I speak of nothing which actually exists in this country . . . where the rationalist party is below contempt
Hugh James Rose, The State of the Protestant Religion in Germany, 1825Footnote 1
Our old Rationalism, which lit such a glow in our hearts that were once young, somehow chills the rising generation
Jane Harrison, Rationalism and Religious Reaction, 1919Footnote 2
Hugh James Rose spoke at the beginning, and Jane Harrison at the end, of a peculiarly Victorian phase of interest in the meaning, possibilities, and limits of “rationalism.” The phenomenon addressed by Rose, a Cambridge-educated, High Anglican clerical controversialist speaking at the outset of the nineteenth century's preoccupation with rationalism, and Harrison, a freethinking Cambridge classicist wondering about the twentieth-century future of what she thought had become an outdated idea, might be thought to the twenty-first-century reader to mean a certain ideal of the scientific method. The professed rationalist Alfred William Benn gave what he took to be such a definition in his History of English Rationalism, published in 1906. Rationalism was, he thought, “the method and doctrine of those who strive to make reason the supreme regulator of their beliefs [a]nd of their actions”; the commitment “to think and speak in terms to which fixed and intelligible senses are attached”; the rejection of all that was “inconsistent with admitted truth” and the acceptance “of the logical consequences of such truth, however remote or unwelcome they may be.”Footnote 3
If such a definition appears conventional and uncontroversial by modern lights, it was at the time one notably pointed outcome of a complex nineteenth-century debate about what rationalism involved. “Rationalist” had entered the English language in the seventeenth century as a label given to those who made reason rather than sense experience the foundation of knowledge; and “rationalism” first came to suggest a risk to theology in the eighteenth century.Footnote 4 It was only in nineteenth-century Britain, however, that rationalism became the subject both of siren warnings and of self-conscious devotion on a scale unprecedented as well as subsequently unrepeated. Rationalism was consistently taken to denote the prioritization of reason as a means of establishing knowledge. Its power to unsettle, or to inspire, derived above all from its pertinence to the question of the cultural authority of religion. But the forms of reasoning to which rationalism generally referred, the senses in which critics understood it to be a broader cultural presence, and the ways in which it became a term of denigration and self-description were all notably unstable. In order to recover the shape of that argument and its implications for how historians understand nineteenth-century tensions over the foundations of knowledge, this article offers a Begriffsgeschichte of the word “rationalism,” its close cognatesFootnote 5 and the modes of thought with which it came to be associated or contrasted in Victorian Britain.Footnote 6
This piece accordingly performs two related historiographical functions. The first is to offer a narrative and a more precise contextualization of a phenomenon that historians of the nineteenth century recognize to have been fundamental to contemporary intellectual controversy, and yet the nature of which remains unclear. “Rationalism” has variously been taken to mean “the scientific quest for the knowable” or “an empirical approach to understanding the world” characteristic of nineteenth-century freethinkers;Footnote 7 George Holyoake's eponymous attempt to rescue the doctrines of Robert Owen in the 1840s;Footnote 8 and the “Enlightenment rationalism” that fed both the Victorian “crisis of faith” and, by reaction, the evangelical revival.Footnote 9 It has also been used as a generalizing label to group together subversive tendencies, which were in reality often quite distinct, in German or Victorian biblical criticism.Footnote 10 Each of these definitions and associations captures an element of Victorian reality. The conflicting scholarly usages reflect selections and sometimes reifications from different parts of a Victorian bricolage, in which rationalism meant different things in changing contexts.Footnote 11 Though rationalism always denoted the privileging of reason in a sense deleterious to traditional religious orthodoxy and its social authority, it was invested with new significance at particular moments of an evolving and recoverable sequence of argument about the sources of truth and value. To make these patterns visible, rationalism should receive the same careful treatment that has been given to the more familiar and similarly complex Victorian categories of “altruism,” “agnosticism,” “positivism” and “scientific naturalism” in existing secondary studies.Footnote 12
