in the cause of right reason; gallantly pressing forward and reaching that goal or rock of truth, against which the surges of sophistry and fanaticism may dash in vain. my Lord Rochester's lines Men, before certain instinct, will prefer Reason, which fifty times for one doth err; Books bear them up awhile, and make them try To swim with bladders of philosophywill be quoted with ecstatic delight for the benefit of souls in general, and christian souls in particular. All of which excellent authority, with sundry charges of presumption, lewdness, horrible profanity, and so on, will be levelled against us, which certainly cannot be justified on the ground of decency or consistency; for not to dwell upon scriptural injunctions, to prove all things, if reason cannot grapple with the subject, why do our systematic divinitarians theologasters, as an old writer terms them, attempt to prove the existence of a god by reason; or why have they challenged inquiry into the matter? for, in the name of sense, if a Fontenelle, a Clark, or a Paley pretend to demonstrate the existence of a god; if they protest that they have shown, and the honest Atheist equally protests that he has not seen; why is he to be denied the right of sincerely stating his conviction and the reasons which sustain it; not seeing the flood of light such writers cast upon the great deep of the mystery, is it unreasonable that he should be allowed to say so much? What are the laboured reasonings of your Clarks, Newtons, and others, but attempts to prove, logically and morally, that To reason, says Burlamaqui, is to calculate, there is an uncaused god, who caused by his and, as it were, draw up an account, after ba- will everything else. An eternal, infinite, unlancing all arguments, in order to see on which changeable, uncaused being, the cause of all side the advantage lies; and can any who things else! for, as Dr. Clark says, in his readmit the right to inquire, show good reason ply to Leibnitz-" "Tis very true that nothing why reason should not be employed to deter- is without a sufficient reason why it is, and mine on which side of the argument the ad- why it is rather than otherwise; and therefore, vantage lies with regard to the question-Is where there is no cause there can be no effect. there, or is there not, a god? or, to state it But this sufficient reason is sometimes no other with even more explicitness-Is there more than the mere will of God." How he came at a reason to believe than to disbelieve in the ex- knowledge of the mere will of a god, except by istence of a deity? The belief in angels, says way of experience, evidence, and observation, Schleirmacher, is now a "dead tradition; a man's head may split before his brain would a belief in a god or gods will, one day or other, work well enough to determine, but it is clear share the same fate; and it is our deliberate the sufficiency of a reason can only be proconviction, that neither of these beliefs, nor nounced by reason; and if it be objected that indeed beliefs of any kind, is necessary for the revelation came to the aid of the worthy doctor, peace, preservation, and general happiness of and gave him insight, or second sight, into the society. We may be told that the discussion supernatural, the difficulty will not by that be will only produce vexation of spirit, irritate shuffled off; for talk as we may about revelaand unsettle, not soothe or convince; that it is, tion proving the existence of a god, reason must, besides, a question with which reason has nothing after all, determine which is or is not revelation. whatever to do; and all sorts of abuse will be Bolingbroke asks, “Can he be less than mad, pressed into the service of true religion, that is who boasts a revelation superadded to reason, Christianity, the believers in which will find no to supply its defects, and who superadds reason difficulty in collecting excellent christian au- to revelation to supply the defects of this too, thority to prove their religion is the sheet at the same time?" No wonder Addison called anchor of happiness, without which all would him "the cankered Bolingbroke,” after asking be wrecked amid the storms and tempests of such unpleasant and unanswered questions. fe; while philosophy will be scouted, or borne How, then, can those who appeal to reason relong by a whirlwind of contempt and indig-fuse to abide by its decisions? and surely, to Nation. All being fish that comes into the use the lightest kind of censure, it is nothing red net, every kind of authority will be let less than iudecent in those who pretend that the existence of a god is demonstrable by rea-idea. "A perfect Atheist (says he) is one who son, not to be content with the weapons drawn believes nothing of a designing principle or If the word chance be used in any other sense, it is by religionists not Atheists; perfect Atheists having no objection to make them a present For ourselves not desiring any armour but of it; but reserve to themselves the right not that of evidence and experience, no sword but to use words in a manner so wildly absurd. the long and sharp one of reason, no kind of The Atheist does not deny that the word cause shelter save that of wit, evidence, and logic, we always implies an effect, the term effect equally without scruple throw aside the ingenious ob- implying a cause; but the error of supernatajection of Wyttenbach, that no man can pro-ralists lies here, they PRESUME the universe to perly be called an Atheist, till it is deelared what be an effect, and argue as though their presumpis meant by the term god; because the deriva- tion amounted to proof. Spinoza, Vanini, on of the term Atheist shows it to apply to Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, in short all who have who is without god in the world. This indirect apology for the Atheist is rejected, not because it is insufficient, but because Atheism needs no apology. Christians as well as Deists admit that no one hath seen their god at any time, Moses and the hinderparts notwithstanding, or can by searching prove such existence, so that those who pretend to have ideas of god, if they have them, have ideas without an archetype, which is an impossibility. Supposing the existence of an uncaused being, the cause and support of the visible universe, which may be called god, or anything else; the idea of such existence must first be produced in the mind before