The Freedom of Science

Without Knowledge of the Human Nature

“Varied, according to character, are the demands made by heart and mind,” assures us a representative of modern philosophy, “corresponding to them is the image of the world to which the individual turns by inner necessity. He may waver hither and thither, uncertain as to himself; at last, however, his innermost tendency of life will prevail and press him into the view of the world corresponding to his individuality. Upon its further development worldly and local influences will play a very important part. But the deciding factor in giving the direction is personality.” “And,” continues Prof. Adickes, “the sharper and more one-sided a character type is brought to expression, the more it will be urged into a certain metaphysical or religious tendency, and this man will find no rest, nor feel himself at home in the world, until he has found the view of life that fits him. Nor does man assemble his metaphysics with discrimination on the grounds of logical necessity, choosing here, rejecting there, but it grows within himself by that inner compulsion identical with true freedom.” Hence, not unselfish yielding to truth, no, the inclinations of heart and mind, the “personality” must form the view of the world. Let every type of character therefore develop itself sharply and one-sidedly, let every one get the view of the world corresponding to himself, without regard to objective truth and logical necessity. This precisely is the “true freedom.” “For when is a man more free, than when he chooses and does – without any compulsion, even resisting compulsion – what his innermost soul is urging him to choose and do? How could he be more true to himself, more like himself?” With such a freedom “the outer compulsion” of an absolute truth, to say nothing of the duty to believe, will not agree. “The core of one's very being,” so Harnack informs us, “should be grasped in its depths, and the soul should only know its own needs and the way indicated by it to gratify them.” “According to my character,” says Adickes again, “is the world reflected within myself by intrinsic necessity just as my creed represents it, and no opponent is able to shake my position by arguments of reason or by empirical facts.”

Hence it is not only true, as has been known from the beginning, that the inclinations of the heart are trying to prevail upon reason to urge their desires, and to oppose what displeases them, and that reason must beware of the heart – no, inclination and character are now directly called upon to shape our religion and view of the world. Every type of man, every period, may construct its own philosophical system, or, if this is beyond it, at least its own ideas; it may also shape its own Christianity, according to its experience. As the individual chooses his clothes, and puts his individuality into them, in like manner may the individual put on the view of life that fits him.

These principles represent the apostasy from objective truth, and, at the same time, the apostasy from the principles of true science: their first demand, the proper understanding of truth, is perverted into its very opposite. A necessary quality of scientific research is exactness; exactness, however, demands most conscientious cleaving to truth; scale and measure are its instruments. The reverse of exactness is to cast away scale and measure, to turn eye and ear, not toward reality, but toward one's self, so as to observe personal wishes and inclinations, and then shape the results of the “research” accordingly. This may be a method of freedom, but it cannot be the method of science. The very thing that true research would eliminate in the first place, viz., to have the decision influenced by hobbies and moods, is most important in the method of individualism; objectiveness, deemed by true science the highest requirement, is to that method the least one: what true science first of all insists on, namely, to prove that which is claimed, this method knows but little of. It recalls the method of the gourmet who selects that which gratifies his taste: it may be likened to the dandy picking frock-coat and trousers that suit his whim. True research, with a firm hand at the helm, aims to direct its craft so as to discover new coasts, or at least a new island; the exploring done by liberal research is like casting off the rudder to be tossed by the waves, for its task is only to hold to the course which the waving billows of individual life give to it. True science, finally, seeks for serious results, able to withstand criticism: the research by individualism produces results which, as individualism itself confesses, must not be taken seriously. They are the subjective achievements of amateurs, creations of fashion, cut to the pattern of the ruling principle: nihil nisi quod modernum est. A science that professes such a method is beyond a doubt unfit to play a beneficial part in the endeavour of mankind.

Do not say: but it is not claimed that religion and view of life are matters of scientific research: on the contrary, they are always distinguished from science. It is true, this is not infrequently claimed. But it is also known how energetically just these matters are appropriated by science. Is it not exactly this sphere in which free research is to be active? Is it not its aim to construct a “scientific view of the world,” as opposed to the Christian belief? Is there not the conviction that science has already carried much light and enlightenment into this very sphere, that it has upset the old tenets of faith?

And what an amount of ignorance of human nature underlies these principles! It is the same complete misconception that has always characterized liberalism, and which it has also manifested in economical matters. There, too, it demanded boundless freedom for all economic sources, ignoring man's disordered inclinations that will work disorder and destruction if not restrained by laws. In a similar manner they dream that man, if left to the unrestrained influence of his personality, will soar without fail to the heights of the pure truth. They know no longer the maxim once engraved by the wisdom of the ancient world upon Delphi's sanctuary: “Know thyself”! They no longer know the beguiling and benumbing influence exerted upon reason by inclination, how it fetters the mind. Amor premit oculos, says Quintilian. The thing we like, we desire to establish as true; favourable arguments are decisive, counter arguments are ignored or belittled, inclinations guide the observation, determine the books and sources drawn from. If we meet with something unsympathetic, something that interferes with the liberties we have grown fond of, it takes a rare degree of unselfishness to love the painful truth more than one's self. It is easy to leave cool reason in control in mathematical speculations: they seldom affect the heart; quite different, however, in questions of philosophy and religion that often have vexatious consequences.

