NINE

Doubt’s Bid for a Better World, 1800–1900

Freethinking in the Age of Science and Reform

The nineteenth century was easily the best-documented moment of widespread doubt in human history: there were more doubters writing and speaking where they could be heard than ever before, and many more had come to hear them. The big new element was the reformists. They begin the century demanding an end to religious persecution and end it in defiance of religious support for political injustice. Indeed, many of the famous calls for reform—for an end to slavery, for women’s rights, for free speech—were made by doubters. Many of these figures experienced religious doubt first and considered their other battles a continuation of this prior and fundamental revolt. Doubters thus established the terms of democracy. Quite a few of these reformist doubters were female, and that’s one of the nice things about this part: we get to hear from more of the women. In philosophy and poetry, doubters also embraced art as a source of natural transcendence, and created the modern idea of the artist. There are more brazenly irreligious philosophical doubters than ever before, and they are often marked now by a celebration of Eastern doubt. Throughout this century, people will speak about the old idea of replacing religion with science or philosophy, but now they call for it out in the open and sign their names. Now some will also speak of replacing religion with politics or with art.

In this century, doubters of all stripes, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to John Keats, to Karl Marx, were committed to their doubt and interested in figuring out what came next. In part because of this, interest in the traditional history of doubt is at a low point: there is less talk of Epicurus, Cicero, Averroës, Pomponazzi, Hobbes, Spinoza—or any of the great line. The story drops out a bit because doubt is now eloquently espoused by common people whose educations lacked much philosophy; they’d never heard of any of these characters. Also, even the best-educated doubters felt that the time for doubting religion was over: it was time to start building something in which one could truly believe, a happy new world. They guessed that it would be a better world because the money and energy once given to religion would be devoted to generating food, clothing, medicine, and ideas. They also thought they might see farther than ever before, now that their vision was mended.

Along with reform and art, there was science. We have long followed the doubters’ suggestion that humanity somehow developed naturally, and in this century Darwin helps the doubters win the point. We have also long followed the doubters’ insistence on atomism; that moves into the mainstream now, too. And just wait until you find out what happened to ancient Skepticism! The nineteenth century also has a pretty dramatic story of the Jewish Enlightenment and reform movement. It’s told here under the heading “Mendelssohn’s Daughters,” although they are more its cautionary tale than its emblem.

We are in a very cosmopolitan world here, and that led to secularization and doubt, as it always does. The century was overrun with change. Capitalism, on the rise since before Adam Smith wrote of it in 1776, broke a million traditions with the past, and because growth and change were an implicit part of it, even the new traditions were now constantly broken to sell something new. Industrialization pulled people out of family-based work and toward the cities. Colonial attacks furthered an explosive intermixing of the peoples of the planet; the shock of culture clash was not from a story in a book but from people around you. Vastly expanded elementary education and new, cheaper methods of printing brought the curious creation of the Enlightenment, “public opinion,” to an ever-wider public. Democratic government made a monarch of public opinion; the real beliefs of individuals now meant a lot. The century also saw terrific new distractions from the duties and pleasures of religion. New leisure activities appeared. More people lived in the cities than ever before, and the city often had a secularizing effect, but in most cases, the measurable rites of religion (church attendance, number of people keeping kosher) declined in the countryside as well as in the cities.

There were many types of doubt, but there were many doubters who partook in more than one of these and saw them as united by doubt. One work that had colossal impact on both politics and art was Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). It was a touchstone of conversion to doubt for a century. Feuerbach noticed that if we have sensed the divine all along, and it turns out there is no God, then what we called divine was coming from us in the first place. For Feuerbach, if God is our projection of ourselves onto the heavens, we are divine:

Eating and drinking is the mystery of the Lord’s Supper;—eating and drinking is, in fact, in itself a religious act; at least, ought to be so. Think, therefore, with every morsel of bread which relieves thee from the pain of hunger, with every draught of wine which cheers thy heart, of the God who confers these beneficent gifts upon thee,—think of man! But in thy gratitude towards man forget not gratitude towards holy Nature! Forget not that wine is the blood of plants, and the flour the flesh of plants, which are sacrificed for thy well-being!¹

In his hands, everything about God was real; our only mistake was in thinking it came from outside us. Feuerbach argued that we could learn about ourselves by studying religious urges outside the context of belief. This doubter thought to take religious myth seriously.

Yet, amid this modern doubt, people still remembered the religious wars and Inquisitions; it was all fresh enough to inspire fury against the Church. At the beginning of the century Francis Horner, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, told his heirs to preserve documents on the burning of young Aikenhead as well as “similar documents from century to century, by way of proving, some thousand years hence, that priests are ever the same.”²

MENDELSSOHN’s DAUGHTERS

Moses Mendelssohn had three daughters, Brendel, Recha, and Henriette. Moses had most carefully educated his sons, and it was his sons’ successes in banking that brought the Mendelssohn family its wealth. Having taught the girls philosophy, literature, math, and religion, Moses insisted on arranged marriages for Brendel and Recha. He had decided on the ratio of secular and sacred and presented it to his children as a finished product. This does not always work. Brendel, first of all, changed her name to Dorothea. As Felix Mendelssohn’s biographer Peter Mercer-Taylor has written, “her forthright manner and staggering erudition” made her extraordinarily popular among Berlin’s intellectual elite.³ Her salons were at the center of the German Enlightenment. She and her sister Recha both left their husbands, Dorothea amicably: her first husband let her have the children and helped support them even though she ran off with the scholar Friedrich Schlegel. Dorothea then converted to Protestantism so she and Schlegel could marry, and the two went off to Paris where they ran another important salon. Later, the two moved to Vienna for a job and converted to Catholicism.

It was Schlegel who firmed up the idea of Romanticism, called out its members, and energetically promoted it. Romanticism was an important voice of doubt as well as spiritualism. It was a rejection of rationalism in favor of feelings, individual experience, and passion. It supported a spiritualism that posed a challenge to traditional religion, but also energized it. On the other hand, the valuing of individual experience encouraged people to wander away from traditional communities, roles, and duties. Schlegel saw Romanticism as fundamentally about freedom and breaking down stultifying cultural mores. He wrote a surprisingly overt novelized treatment of the relationship between himself and Dorothea, she wrote a novel in response, and it was hers that became famous—she henceforth supported them with her writing. His great work was that he introduced the study of Indo-Aryan languages in Germany, and he became a publisher in order to print the Bhagavad-Gita and the Ramayana. Schlegel and Dorothea were fully engaged in religious questions but stepped away from Judaism, from tradition, from Christianity, from the constraints of religious morality.

Henriette, the youngest Mendelssohn sister, was bolder still. She never married. Instead, she went to Paris, opened a school for girls, ran a famous evening salon, and at the age of thirty-six was given a plum job overseeing the education of the daughter of an extremely important French count— Catholic, of course. Although she had been upset over Dorothea’s conversion, soon after taking up residence with her new charge, Henriette became a Catholic. She had an exciting life among the elite of France, and her thirteen-year tutorship came with a comfortable life pension. Moses had died in 1786, before either woman converted; Henriette waited to do it until just after her mother’s death in 1812.

One is tempted to regard the conversions as the legacy of Moses Mendelssohn’s rationalist religious attitude, but thousands of German Jews converted in the first years of the nineteenth century. In the French Revolution, Jews were recognized as citizens of France for the first time. Later, as Napoleon’s victories exported French laws, Jews across Europe were recognized as citizens in the countries in which they lived. Ghettos were abolished, as were mandatory badges; Jews could dress as they chose, live anywhere, and work at any job. In no time they had settled outside Jewish areas, learned the language of the country they were in, settled their children into public schools, such as there were, and generally become comfortable. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the old monarchies were reinstated and the laws protecting Jewish rights were scrapped; in many countries, Jews lost citizenship with all its rights to schools, universities, a multitude of jobs, and much else in public life. Faced with either losing their livelihood or undertaking a brief conversion ceremony, many who saw themselves as Enlightenment Jews converted to Christianity in these years. Later, Abraham Mendelssohn (the middle son) and his wife, Lea, also converted, to Protestantism. Several members of Lea’s family had done it, too, one taking the Christian name Bartholdy, which is why their son Felix, the composer, is sometimes called Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. That first Bartholdy had written coaxingly to Abraham and Lea saying: “You may remain faithful to an oppressed, persecuted religion, you may leave it to your children as a prospect of life-long martyrdom, as long as you believe it to be absolute truth. But when you have ceased to believe that, it is barbarism.”⁴ The modern sense of pride in cultural, secular Jewishness was strikingly missing from the equation. Consider how Abraham counseled his own daughter to understand the family’s conversion:

The outward form of religion … is historical, and changeable like all human ordinances. Some thousands of years ago the Jewish form was the reigning one, then the heathen form, and now it is the Christian. We, your mother and I, were born and brought up by our parents as Jews, and without being obliged to change the form of our religion have been able to follow the divine instinct in us and in our conscience. We have educated you and your brothers and sisters in the Christian faith, because it is the creed of most civilized people, and contains nothing that can lead you away from what is good, and much that guides you to love, obedience, tolerance, and resignation, even if it offered nothing but the example of its founder, understood by so few, and followed by still fewer.

By pronouncing your confession of the faith, you have fulfilled the claims of society on you, and obtained the name of Christian. Now be what your duty as a human being demands of you, true, faithful, and good…⁵

It is an amazing statement. Note first of all that he quickly dismissed the turf-war aspect of Judaism and Christianity (by sticking the pagans in between, he makes the battle seem distant and cold) and instead seems harder pressed to explain why any religion at all is necessary. Then there comes the marvelous note on Christianity’s “founder,” a plain suggestion that the true thing Christianity had to offer—the example of an ancient Jewish philosopher—was actually missed by most Christians.

The Jewish poet Heinrich Heine also converted, in 1825, to secure his rights as a German citizen. Wrote Heine, “In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.”⁶ He had a big interest in the history of doubt, and great facility with an image: “All our modern philosophers, though often perhaps unconsciously, see through the glasses which Baruch Spinoza ground.”⁷

It was in this atmosphere of rampant conversion that a coherent, rationalized, even secularized, “official” form of Judaism was born. It came to be called Reform Judaism. The reformers wanted to stop the hemor-rhaging—they also wanted to make Judaism useful and attractive for themselves, their families, and the future. In the 1820s, many ordinary Jews and not a few rabbis started to drop some of the traditional rules, at first at home, but then in synagogue, too. They saw themselves as no less Jewish, but as merely cleaning out the arcane annoyances of the Jewish way of life. Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), the great German reform rabbi and scholar, came of age in this world. He studied the Torah critically, in secular terms, and concluded that the ever-shifting document, with its many authors and obvious flights of imagination, could not possibly be binding on the lives of adult men and women in a modern world. Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) was one of the other crucial figures: probably the greatest Jewish scholar of the nineteenth century and the champion of what he called Scientific Judaism. The movement was most popular with German Jews, but it had a wide following.

In France, Samuel Cahen (1796–1862) reported in his Jewish reformist journal, “We are asked what reforms we support. Our response is: reforms of our ritual wherever it stands in contrast to our actual habits. We support reforms which our sages would have instituted were they living in 1840.”⁸ Another great leader of this movement was Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860). Holdheim saw true Judaism as a commitment to monotheism and morality. Almost every aspect of Jewish law, ritual, and custom was seen as ancient history, no longer relevant in the modern era.

When the great rabbis arranged a meeting in Berlin to talk about reforming Judaism in 1845, many of those who showed up had already been running reformed services in their various communities for a few decades. These rabbis were also very influenced by Friedrich Hegel. Hegel dominated philosophy in the period after Kant and introduced the idea of history as the unfolding self-revelation of the world-spirit. This philosophy helped the rabbis see change and development as positive and progressive rather than as a mark of decline. But what, the reformists wondered, should change? With much debate, the movement called for worship in the language people speak in their country; the reintroduction of organ music in worship; equal parts for men and women in everything; dropping general observance of the minor holidays; and rejection of the dietary laws—usually completely. The injunction to keep one’s head covered was generally let go as well. They spoke of circumcision as barbaric and useless, and many average Jews did not circumcise their sons in this period—although, eventually, the rabbis decided to retain circumcision. Intermarriage was acceptable. Lots of reformers also suggested taking Sunday as the Sabbath, since there was school and work on Saturday in most countries, but this one never took.

Another change that was generally repudiated by the second half of the twentieth century had to do with the ancient land of Israel. The reformers rejected the long-standing notion of Jews being in exile and called instead for them to devote themselves to the countries in which they lived. These reformers tended to be explicitly anti-Zionist. The new idea of Judaism was to celebrate the Diaspora, for through it the Jews were able to bring their moral monotheism to the world: in this way, these Jews counted Christianity and Islam as the success stories of Judaism, her “daughter religions.” They got rid of the “second holiday,” a habit of celebrating every holiday again the next night so that Diaspora Jews were sure to be celebrating at the same time Jerusalem Jews did. Jews of Jerusalem had never celebrated the second holiday, and now “reformed” Diaspora Jews would not either, as exile was no longer their situation. Synagogues, the places of worship far from the Temple, which later became the only places of worship, were now to be called temples. Even the idea of bringing music into the service was about choosing finally to stop mourning the Temple’s destruction—for that was when instrumental music had gone out of the Jewish service.