The second aim of what follows is more suggestive. Victorian conceptions of reason and rationality are as historically problematic as contemporary constructions of sanity and madness, though they have been less studied.Footnote 13 One way in which nineteenth-century actors reached rational conclusions—the scientific method—has not lacked historians.Footnote 14 This article is not, however, primarily concerned with Victorian discussion of the nature and boundaries of science. These questions certainly did enter into debates over rationalism, but together they represented one element alongside the theological, ethical and historical dimensions of contemporary reasoning about reason which rationalism connoted, and the importance of which has often been underplayed. Only at a relatively late point did rationalism come to be directly associated with the claims of natural science; and it was always related to these other, less closely studied aspects of how Victorians sought knowledge. Rationalism was consistently linked to the problem of the moral orientation from which reasoning ought to begin: whether from adherence to an authoritative revelation, to the conscience, or to science. Discussion of rationalism, as a means of establishing whether a given belief or practice was reasonable, was in addition very often historical in nature. Those who criticized or defended rationalism often understood themselves to be criticizing or defending Enlightenment-era epistemology, in a climate where this had become acutely controversial.Footnote 15 After 1860, thinkers also began to treat rationalism as a transhistorical force that had shaped, and was continuing to shape, Western civilization. Whether that rationalizing process terminated in the purification of Christianity, or in its elimination, was a question that concerned nineteenth-century historical thinkers more than has been distinctly acknowledged. Claims to rational normativity, on these readings, were to be judged by reference to history. Attempts to define rationalism drew in theological speculation, ideals of moral selfhood and historical perspective, in ways connected but not reducible to the promises and limitations of science.
In support of these points, the conceptual history offered here analyses the process by which an initially alien and essentially theological approach to knowledge became naturalized, transmuted and ultimately secularized in British intellectual culture. Victorian discussion of rationalism unfolded in three overlapping stages. Rationalism first became the subject of British public controversy in the 1820s, when British observers of Germany, beginning with Hugh James Rose, became volubly alarmed by the “rationalist” German biblical critics who seemed to subordinate revelation to the judgements of carnal reason. “Rationalism,” in the often indiscriminate sense in which nervous clergy apprehended it, was at first a term designed to block the entry into Britain of a dangerous critical movement. It was only somewhat later, at around mid-century, that “rationalism” became a term of self-description; and then in a notably different sense from that in which its earlier opponents had construed it. In the hands of the Anglo-Irish historian William Lecky, the women's rights campaigner Frances Power Cobbe, and others, “rationalism” now became the affirmative description of a form of moral theism, rooted in the intuition of the conscience and the larger movements of history, and in its advanced form explicitly detached from supposedly untenable biblical supernaturalism. Although unsettling for thinkers such as the High Church, high Tory Oxford philosopher Henry Longueville Mansel, this mid-Victorian construction of rationalism was intended, by its supporters, to act as a means of salvaging the Christian, or at least the theistic, foundations of intellectual and moral experience. As such, it was found to be an inadequate definition by a late Victorian generation of self-identifying rationalists, who around the year 1900 deliberately sought to remove rationalism's earlier theological associations. The newer critics sought to replace them with the specifically secular and scientific norms which, in their estimation, had originated during the Enlightenment and animated a sweeping historical movement that was separating progressive modernity from the superstitious past. Familiar and less familiar trajectories in the Victorian discussion of the authority of reason intersected in the history of a word.
