A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the physical universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold by the Christian scheme--he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist--but some later astronomers seem to have done so. When, however, the great Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis, previously guessed at by Bruno and outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit was rudely shaken as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like every other previous advance in physical science this was denounced as atheistic [1879]--which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed in essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace's system widens immensely the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism of the Christian era; and the subsequent concrete developments of astronomy, giving as they do such an insistent and overwhelming impression of physical infinity, have made the "Christian hypothesis" [1880] fantastic save for minds capable of enduring any strain on the sense of consistency. Paine had brought the difficulty vividly home to the common intelligence; and though the history of orthodoxy is a history of the success of institutions and majorities in imposing incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on this side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change; and as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a Scotch clergyman a very plain indication [1881] of disbelief in the Hebrew story of the stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of the rotation of the earth. It is typical of the tenacity of religious delusion that a quarter of a century later this among other irrational credences was contended for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen, [1882] and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for all scientifically trained men they had become untenable. And that the general growth of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific men the old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814 (No. 46), and was "universally attributed to Prof. Leslie," [1883] the distinguished physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay, Sur les probabilités, it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume that miracles cannot be proved by any testimony. Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in 1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the school of Hume, who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless he again succeeded Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and was knighted in 1832. The invention of the hygrometer and the discovery of the relations of light and heat had begun to count for more in science than the profession of orthodoxy.