We have to concede that D. F. Strauss was right when he wrote: “He who writes about the Rulers of Nineveh or the Pharaohs of Egypt, may pursue a purely historical interest: but Christianity is a power so alive, and the question of what occurred at its origin is involved in such vast consequences for the immediate present, that the inquirer would have to be dull-witted to be interested only in a purely historical way in the solution of these questions.” But we must also regret that this personal interest has misled him, for one, into pernicious ways.

In view of the frequent assurances of the noted historian, Th. Mommsen, that he hates the sight of old Christian inscriptions9we may perhaps welcome it in the interest of history that he refrained from writing the fourth volume of his Roman history, wherein the Origin of Christianity was to be treated. One of his biographers asserts that the downfall of paganism through Christianity was a fact not to Mommsen's liking, that “a description of the decomposition of all things ancient, and the substitution therefor of the Nazarene spirit would not have been a labour of love.”10 And again, when we see the well-known historian of philosophy, F. Ueberweg, in a letter to F. A. Lange, denouncing from the bitterness of his heart “the miserable beggar-principle of Christianity,” and the “surrendering of independence and of personal honour in favour of a servile submission to the master, who is made a Messiah, nay, even the incarnate Son of God,” then we may well dread the historical objectivity of a man of such notions in writing about the religion of Jesus Christ.

With reference to the chief subject of psychology, the noted psychologist, W. James, writes with utmost frankness: “The soul is an entity, and truly one of the worst kind, a scholastic one, and something said to be destined for salvation or perdition. As far as I am concerned, I must frankly admit that the antipathy against the particular soul I find myself burdened with, is an old hardness of heart, which I cannot account for, not even to myself. I will admit that the formal disposition of the question in dispute would come to an end, if the existence of souls could be used for an explanatory principle. I admit the soul would be a means of unification, whereas the working of the brain, or ideas, show no harmonizing efficacy, no matter how thoroughly synchronical they be. Yet, despite these admissions, I never resort in my psychologizing to the soul.”

If we read such statement, if, in addition, we remember the popular-philosophical science of men like Haeckel, particularly perhaps the literature which he recommends for information about Christianity, and of which he himself makes use; if we have read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or the “Philosophy of Races” of a Chamberlain, – we can no longer be at a loss what to think of the “rule of reason” and of the “search for pure truth.” Observe, also, the restless haste of those who, having turned their back upon the Catholic Church, now proceed to attack her, observe their agitated work and incitement, how they rummage and ransack the nooks and corners of the history of the Church in quest of refuse and filth, and if the find is not sufficient how they even help it along by forgery, all this to demonstrate to the world that the grandest fact in history is really absurdity and filth; – then one will understand what instincts may be found there to guide “reason and science.” How even sexual impulses are trying to shape their own ethics we shall not examine here. F. W. Foerster relates: “I once heard a moral pervert expound his ethical and religious notions; they were nothing but the reflection of his perverse impulses. But he thought them to be the result of his reasoning.” Is there not known in these days the inherited disorder of the human heart as characterized by the Apostle in the words: “But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin (Rom. vii. 23)”? The Ancients knew it. The wisdom of Plato knew it, who speaks of the “pricks of sin, sunk into man, coming from an old, unexpiated offence, giving birth to wickedness.” The wise Cicero knew of it: “Nature has bestowed upon us but a few sparks of knowledge, which, corrupted by bad habits and errors, we soon extinguish, with the result that the light of nature does nowhere appear in its clearness and brightness.” Truth is often disagreeable to nature. And if not subdued and ruled by strong discipline, nature proceeds to oppose the truth. Only to lofty self-discipline and purity of morals is reserved the privilege of facing the highest truths with a calm eye. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Mental Bondage

Of this wisdom the admirer of liberal freedom knows little. Instead of distinguishing the good from the evil in man, of unfolding his inner kernel, the pure spirit, and making it rule; instead of demanding, like Pythagoras, discipline as a preparatory school for wisdom, he has learned from Rousseau, the master of modern Liberalism, that everything in man is good. Depravity of nature, original sin, are unsympathetic things to his ear. Even Goethe wrote to Herder, when Kant had in his religious philosophy found a radical Evil in man: “After it has taken Kant a lifetime to clean his philosophical gown of many filthy prejudices, he now outrageously slabbers it with the stain of the radical Evil, so that Christians, too, may be enticed to come and kiss the seam.” Instead of exhorting for a redemption from internal fetters, as the sages of all ages did, the principle of wisdom now proposed is to quietly let individuality develop, with all its inclinations. They call this freedom. Is it not the freedom whereof the slave of sensuality avails himself to form his theory of life? It, too, “grows up in man with that inner compulsion which is identical with true freedom” (Adickes).