I
“Rationalism” entered the vocabulary of late Hanoverian British critics as a term of opprobrium for a distinctly foreign and subversive approach to biblical scholarship. This process formed an episode in the richly variegated intellectual contact between nineteenth-century Britain and Germany, which at that stage was generally marked by British suspicion and incomprehension.Footnote 16 When British audiences were initially made aware of rationalism, in this new sense, by the interpretative acts of that small number of thinkers then acquainted with German intellectual life, discussion centred on the correct way of studying holy Scripture and the relation the individual ought to bear towards it. This question tended to lead on, however, to the problem of the religious faculties the human mind could be said legitimately to possess. Edward Bouverie Pusey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to distinguish reductive rationalism from more appealing Idealist currents in German thought, which informed the more capacious, though not less controversial, conceptions of rationalism that were to become widespread in mid-century. The opening salvo in these exchanges, directed against German criticism understood in a notably undifferentiated way, came from Hugh James Rose, who had visited Germany to recuperate from a recurrent illness in 1824.Footnote 17
At the time of the journey which so scandalized Rose, the modes of scriptural criticism he found to be prevalent in German universities still owed much to eighteenth-century philosophical assumptions. In the 1790s and 1800s, under the dual impress of the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy, the academic popularity of earlier Neologie, which had started to offer naturalistic explanations of scriptural miracles, gave way to a more splintered and methodologically self-conscious situation. Adherents of Supranaturalismus now demarcated themselves from supporters of Rationalismus, which were terms both of criticism and of self-description. Rationalists and supernaturalists were essentially divided on the question whether the Christian tradition was opened purely through reason, or also by supernatural revelation and miracles. But the terms admitted of fine gradations, frequently lost on British readers, which often rendered German critics closer to one another than their warring words suggested. Supernaturalists were not simply a Lutheran old guard, but used Kantian arguments to establish the limits of reason.Footnote 18 There were supernatural rationalists, such as Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, who held to the necessity of revelation on the basis of reason, but who required its accordance with reason in its communication. Pure rationalists, defending what their opponents labelled Rationalismus vulgaris, admitted revelation but regarded it as a republication of principles obtainable through ratio or common-sense reasoning.Footnote 19 Unlike deists, rationalists presented themselves as exponents of Christian truth.Footnote 20 They were often clerics and tenured theologians; Julius Wegscheider, one of the most influential exponents of pure rationalism, was professor of theology at Halle from 1810.Footnote 21 Rationalismus nevertheless made the central Christian teachings much the same as those of Enlightenment-era natural religion, obtained through essentially pre-Kantian universal reason: the existence of God, immortality, morality and the freedom upon which it depended.Footnote 22
Academic Rationalismus lingered on for some time after developments in speculative thought began to transform German biblical criticism in the 1830s.Footnote 23 That transition was shaped by new stirrings in the distinct but overlapping subject of systematic theology, which had begun to situate the Bible, religion and the work of criticism within a teleological conception of intellectual and spiritual history. This framework was itself rooted in an Idealist conception of mind, by which British thinkers were to be deeply exercised. Rationalismus had treated universal truths as essentially separable from historical events, and from the historical position of the knowing subject. This stance posed a problem to those who held that the truth of Christianity rested on its historicity. The Idealism that underlay nineteenth-century German historicism—beginning with Lessing, and systematized by Schelling—offered a potential solution by positing that historical philosophy formed a bridge between the truths of reason, historical events, and the mind that interpreted them. History, in this interpretation, became the vehicle for the revelation of divine truth. The systematic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, a luminary of the theological faculty of the University of Berlin from its foundation in 1810, offered one development of this line of reasoning by arguing that religion, though in its essence a feeling of absolute dependence, could be scientifically studied—and to an extent philosophically defended—as a phenomenon of the human consciousness in history. Hegel, whose works inspired a different kind of systematic theology, offered another. Where Schleiermacher saw an essential difference between critical reflection on religion and the realities concretized in religion itself, Hegel and speculative Idealists held that a panlogist philosophy of history could unfold the mysteries of the absolute.Footnote 24 The assumption common to both approaches—that the subjective mind connected the individual to history, and through history to divinity—was met with a mixture of suspicion and receptivity by early British critics who recognized that it marked a departure from older rationalism. Somewhat later, the suggestion that Idealism could offer its own route into religious truth became part of an enlarged conception of the promise and the danger of rationalism in British controversy.
