The true rationalism : a lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow before St Ninian's Society THE TRUE RATIONALISM \ JJihil obstat. Carolus Widdowson, S.J., Censor deputatus. Imprimatur. * Jacobus Augustinus, A rchiet• S, A ndr. Edimburgen. die 27 1908. \ THE TRUE RATIONALISM A LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW BEFORE ST NINIAN’S SOCIETY BY THE REV. M. POWER, S.J., B.A. To 2pyov dvOpuTrov ipvxvs ^pyeta Kara \6yov, —Aristotle, Eth Nic. i. 6 l LONDON AND EDINBURGH SANDS & COMPANY ST LOUIS, MO. B. HERDER, 17 South Broadway 1908 BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE ANGLO-JEWISH CALENDAR FOR EVERY DAY IN THE GOSPELS Crown 8vo. Price 2s. 6c#. f\ v ; CONTENTS PAOB Foreword .... • 7 Introduction • . ii I. Rationalism or Foolishness ? . • 14 II. Praise of Rationalism . • 1 7 III. Definition of Rationalism « . 22 IV. Inerrancy of the Senses • . 26 V. Materialistic Basis of Rationalistic Idea- LOGY • • • 32 VI. Inerrancy of Reason • % • 43 VII. Reason in Command • • • 53 VIII. The Headship of all Headships • 57 IX. The Old and the New Rationalism Sub Judice ...... 65 5 FOREWORD This Lecture was somewhat hurriedly put together after a long illness—an extenuating circumstance which may be charitably thought to account for some of its defects and omissions. Throughout its composition, I have had before my eyes and mind the figures of Aristotle, founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and his great Christian commen- tator, St Thomas Aquinas. It has long been my ambition to reproduce, however inade- quately, some of the features of these two illus- trious Rationalists, in the conviction that their account of, and plea for, the headship of human Reason, were never more sorely needed than in an age when the many derivatives of the 8 FOREWORD word Ratio (Reason) are in constant and vigor- ous circulation, while the faculty itself is left unregarded, unanalysed, and undisciplined, to the detriment, if not the ruin, of philosophy and religion alike. To Mr W. L. Marsh, Organising Secretary of St Ninian’s Society, University of Glasgow, I am very grateful for the invitation to join the ranks of Lecturers in the Union Hall of the University. I disappointed him once, for the reason above stated, but he kindly renewed his request, and the Lecture was duly given on the 24th February 1908. 1 Messrs Hodder & Stoughton, London, E.C., have undertaken to publish next autumn the series of Lectures delivered by many speakers before St Ninian’s Society during the Winter Session of 1907-8, and covering a wide field of philosophical and religious thought. It was with some misgivings that, at the instance of friends, I approached this eminent firm of publishers and craved permission to 1 Professor Phillimore in the Chair. FOREWORD 9 anticipate the large volume in which my Lecture is to be embodied, and to publish it thus early in the year in booklet form. Throughout their correspondence with me, they showed much consideration and courtesy, and granted my application without reserve or condition. To them, as well as to the members of St Ninian’s Society, who gave me a cordial welcome and an attentive hearing, my best thanks are due and tendered. M. Power, S.J. Lauriston Street, Edinburgh, April 27, 1908. t / \ THE TRUE RATIONALISM INTRODUCTION m Gentlemen,—To lull all fears to rest, and as part requital of the great favour you have done me, I think I can promise that I shall not overpass the philosophical boundaries of my title, nor raid the realm of Theology, nor trouble you with hard sayings touching Divine Revelation or the Supernatural. Thus I hope to confine myself to the elementary psychology which is the basis of Rationalism. Some apology may be due for a title which seems to imply that there are two distinct forms of Rationalism—one true, the other false. Rationalism, like Christianity, has no plural. False Rationalism is a contradiction in terms, implying that a man may follow the guidance of the light of reason, follow it irrationally, and be u 12 THE TRUE RATIONALISM landed in unreason. There are true and false Rationalists, as there are true and false Chris- tians : that is to say, there are people who take a good name in vain ; nevertheless the thing underlying the name is one, and not two. When, then, in the course of my lecture, I am found to prefix the epithet “true” or “false” to Rationalism, you will understand that in the first case, I plead guilty to an innocent tautology, and in the second, I am indulging in a fafon de parler which, though not logical, is deservedly popular. On this difficult subject I shall do my best to be clear. I am an old schoolmaster, not a Gifford lecturer, and I fail to see why it is incumbent on me, when addressing an educated audience, to doff the week-day style which goes down with my collier-friends, and to don the Sunday clothes of a stiff and stilted phraseology. I may have two suits of clothes, but I have only one kind of style ; for men are the same everywhere and I am everywhere the same with men. THE TRUE RATIONALISM 13 The Rationalism I shall try to expound has^had the start of the Rationalism, say, of the Rationalist Press Association, by about 2200 years, and has drawn to it the greatest intellects of the world from Aristotle through St Thomas Aquinas down to the little group of Oxford scholars who are now engaged on a new edition of the Opera Omnia of the founder of the Peripatetic school. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that this long duration through the centuries and this wide-spread influence exercised over the choicest and weightiest of medieval minds, establish some sort of presumption that the old system is at least as worthy of investigation as the new. Not even to us of the twentieth century has antiquity lost all its charms. The only quarrel I have with the University of Glasgow —a quarrel much accentuated in the case of the University of Edinburgh—is, that it is not older than the Papal Charter dated 7th January 1450. Perhaps you would all be better pleased if your alma mater had as many grey hairs on 14 THE TRUE RATIONALISM her head—or should I say was as bald-headed ? —as Paris or Bologna or Oxford, or even St Andrews. The younger the baby, the more beautiful it is. So say some mothers. The older the institution, the more venerable it is. So say I. But we may both be wrong—the mothers and I. Anyhow, what I call the True Rationalism of the Aristotelian school once sat in the chairs of Glasgow University in pre- Reformation and post- Reformation days, figures largely in the works of Robert Baillie, the very capable and very Calvinistic Principal of the seventeenth century, and, for aught I know, is still enthroned within these walls. In such company I am not ashamed to own my- self a Rationalist of the ancient type. I.—Rationalism or Foolishness? Before we come to a scientific definition of Rationalism, let me call attention to this point —if we are not Rationalists, we are fools. But THE TRUE RATIONALISM 15 there is no one here deserving of this reproach. Therefore all of us here are Rationalists. That is a syllogism beloved of the Peripatetics ; it is also a comfort to this assembly. Between Rationalism and Foolishness there is no tertium quid. In human nature — qua 1 human nature—the only light is reason. Where that is not given at all, even in germ, you have not men before you, but lower animals. When the use of that faculty which makes a man a man, is impeded by physiological or pathological conditions, we are imbeciles. If we extinguish that light ourselves by a course of physical or psychical excess, we are self-made lunatics, pro rata , i.e., in proportion to the mental area which we empty of light or invest with dark- ness. Rationalists or Irrationalists we must all be in every moment of conscious or deliberate action. If any course of speculative thought is seen to be irrational, we are obliged, 1 Qua a favourite relative particle with the schoolmen. It is the Aristotelian D, and is getting into English books, and even into leaders in The Glasgow Herald, 16 THE TRUE RATIONALISM in deference to the law of reason, not to enter that path, or to quit it if entered. If we do not, we are, I shudder to say it, intellectual fools, pro rata. Similarly, if in the moral sphere, a course of action is known by the light of reason to be unreasonable, we are constrained to leave that action undone, and if we persist in doing it, we are moral fools—again pro rata. To come to particulars. If Christianity is shown by reason to be irrational or anti- rational, it is, gentlemen, your duty and mine to abandon it to-morrow or perhaps to-night. Again, if ultra- Socialism commends itself to calm and dispassionate reason as the sole and sufficient remedy for all social ills, we must, as consistent Rationalists, evacuate our present position, go over in a body to the Glasgow Socialists, and embrace the Manifesto which was painted with the flaming brush of Con- fiscation as recently as November last. The one great human force to keep us in the old paths of the Faith is Rationalism. The one impelling power to necessitate our migration THE TRUE RATIONALISM 17 to opposite fields of thought and action is Rationalism. If man is a rational animal, we cannot get out of Rationalism any more than we can get out of our skin. s I take it, then, we are all Rationalists, and our determination to remain so is strengthened by the consideration that the type of the non- Rationalist is the born idiot, and the type of the anti- Rationalist is—Mr Robert Blatchford. II.—Praise of Rationalism * I Bonum rationis est hominis bonum} Homo maxime est mens hominis, 2 A panegyric is not always rational in its substance, and its length sometimes makes it highly irrational. Hence I must not linger long on this section. Besides, as we are all 1 “The good of reason is the good of man.”—St Augustine, De Trin., vi., 8. 2 “ Man is pre-eminently the mind of man.”—St Thomas Aquinas, Summa , 1-2, q. 29, art. 4. B 18 THE TRUE RATIONALISM Rationalists, because all non-fools, too much praise of Rationalism might be considered flattery of us Rationalists, and thus stir up the vanity latent, if not blatant, in every human breast. Hence, to escape the danger of any- thing like complicity in guilt, I shall let much of the praising be done by others. Summum animce est ipsa ratio}—“ It is Reason which is the summation of the soul,” says St Thomas, the interpreter par excellence of Aristotle, and the faithful disciple of the Greek master whom he always calls “ the Philosopher.” And again : Causa et radix humani boni est ratio} — “The cause and root of man’s good is Reason.” And more strongly still : Nihil est majus mente rationali nisi Deus , 8 — “ There is nothing greater than the thinking mind, except God.” 4 1 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa , 2-2, q. 53, art. 3. 