In response, the orthodox defenders actually said things such as “The Torah teaches… ‘Hear, O Israel’ not ‘Think, O Israel.’” That wasn’t much to work with. In France the lay members of the community asked the rabbis “to be the first to raise the standard of reform”; without reform, they said, they could offer the next generation only arcane ceremonies choked with unimportant detail and had no “defense against the invasion of irreligion.”⁹ Something had to change. “Everywhere there is doubt,” they wrote, and they asked for a Judaism they could agree on because it was minimal, rational, and egalitarian.¹⁰ To enliven historical memory on the changeability of religious law, they spoke of acting “as in the days of Ezra.”¹¹

Many of the reformers, Geiger among them, were dedicated to the equal participation of women.¹² A rabbinical report of 1846 called for total equality for women in Judaism, explicitly rejecting the humiliations women had been subject to at the hands of the religion; the rabbis joked that, cruel as the male Jews had been to women, at least it was not as bad as the Christians in the Middle Ages “debating whether women had a soul at all!”¹³ The benediction wherein each man thanks God that he was not born a woman was to be abolished, both sexes were to have a communion at age thirteen, and women would count in the minyan.¹⁴ The rabbis admitted that while they were trying to be fair to women, they were also hoping to make them want to run Jewish homes.

The first modern rabbinical seminary in Europe was in Padua, the great old town of doubt. Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) taught there. He was a friend of Zunz and an admirer of his Scientific Judaism. Luzzatto followed Mendelssohn’s idea that belief was secondary in Judaism, and even took it to another level. For him, rationalism could not stop at denying the biblical story of creation and history, letting habit protect the “revealed” idea of the laws. “I call the belief in revealed Judaism supernaturalism, not in the sense of the dogma restraining freedom of thought, but certainly in the sense of the dogma which admits the supernatural meaning of events that happen contrary to the usual order of nature, like miracles and revelation.”¹⁵ If one is a rationalist, one may choose which laws are appropriate for modern Jews—like keeping the Sabbath and eating matzo instead of bread on Passover—and enjoy them as a mark of culture and community.

In one of the few acts of the early Reforms that created rather than negated ritual, Rabbi Michael Silberstein in 1871 helped lead the progressive Jews to take up the festival of Hanukkah, which became the great holiday of secular Judaism (hence the peculiar experience of Jews explaining to others that though it is the best-known Jewish holiday, it is not really a major Jewish holiday). His reason for championing the holiday was to stop Jews from celebrating Christmas: “It is a known fact that unfortunately a misuse has arisen in Jewish families, namely, the observance of the Christmas holy day as a day of Jewish sanctity.” He told his fellow rabbis to make Hanukkah popular not only in synagogue but “also in the schools,” and to “point out to the parents that the festival of Hanukkah should be turned into a family celebration.”¹⁶

The holiday was celebrated by modern, progressive Jews because it fell at the same time as Christmas, but it commemorated the victory of the Maccabees, which was actually an attack on Jewish cosmopolitanism and progressivism. It seems ironic, but in another way, it is a perfect fit: the story of Hanukkah is in the Apocrypha, usually published with Catholic Bibles, never in the Hebrew Bible. This slightly-late, almost-disappeared little text affords us our clearest window into ancient Jewish doubt. Whatever else it is, Hanukkah is a time to remember Miriam with her sandal, striking the Temple and calling it a consuming wolf—not to mention all those Jewish boys who worked out in the Greek gyms, learned some philosophy, practiced a public profession, went to the theater, and read Greek poetry with their wives. Again, that’s not why the Reform Jews picked it. For them, it was a matter of finding a way to make Judaism fit with the modern world, so that Judaism would persist in the world. When we remember the Mendelssohns, we can see their point. Sometimes having your own party—with presents and feasts and candy—can really help.

There were big changes in European Jewry: when the new German Empire was declared in 1871, its constitution gave equal civil rights to Jews throughout the empire. Meanwhile, Reform Judaism, which had begun in Germany, came up against limitations there. Across Europe the official leadership of religious communities was controlled by the secular governments, and these tended to think of the Orthodox as the legitimate leaders and appointed Orthodox rabbis to lead synagogues. Things could move much faster in the United States. In 1885 the Pittsburgh Conference (which met as a continuation of the German conferences of the 1840s) set out a “Declaration of Principles” to define Reform Judaism.¹⁷ The rabbis’ declaration began with cosmopolitanism: “We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite.” It went on to declare that “the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism,” and that the Bible’s miracles reflected “the primitive ideas of its own age.” The laws of Moses were declared over, except for the moral laws; they would now observe only the rituals that “elevate and sanctify our lives,” rejecting those “not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.” They also announced that they were “no longer a nation,” but a religious community, and rejected Zionism. As for the supernatural, they wrote that Judaism is a progressive religion, “ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason,” rejected the ideas of heaven and hell, but reasserted the doctrine of the immortal soul. Finally, they announced that in the tradition of Mosaic equality for the rich and poor, “we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times,” to bring justice to “the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” Reform Judaism is a reformation of Judaism, but it is also Judaism in the service of social reform.

RINGLETS AND BEARDS

Anne Newport Royall was born in 1769 and at age eighteen became a maid at the home of Major William Royall, a widower and veteran of the Revolutionary War and a freethinker with a good Enlightenment library. She found that when “reason is cultivated and our minds enlightened by education,” we can reject “knavery, bigotry and superstition.”¹⁸ Ten years later they were married and they had a happy fifteen years, but when William died his children fought the will and Anne was left with very little. Royall began to travel and found she could support herself publishing books about her trips: both about where to get a good meal or a quiet room and about the mores of the various young states. The discussions were political, too: against slavery, for public relief for widows, in defense of the Native Americans, and most of all, against the missionaries.

In her Black Book (1828), she scorned the missionaries swarming “like locusts” across America, stumping for cash, and getting it, often from the poorest and most sadly superstitious people.¹⁹ She also warned that if the champions of a national religion managed to “get two-thirds of the states to alter the Constitution… then let the people get their throats ready. May the arm of the first member of Congress who proposes a national religion drop powerless from his shoulder; his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth and all the people say amen.”²⁰ Royall was angry about new crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, but she remembered old ones. Do they think, she asks, we have forgotten how the “orthodox” used power when they had it?

Do they think we have forgotten how they drenched England in blood, created a civil war, (what they are in a fair way to do here) and, when they could no longer retain the power of killing there, came over to this country, and began it afresh—dipping their hands in the blood of a harmless, unresisting people?… Do they think we have forgotten how they put innocent men, women, and children to death, in cool blood, under the pretense of witchcraft?… Children of ten years of age were put to death; young girls were stripped naked (by God’s people, the ministers) and the marks of witchcraft searched for, on their bodies, with the most indecent curiosity.²¹

She knew how to keep an audience. She also wrote letters to a friend, Matthew Dunbar, which became Letters from Alabama (1830). In it an 1821 letter asked: “What think you, Matt, of the Christian religion? Between you, and I, and the bed post, I begin to think it is all a plot of the priests. I have ever marked those professors, whenever humanity demands their attention, the veriest savages under the sun.”²²

In this period, if a widow wanted to receive her husband’s veteran’s pension, she had to petition Congress for it. When Royall got to Washington, instead of stopping at her own case she began lobbying Congress to change the law. Royall was now both radical in her doubt and educated in the ways of politics. In 1827 when a Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely began campaigning for Americans to elect only Protestants to government, Royall became the first person to lobby Congress regarding the separation of church and state. She went on to investigate all aspects of government for religious increepings, and her writing on religious rituals at West Point resulted in a congressional investigation of the school. Also, although she failed, she fought hard against the Sabbatarian campaign to stop Sunday mail delivery: “Supposing for argument sake, that it is a sin to carry the mail on Sunday, what is it to them?”²³ When invited to speak, she was often either mobbed or refused admittance to the town; over the years she was arrested, fined—ten dollars in 1829—and once pushed down a flight of stairs. On the other hand, she was so admired that President Andrew Jackson showed up to pay the ten dollars for her, only to find that he had been beaten to it by one of the witnesses for the defense, Secretary of War John Eaton. Later in life she founded and ran two newspapers, declaring her motto “Good works instead of long prayers” on the masthead and supporting what she’d written in the Black Book: “All priests are dangerous when clothed with power.”²⁴ Royall died in 1854 and was remembered as an important American figure well into the next century. As her biographer George Stuyvesant Jackson wrote in 1937: “She was nationally known, liked, feared, ignored, detested; but she would be heard whatever the reactions.” He characterized her as a cross between Voltaire, Carry Nation (a fiery temperance leader), Joan of Arc, and H. L. Mencken.²⁵

In the early nineteenth century, there were a lot of people around who believed that religion had misdirected human energies and thought that because we had finally realized this, it was time to find a better basis for morality and fix this misshapen world. Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism took ideas on secular ethics from Helvétius, Diderot, Voltaire, Locke, and Hume and suggested we forget about parsing “good and evil” and work logically to minimize pain and increase pleasure; the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bentham was friends with the like-minded philosopher James Mill and helped educate Mill’s son, John Stuart—who soon came into his own as a philosopher as well. The Mills, Bentham, and many of their followers were all doubters. John Stuart Mill mentioned in his autobiography that he was “one of the very few examples in this country, of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it”; in fact, he said, he looked upon the modern religion “exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me.”²⁶ John Stuart described how his father rejected revealed religion as contrary to reason, and after much thought found “no halting place in Deism” and “remained in a state of perplexity,” until concluding that nothing at all could be known about the origins of things. And, Mill argued, “the grounds were moral, still more than intellectual.” His father’s idea of religion “was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil.”²⁷ He also called his father’s standard of morals “Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as exclusive text of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain.”²⁸ In character he was a Stoic, Mill continued, and in his rejection of most worldly pleasure, a Cynic.

Much of John Stuart Mill’s great work was the result of collaboration with Harriet Taylor. We need to know about women and doubt, so we will trace Taylor’s role for a moment. Mill met Harriet Taylor in 1833 and the two worked closely together thereafter; when her husband died in 1849, they married. Starting with their 1851 The Enfranchisement of Women, they wrote a series of works that became foundational texts of modern liberal democracy. By her request, even those works written mostly by Taylor bore only Mill’s name. He variously credited her as coauthor, insisting that some of his books were her ideas delivered by his pen. The book that drew the most controversy in their own lifetimes was On Liberty (1859). This great call for freedom of individual consciences arose from letters they had been writing to each other about conformism. Respectability had taken over society at the expense of creativity, freedom, adventure, and a “pagan individualism” (as opposed to Christian self-denial).²⁹ On Liberty held that government should interfere with citizens only if they are hurting others: people should be able to smoke opium if they wanted (the British opium wars of 1839–1842 had just popularized the drug) or, if they wanted to risk it, walk across dangerous bridges. Yet the heart of On Liberty was a call for religious freedom and an attack on the calcification of custom: “The mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”³⁰ It is a stunning contrast to the ancient doubters’ bow to the state’s religion. To speak your own truth was now a virtue.

Consider another of doubt’s Harriets, the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau (1802–1876). Martineau’s family was Unitarian, which she later called a “wonderful slovenliness of thought,” but she counted herself a believer as a child.³¹ She wrote a few religious books in her early twenties, and at thirty-two published a study of American women that was as highly celebrated as Tocqueville’s work on America. Her best-selling books brought her financial independence, and in 1846 she took a trip, touring the Mideast in order to study the great religions. Thereafter she wrote as an impassioned doubter. Consider the tone: “There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irrelevant as to make me blush.”³² Martineau was meanwhile becoming a famous abolitionist and crusader for women’s rights. People in these movements often wished she would quiet down about atheism, which, they rightly observed, could do harm to her other causes. Martineau’s answer was that her primary dedication was to freedom of belief, “the very soul of the controversy, the very principle of the movement.”³³ She also called for children’s books for “the Secularist order of parents.”

In her Autobiography (1877) Martineau wrote that she “certainly never believed” in the idea of “God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition…. I never suffered more or less from fear of hell. The Unitarianism of my parents saved me from that.”³⁴ Yet she was astounded by “how late on in my life” she had still believed in an afterlife—even after she no longer believed religion: “But at length I recognized the monstrous superstition in its true character… and found myself with the last link of my chain snapped, a free rover on the broad, bright breezy common of the universe.”³⁵ She called herself the “happiest woman in England.” Experiencing a “still new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of its everlasting laws… how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology… were fiercely clinging to their Man-God, their scheme of salvation… their essential pay-system, as ordered by their mythology?”³⁶ She did not miss it. Martineau mused that Christianity “fails to make happy, fails to make good, fails to make wise,” so there was not much loss. What is more, “To the emancipated, it is a small matter that those who remain imprisoned are shocked at the daring which goes forth into the sunshine and under the stars to study and enjoy, without leave asked, or fear of penalty.”³⁷

She did good work under those stars: William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the service she rendered to the antislavery cause was inestimable,” and Florence Nightingale wrote that Martineau “was born to be a destroyer of slavery in whatever form, in whatever place.”³⁸ Diagnosed with a fatal heart disease in 1855, Martineau wrote her autobiography, concluding:

I have now had three months’ experience of the fact of constant expectation of death;… And now that I am awaiting it at any hour, the whole thing seems so easy, simple and natural…. The case must be much otherwise with Christians…. They can never be quite secure from the danger that their air-built castle shall dissolve at the last moment…. I used to think and feel all this before I became emancipated from the superstition…. But now the release is an inexpressible comfort; and the simplifying of the whole matter has a most tranquilizing effect. I see that the dying… desire and sink into death as into sleep…. Under the eternal laws of the universe, I came into being, and, under them, I have lived a life so full that its fullness is equivalent to length…³⁹

It is somewhat new to find a doubter who believed everyone doubted. The deathbed scene was usually imagined as the sweetest surrender of the believer, so it is a strong claim. Martineau, for her part, surprised everyone and lived another twenty-one years, dying in 1876 at age seventy-four.

