The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America

by Charles D. Cashdollar

Overview

Charles Cashdollar reinterprets nineteenth-century British and American Protestant thought by identifying positivism as the central intellectual issue of the era. Positivism meant, at first, the ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte; later in the century, the term indicated a more general opposition to supernatural religion. Cashdollar shows that contemporary thinkers recognized positivism, at each of these stages, as the most fundamental of the proliferating challenges to religious belief. He further reveals how the encounter with positivism altered Protestant orthodoxy—in both subtle and radical ways.

Positivists denied that humans could know anything other than physical phenomena. Declaring many orthodox beliefs archaic, they proposed a new, ethically based vision of service to humanity. After portraying the dissemination of these positions among British and American Protestants, the author explains how each of several groups reacted. A few theologians rejected positivism outright, but many more responded by recasting their own beliefs. The implications of this story of change extend to such topics as Darwinism, Biblical criticism, the rise of the social sciences, theological liberalism and the Social Gospel, the beginnings of fundamentalism, and the twentieth-century debate about "creationism" and science.

Originally published in 1989.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691630922
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #977
Pages:	502
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

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The Transformation of Theology, 1830â"1890

Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America

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By Charles D. Cashdollar

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05555-8

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CHAPTER 1

"Tolerably Familiar to Most"

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Comte and the British Clergy to 1853

JOHN STUART MILL, in the fall of 1844, was not yet at the peak of his prominence in Britain and America. His System of Logic had been published the preceding year, but Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty were yet to come. His ideas were still developing, too, and it was yet uncertain how earlier influences — his father James Mill; Jeremy Bentham, the English Utilitarian; or Thomas Carlyle, in whose circle he had moved during the 1830s — would ultimately mix with those of his current favorite, the French thinker Auguste Comte. Nevertheless, Mill, though only thirty-eight years of age, thought it not too soon to begin to look for a philosophical successor. He attracted bright followers, so there were a number of possibilities. It was Alexander Bain, a young Scot, whom Mill believed held the most promise. He reminded Mill of himself at a younger age, "except that I had not half his real originality." In October, Mill wrote to Comte that, should he die tomorrow, only in Bain could he be sure of a capable successor.

Five years earlier, Alexander Bain, then a twenty-year-old student in Aberdeen, had never even heard of John Stuart Mill; perhaps, he later recalled, he "may have known something of his father," but nothing of the younger Mill. Bain himself was a testimony to the democratic possibilities of the Scottish educational system. The son of a weaver, young Bain had been forced to leave school at age eleven when he entered his father's trade. But he continued with his studies at night, and in the fall of 1836 he enrolled at Marischal College, Aberdeen.

Bain brought with him to college the stern Calvinism of Scotland's northeastern coast, modified somewhat by his parents' fondness for Thomas Erskine and the youth's own visits to the local Methodist chapel, to which his love of singing drew him. Still, religion in the Bain household was a "most forbidding" subject and there was "never anything kindly" involved. "I can remember," he wrote in his Autobiography, "my occasional fits of anguish from the fear of hell, and the possibility of being cut off before making my peace with the Almighty."

While at the university in Aberdeen, Bain's views began to soften. First it was Aristotle, then eighteenth-century literature. The turning point came in the summer of 1838, when his reading turned to the works of William Ellery Channing, the American Unitarian. "The effect," he wrote later, "was to dissolve the exclusive evangelism of my previous education, and to inspire an ennobling Theism, without regard to special embodiments." Above all, he "rejoiced in a very decided emancipation from the narrowness of the Calvinism that had formerly monopolized me."

The turn opened Bain's mind, and he was eager and able to entertain strikingly different ideas, like those of John Stuart Mill, when he met them. At the end of the winter term in 1838, John Robertson, whom Bain knew from their schooldays and who was now assisting Mill with the Westminster Review, visited Aberdeen, his hometown. Robertson encouraged Bain to write something for the Westminster Review, and Bain agreed, handing in a capable review of Sir John Herschel's History of Natural Philosophy. More important, Bain was encouraged to read the Westminster Review. Over the next several months, especially during the relative freedom of the summer, Bain, together with his "inseparable companion" David Masson, read the journal's past numbers. "There was in these," Bain said, "a mass of entirely novel thinking, and I devoured the volumes greedily." Mill, in particular, he found a "wonderful fascination." At the end of the summer, Masson went off to Edinburgh to study divinity; Bain stayed on in Aberdeen to complete a master's degree.