It was as a translation, and transmutation, of Rationalismus that rationalism first entered nineteenth-century British intellectual debate. Rose delivered the first British examination—and denunciation—of “the Rationalizing school” of German biblical scholarship in a series of university sermons he delivered at Cambridge after his return to England in 1825. They were published as The State of the Protestant Religion in Germany. Rose's discourses instantiated the longer-running antipathy to the exercise of mere logic, uncorrected by searching scriptural examination, that he had previously displayed in his rebuttal of Jeremy Bentham's call for the “euthanasia” of the Church of England.Footnote 25 In a procedure followed by many Victorians, and not a few later historians, Rose grouped together as “rationalists” what was in fact a spectrum of German critics, only some of whom would have been content to accept the label. In his assessment, Christian Wolff, Lessing, Bretschneider, Wegscheider, Kant and others were all guilty of rationalism because—while outwardly professing Christian belief—they only accepted the words of Christ and the biblical writers insofar as they approved themselves to reason. The result was the conversion of Christianity into mere natural religion.Footnote 26 The origin of such presumption, on Rose's account, lay in the spiritual pride denounced by Isaiah: “Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee.”Footnote 27
The fullest British response called out by Rose's 1825 sermons came from a fellow High Churchman, E. B. Pusey. Pusey, at that time a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, was encouraged by friends in Germany to publish his first book in response to Rose's Cambridge discourses.Footnote 28 His Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in Germany, appearing in 1828, was in some ways an unlikely tract for a future leading Tractarian and ultra-conservative Regius Professor of Hebrew to have written.Footnote 29 In common with Rose, he had previously spent an extended period studying in Germany; he had heard Schleiermacher at Berlin. But Pusey's estimate of what he had found was markedly, even daringly, approbatory when contrasted with the censorious tone Rose had adopted. Rose had construed rationalism as an immediate and wilful danger to religion; and he was relatively uninterested in explaining its historical origins. Pusey, however, took rationalism to be a specific phase of German intellectual history, the inadequacy of which had been exposed by the subsequent development of Christian thought. The history of theology—a witness to providence—was better understood, Pusey argued, not by jealously watching for apparent departures from positions enforced by external authority, but by tracing its own internal dynamics and lines of development.Footnote 30 Rationalism, though it had initially been a moral and historically minded departure from dead Lutheran orthodoxy, had, by its failure clearly to delimit what was and what was not admissible in scriptural interpretation, descended into mere carnality and common sense under the influence of English deism.Footnote 31 Rationalism proper, belonging to the eighteenth century, had now given way, Pusey reflected, to better influences. For all their limitations, Lessing's conception of the historically progressive character of divine purpose, Kant's elevation of moral interiority over mere logic, and Schleiermacher's defence of the distinction between theology and speculative philosophy prepared the ground for the spiritualized renewal of orthodox divinity.Footnote 32
Pusey's awareness that rationalism was more a regrettable phase than a general characteristic of German theology brought him close to the growing number of British critics who saw the apologetic promise of attending to the intuitive and historically dynamic aspects of the believing mind. Rose had noticed, and attacked, the German reaction against rationalism, exemplified by Schelling, in the direction of reliance on mere mystical feelings as a guide to religious truth.Footnote 33 Others shared Pusey's relative openness to this trend. Coleridge comparably held that recent developments in German thought—which treated reason less as lord of history than as its mediator—furnished an antidote to rationalists’ failure to interpret the biblical record in the light of the Christian “idea.”Footnote 34 Coleridge posited that this idea was accessible through Reason, or the partly intuitive, partly reflective faculty connecting man to God, which properly saw the Bible as a symbol connecting the perceiver to the transcendental perceived. Pusey never elevated the subjective interpreter to the extent Coleridge did. But his openness to the spiritual movement of thought in time prompted the liberal Anglican Julius Hare, in a preface to a volume of sermons dedicated to Coleridge, to praise Pusey's Historical Enquiry as “the most theologically valuable of his writings,” before likewise faulting that “meagre Rationalism” which falsely made itself historically absolute.Footnote 35