Frances Wright, usually called Fanny, was one of the best-known American reform women who championed religious doubt. Her work had a terrific appeal. Thomas Jefferson’s personal journal contains seven pages filled with passages from one of Wright’s books. He invited her to visit him at Monticello, which she did, along with Lafayette. She was also invited and stayed with Andrew Jackson at his home, the Hermitage; and she met Monroe as well. When she visited Europe she became friends with Jeremy Bentham. Walt Whitman wrote of Fanny Wright, “We all loved her; fell down before her.”⁴⁰ She and her sister Camilla were orphaned young and later inherited a fortune from an uncle, which allowed them a great deal of freedom. At eighteen Fanny had a literary and philosophical club at which members delivered essays to one another: Fanny gave one about Epicurus, including a discussion of Leontium, “Epicurus’s first female disciple.” It was later published as A Few Days in Athens, augmented with even stronger doubt: “Surely the absurdity of all other doctrines of religion, and the iniquity of many, are sufficiently evident. To fear a being on account of his power is degrading; to fear him if he is good, ridiculous…. I see no sufficient evidence of his existence; and to reason of its possibility I hold to be an idle speculation.”⁴¹ She traveled in the United States (she also wrote a play that was produced on Broadway to good reviews) and wrote that American Unitarianism was so rapidly taking over that it could outstrip Calvinism. The Calvinists were furious, “but fortunately Calvin could no longer burn Servetus, however much he might scold at him.”⁴²

She was influenced by Utilitarianism, but also by what would later be thought of as utopian socialism. The French produced most of its leaders: Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, were all famous for their schemes for the perfect community, including a great deal of gender equality, free love, and of course, free thought. Proudhon, in particular, attacked the Catholic Church. The great utopian socialist of Britain, Robert Owen, made a fortune in textiles and then sought to find a way in which industrialization could avoid exploiting the worker. He bought twenty thousand acres of land in the United States and invited workers to come join him in a socialist venture; eight hundred showed up, and they called the place New Harmony. What did Owen think of religion? “All the religions of the world are based on total ignorance of all the fundamental laws of humanity…. Fully conscious as I am of the misery which these religions have created in the human race…, I would now, if I possessed ten thousand lives and could suffer a painful death for each, willingly thus sacrifice them to destroy this Moloch.”⁴³

When Owen invited the like-minded Fanny Wright to give the July 4 address at New Harmony, she became the first woman in America to give a lecture to an audience of both men and women. Her speeches in general spoke of the failure of religion and called for each community in America to form a Hall of Science with an auditorium, a school, a museum, and a library. In 1829 she bought the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Broome Street in New York City and renamed it the Hall of Science. It seated about twelve hundred people, and there were lectures and debates throughout the week, with a special event on Sundays. The bookstore sold works by Paine, Shelley, Owen, and Wright. It also sold birth control tracts, as birth control information was a point of attack in the fight for freedom of speech. At one lecture she told the crowd:

The halls of science are open to all…. She says not to one, “eat no meat on Fridays”; and to another “plunge into the river”; to a third “groan in the spirit”; to a fourth “wait for the spirit”… and to nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the human race “ye were born for eternal fire.” Science says nothing of all this. She says, only, “observe, compare, reason, reflect, understand”; and… we can do all this without quarreling.⁴⁴

She mentioned Galileo, pretty much alone among heroes of doubt, but her thought on doubt was sophisticated: “A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence. Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics.” The only true ethics was “beneficial action.”⁴⁵ Wright was deeply appreciative of the new home doubt had in the United States. She mentioned it when countering the religious idea of the “innate corruption” of man: “Think of his discoveries in science—spite of chains, and dungeons, and gibbets, and anathemas! Think of his devotion!… Think of the energy… with which he fought, and endured, and persevered throughout ages until he won his haven of liberty in America! Yes! he has won it. The noble creature has proved his birthright. May he learn to use and to enjoy it.”⁴⁶ It is a stirring speech for the history of doubt, but for her, free thought had to lead to a more responsible world, and she could be stirring here, too: “I will pray ye to observe how much of our positive misery originates in our idle speculations in matters of faith, and in our blind, our fearful forgetfulness of facts—our cold, heartless, and I will say, insane indifference to visible causes of tangible evil?”

There are three more world-changers who need be mentioned here: Ernestine Rose, Karl Marx, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With Ernestine Rose the tone of doubt became just a bit more ironic than it had been before. Rose was born in Poland in 1810, the only child of a rabbi. He taught her to study the Torah in Hebrew, and the same freedom that allowed him to break custom and instruct her seems to have infused her whole personality. She later wrote that she had rejected the Bible by age fourteen. Early an activist, by twenty-four she was invited by Owen to give a speech to a workers’ meeting. The speech was doubt’s new favorite form of communication and she was good at it. Rose married, moved to America, and began campaigning against slavery and for women’s rights and religious freedom. She was part of the movement to create nonreligious holidays, throwing a Thomas Paine celebration on the 113th anniversary of his birth, January 29, 1850. Because Ernestine Rose wore her hair in easy-to-care-for ringlets, many freethinking women adopted the style. At mid-century, describing a woman as “in ringlets” meant she was a freethinker and a reformer.

At the 1856 Seventh National Women’s Rights Convention, an audience member scolded that the Bible submitted women to men. Rose said, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom…. Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.”⁴⁷ The connection between women and religion was also financial and practical. “Sisters,” she enjoined, “when your minister asks you for money for missionary purposes… for colleges to educate ministers, tell him you must educate woman, that she may do away with the necessity of ministers, so that they may be able to go to some useful employment.”⁴⁸ Rose became a famous abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, and atheist lecturer. In an 1861 lecture in Boston, “A Defense of Atheism,” she argued philosophically against God but also joked that instead of saving Noah and the rest, God should have “let them slip also, and with his improved experience made a new world.”⁴⁹

What did she make of the world without a creator? One believer had told her that an eyeless fish living in a cave in Kentucky proved that there was a creator, since this showed design. Rose explained, “He forgot the demonstrable fact that the element of light is indispensable in the formation of the organ of sight, without which it could not be formed.” This reminded her of a preacher who had proved the existence of God by noting that someone had placed the rivers near large cities. Rose believed the world could make itself, by its own logical patterns. This was 1861. Darwin had published in 1859 and she did not mention him—here it is enough to note that Rose had a notion of how some doubters have always understood the world: “The Universe,” she wrote, “is one vast chemical laboratory, in constant operation, by her internal forces. The laws or principles of attraction, cohesion, and repulsion, produce in never-ending succession the phenomena of composition, decomposition, and recomposition.”⁵⁰ Nature suffices as explanation, and nature is the only thing that can claim universal consent. Wrote Rose, “We are told that Religion is natural; the belief in a God universal. Were it natural, then it would indeed be universal; but it is not.”

Rose had a strong belief in the coming of a wonderful new world based on the energies of freethinking people: “The Atheist says to the honest conscientious believer, Though I cannot believe in your God whom you have failed to demonstrate, I believe in man; if I have no faith in your religion I have faith, unbounded, unshaken faith in the principles of right, of justice, and humanity. Whatever good you are willing to do for the sake of your God, I am full as willing to do for the sake of man.” She added that “the monstrous crimes the believer perpetrated,” on account of difference of belief, would never be committed by the atheist, “knowing that belief is not voluntary, but depends on evidence.”⁵¹ The twentieth century was not able to bear out this optimism, and I cite this in part because it clangs with such power against that coming lesson, that secular states can make vicious decisions, too. For her, whatever believers would do in hope of heavenly reward, “the Atheist would do simply because it is good.”⁵²

If Ernestine Rose associated doubting women with ringlets, Karl Marx connected doubt and beards. His grandfather was a rabbi in Prussia; his father, Heinrich Marx, was a modern man, a deist, and did not practice Judaism. Just before Karl was born, in order to keep his post in the Prussian civil service, Heinrich had himself baptized; the children were baptized when Karl was six; Karl’s mother waited until her own father, a rabbi, had died, and then was baptized, too. In his youth Karl was a bad poet; in 1837 he was converted out of poetry by the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel saw the world as being a result of minds thinking about it. It was a kind of pantheism, seeing the universe as God, with the mind of God coming into being as the minds of his creatures. Hegel then posited a “spirit” in history, which needs to go through a sequence of epochs. From the Enlightenment on, people had considered the idea of secular history having its own purposeful progress, but Hegel took it to grand levels. Human progress is the developing self-consciousness of the cosmos-God itself. By the time Marx was reading these ideas, Hegel was dead and a group calling itself the Young Hegelians was arguing over whether the philosopher had been for or against Christianity. It was hard to tell: Hegel thought Christianity was the best of the religions, yet he offered a secular morality in which community replaced God as the arbiter of good and evil. Marx went to the café the Young Hegelians frequented and there met Bruno Bauer, one of the fieriest atheists of the period.

Between 1839 and 1841 Marx wrote his doctoral thesis. It was on Epicurus and Democritus. His introduction growled, “Up to this time there has been nothing but repetition of Cicero’s and Plutarch’s rigmarole.” Meanwhile, “Gassendi, who freed Epicurus from the interdict laid on him by the Fathers of the Church and the whole of the Middle Ages—that age of materialized irrationalism”—doesn’t offer much. “It is more a case of Gassendi learning philosophy from Epicurus than being able to teach us about Epicurus’s philosophy.” Marx says Gassendi’s attempt to make Epicurus cohabitate with the church “is like throwing the habit of a Christian nun over the exuberant body of the Greek Lais.”⁵³ He also cited David Hume saying that philosophy should not have to answer to religion. Then came the coup de grâce: “Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall beat in its heart, being absolutely free and master of the universe, will never grow tired of throwing to its adversaries the cry of Epicurus,” that the blasphemous person is not the one who scorns the God of the masses, but the one who blindly embraces him. “Philosophy makes no secret of it.”⁵⁴ Note that there is nothing here about communism; Marx was an old-school atheist before anything else. In the summer of 1841, he and Bauer began to edit a journal called the Atheist Archives. It didn’t pan out. Then they wrote an atheist pamphlet that got Bauer fired and made it impossible for Marx to find work in academia.

Marx then found Feuerbach and was struck by his idea of religion as a human creation, and his claim that by studying it we could learn about ourselves. Thereafter, Marx traded Hegelian idealism for the philosophical materialism he would ever after proclaim. In 1843 Bauer published an argument that the problem of the Jews—still at a civil disadvantage in England and Germany—should be solved by Jews and Christians alike giving up religion. Having read Feuerbach, Marx found he could no longer agree with Bauer. Religion was not some crazy nonsense that could be swept away and beneath it would be a better world. Now Marx saw religion not as an independent problem, but as a symptom of a cruel economic world: people had religion because their lives were rotten; make their lives better and religion will melt away. In an 1844 paper (on Hegel), Marx wrote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”⁵⁵ The task of history, therefore, “once the world beyond the truth has disappeared,” is to “establish the truth of this world.”⁵⁶ For Marx it is social revolution, not science, that will finally dissolve religion. After millennia in which doubters had noted that religion seemed designed to control the masses, Marx said yes, let’s do something about that. Also, tradition had it that well-fed, educated, cosmopolitan people often wander away from religion whereas their hard-scrabble neighbors thank God for their crumbs. Socialist doubt helped change that image.

Religion was the palliative that had to be removed in order to wake people up to the pain of life as it was, but there did not have to be a concerted effort against the palliative, because it would fall out of use as soon as things got better. And that’s it. As historian Owen Chadwick has remarked, Marx “wrote so little about religion that some readers have doubted whether it was important to him.”⁵⁷ Even in the Communist Manifesto (1848) there was not much. Friedrich Engels, with whom he wrote the manifesto, came to his own atheism through Feuerbach, Bauer, and the Young Hegelians, and had spent two years in England studying Robert Owen’s work. Still, all the Manifesto said about religion was contained in a few lines. Of the proletariat: “Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” Perhaps the key statement of doubt in the Manifesto is the first line: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” Marx and Engels nowhere mention that this specter was replacing another specter that once haunted Europe, but it was, and the allusion was not that vague. Many would note that with its savior and martyrs, symbolism, festivals, and dreams of paradise, Marxism took on many of the characteristics of a religion.

