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They have the zealous service and unswerving credence of millions of honest and worthy citizens: and they are defended by solid ramparts of prejudice, and sentiment, and obstinate old custom. The odds against the Rationalists are tremendous. To challenge the claims of Christianity is easy: to get the challenge accepted is very hard. Rationalists' books and papers are boycotted.
One of the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the two schools called respectively 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'. The empiricists who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume maintained that all our knowledge is derived from experience; the rationalists who are represented by the Continental philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially Descartes and Leibniz maintained that, in addition to what we know by experience, there are certain 'innate ideas' and 'innate principles', which we know independently of experience.
And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston's. You will note that while in this book we use the word "God" to indicate the God of the Heart, Sir Harry uses "God" for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being.
Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography: "William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and children aghast; defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it: information given as certain that 'God Save the King' was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon, that Christ was watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists.
He may say that the good of exercise is self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned educationists. The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales.
As one looks round one sees here a clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons bulging with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars....
And such, tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are blank."
Those whose experience has to do with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings in whose active production they have had no share are practical rationalists.
But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation EXPRESSLY SAY THAT THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR PRACTICAL INTERESTS OR PERSONAL REASONS. Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say, relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his evidence merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself.
Both those innovators recognised themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people.
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