In the wake of the exchange between Pusey and Rose, rationalism became naturalized in British learned society as a shorthand for German biblical criticism. The appearance of pioneering works of biblical criticism in English during the 1820s encouraged nervous reviewers generally to echo the simplified conception of rationalism pushed by Rose, rather than the more discerning taxonomy of German critical conceptions which Pusey and the Coleridgeans arranged in their different yet interlocking ways.Footnote 36 The stormy reception accorded to Essays and Reviews, a radical collection written by Anglican clergymen and published in 1860, showed the persistence of rationalism's associations with Teutonic heterodoxy, and the continuing strength of the conservative clergy's desire to keep it at bay as a mode of approaching the Bible.Footnote 37 The arguments over the proper relationship between Scripture and its readers into which Rose, Pusey and Coleridge had entered had nevertheless raised a question that was not itself reducible to an issue of biblical interpretation. This problem was how the moral reason or intuition of the subjective mind might, or might not, be regarded as a legitimate source of religious authority. Rationalism soon ceased to be viewed in the context of biblical interpretation alone, and came to denote—for better or for worse—a broader epistemological claim on behalf of the individual mind regarding the basis of theism and the possibility of religious knowledge.
II
As rationalism came to have a broad reference to the prioritization of natural reason as a means of understanding the Bible, it also began to denote a wider complex of solvents of dogmatic Christianity. Around mid-century, rationalism—before it was directly linked to the claims of natural science—came to imply the prioritization of present moral reason, or conscience, as a means of knowing God. Advanced critics who began to appropriate rationalism as a term of self-description in this context sometimes explicitly sought to detach the possibility of theism from its prior mooring in biblical authority, and instead to anchor it more firmly in the inward witness of the spirit, in a sense often deliberately distanced from eighteenth-century intellectual categories. This attempt to affirm the independent religious authority of consciousness generated a new, epistemological rather than exegetical opposition to rationalism, notably from Henry Longueville Mansel. At approximately the same time, liberal critics drawn to rationalism as a means of reinvigorating moral theism also began to treat it as a term of historical and sociological analysis. William Lecky's 1865 History of Rationalism was in one respect a celebration of the progressive potential of the relocation of cultural authority away from dogmatic theology and towards the individual conscience.Footnote 38 But Lecky was also significantly more ambivalent about the consequences of rationalism's slow permeation of European societies than more combative and much less residually pious late-century rationalists were to be.
By the 1850s, rationalism was acquiring a different shape in the minds of Victorian commentators from that which it had possessed a quarter of a century previously. The inaugural lecture of the liberal Church of Scotland historian and theologian John Tulloch, after his 1854 instalment as Principal and Primarius Professor of Divinity at St Mary's College, St Andrews, pointed to an important change.Footnote 39 His lecture, on the “Theological Tendencies of the Age,” reflected Tulloch's lifelong concern both to free Christianity from the constraints of dogmatic exclusivism, and to guard its scriptural foundations and metaphysical claims from subjectivist and scientific assault. Tulloch's taxonomy identified “traditionalism” and “rationalism” as the two main forces in contemporary religious debate. By traditionalism he meant the belief that certain denominations possessed the entirety of religious truth, in relation to which private judgement was not to be exercised.Footnote 40 Tulloch's conception of