The Retreat from Reason

Abstract

The Retreat from Reason Bertrand H. Bronson LeST I STUMBLE, and because the time is short, I will state at once the propositions I would try to illustrate in what follows. As generalities, they are unlikely to excite disagreement, and the interest must lie in the fluctuations of thought and feeling that dif­ ferentiate those generations, chronologically viewed. 1. At the opening of the eighteenth century there is a weakening of conviction of the importance of man’s personal relation to God the Father. 2. There is a depersonalizing of external nature, from the cooper­ ative universal Mother to universal, unalterable physical laws. 3. There is a shrinkage of assurance of the potency of man’s ra­ tional powers, no longer seen as ’'infinite in faculty,” yet a keener sense of reliance on them. As the century passes its meridian, values are gradually rescaled and redefined, roughly as follows: 4. Nature in a "state of nature” is preferred to nature domesti­ cated. 5. Irregularity enforces a lawless appeal that surpasses rational ordering. 6. Sudden irrational conversion and conviction of salvation by faith returns to religion. 7. Emotional assurance tends to supplant the appeal to reason as expressed in logical trains of thought. It may be laid down as an axiom, as Dr. Johnson would say, that everything had already begun before we realized. In the con­ text of the moment, this truth if pursued would take me back straightway into the seventeenth century, where I have no wish to 225 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century go, further than to acknowledge that the beginnings are there, Pyrrhonism and all. About 1700 there was an unusually pervasive sense of the open­ ing of a century as a true beginning: almost the birth of a ’’brave new world.” The shadows and superstitions of the past were being dispersed by Newton’s universal light, swept away like ghosts: ’Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin a New.1 As Newton had disclosed the laws of celestial mechanics, Locke had found a key to the inner world, which could open the mechan­ ics of the mind—or a clue, a method, if not a key. The new revela­ tions, fortunately, did not require the sacrifice of cherished beliefs. Locke and Newton were devout. God was still Creator and Lord of all, and the natural universe bore witness to His power and glory: ’’The works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity,” declared Locke. "The spangled heavens proclaim their great Original,” sang Addison. But now the old ideal system of orders, each hierarchically ascending, and bound’together in mu­ tual cooperative obedience to divine command, needed reformula­ tion in less spiritual terms—the political order in Britain having al­ ready been reconstituted by the simple stroke of an ax. The new world-view still assumed a Divine Author, but shifted the focus of attention, in Tuveson’s phrase, from why to how He did it. The prevailing optimism of the age rested in the conviction that the physical universe was based on natural laws which could be discovered—gradually—by man, and understood as being fixed, regular, unalterable procedures; not beyond the capacity of human mentality to grasp as principles, though too vast to be compre­ hended as a whole, and too complicated to be known except piece­ meal; but not supernatural, not outside or alien to intellectual pro­ cess as we know it. Underlying this confidence is faith—faith in the Creator, faith in the stability of Nature, and faith in rationality as humanly conceived. The supreme expression of this confidence is paragraph IX of the first Epistle of Pope’s Essay on Man, begin­ ning: 226 Symposium*. The Retreat from Reason All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. Because of its very lack of philosophical originality, Pope’s state­ ment is a paradigm of its century’s characteristic attitude toward the Cosmos; it was so widely accepted as to be translated into twenty languages, and into some of them many times. Catholics, Protestants, and deists could join in adopting it, punctuating or footnoting to suit themselves. But when God said, "Let...