Freedom this may be. But only external freedom, the only freedom they often know. They are unaware that they forfeit thereby the real, the inner freedom. “Thou aimest at free heights,” admonishes even the most impetuous herald of freedom, “thy soul is athirst for stars. But also thy wicked impulses are athirst for freedom. Thy wild hounds want to be free, they bark joyfully in their kennel when thy spirit essays to throw open all dungeons.”11 They think to be free and speak of the self-assurance of individual reason, and they cannot see that the mind is in the fetters of bondage.

Else how is it that the atheistic free science, considered in general, arrives with infallible regularity at results that obviously tend to a morally loose conduct of life? How is it, that it tries throughout to shirk the acceptance of a personal God, and is at home only in open or disguised atheism? that it so persistently avoids the acceptance of anything supernatural? Why does it in its researches never arrive at theism, which has as much foundation at least as pantheism and atheism? Why does it, nearly without exception, deny or ignore the personal immortality of the soul and a Beyond; why does it never reach the opposite result which, in intrinsic evidence, ranks at least on a par with it? Why is it not admitted, that the will is free and strictly responsible for its acts, although this fact is borne out by the obvious experience and testimony of mankind? Why does it so regularly arrive at the conclusion that the Christian religion has become untenable, and needs development; that its ethics, too, must be reformed, more especially in sexual matters? Why does it not defend the duty to believe, but reject it persistently? A striking fact! The matters in question here concern truths that impose sacrifices upon man, whereas their opposites have connections of intimate friendship with unpurged impulses. It may be noted also that this same science, that announces to the world these results of research, meets with the boisterous applause from the elements that belong to the morally inferior part of mankind.

St. Augustine prays: “Redeem me, O God, from the throng of thoughts, which I feel so painfully within my soul, which feels lowly in Thy presence, which is fleeing to Thy mercy. Grant me that I may not give my assent to them; that I may disapprove of them, even if they seek to delight me, and that I may not stay with them in sleepiness. May they not have the power to insinuate themselves into my works; may I be protected from them in my resolution, may my conscience be protected by Thy keeping.” It is the realization of the want of freedom of the human reason, the only way to the liberation from the fetters of our own imperfection. He, who has seriously begun to take up the struggle with his inner disorders, will, by his own experience, pray as St. Augustine prayed.

Recognizing this fact, man will try to rise above himself, to cleave to a superior Power and Wisdom, who, in purer heights, untouched by human passions, holds aloft the truth, in order to rise thereby above his own bondage; he will understand the necessity of an authority clothed with divine power and dignity, so that it may hold in unvanquished hands the ideal against all onslaughts of human passions. He will without difficulty find this power in the religion of Jesus Christ and in His Church: in Him, who could not be accused of sin, who by His Cross has achieved the highest triumph over flesh and sin, who has surrounded His Church with the bright throng of saints. And if he sees this religion and Church an object of persecution, he will behold in it the signature of its truth. For truth is a yoke despised by sensualism and pride, and the spiritual power that contends for purity and truth will be hated.

Without Earnestness

The regrettable conception of truth proper to the modern freedom of thought, leads to that flippancy with which our time is prone to treat the highest questions. Why conscientiousness and anxious care? All that is needed is to form one's personal views; there is no certain, generally valid, truth in religious matters. Hence there is often in this sphere of scientific research a method wholly different from that in use anywhere else. In history, philology, natural science, there is a striving for exactness, but in these matters exact reasoning is replaced only too often by discretionary reasoning, by loose forming of ideas; in the very domain which has ever pre-eminently been called the province of the wisdom of life, there is now in vogue the method of flippancy.

True wisdom is convinced that reason has not been given to man to grope in the dark in respect to the most momentous questions of life; that reason, though limited and liable to err, is given him to find the truth. True wisdom knows its difficulties when the matter in quest is metaphysical truth: it knows how, in this case, more than in any other, reason is exposed to the influence of inclinations from within, and to the power of error and of public opinion from without; that in these matters, least of all, reason is not in the habit of taking the truth by assault. True, there are intuitions, and inspiration by genius – they have their rights, but they are the exceptions. The ordinary, and only safe, way is to advance cautiously, by discoursive thinking, from cognition to cognition, otherwise there is danger of a sudden fall from the steep path.