2 Ibid., 1-2, q. 66, art. 1. 3 Ibid., Supplem., q. 16, art 6. 4 St Augustine had written the same sentence with “human ” instead of “thinking” mind. St Thomas, who was a great believer in angelic spirits and their resplendent intelligences, remembers that in the mental scale they come between man 1 THE TRUE RATIONALISM 19 Rationalism is often said to be a formidable foe of Religion. It was once thought to be its best friend. There is some mistake here, that prompts me to refer you to a foregoing remark about Rationalism true and false. Let Rationalism grow from more to more in Religion, and Religion will be all the better for it. If reason got a fair chance, would it, think you, lead us into the welter of doubt and strife and recrimination in which this dear land is plunged, and plunged so long that it is matter of conjecture whether she will ever emerge with breath enough in her body to pronounce the name of God ? An enemy hath done this thing, and no friend. The best human friend of Divine Truth is the thing that makes man most like to the mind of God, and that is reason. If Rationalism, through such agen- cies as the Rationalist Press Association, proclaims itself the enemy of Christianity, make sure, with the aid of your reason, which and God, and so adroitly changes the word “ human ” to “ thinking.” 20 THE TRUE RATIONALISM kind of Rationalism is speaking, the false or the true. If “ Modernism ” poses as the friend of Religion, let reason pause and see whether such friendly professions come well from a system which belittles and belies reason, and is therefore the death of Rationalism, rather than the life of Religion. “We could not believe,” says St Augustine, “if we had not rational souls.” 1 With rational souls men can disbelieve, but is it the rational element in the soul that is in arms against Faith, or has their reason capitulated to such foes of reason as ignorance, passion, or pride ? In the religious sphere, which constitutes, as Matthew Arnold says, “ the three-fourths of life,” there is room for the exercise of reason, and yet this depart- ment is just the one where reason is exercised least. This looks badly for truth, consider- ing that, in the words of Bishop Butler, “ Reason is the only faculty we have where- with to judge concerning anything, even religion itself.” 4 In the search for the true 1 Epist 120, n. 3. 2 Analogy , etc. THE TRUE RATIONALISM 21 religion, reason is wanted, even more than in the search for anything else. “It is a disgrace,” cries St Augustine, “ to believe any man without good reason. Why expect and importune me to do it ? ” 1 And St Thomas adds, “A rational man should not believe unless he sees that the proposition believed were worthy of his belief, by reason of the evidence of accompanying signs, or for some good reason.” 2 Dispraise of a great thing may be as culpable as praise of what is ignoble. Rationalism is the highest of all the “isms.” To underrate it is to deride, and to denounce it is to forswear the noblest attribute of human nature. Outside of it no one can find human salvation. Whatever views philo- sophers have held of the genesis of man, whatever theories about his essence have been broached, established, attacked, or exploded, whether we be illimitable nothings or the sum 1 De Utilitate Credendi , xiv., 31. 2 Summa , 2-2, q. 1, art. 4. 22 THE TRUE RATIONALISM of all things, the sport of chance or the objects of design, the scions of brutes or the sons of God, the expansion of a bodiless idea or the resultant force of dead matter, the cunning workmanship of demiurges or the clumsy experiment of one of nature’s journeymen ; whencesoever we are and whithersoever tend- ing, all are agreed that there is in us such a thing as thought, and to this thinking power in the last resort, the truth or falsehood of every judgment that sweeps the area of consciousness must be referred, and by this power the final word of acceptance or con- demnation on every imaginable creed, system, or hypothesis must be pronounced. III.—Definition of Rationalism It is no grave fault of mine, I submit, to have deferred the definition of Rationalism so long ; it is rather a covert compliment to you, THE TRUE RATIONALISM 23 gentlemen, that you know the thing before I define it. A very conspicuous feature of the old Rationalists is the love of definition. They not only could not get on without it ; they simply revelled in it. Were it only to humour them, let us define Rationalism to be that system of philosophy which upholds the headship of human reason. Exception may well be taken to this form of words as a near approach to tautology. It comes to this, that human reason upholds the headship of human reason. It is to be hoped it does. What else is head within man except his head ? A man sticks up for himself, why not reason for itself, especially as there is nothing else worth sticking up for ? The man indeed may be in the wrong in his