To Mr. Abbot.

Cambridge, Feb. 10, 1869.

I have had the proposition A request that Chauncey would contribute an article on “The Religious Aspects of Positivism” to a volume which it was then proposed to publish. ⁵⁰ of your letter of so long ago, so long in debate that I presume you have concluded ere this that my silence means dissent. This I am now persuaded is the true interpretation, though contrary to the current maxim.

I owe you an apology for this delay in answering your kind letter, to which you wished an immediate reply. But I really desired to see my way clear to meeting your wishes and my own, touching the essay on the positivists’ religion; and I regret very much that I cannot count upon myself as good for so difficult and delicate a task. My pen has of late forsaken the paths of speculation; and I have not been able to persuade it back.

I do not feel competent, nor do I care, to address, unprovoked, a large promiscuous audience, the majority of whom judge by texts and phrases, and apply the touchstone of magical words, —and so think they think. Something more stimulating, like misrepresentation by an opponent, or like personal debate, must inspire me. A cold thesis, served in a book, does not incite the speculative appetite with me; and I confess to the heartiest sympathy with Plato’s preference for a man, who can question and answer, rather than for a book, which must say much at random, or demand an artist’s skill and imagination in the writer. One of the most important of the teacher’s or preacher’s qualifications, yet one of the rarest, is a knowledge of the hearer’s mind, so that his discourse may answer to something, or else raise clear and profitable questions. Most philosophical books, lectures, and sermons seem

to me either mechanical performances, or else the offspring of a subtile vanity and desire for intellectual sympathy. Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence. Men will not agree in the fashions of their dress, in manners, or “beliefs,” till reduced to the naked facts of experience; and the precepts and methods of modern science, every day extended to new fields of inquiry, will, in these, I believe, do more to invigorate and correct the human understanding than all the essays of all the philosophers.

The old philosophy is ignored by science, not opposed by it, and must take its chance in the reconstruction of speculative thought without the aid of the traditions, the loyalties, and the patriotisms which now certify so much to so many. Why are we Protestants rather than Catholics, Unitarians rather than Orthodox, radicals rather than reactionists? Certainly, not for the kind of reason which makes us Newtonians.

Positivism, to be sure, so far as it pretends to be a philosophy at all, is more than the body of the sciences. It must be a system of the universal methods, hypotheses, and principles which are founded on them, and if not a universal science, in an absolute sense, yet must be coextensive with actual knowledge, and exhibit the consilience of the sciences.

But while positivism ignores religion in the narrower sense of the word, — that is, the body thereof, — it nevertheless, unlike the old atheism, does not reject the religious spirit. It is rather constrained — not for itself, but through the earnest, practical characters of many of its disciples — to yield some worthy object to religious devotion, which they think they find in the interests of humanity. But this is an affair of character, not of intelligence. If you define the end of philosophy to be the attainment of religious objects and truths, then positivism is no philosophy. The religion of positivism is no

part of its philosophy, but is only a religion which consists with its rigid methods and restraints. Mr. Mill maintains that such a religion is not only possible, but has actually controlled the lives and formed the characters of men of this way of thinking.

I see that, after declining to enter into this discussion in your book, I have straightway been tempted to take it up in my letter; but my aim is only to show how such an essay as you desire would not properly come from one who is a positivist in spite of religion: it should rather come from some one who is religious in spite of his positivism. I could do better in the way of defending this philosophy from theological attacks than in adapting a religion to it.

I hope to hear from you soon, in spite of my ill-deserts, and to hear that you are prospering.