In the summer of 1841, Robertson, Masson, and Bain were again together in Aberdeen. This time Robertson encouraged Bain to open up a correspondence with Mill and to plan a visit to London at the end of the next school year. Mill already held a high estimate of Bain's potential as a result of Robertson's praise and Bain's review of Herschel, so when Bain wrote to Mill in September 1841, Mill replied promptly and a regular correspondence was established. Mill described the progress of his own project on logic and suggested books for Bain to read. In Mill's second letter, written in October 1841, he asked, "Have you ever looked into Comte's Cours de philosophie positive? He makes some mistakes, but on the whole, I think it very nearly the grandest work of this age."

When Bain arrived in London in April 1842, he heard more about Comte. Bain stayed five months and left only when it was necessary to return to Aberdeen, where he was now an assistant to Dr. Glennie, the professor of moral philosophy. During his time in London he spent long hours reading books from Mill's library. Twice a week he met Mill at India House at the end of the day and walked with him to his house in Kensington Square. He met Mill's friends and dined with them. He even helped Mill ready part of the manuscript of Logic for the printer. "I may be said," Bain reflected, "to have travelled over a good part of his mind that summer." It was an exhilarating experience for the young man, and he returned to Aberdeen with his head full of projects. Primary among them was a determination to improve his French so that he could read Comte for himself.

John Stuart Mill had first encountered the writings of Comte through his interest in the Saint-Simonian movement. In May 1828 he met Gustave D'Eichthal, a Saint-Simonian and former mathematics pupil of Comte, at the London Debating Society. Sometime afterward, D'Eichthal shipped Mill a group of books by Saint-Simonian writers. Included among them was Comte's 1824 essay "Systeme de politique positive," which D'Eichthal especially recommended. Mill got around to reading the small piece in the late spring or summer of 1829, and in October he wrote to D'Eichthal that he was "no longer surprised at the high opinion which I had heard you express of the book, & the writer, and was even seduced by the plausibility of his manner." Though Mill had some reservations about the essay and thought it better as a criticism of earlier thought than as a suggested solution to the problems of society, he later reflected that it had given him a sound perspective on the difficulty of living through an age of transition, and he told Comte that it had helped to break him away from Benthamite ideas.

Mill, at age twenty-three, was already proving himself a good transmitter of others' ideas. He gave D'Eichthal advice on which English thinkers might respond favorably to the Saint-Simonians. His own small collection of Saint-Simonian writings, including the essay by Comte, he lent in 1834 to the Reverend John Pringle Nichol (1804–1859), the Glasgow astronomer who was later to provide technical assistance to Harriet Martineau for her translation of Comte's writings into English.

Mill lost track of Comte when Comte left the Saint-Simonian movement and Mill's interests changed. But his attention was refocused in 1837 by the arrival in London of the first two volumes of Comte's great work, the Cours de philosophie positive. The tradition has always been that the two volumes — in print since 1830 and 1835, respectively — were first carried to London and introduced into intellectual circles by the scientist Charles Wheatstone. Certainly Wheatstone always claimed such priority, though there is reason to doubt the accuracy of the claim because the Foreign Quarterly Review noted Comte's second volume, with an eight-shilling selling price, in its "List of New Works" promptly upon its publication in 1835. Wheatstone, at any rate, did introduce Comte where it counted: into London intellectual society and to a small group of scientific friends across Britain.

Among the latter was David Brewster (1781–1868), a prominent Scottish scientist and minister who was then principal of St. Andrews and later of Edinburgh University. Comte's work excited Brewster because he could see a use for it as a weapon in the spirited controversy that he was just then waging with Cambridge's William Whewell. Brewster quickly penned a full, article-length review of the two Comte volumes, and it appeared in the Edinburgh Review in July 1838.12 Ostensibly, the dispute between Brewster and Whewell related to theories of the origin of the solar system; more fundamentally, it involved the meeting place of science and religion. Brewster had already blasted Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences in the previous October's issue of the Edinburgh Review. The book, he complained, was composed in haste and riddled with errors and misunderstandings, especially in optics, Brewster's own specialty. But Brewster was primarily disgusted because Whewell had allowed his "sectarian" religious views to interfere with his reading of scientific data. Brewster had no patience with this. In other articles he remembered the difficulties that geologists like James Hutton had faced, working as they did "in chains forged by a presumptuous theology." By the 1830s the old issue had been settled; even professors of divinity had accepted Hutton's work, and "the public mind was equally tranquillized."