In the early Christian ages this insight led to careful cultivation and application of certain methodical means of thinking and terms of expressions, to definitions, distinctions, and forms of syllogism, with that “insulting lucidity,” in the words of a modern philosopher, which gives to them the stamp of scrupulousness. The same insight into the cognitive weakness of reason leads to the noble union between science and modesty.

What, however, do we see in modern philosophic-religious thinking? Often unsolidity, with hardly a remnant of the principles of the serious pursuit of knowledge.

The autonomous freethinker of these days lacks chiefly humility and modesty. The ancient Sage of Samos once declined the name of “sage,” saying that God alone is wise, while man must be content to be wisdom-loving (φιλόσοφος). Not always so the sages of modern times.

Kant believed of his system: “Critical philosophy must be convinced that there is not in store for it a change of opinions, no improvement nor possibly a differently formed system, but that the system of criticism, resting on a fully assured basis, will be established forever, indispensable for all coming ages to the highest aims of mankind.” Hegel, in turn, was no less convinced of the indispensability of his doctrine. In the summer term of 1820 he began his lectures with the words: “I would say with Christ: I teach the truth, and I am the truth.” Yet, to Schopenhauer Hegel's philosophy is nonsense, humbug, and worse. Schopenhauer knew better, and was convinced that he had lifted the veil of truth higher than any mortal before him; he claimed that he had written paragraphs “which may be taken to have been inspired by the Holy Ghost.” Shortly before his death he wrote: “My curse upon any one, who in reprinting my works shall knowingly make a change; be it but a sentence, or a word, a syllable or a punctuation point.” Nietzsche held: “I have given to the world the most profound book in its possession.” To the eyes of this philosophy, modesty and humility are no longer virtues. B. Spinoza, a leader in later philosophy, states expressly: “Humility is no virtue; it does not spring from reason. It is a sadness, springing from the fact that man becomes aware of his impotence.”

An arrogant mind is not capable of finding the higher truth with certainty; conscientious obedience to truth, unselfish abstention from asserting one's ego, and one's pet opinion, can dwell only in the humble mind. Here applies what St. Augustine said of the Neoplatonists: “To acquiesce in truth you need humility, which, however, is very difficult to instil into your minds.”12

When God's authority steps before scientists and earnestly demands faith, they will talk excitedly about their human dignity that does not permit them to believe; about reason being their court of last resort that must not know of submission; and if the Church, in the name of God, steps before them, they become abusive.

Men who have scarcely outgrown their minority often feel it incumbent upon themselves to furnish humanity with new thought and to discard the old. D. F. Strauss, a young under-master of twenty-seven years, writes his “Life of Jesus, critically analyzed” (1835); he tells the Christian world that everything it has hitherto held sacred is a delusion and a snare; he feels the vocation to “replace the old, obsolete, supernatural, method of contemplating the history of Jesus with a new one,” which changes all divine deeds into myths. Hardly out of knickerbockers and kilts, they feel experienced enough to come forth with novel and unheard-of propositions on the highest problems. In business and office, as in public service, sober-mindedness and maturity are demanded; but to work out the ultimate questions of humanity, inexperience and lack of the deeper knowledge of life do not disqualify in our time. If Schiller's complaint of the Kantians of his time was that, “What they have scarcely learned to-day, they want to teach to-morrow,” what is to be said of those who teach even before they have learned? And what superficial thinking do we meet in the philosophy of the day! Lacking all solid training, they proceed to construct new systems, or at least fragments of them. As regards their competence, one is often tempted to quote the harsh words of a modern writer: “I believe Schopenhauer would have formed a better opinion of the human intellect, had he paid less attention to authors and newspaper-writers, and more to the common sense evinced by men in their work and business” (Paulsen).

It would be highly instructive to take a longer journey through the realm of modern philosophy, in so far as it touches upon questions concerning the theory of the world, or even liberal Protestant theology, so as to subject to a searching criticism the untenable notions and attempts at demonstration even of acknowledged representatives of this science, whereby they generally do away with God and miracles, the soul and immortality, freedom of the will, the divine moral laws, the Gospel, the divinity of Christ, and so much more, and show what they offer in place of all this. It would disclose an enormous lack of scientific method: instead of assured results they offer questionable, even untenable theories; in place of proofs, emphatical assertions, imperatives, catch phrases; or else arguments which under the simplest test will prove miscarriages of logic. These philosophers vault ditches and boundaries with ease, and derive full gratification from imperfect and warped ideas. Of course, exactness in philosophical thinking is not a fruit to be plucked while out taking a walk; it is the product of serious mental work, of sterling philosophical training, which, alas, is wanting to-day in large circles of scientists.

As an instance, we point to the method described in a previous chapter, by which all supernatural factors are rejected by the arbitrary postulate of “exclusively natural causation,” without valid proofs, based only upon the arbitrary decision of so-called modern science – in the gravest matter an unscientific process that cannot be outdone.