self-defence, whereas reason cannot err in its declaration that it cannot knock under to something inferior, that it cannot abdicate or substitute in its place a locum tenens. If any such com- petitor or rival or representative is to be found, 24 THE TRUE RATIONALISM reason asks, where is it ? and there is no answer. There is only one runner in the race, and it has a walk-over. Cast about for the main thing in the material universe, and your mind will not only light upon, but get fixed on, man, and your scrutiny of man can lead to no other conclusion than that the biggest thing amidst all his littlenesses is his power of thought. “ Narrow the world, roomy the brain of man,” says Schiller. With equal truth, perhaps, we could reverse the epithets and speak of the roomy world and the narrow brain, but it is not a question of space here, but of relative positions in the scale of being. 1 The thinking power lodged in the convolutions of the little organ called the brain of man, is confessedly of a higher order than the vast stretch of ether “ which bathes the shores of the farthest star,” and comes under the designa- tion of the “lower creation.” Reason, then, knows itself to be head, and this fact will 1 This “ scale ” is a great favourite with Pope in his Essay on Man. THE TRUE RATIONALISM 25 enable us to leave out all reference to reason as upholding herself, and define Rationalism more simply as the headship of reason. “Supremacy” would not do as well. It means too much. We may stand head and shoulders above all that is of the earth earthy, but we are certainly not supreme over it, as we find to our cost, when we try to tackle it and bring it under control. In this tussle, if any- thing is supreme, it is not our minds but certain “laws of Nature” which are not only not of our making, but are often directly opposed to our will. If Sir Gilbert Scott, the architect of this University, saw a stone at the bottom of the ravine, and judged it worthy to mount to the top of the tower on Gilmorehill, you know how little he could do with his mind and will, if, furnished with these weapons alone, he entered into conflict with the phenomena of gravitation, and commanded the stone to rise. The stone would not move, and the bystander might laugh. A happy compromise between Nature and Sir Gilbert would follow, 26 THE TRUE RATIONALISM and the block and pulley would lift the stone into mid-air. All the while this mechanical device would be as much under the “ law of gravity ” as the weight moved. We may coax Nature and play into her hands, but it is folly to talk of supremacy over forces which we are powerless to check or change in any sub- stantial way. “ Supremacy,” then, has no place in our definition. We are really and truly heads over some things, but what are we supreme over ? I, for one, don’t know. IV. — Inerrancy of the Senses My panegyric of reason was pretty strong. As I went on, somebody may have i egarded me as a kind of Rugby footballer who was going a little too fast and furious, and ought to be stopped. I am afraid I must go on, and take my chance of a tripping. I am going to call reason inerrant or infallible. The shock may THE TRUE RATIONALISM 27 possibly be intensified when I add that the senses of man, inferior though they necessarily are to the dominant reason, are themselves entitled to be called inerrant. Applying a little of the old Rationalism to Sensism, I venture to assert with the Aristo- telian scholastics that our senses are per se infallible guides in their limited domain. Never wrong themselves, they do seem to mislead us, especially when the organs of sense are ill-equipped, to begin with, or have suffered some lesion, or are forced to work under abnormal conditions. Hampered or vitiated though they be, they do the only thing they can do—their mechanical best—and if error of judgment follows, it cannot be imputed to the non-judging sense, but to some other faculty in us. When a sense is from any cause, congenital or other, defective in structure or function, it fails, of course, but it cannot turn false witness. Aristotle applied to this breakdown of a sense a Greek phrase which is nearly always mistranslated by the English 28 THE TRUE RATIONALISM “accidentally” or “casually.” 1 There is no such thing as chance. No cataract on the eye comes “casually.” Another thing which the Peripatetics always did with mishaps among the senses, was to ignore them and turn back to the general rule of their normal operation—and we cannot blame them. They were not oculists, or aurists, or specialists, but only philosophers. The proper object, say of the sense of vision, is that condition of the thing seen which we call its colour, and nothing else, not hardness nor softness, nor nearness, nor distance. The normal eye—and we always assume unless positive proof to the contrary is forthcoming, that all our eyes are normal—can distinguish between red and green in coloured objects. Ten thousand pairs of eyes set in the skulls of ten thousand rational men, see a train passing a signal at express speed and hurrying to destruction. This great body of spectators 1 This famous term is kcltcl crvfipe(3r]K6s • medieval Latin, per accidens. It generally means out of the normal course of nature, and approximates to napci (f>t