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

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.