Of all the great doubters among American reforming women, the greatest were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her comrade in arms, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony is more famous now because it was she who could travel and lecture—she had no children and Stanton had seven. Stanton was also a much more vocal doubter, although their ideas seem to have been similar: there did not appear to be a just God and there was no evidence of any other kind either. Anthony had seen, from close up, how Ernestine Rose’s public atheism had hurt her strength in the movement for women’s property and voting rights. She had defended Rose with vigor but chose a more discreet way for herself. Stanton took the vocal doubting role of Rose; for Stanton, doubt was fundamental. Here’s how she told Anthony about the arrival of her second daughter: “Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriet Eaton Stanton—oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday—opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.”⁵⁸ In an 1860 address, “Antislavery,” along with the central issue, she called for those enslaved by religion to be “born into the kingdom of reason and free-thought.”⁵⁹

Stanton spoke out on myriad church-and-state issues (a campaign she led managed to keep the World’s Fair open on Sundays) and initiated feminist biblical criticism, pointing out how man “can stand in the most holy places in the temples, where woman may never enter,” and that, throughout the Bible, “there is a suspicion of unworthiness and uncleanness” regarding women. She commented, in her wry tone, that you can’t even sacrifice a female goat to God. But it wasn’t really funny. As she proclaimed in 1882: “According to Church teaching, woman was an after-thought in the creation, the author of sin, being at once in collusion with Satan. Her sex was made a crime, marriage a condition of slavery, owing obedience, maternity a curse, and the true position of all womankind one of inferiority and subjection to all men; and the same ideas are echoed in our pulpits to-day”⁶⁰ Stanton did not have many heroes in the history of doubt, but she did tell the Galileo story, with its dramatic “Still, it moves.”⁶¹ Closer to home, she mentioned that “Harriet Martineau said that the happiest day of her life was the day that she gave up the charge of her soul,” and she agreed that the happiest period of her life had been since emerging from the “shadows and superstitions of the old theologies.”⁶² Stanton and Anthony both praised Ernestine Rose for having helped women “to do their own thinking and believing.”⁶³ She praised Paine as a major forerunner, too, but said that the most influential for her had been the abolitionist Lucretia Mott:

I found in this new friend a woman emancipated from all faith in man-made creeds…. Nothing was too sacred for her to question…. It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments,… recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.⁶⁴

It is a nice story of awakening. For more detail on where she ended up, consider a letter of 1873. A formidable feminist, Isabella Beecher Hooker, was disappointed that Stanton did not discuss the afterlife as a part of women’s salvation. Wrote Stanton to a friend, “To suppose this short life to be all of this world’s experiences never did seem wholly satisfactory, but at the same time I see no proof of all these vague ideas floating in Mrs. Hooker’s head.”⁶⁵

Stanton’s famous address “The Solitude of Self,” delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage on February 20, 1892, is a plea for civil rights on the basis of metaphysical need. In it, Stanton gently states that the essential reason for women having equal rights is that women, like men, live and die alone, under a perhaps godless sky.⁶⁶ Economics and politics were important, but this was about losing superstition and getting some philosophy. Elsewhere, Stanton worked to help fix religion. Of the Bible she joked, “Disraeli said that the early English editions contain 6,000 errors in the translation from the Hebrew…. It is fair to suppose that at least one-half of these errors are with reference to woman’s position.”⁶⁷ Again, she was a wit, but serious: “We do not burn the bodies of women today, but we humiliate them in a thousand ways, and chiefly by our theologies.”⁶⁸ In 1895 at a celebration for her eightieth birthday at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, before an audience noted to be a few thousand feminist and freethinking fans, Stanton noted that clergymen were “still preaching sermons on the ‘rib origin’” and excluding women from church government. “We must demand that the canon law, the Mosaic code, the Scriptures, prayer books and liturgies be purged of all invidious distinctions of sex.”⁶⁹ The first volume of her most scandalous work, The Woman’s Bible, came out two weeks later. When people got mad, Anthony defended Stanton just as she had defended Rose. The Woman’s Bible was a best-seller, going into seven printings in the first six months.

PHILOSOPHERS OF DOUBT

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is the person who, coming upon Kant’s philosophy, noticed that the God therein was not attached to anything and shook the text till the God fell out. Suddenly nothing rattled, and it was a hell of a hush. Schopenhauer called himself a pessimist and seemed pessimistic to a lot of people, yet on the page there’s an odd cheerfulness to his language. Here’s a charming line on believers: “For if we could guarantee them their dogma of immortality in some other way, the lively ardor for their gods would at once cool; and … if continued existence after death could be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods… they would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality, and be hot for atheism.”⁷⁰ It may be the funniest statement in the history of doubt.

Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that our minds project time and space and inference and causality onto the world around us, so we cannot know anything about the real world, about the reality of things outside our perception of them. Kant thought we could have some intimations from the real, noumenal world, but Schopenhauer saw this as an error: since time, too, is an idea of the mind, we cannot even imagine what an intimation from the noumenal world would be since our thoughts are arranged in sequence, in time. If we can imagine it, it is from the phenomenal world. The other world was real then, more real than this one, just as Plato had said all those years ago.

There was no need for God in this understanding of the universe, and, indeed, Schopenhauer was an avowed atheist. As he saw it, there is no God, nothing made the world, we are accidental animals, and our way of knowing creates the world as we know it. Philosophy had “proofs” of God until Kant, but, as Schopenhauer put it: “Kant first suddenly wakened it from this dream; therefore the last sleepers (Mendelssohn) called him the all-pulverizer.”⁷¹ Both Kant and Mendelssohn had accepted that philosophical arguments for God had been pulverized, but they believed anyway. Schopenhauer didn’t, but he was not happy about it. Some people like doubting and don’t mind dying; some doubters don’t like it and choose to believe: think of the nice woman Diderot portrayed, Madame la Maréchale, or think of Pascal. But some people find doubting painful and do it anyway. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes saw no justice and advised a melancholy acceptance of it. Schopenhauer took this to a new level:

Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good…. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat and blood of the great multitudes must flow…. In peace… inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate case with… comparative painlessness (though boredom is on the lookout for this), and then the propagation of this race…. With this evident want of proportion between the effort and the reward, the will-to-live… appears … as a folly, or … as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value.⁷²

Schopenhauer was aware of the worst: the struggle among animals was most obvious. Given how complex the natural world is, with its arrangements of perfect-prey for perfect-hunter, you would think it all added up to something sublime. “Instead of this we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on… until once again the crust of the planet breaks.”⁷³ One may demur that Schopenhauer hardly mentions the equal cacophony of birth, joy, and satisfaction and note that his only critique against pleasure is that it is fleeting (a judgment best left to each individual creature). Still, his lament is compelling. Optimism for him “seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.”⁷⁴

Schopenhauer said Kant had missed the final step of perfecting his own philosophy. We know our sensory equipment is not up to the task of knowing the world, but does that mean that our experience is the only real thing, as Berkeley said, or are there real things that we simply can’t access? Kant thought there are “things-in-themselves” and we just can’t know them. Schopenhauer said there are not things, there is only one great “thing-in-itself,” the universe. The world is one field, which burbles along in a way we will never be able to access. Schopenhauer got to this by a kind of evolutionary assumption: human senses and human mind are devices suited to keep us alive, fed, and reproducing. It is a tough world, and the human body is suited to survive in this world, not to seek truth. We are deeply hypnotized by our needs and desires; that is, the world is actually fabricated by want, by hunger, by will. In this he presaged Darwin. Schopenhauer discussed desires that remain hidden for decades, working in some covert way, active all along. In this he presaged Freud.

In 1813, just after he published his first great philosophical work “completing” the work of Kant, Schopenhauer discovered Buddhism and Hinduism. The relevant texts were making their way into Germany, and he was shocked to find in them all sorts of claims that strikingly paralleled what he had published. His most beloved find was a Latin translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads, and ever after discovering it, we are told, he read a few pages of the book each night before bed. He once wrote that “With the exception of the original text, it is the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.” An Eastern doubt had arrived to comfort a Western one. No wonder, then, that in his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer excitedly points out the similarities between his philosophy and the atheist religions of India. He says that Kant had found his own way to the doctrine of Plato, especially in the metaphor of the cave, and to the doctrines of the Hindu Vedas and Puranas. “Plato and the Indians,” marveled Schopenhauer, had somehow perceived the unreal nature of the world but presented it “mythically and poetically.” Kant then “made of it a proved and incontestable truth” by realizing the extent of the limitations of our cognitive apparatus.⁷⁵

Schopenhauer did not think there was any danger that the English missionaries flooding India would be successful; it was “as if we fired a bullet at a cliff… the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back into Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.”⁷⁶ He believed Christianity had brought to Europe the true values of Asia: “contempt for the world, self-denial, chastity, giving up of one’s own will, that is, turning away from life and its delusive pleasures. Indeed, it taught one to recognize the sanctifying force of suffering; an instrument of torture is the symbol of Christianity.” Schopenhauer found a few heroes in the Old Testament, too: he liked Swift’s custom of celebrating his birthday by reading Job.⁷⁷ Schopenhauer also memorialized the martyrdoms of Socrates and Giordano Bruno, along with “many a hero of truth [who met] his death at the stake at the hands of the priests.”⁷⁸ And when he cursed all philosophers, from Augustine all the way to Kant, for upholding “the prevailing national religion over philosophy,” he quickly noted that “Bruno and Spinoza are to be entirely excepted,” because they saw the world as one, and because they suffered horribly for truth. Wrote Schopenhauer, “The banks of the sacred Ganges were their true spiritual home.”⁷⁹ The comment forces us to imagine that ebullient Italian hothead standing next to the excommunicated Dutch lens grinder on a warm afternoon by the Ganges. Connections between Eastern and Western doubt were growing strong enough to provide imaginary homes.

Schopenhauer’s main point in this work was not religion, but when he mentioned it (mostly in footnotes), his tone was sharp. He wrote that believers convince themselves their religion’s myths are somehow connected to its ethical code and thus “regard every attack on the myth as an attack on right and virtue.” Almost comically, “this reaches such lengths that, in monotheistic nations, atheism or godlessness has become the synonym for absence of all morality.” Due to this confusion, explained Schopenhauer, priests get away with murder. In Madrid alone, he reports, “The inquisition in three hundred years put three hundred thousand human beings to a painful death at the stake, on account of matters of faith. All fanatics and zealots should be at once reminded of this whenever they want to make themselves heard.”⁸⁰ This was tucked in a note. In another stunning observation, also in a note, he wrote that the endless battles over the contradiction “between the goodness of God and the misery of the world,” and between free will and “the foreknowledge of God,” all miss one thing:

The only dogma fixed for the disputants is the existence of God together with his attributes, and they all incessantly turn in a circle, since they try to bring these things into harmony, in other words, to solve an arithmetical sum which never comes right, but the remainder of which appears now in one place, now in another, after it has been concealed elsewhere. But it does not occur to anyone that the source of the dilemma is to be looked for in the fundamental assumption, although it palpably obtrudes itself.⁸¹ Schopenhauer added, “Bayle alone shows that he notices this.” He loved the history of doubt. He quoted Lucretius, too; and he crackled with bright psychological insights, such as: “The prayer ‘lead me not into temptation’ means ‘Let me not see who I am.’”⁸²

Schopenhauer did not believe in God, but he did not believe in science either. To him, trying to learn about reality by figuring out the laws of nature (as they appear to us) is doomed. Yet he believed there was a worthy pursuit of truth, through art. He said people think individual examples are just data, and that the real truth is some overall concept. People prefer concepts because they can be communicated, but we all know concepts are of use only if you can cash them back in as helpful, in a given “real case.” What we really need is to know real cases. Schopenhauer wrote, “If perceptions were communicable there would then be a communication worth the trouble; but in the end everyone must remain within his own skin and his own skull, and no man can help another. To enrich the concept from perception is the constant endeavor of poetry and philosophy.”⁸³ His influence on Romanticism was tremendous. As the Schopenhauer scholar Bryan Magee has put it, he helped elevate the arts “into something approaching a religion and this so suffused the general mental climate that in the remainder of the century most cultivated Europeans, and not only the romantics, attributed an unprecedented importance to art in the total scheme of things.”⁸⁴ Some turned from religion to science; some turned from religion to art.

Schopenhauer’s Dialogue on Religion addressed doubt head on. Where Hume’s 1779 Dialog Concerning Natural Religion had borrowed its structure from Cicero’s dialog The Nature of the Gods, Schopenhauer’s Dialogue on Religion borrows from them both—although the relationship is looser. The characters are now Philalethes and Demopheles and they embody, respectively, the voice of philosophy and the voice of the people. Demopheles defends religious belief as “the metaphysics of the masses.”⁸⁵ Religion, he argues, rouses average people from their “stupor” and points “to the lofty meaning of existence.” And, he says, even if it isn’t true in the same way philosophy is true, there’s not much to be done about it. “For, as your friend Plato has said, the multitude can’t be philosophers, and you shouldn’t forget that. Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it.”⁸⁶ Demopheles says this popular metaphysics is also a guide in life and a comfort in suffering and death, and even goes so far as to say that “it accomplished perhaps just as much as the truth itself could achieve if we possessed it.” He then scolds his friend, saying, “Don’t take offence at its unkempt, grotesque and apparently absurd form; for with your education and learning, you have no idea of the roundabout ways by which people in their crude state have to receive their knowledge of deep truths.” It is “shallow and unjust,” he says, to attack them.⁸⁷

Philalethes’ answer has sat at the heart of doubt ever since: “But isn’t it every bit as shallow and unjust to demand that there shall be no other system of metaphysics but this one, cut out as it is to suit the requirements and comprehension of the masses?” Should these doctrines “be the limit of human speculation”? This entails “that the highest powers of human intelligence shall remain unused and undeveloped, even be nipped in the bud, in order that their activity may not thwart the popular metaphysics.”⁸⁸ All the while, the members of this dominating folk-metaphysics constantly lecture a morality they do not practice: “Isn’t it a little too much to have tolerance and delicate forbearance preached by what is intolerance and cruelty itself? Think of the heretical tribunals, inquisitions, religious wars, crusades, Socrates’ cup of poison, Bruno’s and Vanini’s death in the flames! Is all this to-day quite a thing of the past?” It is good to see our old friend Julius Caesar Vanini remembered in the nineteenth century! (In another work Schopenhauer cited Vanini, with the clause: “Vanini, whom his contemporaries burned, finding that an easier task than to confute him.”)⁸⁹ Getting back to his point, Philalethes says that “genuine philosophical effort, sincere search after truth” has to struggle against a system of metaphysics that has a state monopoly, “the principles of which are impressed into every head in earliest youth so earnestly, so deeply, and so firmly, that, unless the mind is miraculously elastic, they remain indelible.”⁹⁰ That, he sighed, has a serious effect on the capacity for original thought and unbiased judgment, which is already weak enough without this extra handicap. It was the first real argument that doubt should be encouraged in the masses.

