A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz (1646–1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation;19 and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,20 he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;21 and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668 (aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first (anonymous) appearance an “unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,” and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it “dared to apply to sacred Scripture.”22 Yet in the next year we find him writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the Church. “A philosophic age,” he declares, “is about to begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread even among politicians.

Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy—I will not say atheism, but—naturalism, be publicly professed.”23 For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes,24 whom he also habitually resisted.

This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious thought.25 His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée,26 written in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers27 a process of begging the question. Deity, a mere “infinition” of finite qualities, is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other men’s theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed truths;28 and he always discussed the Bible as a believer; yet he rarely went to church;29 and the Low German nickname Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, “believes nothing”) expressed his local reputation.

No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one else went, save his secretary.30 It is on the whole difficult to doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had been and has been for deism and atheism.31 He and Newton were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age; and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of Newton32 tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism.33 Spinoza being, according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,34 there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of optimism—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds—which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful men give up the principle.

4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism in Germany. After the Thirty Years’ War there arose a religious movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them.35 Contending against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought.36 Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies,37 their impulse went far, and greatly influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in one generation.38 Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to suppress their schools.39 Virtues generated under persecution, however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that of orthodoxy in its dogmatism.

Religion was thus represented by a species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and cant.40 Thus “the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief.”41 “How sorely,” says Tholuck, “the hold not only of ecclesiastical but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances.”42 Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin, the declaration that “Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the better.”43 But again there is the testimony of the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as “free atheists.” And though the name “freethinker” was not yet much used in discussion, it had become current in the form of Freigeist—the German equivalent still used. This, as we have noted,44 was probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the “Free Spirit,” rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English “freethinker.”

5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen, the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who in 1687 published a treatise on “Divine Jurisprudence,” in which the principles of Pufendorf on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of theological fear.45 Some years later, gaining self-possession, he recognized the rationality of Pufendorf’s system, and both expounded and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf, there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist.46 Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus preparing the way for utilitarianism.47 This sufficed to make the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius, heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane reform.