But the danger was still there: science needed to be free of religious restrictions. Brewster firmly believed that true religion and true science could never contradict each other. If a theologian read the Bible "with the discrimination and learning it demands, he will never find it at variance with the deductions of science." But if, on the contrary, Scripture were studied "by installments, and viewed from insulated points, and interpreted literally, in its detached passages," then all bets were off, and "we ... shall reproduce all the heresies which have disgraced the history of the Christian Church." Brewster was looking for something that would warn off religious intrusions into scientific work. Rather naturally, he leapt at Comte, and in that respect his July 1838 article should be seen as a sequel to his earlier concerns and his disagreement with Whewell. At the same time, it provided to English readers their first clear exposition of Comte's ideas.

Brewster left nothing to chance in his review. He made the connection between Comte and his battle with Whewell explicit from the start. Whewell and Comte, he explained, were competitors; each had proposed a comprehensive history of the sciences. As the article unfolded and the gibes against Whewell multiplied, it became clear how much Brewster preferred Comte. At one point, alleging that Whewell had "borrowed without acknowledgement from another English work," he even accused him of plagiarism. Brewster also chided Whewell for ignoring Comte's two volumes, which, he pointed out, had been in print seven years and two years, respectively, before Whewell wrote. This criticism was hardly fair, but Brewster could not resist twisting the knife a bit more: "We presume, therefore notwithstanding several similarities of sentiment and expression, that the Cours de Philosophie Positive had not found its way to Cambridge, although it was well known and highly appreciated in London, before the publication of Mr. Whewell's work." Brewster quickly clarified that any similarities were "merely accidental," the result of the authors' treatment of similar subject matter. In interpretation, the two were "strongly opposed to each other."

His intention to praise Comte so highly presented Brewster with a problem, however. On the face of it Whewell was a thoroughly devout Christian; Comte clearly was not. For Brewster, this was not the important point; scientific validity was not supposed to be measured by religious orthodoxy. Still, he realized that he needed to disarm his readers and protect himself against any complaint that he was promoting an attacker of Christianity. He decided that the best strategy was to present the matter quickly and clear it out of the way. Before starting to describe Comte's ideas, he therefore admitted to his readers "that M. Comte avows himself an Atheist." This was, Brewster allowed, quite a "stumbling-block which he has placed in our way." But Brewster felt certain that by stating this difficulty openly and boldly, he could "deprive it of all its dangers" and then proceed to Comte's science without any further need to trouble himself about what he surely considered an irrelevancy to matters scientific.

Brewster now felt able to go on to his main topics, Comte's history and classification of the sciences. Brewster not only accepted but was enthusiastic about the three-stage theory of history. He had, he wrote, "no hesitation in admitting its general accuracy." Some of the "quaint, though expressive terms" might cause an English reader to hesitate, but "when this prejudice is removed by the study of the early history of science, he cannot fail to recognize its truth and importance." Simply put, it made sense to Brewster. "In the infancy of science this natural passion for generalization is easily gratified. Supernatural power offers an immediate and a complete solution of every difficulty. Metaphysical abstractions gradually replace theological agents, and in the process of time these gradually disappear, and the phenomena themselves become the principle object of our notice. In this manner the theological gradually passes into positive philosophy, the nature of which is thus described by M. Comte."