Demopheles would not be convinced, but neither would Philalethes: “We won’t give up the hope that mankind will eventually reach a point of maturity and education at which it can on the one side produce, on the other receive, the true philosophy.” No philosopher had quite afforded all humankind this respect before, but Demopheles’ reply was the more usual one: “You’ve no notion how stupid most people are.” To that Philalethes merely counters, “I am only expressing a hope which I can’t give up. If it were fulfilled… the time would have come when religion would have carried out her object and completed her course; the race she had brought to years of discretion she could dismiss, and herself depart in peace: that would be the euthanasia of religion.”⁹¹ Philalethes also says that humanity would find real truth faster if we were all working on it. It is presented as the stronger argument, but Schopenhauer did not give it the palm of victory—nor did he follow the example of Cicero and Hume and crown a false king. Instead, he lets the two characters agree to disagree: “Let us… admit that religion, like Janus, or better still, like the Brahman god of death, Yama, has two faces, and like him, one friendly, the other sullen. Each of us has kept his eyes fixed on one alone.”⁹²

Søren Kierkegaard’s is a doubt that yearns to believe. The dominant philosophers of the period were Hegelians, and Kierkegaard was enraged with what he saw as the complacent conformism of this crowd. He was more passionate than they in both his doubt and his belief. In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard explains his doubt through the story of Abraham and Isaac. It is a lovely aspect of the history of doubt that interest in Abraham’s doubt, faith, and actions threads through the centuries, and that here in this late period the interest is in this later period of Abraham’s life. Kierkegaard said that if anyone found a man today who was taking his son someplace to murder him because a voice told him to do it, we would attempt to stop him and we would despise the fellow. If Abraham was to be lauded as the father of faith (as the Hegelians did), Kierkegaard said they must see that what he did was in fact publicly indefensible. “Humanly speaking he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone.”⁹³ So if this was moral, morality cannot be merely what is communally approved. Kierkegaard said that what Abraham believed when he was sharpening his knife was that God would restore Isaac to him; otherwise, we would think him the father of resignation, not faith. How could Abraham believe such a thing, when no suggestion of it has even been made by God? Kierkegaard’s answer is: “on the strength of the absurd.”

Now Kierkegaard did not say that he, himself, had faith on the strength of the absurd. Instead, he said again and again that he was not capable of it. But at least, he argued, he did believe in faith. He was interested in it, he longed for it, he was sure that, although he was “happy and satisfied,” those who have faith are happier. He, the doubter, defended faith against those who said they had it but were really just talking about civic politeness. Listen to Kierkegaard’s wistful pride: “I have seen horror face to face, I do not flee it in fear but know very well that, however bravely I face it, my courage is not that of faith and not at all to be compared with it. I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account.” It is a powerful new formulation of the problem. He continued on to an explanation of his experience of doubt: “I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack.”⁹⁴ Further on: “When learning how to make swimming movements, one can hang in a belt from the ceiling… likewise I can describe the movements of faith but when I am thrown in the water … I make other movements.”⁹⁵

Toward the end of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard casually drops clauses like “Nowadays, when indeed all have experienced doubt…”⁹⁶ And he advises caution “when one sometimes judges a doubter severely for speaking.” In his opinion, even “if things go wrong, then a doubter, even if by speaking he should bring all manner of misfortune upon the world, would still be far preferable to these miserable sweet-tooths who try a taste of everything and would cure doubt without being acquainted with it, and are therefore as a rule the immediate cause of outbreaks of ungoverned and unmanageable doubt.”⁹⁷ His notion of the absurd opened up a new way to imagine faith and hooked up the notion of the absurd to the problem of doubt.

Doubt was at the center of things now, for many people, and they thought it was only a matter of time before doubt changed the world. Nietzsche’s famous line “God is dead” is in the “Madman” story in The Gay Science. It begins: “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’” People laugh at him because “many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then.” Someone asks, “Why, did he get lost?” Another says, “Did he lose his way like a child?… Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?” People jeered. “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Whither is God’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I…’” As a result, value was meaningless:

Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while?… God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?⁹⁸

When the madman’s listeners merely stare at him in astonishment, he throws down his lantern and declares that he has come too soon—they do not yet realize the importance of their moment.

Nietzsche said there is no God and that in his absence we ought to look at the whole religious tradition as a farce. Most doubters throughout the West considered Judeo-Christian morality to be deeply valuable even in a secular world. Nietzsche thought the Judeo-Christian morality was inferior to that of the ancient world. It advised meekness, humility, and subservience—it was a slave religion. Machiavelli had said the same thing. Nietzsche pointed out that Christianity at first spread among the poor. It was suited to them. Nietzsche proposed a new morality of the “superman,” the person who steps outside the civil bonds of the moment and transcends, through knowledge and training, to the ranks of the great of all time. One more word from Nietzsche, on doubt itself:

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature—is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.⁹⁹

It’s nice to hear him speak of doubt as our “amphibious nature.”

ATOMISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Science forwarded the nineteenth-century belief that doubt had turned a corner. Modern atomic theory began with work John Dalton published in 1808: elements are composed of atoms that are specific to them, identical in size and weight, and different from atoms in all other elements; they then unite in simple numerical ratios to form compounds. By 1808, atomism was up and running without its metaphysics—that is, without its history of doubt. At the other end of the century, Marie Curie’s demonstrations of radioactivity furthered atomic theory. Her first Nobel Prize came in 1903. Her father was a Polish freethinker and, although she was reared by her Catholic mother, she left the church in her late teens. When she and Pierre married, it was a civil ceremony, which she explained as such: “Pierre belonged to no religion and I did not practice any.” Across the century, atomism was no longer considered Epicurean, but it still offered an explanation of the world as self-creating that seemed wonderfully complex, but sensible. The theory lost its connection to Epicurus and Lucretius in part because that was a requirement of its being widely accepted, and in part because once atomism found a functioning mechanism, its proponents no longer felt they needed to quote the ancient authorities. It is a long jump from the idea of atoms to a thesis specific enough that it offers experimental predictability. Still, when moderns credit the ancients for atomism at all, they mention Democritus, who did, after all, make it up. But what gets missed is that for more than two thousand years atomism was thought of as the crazy/brilliant idea of Epicurus and Lucretius and their followers, embraced precisely because it explained the world as self-creating. It was a doubter’s doctrine.

Beyond atoms, throughout history doubters had guessed that the world made itself, through the same kinds of repetitions, accidents, and patterns that we see around us every day. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology first appeared in 1830 and argued that presently observable geological processes were enough to explain geological history. With enough time it is possible that rain, sea, volcanoes, and earthquakes could explain everything. It was not only the world that was suspected of evolving. During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck came up with an idea for how the species might have done it: “the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” The idea was celebrated by the revolutionaries because it said self-improvement and social change were natural, and also because it explained life on earth making itself, without God. In France and England, before Darwin, there were lively groups of political radicals, deists or atheists, who believed in some kind of evolution: “natural transformism” in France, “animal transmutation” in England.

Pre-Darwinian evolutionism was very much about politics and religion. Those who believed in transformism tended to be on the side of the doubters, and on the left politically. The new hot spots for such doubt and republicanism were the medical schools of Europe. In France, after the Revolution and Napoleon, with the restoration of the monarchy, the great anatomist Georges Cuvier took over establishment natural science, rejected Lamarckianism as revolutionary nonsense, and promoted the idea that each species was fixed in its God-given place. The deist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire arose as the opposition, describing a materialist evolutionary determinism.

In The Politics of Evolution, historian Adrian Desmond has detailed the pre-Darwinian evolutionary beliefs of various groups of English materialists, atheists, deists, and social reformers of every stripe. He tells us that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was ignored by clergy and gentlemen naturalists, while the medical schools, notorious for freethinkers, invented courses in order to use his books.¹⁰⁰ Benthamites and utopian socialists often promoted Lamarckianism. Leftists like George Jacob Holyoake praised Lamarck as supporting the “evolution” toward republicanism. Authority, too, now saw doubt as very much to do with biology: the royalist philosopher Louis de Bonald cursed both the “insane” system of d’Holbach and the species transformism of Lamarck.¹⁰¹ In 1844 there was a bit of a surprise: Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation mixed things up by championing an idea of evolution directed by God. There were religious people and scientific people who fulminated against it as contradicting the Bible and being laughably bad science, but everyone read it. So just before Darwin, there were attempts to take on the idea of evolution even among the religious. This did not stop doubters from seeing Chambers’s work as more evidence that the world made itself.

One of the most outspoken pre-Darwinian materialist transformists in England was Robert E. Grant, and Desmond shows that Grant took Darwin under his wing at medical school in Edinburgh. Grant’s transformism was very much concerned with spontaneous generation, that is, with proving that life could get started with no God, and very much concerned with radical politics. Darwin rejected his mentor’s transformism in those early days. When he changed his mind, it was under the influence of the economic thesis of Malthus, which stated that as long as people have more than one child per parent, there will be more people than can be supported—some will always die. Darwin saw that some creatures, too, will always die or otherwise fail to reproduce themselves, and that this was a mechanism by which nature could choose a trait and favor it, just as human beings had long done in their selective breeding of pigeons, horses, and dogs.

Famously, after Darwin saw this, he waited twenty years to publish his theory of evolution. In fact, it was only when Alfred Wallace showed up with the same theory and asked the much more established Darwin what he thought, that the shocked Darwin moved to avoid being trumped for all history. We suppose he waited because he feared the reaction. The wider world had already heard of transformism and knew of it as part of a politically radical worldview. Darwin’s mother and wife were Unitarians—doubt in the myth of Genesis would not be a problem for them; it was not a big step for them to incorporate evolution into their religious world. But they would not have wanted to be associated with transformism’s usual associates. When he had to publish, he went out of his way to disassociate himself from transformism’s past. Darwin was able to forward the transformist revolution not only because he had figured out a mechanism by which change happened, but also because he went out of his way to be markedly conservative. To separate himself from the earlier, atheist believers in species transformism, he kept the argument away from spontaneous generation, and now and again mentioned “the Creator.” Of course, he nowhere claimed evolution was a basis for socialism. Indeed, it supported the capitalist competition of the Industrial Revolution and the notion that whoever is surviving best is the fittest. Wallace, who was a well-known freethinker, socialist, and feminist, has been comparatively forgotten.

Darwin was careful what he said about God in public, but in his notebooks we find such items as “Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you, materialist!—Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.”¹⁰² There were also cautionary notes to himself: “To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock.”¹⁰³ That is, stay off the issue of mind. The equation of brain and mind was a standard of freethinkers by the 1830s, not only in debates about transformism, but in the phrenology craze as well. Phrenology, the study of bumps on people’s heads, also meant atheism to a lot of people (practitioners as well as opponents) because it was based on the idea that the mind and the brain were the same thing. That brain matter defined personality was one of the century’s favorite arguments against God. In any case, atomism and the anthropology of the origins of humanity had historically been mentioned most often in letters, books, and speeches that were about doubting religion. The evidence in both cases got overwhelming, and those who brought these ideas to their new status kept comments about philosophical materialism in private letters and notebooks.

The reception of Darwinism varied. In Germany On the Origin of Species was translated quickly and well by Heinrich Georg Bronn, a man with an excellent reputation who did not believe the theory. He omitted the one sentence of the final paragraph that stood as the only mention of humanity in Darwin’s big book on pigeons, horses, and dogs (“light will be shown on the origins of man”).¹⁰⁴ In France On the Origin of Species was translated rather late and, oddly, by Clémence Royer, a woman who was a Lamarckian from long before she had ever heard Darwin’s name. She explained in her extensive preface that transformism was a settled fact and that it proved there was no God. Yet even where Darwinism was not introduced by an evangelical atheist, soon enough, some evangelical atheists appeared to preach the new evolutionary gospel.

The century had produced a new breed of doubter, not as educated as the philosopher considering the universe, but not as ignorant as the villager balking at myth and razzing the portrait of the pope. The heroes of these new doubters were Galileo, Voltaire, and d’Holbach, and their mentors were Bentham, Mill, and the utopian socialists. Many were angry from past and present religious cruelties. When Darwin’s book hit this crowd, it was like Christmas for the ex-Christians.

In Germany there were Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner. Karl Vogt was a geology professor and materialist who lost his post in Germany, got a new one in Geneva, and there in 1858 translated Chambers’s Vestiges into German. When Darwin’s theory came out in 1859, Vogt immediately saw that he now had a mechanism for the material creation of the biological world, and he toured Europe’s lecture circuit with the news. He gained fame with lines such as “Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys.”¹⁰⁵ Jakob Moleschott was a professor of physiology and the son of a Dutch freethinker. He read Feuerbach, started writing about the material basis of humanity, and got famous for the comment “no thought without phosphorus”; then got famous again when he advocated cremation so that bodies could return to nature. His name became a catchword for science and doubt. Vogt was the public preacher, and Moleschott a powerful symbol, yet it was Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter that, for many people, was the century’s key book on science and belief. It was published four years before On the Origin of Species, but later editions incorporated Darwinism into the argument. The point of it, in all its editions, was that there are only force and matter: the universe is eternal, infinite, and self-propelling; and thought is entirely dependent on matter. He heated things up by asserting that the universe has no purpose, and that it will eventually be destroyed. This was all good, soothed Büchner, for it was better to be “a proud and free son of Nature” than a “humble and submissive slave of a supernatural master.”¹⁰⁶

In France, a group of anthropologists played this role. The group had actually met as a secret freethinkers’ society, and when they read Clémence Royer’s introduction to On the Origin of Species they became anthropologists to use this new weapon against the Church. Along with Royer, this atheist group joined Paul Broca’s Society of Anthropology and replaced its general positivist credo with an insistence on materialism and atheism. Royer and the other freethinking anthropologists—Gabrielle de Mortillet, Charles Letourneau, André Lefèvre, Eugene Véron, and Abel Hovelacque were the key figures—learned anthropology as they went along, and made some contributions to the field, but the promotion of atheism and materialism was always their chief aim. As I’ve explored in my End of the Soul, the greatest example of this was the Society of Mutual Autopsy.¹⁰⁷ They wanted to show the church that there was no soul by proving a direct relationship between a person’s material brain—its shape, form, and weight—and his or her personality and ability. To that end, they donated their brains to one another and carried out the autopsies over a period of some thirty years. Broca, who was a freethinker himself, had found the first lasting mind-brain connection: damage to a particular spot on the brain correlates with particular speech problems—such impairment is still called Broca’s aphasia. While hunting for more connections, the Society of Mutual Autopsy created a secular, even atheistic, version of Catholic death rituals, including a materialist deathbed scene, the keeping of relics, and a chance for unbelievers to confer their very bodies, after death, to science instead of religion.