rationalism, however, was more differentiated. The Rationalismus vulgaris of the early nineteenth century had now all but perished, he averred.Footnote 41 The rationalism most active in the present was not “intellectual,” but “intuitional.” Drawing on Coleridgean categories to illustrate the transition, Tulloch explained that whereas older rationalism had approached religious truth through the “understanding,” or the merely critical faculty, the newer rationalism referred religious truth-claims to the “primary feelings, or intuitions of the soul, or higher nature in man.”Footnote 42 The phenomenon was exemplified in Britain by Francis Newman, brother of John Henry and an advocate of a moral theism severed from any lingering reverence for Church or biblical authority, and in Germany by Schleiermacher.Footnote 43 Tulloch's chief complaint against rationalism—a treatment he would later significantly modify—was the fact that it elevated present consciousness over the biblical record in determining religious truth. True theology, Tulloch argued, must recognize the divine claims of reason in interpreting revelation, whilst rejecting the doctrine of human sufficiency that rationalism embodied.Footnote 44
A few years later, Mansel made a similar conception of rationalism an important target of the contentious epistemological defence of revealed religion he delivered in his 1858 Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought.Footnote 45 A scion of classically Tory clerical and military Northamptonshire stock, Mansel had taken holy orders after graduating from St John's College, Oxford, and became reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855. At that time, many High Churchmen hoped that he would emerge as a new Joseph Butler now that the Tractarians’ intellectual ranks had become depleted.Footnote 46 Rising to the challenge in an unexpectedly idiosyncratic and disturbing way, Mansel's lectures, heavily informed by Kant as mediated by Sir William Hamilton, contended that the inherent limitations of speculative reason made it incapable of obtaining or criticizing religious truth. Revelation must thus be accepted as authoritative as it is made known to our limited consciousness through the Bible, which was attested by historical evidences. Mansel's totalizing conservatism, directed against empiricism, pantheism, positivism, biblical criticism, and the prospect of a reformed, professorial Oxford that might foster speculative heterodoxy, mandated a broader definition of the rationalism he sought to curtail than that which would have come naturally to an older generation of High Churchmen:
By Rationalism, without intending to limit the name to any single school or period in theological controversy, I mean generally to designate that system whose final test of truth is placed in the direct assent of the human consciousness, whether in the form of logical deduction, or moral judgment, or religious intuition; by whatever previous process those faculties may have been raised to their assumed dignity as arbitrators.Footnote 47
Mansel further explained that a rationalist might still accept the possibility of supernatural revelation, or even that one had in fact been given. A rationalist was one who made reason, as a whole, the tribunal for deciding which parts of revelation were essential and which were inessential. It did not matter whether the reasoning had more of the character of common sense or of intuition; it was the primacy ascribed to reason that mattered. Thus, in an endnote, Mansel explicitly grouped Kant and Schleiermacher together with Wegscheider as rationalists, despite the greater inward focus of the former two. Schleiermacher made internal believing consciousness the test of truth, and by so doing set aside the supernatural conception and resurrection of Jesus. This was as arbitrary as Kant's apotheosis of moral reason. Extending the category beyond modes of German philosophy and the ways of reading the Bible they underpinned, Mansel also judged modern-day spiritualists to be an instance of rationalism, for they made feeling or intuition an arbitrary and absolute standard in arriving at religious truth.Footnote 48 Mansel's lectures generated much opposition from figures such as the Broad Churchmen Frederick Denison Maurice and Goldwin Smith, to whom Mansel's argument sealed off the believing individual from any possibility of personal contact with God.Footnote 49 It was precisely rationalism's capacity to free authentic theism from untenable historical accretions that recommended it to a growing number of progressive critics.