it is possible such a being could be known to exist; so that those who are atheistically inclined, and do not choose to avow it, may safely defy the whole world of intellect and faith conjoined, logically to show that they are so, though every man of sense may be morally sure of it; for, as before shown, proving a man to be an Atheist logically, is contingent upon a clear certainty that he is without a god in the world. This nice little quibble of logicians, we disdain to make use of; at once agreeing to the definition of an Atheist given by Lord Shaftesbury, as being complete, intelligible, and quite in harmony with our own written for or against the existence of a god, agree that something is uncaused, and therefore external. Spinoza establishes clearly that something exists, and from its existence argues its eternal existence. When Dr. Clark tells us, in his fourth reply to Leibnitz, that the Epicurean chance is not a choice of will, but a blind necessity of fate, he wrote at random; for though chance can never be a choice of will, the word meaning as above noted, a perceived effect of an unknown cause, it is foolish as unjust to talk of the Epicurean notion of chance as signifying" a blind necessity of fate;" all Epicureans knowing that necessity is neither blind nor seeing. The word necessity is expressive of the general truth, that matter does now, ever did, and ever must act definitely and uniformly. So much for the word chance, which has been dragged forward upon all occasions by supernaturalists as positive proof of the absurdities of Atheism; but if they had taken the pains to understand Atheism, they would have known that its advocates contend that in nature there is no such thing as confusion, the whole being necessarily what it is, and acting in virtue of its inherent properties. A chaos. as remarked by Voltaire, never having existed, except in the minds of a Homer or a Hesiod. (Fossil Man.) occupied themselves in the solution of it; and if you do not say that merry-andrews would have gone a better way to work it will be odd indeed; for like those creatures that by a certain sort of instinct, to avoid pursuit, darken the medium through which they pass, so have our clerical swimmers in the sea of knowledge a happy knack of leaving a long tail of obscurity behind. Instead of carefully collecting facts, and opening their mental exchequer to receive something solid in the way of experience, they in general rest contented in most shameful ignorance, rather than their pride should be mortified by any discoveries in science, hostile to their cherished opinions. Solicitous, for their own advantage, to maintain what they call the honour of the human species, and its superiority over the brutes, all that could flatter and soothe the delightful idea is that alone which has been said and collected. Any attempt to establish a relationship, however remote, between man and the inferior animals, has always been scouted as impious, an insult to the creator, in whose image they tell us we are made, and little short of blasphemy against the holy ghost. Hundreds of sermons have been preached against the unlucky Bulliver, who insisted that in his day there was a Kentish famiy all tailed. Anathema after anathema was heaped upon Lochner, who, in his Miscellanea Curiosa, relates, with great gravity and minuteness, the case of a boy with a monstrous tail. As to Dr. Ferriar, who considered that the os coccygis must sometimes have an accidental elongation; and Dr. Grindant, who published many cases tend"I will show you how the earth has been peopled; howing to give strength to the opinion that our organic formation after organic formation has taken forefathers were at first tailed animals also; place, passing gradually from simple to compound both those gentlemen have been very roughly hodles, and covering itself, as at this hour we find it, handled. The last-named doctor states, among other facts, as he styled them, that the islands of Moluccas, Formosa, and the Philippines, were at one time inhabited by whole races of men with tails. But to pass by all these, and the flagellations they received from our spiritual whips,for setting forth such degrading opinions, NOTHING is more fatal to a common-sense we need only refresh the reader's memory with View of things, than the very prevalent habit the case of the famous Monboddo, who had of considering consequences before investigating such a predilection for monkey-men that he d determining principles. It is not only il- has taken vast pains to prove that they formerly bgical but absurd, and highly prejudicial to did wear tails; for insisting upon which antihe cause of truth; for it fills timid minds poetic notion he has been as soundly abused as with alarm, lest by a resolute and persevering any man that ever lived. That his theory was search into the properties of matter and the incomplete and erroneous in many important nature of opinions, they may light upon results particulars, it is presumed these papers will disastrous to their prejudices and perhaps fatal show; but that there is some truth in it will be to their hopes of "singing hallelujah above the as clearly proved. Lord Monboddo was ignolonds." The rightly balanced, well ordered rant of many particulars, without a knowledge mind has the strongest assurance-an assurance of which he could not but blunder, as the foldrawn from the great fountain of human ex-lowing, from the "Origin and Progress of Lanrience and the general analogies of things, guage," will show: "A whole nation, if I may at neither truth nor virtue are empty names, call them so, have been found without the use ut real, substantial blessings, whatever clerical of speech. This is the case of the ourang-ouinstructives may preach to the contrary. Take tangs that are found in the kindom of Angola, e question, the regular gradation of the hu- in Africa, and in several parts of Asia. They in species, and note how philosophers have are exactly of the human form, walking crect, THEORY OF REGULAR GRADATION. I. with plants and animals. In following matter through all its changes, noting its metamorphoses, from the most simple organization to the most complex, we shall find, without doubt, that point where man, trutish and savage, as at first he must have been, Free Translation from "L'HOMME FOSSILE" (Fossil Man), of Boitard. tok rank among the creatures of the universe." |