When Brewster considered Comte's hierarchy of sciences, he was equally pleased. Here he contrasted "the learned and philosophical discussion of the subject by M. Comte" with Whewell's competing classification. He found Whewell's "not only barren of information, but vague in its conceptions, as well as incorrect in its statements." What all this amounted to was that Whewell's system had been invented upon his own favorite speculations. It was "mere hypothesis" and unrelated to facts. Comte, however, understood the proper use of hypothesis. In fact, Brewster was almost ecstatic to find Comte insisting upon what he himself had been advocating to other physicists for a long time, and he now gladly hailed "the assistance of so powerful an auxiliary as Mr. Comte." What Brewster admired so much was Comte's careful balancing of the necessity and yet the danger of building hypotheses. Of course, everyone understood induction and deduction, Brewster submitted. "But even in the case of the most simple phenomena, these methods would prove insufficient were we not often to anticipate the results by making some provisional supposition, at first essentially conjectural, with respect to some notions which constitute the final object of research. Hence, ... the introduction of hypotheses into natural philosophy is strictly indispensable!' Yet — and here Brewster emphasized —"in employing this artifice such hypotheses only are to be admittedas relate to the laws of phenomena, and are susceptible by their nature of positive verification." Thus, Brewster concluded along with Comte, there could be no discussion of ether, or any other "invisible, intangible, and imponderable fluids by which the phenomena of light, heat, magnetism, electricity, and galvanism have been explained."

The only flaw that Brewster could find in Comte's work was his rejection of the undulatory or wave theory of light. It was a "grave error," and one "we should not have expected." But even here Brewster found a way to excuse Comte and blame Whewell. Comte's lapse came, Brewster concluded, because the "philosophers of the Cambridge school" — like Whewell — arguing that the wave theory expressed the glory of the Creator, draped it with religious decorations. After that, "it is scarcely to be wondered at that men more cautious in their judgments should be driven into the opposite extreme by such ludicrous extravagances." And that, Brewster concluded, was the greatest danger if people like Whewell were permitted to put religious speculation ahead of scientific evidence.

Brewster's description of Comte's ideas was one-sided in the sense that it had virtually excluded religious implications of positivism and had focused almost exclusively on Comte's contributions to logic and the scientific method and to the history and classification of the sciences. In part this was because those were the portions of Comte's projected six-volume work that were completed, but mostly it was because Brewster was interested in Comte the scientist, not Comte the metaphysician. Still, this 1838 article in the Edinburgh Review, written by a Scottish clergyman-scientist, stood for years as the most favorable appraisal of Comte in the English language.

Meanwhile, back in London, Mill was rediscovering Comte. Once the first two volumes of the Cours were introduced in London, he acquired copies and read them avidly. His initial reaction was enthusiastic. To John Pringle Nichol he dashed off a note requesting the return of his copy of Comte's 1824 essay and wondering if Nichol had read the Cours. It was "one of the most profound books ever written on the philosophy of the sciences; and that of the higher branches of mathematics it appears to me to have created; the elementary and purely metaphysical parts it leaves nearly as it found them," Mill explained. "I shall be much astonished if this book of Comte's does not strike you more than any logical speculations of our time. There are two enormous octavo volumes out, and two more to come." Actually, of course, there were four more expected. Mill secured each one as quickly as possible. He told Comte, "I always await each new volume impatiently and I read and reread it with a true intellectual passion."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Transformation of Theology, 1830â"1890 by Charles D. Cashdollar. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Abbreviations, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• Introduction. "The Bugbear of the Modern Religious Mind", pg. 1
• 1. "Tolerably Familiar to Most": Comte and the British Clergy to 1853, pg. 21
• 2. "That Dilutedcomtism": Positivism and the British Clergy, 1853-1865, pg. 57
• 3. "Its Fertile Suggestion": Positivism and the American Clergy to 1865, pg. 93
• 4. "In The Mouth Of Every Man": Positivism and the Theologians, 1865-1890, pg. 142
• 5. "By The Company They Keep": Positivism's Association With Darwinism and Biblical Criticism, pg. 182
• 6. "Wholly And Finally Given": The Believing Positivists, pg. 209
• 7. "Scepticism Afraid of Itself ": Church Authority and Biblical Literalism, pg. 237
• 8. "We Who Have Broken Loose": Radical Unitarians and Theists, pg. 281
• 9. "Supplementing the Old Work": The Judicious Conservatives, pg. 329
• 10. "New Wine in New Bottles": The Liberals, pg. 373
• Epilogue. "In Common With Ourselves, pg. 441
• Bibliography, pg. 449
• Index, pg. 481