Among a mid-Victorian generation of advanced religious thinkers, the new form of rationalism criticized by Tulloch, and more comprehensively repudiated by Mansel, was often affirmatively interpreted as a means of harmonizing social and intellectual modernity with a continuing spiritual conception of the basis of moral life. The women's rights campaigner Frances Power Cobbe argued in the 1860s that rationalism, the opposite of traditionalism, was in its essential form a kind of theism. Inseparable from the theory of intuitive morals she had previously elaborated in opposition to Hume, Gibbon and utilitarian philosophy, Cobbe's theism drew inspiration from the universal religious consciousness in history, but not from the particular historical events recorded in the Bible. Her desire to detach belief in God from vestigial Christianity, informed by what she saw as Christianity's patriarchalism, owed much to the American Unitarian divine Theodore Parker.Footnote 50 The leading English Unitarian minister and historian Charles Beard comparably treated rationalism as a religious philosophy, capable of bridging the religious and scientific impulses in a synthesis notably independent of close reference to the biblical record. In a series of lectures delivered towards the end of his life, in which he used the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth, in 1883, to call for a new Reformation, Beard extolled what he called “philosophical rationalism.” He distinguished this from the “bastard rationalism,” prioritizing mere common sense, of eighteenth-century deism and older German neology. True rationalism, Beard argued, posited a God that would approach mankind through the imagination, as well as the reason. It ascribed value “to the straining of the imaginative intellect after the Infinite and the Absolute; the aspiration of the soul towards the eternal, the indwelling, the all-energizing Life; the revelation in conscience of an ideal holiness.”Footnote 51 Rationalism, in these treatments, was not so much a curtailment of divine revelation as a new way of discerning it.
The Anglo-Irish historian William Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe owed much to this mid-century moment in religious apologetic, though significantly without replicating its more exuberant forms. Born into a landlord family, Lecky had passed over the chance to take up a family living in the Church of Ireland in favour of life as a liberal Protestant man of letters; he was to become the Member of Parliament for Dublin University in 1895.Footnote 52 As with Tulloch in 1854 and Mansel in 1858, Lecky's definition of rationalism no longer wholly pertained to a particular way of understanding Scripture, but to the raising of present human consciousness to the status of supreme arbiter of all religious claims. The “central conception” of rationalism, Lecky argued, was “the elevation of conscience into a position of supreme authority as the religious organ, a verifying faculty distinguishing between truth and error.”Footnote 53 That elevation was, moreover, now made a historical process in Lecky's hands. It became the animating principle of modern European civilization.
For Lecky, this historical tendency was not equivalent to the spread of “any class of definite doctrines or criticisms, but rather a certain cast of thought, or bias of reasoning, which has during the last three centuries gained a marked ascendancy in Europe.”Footnote 54 In common with the pioneering sociologists of the day, Lecky believed that that change followed a “law of orderly and progressive transformation to which our speculative opinions are subject.”Footnote 55 Hence rationalism became part of a long process of rationalization, and one that Lecky interpreted in a more than residually Protestant way towards which later rationalists were to be critical.
Changes of opinion in one department, thought Lecky, inevitably wrought connected changes in others. He adduced the increasing complexity of civilization, the growing systematization of scientific conceptions and, above all, the decay of dogmatic theology since the sixteenth century as the primary explanations for the decline of belief in witchcraft and the miraculous; the end of persecution; the “secularisation of politics”; and the spread of industrial rationality as manifested in the development of political economy. While he fretted about temporary aberrations from the progress of rationalism in the form of reactionary religious movements, rationalism in truth was a determinative language in terms of which modern religious conservatism had to speak.Footnote 56 He often pointedly remarked on the reluctance of recent High Churchmen such as Mansel to rely on miraculous testimony.Footnote 57 Lecky did not apply his historical philosophy to the question of the New Testament record. But nor did he say that rationalism sealed off the spiritual world. The spirit of rationalism instead regarded Christianity “as designed to preside over the moral development of mankind” as an ever more “sublimated and spiritualised” idea.Footnote 58 Lecky's concern to establish the power of conscience as the source of beneficial action helps to explain why the first chapter of his subsequent History of European Morals was dedicated to proving the “intuitive” as against the utilitarian theory of morals.Footnote 59
Lecky's admiration for the progress attendant upon the spread of rationalism, and his evident satisfaction at the discomfiture to which it exposed the clergy, were tempered by his regret for some of the higher virtues which he supposed rationalism to have undermined. The decay of loyalty, the destruction of asceticism, and the restriction of the sphere of charity that followed from advancing rationalism had “given our age a mercenary, venal, and unheroic character.” It was not rationalism, but “the moral or religious faculty” that yielded the conception of the purely disinterested and “the impress of the divine image, the principle of every heroism.”Footnote 60 Lecky also attributed a degree of impersonality to the rationalizing process which seemed to minimize the importance of definite arguments or personal responsibility in advancing it. Variance in speculative opinion depended on “habits of thought”; it “does not imply an increase of the data upon which those opinions rest.”Footnote 61 This interpretative self-distancing inhibited Lecky from directly affirming that the history of rationalism was itself rational. It instead had the character of accident, even mystery, though the ultimate results may still have been beneficial. “Civilisation makes opinions that are opposed to it simply obsolete”; they die “by indifference, not by controversy.”Footnote 62 Lecky's developing frustration with Ireland's rising preference for Ultramontanism over secular patriotism may have fed his sense of the limitations of rationalism, both practical and innate, as a source of value. It was a feature of Lecky's argument with which later, more confident rationalists were to find fault.