Meanwhile, in England Thomas Huxley was so loud and tenacious in his support of the theory of evolution that he was nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog. He was also the person who coined the word agnosticism. The term naturalism was not good enough, he said, because a naturalist could espouse materialism, idealism, determinism, or libertinism. Huxley showed his knowledge of the history of doubt in his rejection of the term, saying that someone known to profess naturalism “may be a pure empiric, or a believer in innate ideas; a Platonist or an Epicurean. Doctrines as widely different as the pantheism of Spinoza and the so-called atheism of the Buddhist are forms of ‘Naturalism.’” Agnosticism, Huxley explained, was less certain than any of these doctrines. What he then described was Skepticism. Where did he get the idea? As he put it: “Before now, I have had occasion to speak of the pedigree of Agnosticism; and I have vainly endeavored to placate its enemies by showing that it is really no child of mine, but that it has a highly respectable lineage which can be traced back for centuries.”

He explained that he first heard about it in a passage by Sir William Hamilton (published in 1829, but not read by Huxley until 1840), “which, so far as I am concerned,” wrote Huxley, “is the original spring of Agnosticism.” The quoted passage was this: “Philosophy … is impossible. Departing from the particular, we admit that… our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can be nothing more than a knowledge of the relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself [we] recognize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” Huxley explained:

When, long years after these words had made an indelible impression on my mind, I came across the Limits of Religious Thought (which I really did read, though the fact that I once unfortunately spelt Mansel with two l’s has been held by a candid critic to be proof to the contrary), I said to myself “Connu!”; and the thrill of pleasure with which I discovered that, in the matter of Agnosticism (not yet so christened), I was as orthodox as a dignitary of the Church, who might any day be made a bishop, may be left to the imagination.¹⁰⁸

Henry Longueville Mansel was a student of Hamilton, the chief philosophical Skeptic of the period, and Mansel applied that Skepticism to religion in his famous Limits of Religious Thought. So it really was straight out of Skepticism that agnosticism sprang! In that first generation it had Skepticism’s strict denial of judgment. Huxley said that if you’ve never met any creatures from Saturn, and have no indication that they exist, you may not necessarily believe they don’t exist either. Agnostics “totally refuse to commit” to the denial of the “supernatural.” But he insisted on his right to doubt: “the future of our civilization… certainly depends on the result of the contest between Science and Ecclesiasticism which is now afoot.”¹⁰⁹ Huxley celebrated Descartes as the first to train himself to doubt: “The enunciation of this great first commandment of science consecrated Doubt. It removed Doubt from the seat of penance … to which it had long been condemned, and enthroned it in that high place among the primary duties.”¹¹⁰ Like Taylor and Mill, Huxley finds doubt a duty. He celebrated other historical doubters, too, writing a book on Anthony Collins, whom he called a “Goliath of Freethought.” Speaking of priests and miracles, Huxley wrote, “That true man of letters, Lucian, had something to say about these people and their dupes which is well worthy of modern attention.”¹¹¹

Huxley was moderate in comparison to some. The nearly forgotten scientist and doctor Henry Bastian’s overt atheism in the debates over Darwinism and spontaneous generation marginalized him in his profession and in our historical memory of him. A recent book of documents compiled and explained by historian James Strick follows his dramatic story.¹¹² Bastian insisted that the understanding of Darwinian evolution that was taught and accepted should include the idea of spontaneous generation to cleanly announce that science dispelled the need for God.

Darwin stayed out of it. It was Huxley, working hard to keep evolution respectable, who was chiefly responsible for the eventual rejection of Bastian’s materialism.

Many learned of agnosticism from the Social Darwinist and early sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer had a Benthamite, anticlerical uncle who influenced him a good deal, but we may also note that he was the eldest of nine children and the only one of them to survive infancy—that parade to tiny graves could make anyone a little circumspect of anything unproved.

THE SECULAR STATE

Especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, there were activists whose primary or even sole interest was the freedom of doubt, and secular movements arose all over the world. We’ll take a quick tour starting with France, for it was France in the second half of the century that raised up the greatest din of anticlerical rebellion the world had ever known. The Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798–1857) did something that had not been done in a long while: he pitched a populist, deeply secular, antireligious “religion.” It was called positivism and it came to dominate European (especially French) attitudes for much of the century.

The idea was that human history comprised three successive stages. They were the Theological stage, “in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof”; the Metaphysical stage, “characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities”; and last, the Positive stage, “based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.”¹¹³ The hubris is kind of funny, but to Comte’s mind, that’s the end of history: “The third is the only permanent or normal state.”¹¹⁴ Comte was magisterial in his conviction that these three stages are the meaning of all history. He insisted we needed a science of society and coined the word sociology and came up with a few of the field’s early tenets. Comte became a hero to generations of people because he furnished a secular credo: positivism would replace religion.

Comte rejected atheism. In his General View of Positivism he wrote that “The fact of entire freedom from theological belief being necessary before the Positive state can be perfectly attained, has induced superficial observers to confound Positivism with a state of pure negation.”¹¹⁵ He then said that atheism had at one time been “favorable to progress” but was not anymore. “Atheism,” he said, “even from the intellectual point of view, is a very imperfect form of emancipation; for its tendency is to prolong the metaphysical stage indefinitely,” because it still talks about theological problems “instead of setting aside all inaccessible researches on the ground of their utter inutility.” Positivism was about studying how instead of why. “Now this is wholly incompatible with the ambitious and visionary attempts of Atheism to explain the formation of the Universe, the origin of animal life, etc.” In his opinion, if people “persist in attempting to answer the insoluble questions which occupied the attention of the childhood of our race,” well, then, “by far the more rational plan is to do as was done then, that is, simply to give free play to the imagination.”¹¹⁶It’s a surprising position.

Comte explained that for his part, if he had to guess, he found the world “far more compatible with the hypothesis of an intelligent Will than with that of a blind mechanism.” He believed that it was only “the pride induced by metaphysical and scientific studies” that made atheists “modern or ancient.” Comte seems not to have known, or cared, about the history of doubt. He did not like the people he met who called themselves atheists, claiming the doctrine was “generally connected with the visionary but mischievous tendencies of ambitious thinkers to uphold what they call the empire of Reason…. Politically, its tendency is to unlimited prolongation of the revolutionary position.”¹¹⁷ Atheism had this political dimension in France. Comte’s followers loved him for providing a calm yet modern and rationalist doctrine, devoted to progress and allowing one to skip church.

When people thought of the classic Comtian, many of them had in mind a character in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856): the village pharmacist Monsieur Homais. Homais claimed: “I do have a religion, my religion, and I have rather more than that lot with their jiggery-pokery…. I believe in the Supreme Being… but I don’t need to go into a church and kiss a lot of silver plate, paying out for a bunch of clowns who eat better than we do!”¹¹⁸ He said his was the same God as that of Socrates, of Franklin and Voltaire, and he could not, therefore, “abide an old fogey of a God who walks round his garden with a stick in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a loud cry and comes back to life three days later”; all this was “absurd” and “completely opposed … to every law of physics.” He added that “priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance, doing their utmost to engulf the population along with them.”¹¹⁹ At the end of the novel, the village priest and M. Homais argue in a room where a body lies. As we see the young widower look in on his dead wife over and over, we hear these two in the background: “Read Voltaire! said the one; read d’Holbach! read the Encyclopédie,” and the priest retorted with a call to read the modern Christian tomes.¹²⁰ For Flaubert, both priest and Comtian had lost connection to the mysteries of life, love, and death.

Over the course of the century, the French increasingly saw secularism and democracy as locked in a pitched battle with church and monarchy. Church and monarchy dominated the century. When a lasting French democracy was set up at the end of the nineteenth century, leading republicans—often medical doctors, and often Comtian positivists, if not atheists—zealously secularized the French state. Across the century, in France, baptism and confession declined and civil marriages (by the town mayor) increased. People did not even turn to the Church to handle their deaths: the civil burial became the great banner of republicanism and secularism. Not only did the republicans work to get the priests out of politics, they transformed the school system in 1883 so that there was free, mandatory, secular education for children, to ensure “countless young reserves of republican democracy, trained in the school of science and reason.”¹²¹ Historian René Rémond wrote of the schoolteacher as “apostle of the new religion, an officiate of the cult of reason and science.”¹²² The early Third Republic passed a battery of laws limiting the clergy’s place in the government and public institutions and ending some remaining privileges—seminarians, too, now had to perform military service. Ernst Renan’s secular, novelized Life of Jesus hit France the way Euhemerus’s Sacred History hit the ancient world. Just as Zeus had been a man who lived and died in Crete, Jesus had been a fellow who had a bit of an adventure in Galilee.

In the fevered pitch of the religion-and-science wars of the last decade of the century, Emile Durkheim picked up the word Comte had coined, sociology, and in its name made an observation that calmed things down a good bit. Durkheim said that avid atheists were wrong for arguing that religion is false. Religion is not about knowing the world factually but about feelings and experience. He accepted the skeptical claim that we cannot know reality, and Kant’s notion that our minds shape our experience of reality such that we are ignorant of reality itself. Durkheim said that it was society that created the shared dreamworld of likenesses, categories, and meanings, and that it did so, primordially, through religion. As he wrote in an essay of 1898, the moral obligations we feel that seem like they come from outside ourselves, really do—they come from society. “This obligation,” he explained, “is the proof that these ways of acting and thinking are not the work of the individual but come from a moral power above him, that which the mystic calls God but which can be more scientifically conceived.”¹²³

All those strange internal-yet-external forces that had always seemed to be the properties of God were, really, the properties of society. There was no more reason to attack religion as inherently bad, soothed Durkheim. Durkheim would not argue with religion by throwing reason at it, and instead took religion as a real human phenomenon and used reason to understand it. Durkheim’s father was the chief rabbi of their region, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had also been rabbis, but the ideas here were especially to do with French Catholicism. Intellectuals in France were able to ease the tension in part because the secularization of the state was well under way. Catholic Italy also went through a period of heightened anticlericalism in which science was a political banner. In Italy a “Bruno mania” was part of the intellectual enthusiasm of cultured Italians. Elsewhere, doubters of other religions had other political concerns.

In Russia, from the 1830s on, German philosophy and French socialism began to dominate intellectual life. By the 1840s the “Westernizers,” who followed Hegel, Proudhon, and Fourier, were calling for a far-reaching rejection of all Russian traditions, institutions, and social habits. Soon their central texts included the new European Utilitarian and materialist books. By the 1860s the heat of these issues had produced an intellectual generation called the Nihilists—a term that first appeared in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons in 1861.¹²⁴ The fathers in this novel all spoke of progress and humanitarian-ism in great waves of vague sentiment and optimistic romanticism. The sons all spoke of science, and scolded their fathers for speaking in theories while ignoring the actual suffering going on around them. Whereas the Westernizers had fed on the meaning-laden historical visions of Hegel and idealism, the Nihilists were raised on Feuerbach, Comte’s positivism, and the popular German materialists: Büchner, Moleschott, and Vogt. John Stuart Mill also had a big influence. Although always haunted by a Russian preference for Lamarckianism (competition was not the only thing that could run a group or lead to progress), Darwinism still came as a great windfall for doubters, as it did everywhere else. Among the Russian Nihilists, the mood of doubt and emphasis on science were linked with anthropology and sociology. The radicalization of Russian intellectuals took place through the influence of the Nihilists, and it was their materialism and socialism that developed into the Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the twentieth century.

Dostoyevsky was attracted to these ideas in his youth, but later was too pro-Russian to abide the Westernizers and too spiritualist to bear the Nihilists. In his novel translated as The Devils or The Possessed, he attacks the Nihilists, and in the planning stages, the book was to be called The Atheist. In one passage of the book, an army officer goes mad and attacks his commander. In the investigation it comes out that the officer had recently smashed up his landlady’s little shrine of Christian icons. In its place he set up works by Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner, like a trio of Bibles on stands, and then burned a wax church candle in front of each. He turns out to be a political radical, and violent, too. Dostoyevsky doubted much about religion, but he did not like the look of the moral world without God.

The German David Friedrich Strauss got all Europe’s attention with his Life of Jesus (1835) by discussing the miracles of the Bible not as mistaken perceptions, but as meaningful myth.¹²⁵ Strauss cited Spinoza a lot, but his work was also very original and modern: he advanced the scholarly techniques for teasing out the likely historical realities in the Gospels. Secularization advanced so that there was less religion in the other disciplines, and more of the other disciplines in the study of religion.

As for Britain, in 1851 Harriet Martineau translated Comte into English and condensed his six-volume work to two, to his approval and to tremendous success. In 1859 Leslie Stephen was a young tutor at Cambridge and a newly ordained priest, but soon after he began reading Mill, Comte, and Kant he had doubts. In 1862, having declined to take part in the chapel services, he was asked to resign his tutorship. He left the church as well, and married a freethinking woman. In 1873 he published Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking, a book that made him a famous doubter longing for real spiritual fulfillment that he said could not come from religion, since religion was impossible to believe.¹²⁶ Still, reading Stephen’s article “An Agnostic’s Apology” in the Fortnightly Reviewwas the first time many people ever came across the term agnostic. After that, use of it was in high vogue. Stephen’s biography of George Eliot (real name Marian Evans and a brilliant doubter—as I’ll discuss below) appeared in 1902; that same year he was knighted for his editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography, which did not do the status of doubt any harm. He died in 1903, but a posthumous work on Hobbes appeared in 1904. Sir Leslie was also survived by his daughter, the novelist Virginia Woolf. She was less polemical on this issue than her father, but her books are full of searching agnostic and atheist characters. In unpublished autobiographical essays, she wrote things such as “certainly, emphatically, there is no God,” and in a private letter: “I read the book of Job last night—I don’t think God comes well out of it.”¹²⁷

The greatest idol of late-century British doubt was Charles Bradlaugh, a big man with an imposing manner and a lot of power to his speech. His motto was “Thorough!” which meant he was quite an atheist. His lectures on unbelief were among the most popular of the era. Consider this conversation in Bradlaugh’s Doubts in Dialogue:

CHRISTIAN PRIEST: At least, belief is the safe side. When you die, if your

unbelief be right, there is an end of you and of all your heresy; and if it

is wrong, there is eternal torment as your sad lot.

UNBELIEVER: Hardly so. If I am right, my unbelief will live after me, in its

encouragement to others to honest protest against the superstitions

which hinder progress.

PRIEST: But you, at any rate, may be wrong, and belief is, therefore, safest

for you.

UNBELIEVER: Which belief? Must I accept alike all creeds?

PRIEST: No; that is not possible. You are asked to accept the true Christian

faith.

UNBELIEVER: Why not the true Jewish faith?

PRIEST: A new dispensation was given through Jesus.

UNBELIEVER: Why not the true Mahommedan faith?

PRIEST: Mahommed was an impostor.

UNBELIEVER: About two hundred millions of human beings now believe that

he was the prophet of God, and that the Koran is a divine revelation.

PRIEST: He was a false prophet. His pretense that the Koran was revelation

was an imposture.

UNBELIEVER: Then it would not be safe for me to believe in Mahommed?

PRIEST: Certainly not; you must believe in Christ and in the Gospels.

UNBELIEVER: Would it not be enough to believe in Buddha, and the blessing

of eternal repose in Nirvana?

PRIEST: Buddhism is the equivalent of Atheism. Nirvana is another word for

annihilation.

UNBELIEVER: But some four hundred millions are Buddhists, and the character

of Buddha is placed very high.

PRIEST: The true faith is that in Jesus, and in him crucified.

UNBELIEVER: Do you mean the man Jesus in whom the Unitarians believe?

PRIEST: Unitarians! Do you not know that there is a special canon

of the law-established Church against the damnable and cursed heresy

of Socinianism? It is belief in Jesus as God, the second person in the Holy

Trinity.¹²⁸

Along with this cosmopolitan critique, Bradlaugh wrote that “the Atheist does not say ‘There is no God,’” but says: “‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception’ especially when even those who believe in the thing cannot even define it.” He adds that if God is defined to mean an existence other than the human kind of existence, “then I deny ‘God,’ and affirm that it is impossible such ‘God’ can be. That is, I affirm one existence, and deny that there can be more than one.”¹²⁹ Bradlaugh wrote that a large part of his atheism was based in having glimpsed Spinoza’s Ethics in secondary sources and found himself in agreement that the universe is one—it has no other, mystical part.¹³⁰

Bradlaugh’s is a good story: As a young man he had been rejected by his family because he doubted the Gospels. In his travels he met free-thought enthusiasts and embraced atheism; he got a job clerking for a lawyer and began a side career as a free-thought lecturer. His audiences were groups that had been followers of Robert Owen but were being retooled by George Holyoake as secular clubs. In 1858 Bradlaugh replaced Holyoake as president of the London Secular Society and was soon made editor of The National Reformer, a paper dedicated to atheism, democracy, and birth control. He founded the National Secular Society and became its first president and started a campaign to show the legal injustice of court oaths. He won: in 1869 a law granted the right of atheists to “affirm” in court cases rather than to swear. Meanwhile, he led the movement to get rid of the monarchy and was powerful enough that in 1873 the New York Herald proclaimed him “The Future President of England.” Queen Victoria, however, rallied and returned to popularity; that ended that, but it was a gesture of democratic zeal by a great doubter. In 1880 Bradlaugh was elected to Parliament. When invited to take the standard oath before taking his seat, he asked to affirm instead—it was his famous issue—but a committee announced that the right to affirm did not extend to Parliament. Bradlaugh said, fine, he would take the oath, but another committee insisted that his well-known atheism prevented this: he should “affirm” and vote “under pain of statute”—meaning subject to penalties for voting without taking the oath. Legal proceedings against him began as soon as he voted the first time and lasted six years. His seat was empty meanwhile, but he was reelected in three by-elections. At each juncture he would try to take the oath (and his seat) but other members would not let him. He was once thrown bodily out of the Palace of Westminster, and he was the last person in history imprisoned in the Clock Tower.

Finally, in 1886 the Speaker helped him take the oath quickly, before anyone could object, and henceforth Bradlaugh was able to participate. He grew to be a very well respected member of Parliament, encouraging public vaccination, ending aristocratic privileges, and arranging systems of support for the working class. Among these wide-ranging concerns, he introduced and successfully championed the 1888 Oaths Act, so that anyone could affirm as an alternative to any oath. He was also famous for his support of India. The year 1880 saw the foundation of free-thought International, in Brussels, and its first conference; Bradlaugh was one of its founders, along with Büchner, Spencer, Vogt, Royer, and Moleschott.

In the early 1870s Bradlaugh met Annie Besant, another powerful figure in the history of doubt, and they became close collaborators. Annie Wood had been married off at age nineteen to a preacher named Frank Besant, and they had two children. Annie’s increasing religious doubt, culminating in her refusal to take communion, led Frank to kick her out and, in 1873, a legal separation resulted. After her writing caused further scandals, the husband ended up with both children. She became a member of the National Secular Society and the Fabian Society, where Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw talked over socialism (leading to the founding of the Labour Party). Besant tells us in her autobiography that while married she’d stood at her husband’s pulpit when the church was empty, “to try how it felt,” and had liked it. Once on her own, she put her interest in public speaking to use supporting the causes of free thought, national education, women’s right to vote, and birth control. She famously organized the matchworkers’ union to protect the girls of that trade, and had a major impact on labor power and women’s rights. She and Bradlaugh coedited the National Reformer now, and they wrote a pamphlet on birth control for which they were brought to trial but acquitted. Together they also wrote The Freethinker’s Text Book, indicting Christianity for opposing “all popular advancement, all civil and social progress, all improvement in the condition of the masses.” Progress has come now, they said, because the “failing creed has lost the power to oppose.”¹³¹

In 1876 Besant wrote The Gospel of Atheism, in which she said, “An Atheist is one of the grandest titles … it is the Order of Merit of the World’s heroes… Copernicus, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Priestly.” In 1889 Annie Besant was elected to the London School Board with a fifteen thousand majority over the next candidate, and took the landslide as mandate for profound reform of the local schools. Beyond her educational initiatives, she was famous for instating free meals for poor students and free medical exams for every child in elementary school. Later, Besant read Hindu and Buddhist texts and these changed her focus profoundly. She became a leader of the Theosophical Society, which sought to combine the philosophies and religions of the East and the West into something modern people could believe. This all soon took on a spiritualism that included the possibility of communication with the dead. European atheists tend to see her as having abandoned them at that point, but she never betrayed the wider cause of doubt. Besant went to India, became involved in Indian nationalism, and in 1916 established the Indian Home Rule League of which she became president; meanwhile, her Gospel of Atheism and Freethinker’s Text Book were very popular among the intelligentsia in India and Sri Lanka. She wrote a library of theosophist books on atheism, Buddhism, yoga, Hinduism, and the nature of the soul, and in 1923 translated the Bhagavad-Gita, among other key texts of Indian religion. One of her many books was Giordano Bruno: Theosophy’s Apostle in the Sixteenth Century (1913). She thus brought to India the doubt of the West and brought Eastern thought to the West. Besant lived out much of her life in India, dying there in 1933.

Consider also Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (1858–1934), daughter of Charles and named for the great Hypatia of Alexandria. Charles Bradlaugh named his daughter after the ancient philosopher in praise of philosophy. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner was a wonderful freethinker: she took over her father’s affairs while he was under prosecution (with Annie Besant, for their campaign on birth control), and meanwhile studied inorganic chemistry and animal physiology at London University. She later taught these subjects at her father’s Hall of Science, sponsored by his National Secular Society. Hypatia met her husband there (he taught math). Hers was a quiet life, but when her father died in 1891 and there were rumors he’d had a deathbed conversion, Hypatia was riled: she wrote retorts, successfully sued one party, and eventually published a pamphlet titled Did Charles Bradlaugh Die an Atheist? She began to campaign against the death penalty, edited a complete edition of Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason, and launched a journal called The Reformer with the motto “Heresy makes for progress.” She was friends with Ernestine Rose toward the end of the older woman’s life. After forty years of public service, Hypatia was appointed Justice of the Peace for London in 1922 and sat on the bench until 1934. When she died, a testament offered a rebuttal to any rumors: “Now, in my seventy-eighth year, being of sane mind, I declare without reserve or hesitation that I have no belief, and never have had any belief, in any of the religions which obsess and oppress the minds of millions of more or less unthinking people throughout the world.” She added, “Away with these gods and godlings; they are worse than useless. I take my stand by Truth.”¹³²

Robert Ingersoll, sometimes called “the Pagan prophet,” was the best-known doubting lecturer in the United States. Born in New York, he had been required to attend his minister father’s two Sunday sermons; on his own he read Epicurus, Zeno, Voltaire, and Tom Paine. Ingersoll saw his naturalist morality based on happiness as directly indebted to Epicurus rather than to the Utilitarians. He called himself an agnostic, writing, “Let us be honest…. Let us have the courage and the candor to say: We do not know.”¹³³ There was American pluck in it: “If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will be time enough to kneel. Until then let us stand erect.”¹³⁴ Ingersoll married Eva Parker after having been comforted to learn there were works of Paine and Voltaire on her family’s bookshelves, and that Eva’s grandmother was an atheist and her parents deists. Ingersoll worked with Mortimer Bennet, another important doubting lecturer, who reported having been converted to atheism as he read Paine’s Age of Reason. Bennet started the atheist paper The Truth Seeker. When he was arrested under the Comstock laws for mailing birth control information, Ingersoll argued in his defense that the Bible was full of sexually explicit passages, so it, too, should be barred from the mail system.

In the United States there were more reforming doubters than could be listed, and many who incorporated doubt in their attack on political wrongs. Frederick Douglass, for example, did not speak much on religion, but here is something he wrote in 1852:

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors…. For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!¹³⁵

Douglass goes on to say that the antislavery movement will cease to be an antichurch movement as soon as the churches join the antislavery movement. So far, he howls, “YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.”¹³⁶

Consider also the atheist, women’s rights activist, and eventual anarchist, Voltairine de Cleyre. Her father had named her after his favorite author but apparently forgot to give Voltaire’s work to the girl. Instead, she was sent to Catholic boarding school, where she questioned her faith in terrified solitude—stunning when her very name should have been company. She became a renowned atheist lecturer. De Cleyre had a sense of doubt’s history, but it was a different one. At a speech on Easter, 1896, she explained, “Whether it be the festival of a risen Christ, or of the passage of Judah from the bondage of Egypt, or the old Pagan worship of light, ’tis ever the same—the celebration of the breaking of bonds. We, too, may allow ourselves the poetic dream.”¹³⁷ She then gave a list of “resurrected” heroes, dominated by doubters: Hypatia, Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, Harriet Martineau, and Lucretia Mott. De Cleyre was a marvelous character, famed as strikingly beautiful, brave, and principled. She made her living in the public advocacy of atheism, as well as women’s rights and labor rights.

There were many more. Etta Semple and Laura Knox edited The Free-Thought Ideal in turn-of-the-century Kansas, and from 1897 Semple was president of the Kansas Freethought Association and later vice president of the American Secular Union. She also did so much good in her community—she opened a hospital and sanitarium for the poor, for example—that when she died the banner headlines mentioned only her humanitarianism. In one of her editorials, “Liberty of Conscience Is All That We Ask,” Semple wrote, “If I deny the existence of a God—if I deny the idea of a gold paved city with pearly walls and jasper gates somewhere out of knowledge and space and prefer to die and trust to the unfaltering laws of nature—if, in plain word I don’t want to go to heaven, whose business is it but my own?”¹³⁸ Consider also Helen Hamilton Gardener, who the New York Sun called “Ingersoll done in soprano” and the Chicago Times called “the pretty infidel.”¹³⁹ Her book Men, Women, and Gods included lines such as “I do not know the needs of a god or of another world…. I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.”¹⁴⁰ In 1920 she was appointed to the Civil Service Commission—the highest office a woman had yet occupied in the federal government. The great abolitionist and women’s rights campaigner Lucy N. Colman wrote that she herself gave up the church “more because of its complicity with slavery than from a full understanding of the foolishness of its creeds.”¹⁴¹ She used to date her articles in The Truth Seekerstrangely: 1887 was 287. It marked the martyrdom of Bruno, 287 years earlier.

THE POETS

There were doubters in many of the arts: in 1885 the great actress Sarah Bernhardt, for instance, was quoted answering the question Do you pray? by saying “Never. I’m an atheist.”¹⁴² But of all the doubting artists, poets may be the ones who most directly wrestle their doubt in their art. Most doubting poets of the nineteenth century are as far from polemic as can be; more like Cheshire Cats than Red Queens. That’s why the earliest one is such an unusual story. In 1811 one of the most beloved poets in the English language, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), was in college at Oxford. Shelley was nineteen. He and his friend T. J. Hogg wrote what has often been described as the first published attestation of atheism in Britain. We have seen that there was precedent, and indeed England knew a handful of isolated atheists and other radical doubters in this same period.¹⁴³ Still, there had not been anything like it. It was called The Necessity of Atheism. They circulated it to the heads of colleges and to bishops and were summarily kicked out of school. Two years later, Shelley expanded the pamphlet and included the whole thing as a note to his long poem Queen Mab.

The book follows through on its titular confidence, but it begins with a note bearing the book’s one caveat, tucked weirdly under the section heading “There Is No God”; it reads: “This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe remains unshaken.”¹⁴⁴ The book henceforth ignores that spirit. It begins as Cicero began: “A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition is the only secure way of attaining truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant: our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a subject of such importance that it cannot be too minutely investigated …” For Shelley, the way to do that is to examine the proposition of God while remembering that the senses are our strongest link to truth, that our minds are a somewhat weaker link, and that other people’s words are the worst. How does God hold up according to the evidence of the senses? It’s not good. “If the Deity should appear to us, if he should convince our senses of his existence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared have the strongest possible conviction of his existence. But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility.” That last switch is an adroit reminder that the biblical stories and the philosophically argued God (variously distant, unimaginable, and unmoving) do not mesh. It is a major rupture, generally ignored in the history of both belief and doubt.

Our next link to truth, reason, also fails to prove God for Shelley: he dismissed the idea that the “created” universe proves a creator, since “we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity.” Echoing Aristotle here, Shelley went on to echo Cicero, writing, “We must prove design before we can infer a designer”; and then to echo Hume: not only do we not need a first cause, we don’t even know what cause is. Our weakest link to truth, witnesses other than ourselves, fared worst of all in the attempt to prove God’s existence. Anyway, a God who cursed those who dared disbelieve could not be, explained Shelley, because it is folly to think you can legislate belief. Shelley also said it is true we do not understand the generative force of life, but it doesn’t clarify anything to imagine that this force is eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent. His conclusion: “Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God…. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.”

Shelley introduced many familiar arguments: God was invented by those in power to control the masses; belief is based on blind custom and obedience; believers themselves, “who make a profession of adoring the same God,” disagree on every aspect of him and deny each other’s proofs. But there were some fresh notions here. Shelley added his century’s sense of human mastery: “Is there a country on earth where the science of God is really perfect? Has this science anywhere taken the consistency and uniformity that we see the science of man assume, even in the most futile crafts, the most despised trades?” Shelley had a clever take on believers in the philosophical, distant God: “The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.” But, he assures, if ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature destroys them. “In a word, [man’s] terrors dissipated in the same proportion as his mind became enlightened. The educated man ceases to be superstitious.” This was 1811; the chutzpah was remarkable.

Shelley paraphrased d’Holbach’s French, musing of God: “If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?”¹⁴⁵ He quoted Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, concluding that “The enlightened and benevolent Pliny thus Publicly professes himself an atheist.” He ended with a quotation by Spinoza in Latin, saying “God and Nature are one and the same.”¹⁴⁶

Shelley believed that life is a different thing than matter, but where others used this as an argument for immortality, he wondered how you could leap from “different than matter” to immortal. In an essay called “On a Future State,” Shelley wrote:

Suppose… that the intellectual and vital principle differs in the most marked and essential manner from all other known substances…. In what manner can this concession be made an argument for its imperishability? All that we see or know perishes and is changed. Life and thought differ indeed from everything else. But that it survives that period, beyond which we have no experience of its existence, such distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothing but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine.¹⁴⁷

The essay ends with the claim that only “this desire to be forever as we are” and the fear of an “un-experienced change,” which all the animated and inanimate “combinations of the universe” undergo, is “the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.”¹⁴⁸

Shelley advocated free thought his whole short life, fighting for tolerance and for doubt. In his “Refutation of Deism,” he wrote that there can be no middle ground between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of God. Drawing on Epicurus, Locke, and Hume, he concluded that “the existence of God is a chimera.”¹⁴⁹ His Queen Mab is one of the great dialog poems. Its epigrams include Lucretius’s Epicurean denial of the gods and Voltaire’s “Ecrasé l’infame!”, and its whole point is to critique revealed religion and champion doubt. As one famous scene begins, Spirit speaks of a burning:

SPIRIT:

I was an infant when my mother went

To see an atheist burned. She took me there.

The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;

The multitude was gazing silently;

And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,

Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,

Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;

The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;

His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;

His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob

Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.

“Weep not, child!” cried my mother, “for that man

Has said, There is no God.”¹⁵⁰

It is often thought that Shelley was honoring Bruno. The Fairy answers:

FAIRY:

There is no God!

Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed.

…Let every seed that falls

In silent eloquence unfold its store

Of argument; infinity within,

Infinity without, belie creation;

The exterminable spirit it contains

Is Nature’s only God; but human pride

Is skilful to invent most serious names

To hide its ignorance.

The name of God

Has fenced about all crime with holiness,

Himself the creature of his worshippers…

The Fairy continues on to say that “priests dare babble of a God of peace, / Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,” that as they murder they uproot “every germ / Of truth” and make the earth into “a slaughter-house!” It’s worth seeing this particular aspect of what people meant when they said they were reading Shelley. Yet more powerful than his drama about what the universe is not, was his verse about what the universe really was, to his eyes. His sonnet “Ozymandias” is one of doubt’s great poems. It begins: “I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies…’” This huge, broken face sneers its “cold command,” unaware that its moment is over. The poem concludes: “And on the pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The contemporary Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) never launched any attack on religion, but he is a darling of the history of doubt—and one of the best poets there ever was. In a letter to his brother, Keats wrote that the poet is no one because the poet takes on the point of view and experience of everyone and everything. That capacity for ambiguity, he asserted, is necessary for all greatness: “At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A few lines later he told his brother, “Shelley’s poem is out, and there are words about its being objected to as much as ‘Queen Mab’ was. Poor Shelley… !!” Keats had a hard life, saw several beloved family members die—and then he himself began spitting blood and knew what it meant. He came to believe that the world was a place for “soul making”; this brutal world is the only way for each of us to become a unique identity. Many Romantic poets, and many modern artists of all types, would explicitly take the transcendence and meaning of art as a substitute for religion. Keats’s Negative Capability and “soul making” world are among the sublime ideas of that tradition.

In the United States at this time Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was developing a movement called Transcendentalism. He, and most of his followers, were former Unitarians who no longer believed even in the distant God with whom they had been raised, and found a replacement in the beauty of nature. Emerson had been a Unitarian minister; he passionately read Plotinus and the Neoplatonist texts that followed therefrom, as well as the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Whereas Jefferson’s library contained lots of Epicurean texts, especially Lucretius, Emerson’s had none, but he owned several Stoic texts—it was Velleius and Balbus on the eastern seaboard.¹⁵¹ Emerson married Lydia Jackson, who was also “a nonconformist Unitarian with Neo-Platonist beliefs,” but to his great grief, she died within two years of their wedding. He resigned from the church. Soon after, in 1832, he left for England where he became friends with Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, all Romantic poets who had rejected traditional religion but basically maintained belief in a spirited world. From this and from his reading of ancient Stoicism, Emerson formulated his Transcendental faith. It rejected religion, yet was spiritual in its mood and its vision of the natural world as a humming abundance of beauty, love, and creativity. It would have an important future in modern American thought—up to the present day.

The two other major figures of Transcendentalism were Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Both were considerably influenced by Stoicism before they met Emerson. They were all poets of nature. Thoreau lived on Emerson’s Walden Pond for two years, basking in Nature, but it was not all leaves and sky. In a paragraph praising the morning, and waking to it, alone in nature, Thoreau managed to cite “the Greeks,” Confucius, and the Vedas. Indeed in his solitude in the woods he had time to read Cicero and the Bhagavad-Gita; both he and Emerson read the Samkhyya Karika and the Vishnu Purana as well. What was being advised was a highly informed naturalism. Margaret Fuller, who was editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, was more the reformer than either Thoreau or Emerson. They were all abolitionists, but Thoreau and Emerson tended to the removed life of the philosopher. Fuller became famous for her books on women’s rights, for her defense of Native Americans against the missionaries who plagued them, and for her “conversation classes” for women, where her paying guests learned to discuss ideas. The first lesson was “Greek mythology.” In her Memoirs (1852), Fuller wrote that when she read Christian teachings, they made her cry out for her “dear old Greek gods.”¹⁵² Here’s part of what she meant: “The missionary… vainly attempts to convince the red man that a heavenly mandate takes from him his broad lands. He bows his head, but does not at heart acquiesce. He cannot. It is not true.” Further, “Let the missionary, instead of preaching to the Indian, preach to the trader who ruins him.”¹⁵³ In Fuller, doubt was philosophical but also moral.

The future Victorian novelist Marian Evans, mentioned earlier, was brought up with religion in Derbyshire, England, but got hold of a freethinking book on the origins of Christianity and looked up the references. Friends who shared her doubt introduced her to other doubters; she met Emerson once. By the early 1840s she had openly renounced Christianity and set to work on writing the first English translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus. It was published anonymously, to much acclaim and uproar, in 1846. In 1854 her translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity sent another shock through the English-speaking world and was the only book she ever published in her own name. On its strength, she became a contributing editor of John Stuart Mill’s old journal, the Westminster Review; she also translated portions of Spinoza, whom she particularly admired, and of Comte. Only later, with Adam Bede in 1859 to Middlemarch in 1871, did she became England’s beloved poet and novelist, under the name George Eliot. Her novels center on the inner life and the mistakes of perception and expectation. Thus she moved from an early role of quiet, brilliant evangelism to a later life as an investigator and poet of the human.

If Keats was the great doubting poet of the first half of the century, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) took the prize for the second half. She, too, was a Cheshire Cat of a doubter, welcoming ambiguity, playful, but exquisitely serious:

Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision.

The channel of the dust who once achieves

Invalidates the balm of that religion

That doubts as fervently as it believes.¹⁵⁴

She could do in a four-line poem what other people took a chapter for, but in the best circumstances they take as long to read. Even as she tells us here how it feels to bury a loved one and mouth religious words about an afterlife (“sweet derision”), she keeps the language so tricky that the second line is about the grave accepting the casket but also about the human being, now dust. The poem is also a little psalm to the inner life. And it’s got amazing rhythm. It’s one of doubt’s best.

Dickinson grew up during the period of New England revivalism, but refused to make the public confession of faith that would formally admit her to the church. By the time she was thirty she had stopped going to services entirely. Soon she did not leave the house at all. She stayed in, listening to her inner moods and conversing with herself, in verse, about what she heard there. She sang this song according to a deeply religious melody, the hymns of that church she did not attend. As the critic Dennis Donoghue has written, “of her religious faith virtually anything may be said, with some show of evidence. She may be represented as an agnostic, a heretic, a sceptic, a Christian.”¹⁵⁵ She wrote to a friend about her family, “They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call Father.”¹⁵⁶ The woman doubted; that was her whole business.

Those—dying then,

Knew where they went—

They went to God’s Right Hand—

That Hand is amputated now

And God cannot be found—

The abdication of Belief

Makes the Behavior small—

Better an ignis fatuus

Than no illume at all—¹⁵⁷

Dickinson was brilliant at keeping the tension of doubt, and at generating a private religion, of art and inner life, that “doubts as fervently as it believes.”

There is more worry in Thomas Hardy’s “God’s Funeral.” In the first five stanzas Hardy describes coming upon a funeral procession and, able to sense that it was God’s funeral, he watched with pained awe. He overheard the mourners ask, “O man-projected Figure,” how can we outlive you? “Whence came it we were tempted to create / One whom we can no longer keep alive?” The speech explained that “rude reality” had “mangled the Monarch” we invented, until he “quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.” The sadness here echoed other religious losses:

So, toward our myth’s oblivion,

Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope

Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,

Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

How sweet it was in years far hied

To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,

To lie down liegely at the eventide

And feel a blest assurance he was there!

And who or what shall fill his place?

Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes

For some fixed star to stimulate their pace

Towards the goal of their enterprise?

In the background, the poet could hear some people protest that God still lived. Hardy wished he, too, still believed, but for him, “how to bear such loss I deemed / The insistent question for each animate mind.”¹⁵⁸ Some few mourners insisted they could see the glow of something new on the horizon, but the poet lingered with the crowd, aimless between “the gleam and the gloom.”

It was doubt’s most evangelical century to date. There had been a long history that considered doubt a private club with no other aspirations than truth and enough freedom to debate with one’s colleagues in peace. There had never been campaigns for the doubters to convert the believers. Now when the doubters’ ranks swelled in response to religious incursions into politics (including persecution and the support of social injustice), people grew convinced that atheism would soon take over. Some were glad for it, some horrified; what is remarkable is that so many expected it. Few remembered that through the millennia, doubt had never been evangelical, but had been passed down, quietly and respectably, in families, had leapt gently from student to teacher, and had appeared de novo now and again—all without looking to take over. In their visions of the future, perhaps Nietzsche was wrong and Etta Semple was right: to many modern doubters, tolerance seems more attractive than uniform disbelief. In any case, nineteenth-century doubt hammered out the basic needs of a mass democracy, achieved a staggering revolution in atoms and anthropology, and reenvisioned art as sufficiently transcendent and transformative to enchant modernity.