John Tulloch's criticisms of Lecky's History of Rationalism contained premonitory signs of an impending intellectual change. By the mid-1860s, Tulloch was coming more distinctly to understand the spiritual nature of the history of thought as furnishing a powerful reply to materialist conceptions of human experience. Evaluating the History for the Contemporary Review in 1866, Tulloch set out the view—which he would later develop at greater length—that the history of reason was not a “blind issue of sentiment or feeling,” as Lecky had it, but instead expressed the reason that lay at the heart of history. Loosening his earlier, mainly negative definition of rationalism, Tulloch now argued that a history of true rationalism “would concern itself mainly with the labours of the succession of theological thinkers who have recognised the rights of reason, and sought to bring these rights into harmony with the revelations of spiritual truth in Scripture and in Conscience.” The history of higher rationalism, on this reading, represented no accident, but the “expansion of man's powers of comprehension of the world around him, or of the world of thought within him.”Footnote 63 Those who adopted the rationalist label in the closing years of the century would echo Tulloch's view that the history of true rationalism was the fruit of expanding rationality. But less and less did they interpret this true rationalism as the defence and purification of theism. In place of religiously liberal compromises, late Victorian rationalists effusively celebrated the scientific method. In so doing, they consciously reanimated those eighteenth-century radical and empiricist currents which, in their eyes, the nineteenth century's shift to idealism and intuitivism—so constitutive of mid-Victorian rationalism—had wrongly arrested.
III
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, rationalism came to be associated with a new kind of systematism, marked by a preference for utilitarianism and scientific method over intuitionism. Although this form of rationalism was seldom construed so as rigidly to exclude theism, it more stringently demarcated what could be rationally known about the world from supposedly false, even immoral, claims to spiritual knowledge. Rationalists’ increasingly integrated view of what promoted progress in the present drew support from two confident historical assumptions. The first, deeply embedded in later rationalist writings, was a radicalization of Lecky's view that civilization was steadily moving towards rationalism and away from theology. Their second, connected act of historical self-positioning was to root their own intellectual approach not in a past phase of advanced German theology, or in Idealism, but in a teleological reading of the history of science and ethics in which an indigenous, British tradition of radicalism and empiricism prominently featured alongside a spectrum of more recent European intellectual developments. Of these latter, Comtean positivism—having been such a pivotal influence in many earlier rejections of Christianity—occupied an ambiguous and, around 1900, increasingly controversial position.
Signs of change can be detected among some of Lecky's progressive reviewers. Henry Reeve, the influential editor of the liberal Edinburgh Review, appreciated Lecky's endorsement of “the great principles of religion” but worried that his choice of title did not convey that such was his intention. A word “borrowed within the last half-century from the Germans” had come to mean something “restricted and sectarian” in England: the reduction of supernatural and dogmatic religion “within the limit of natural causes.”Footnote 64 James Fitzjames Stephen, whose religious beliefs were ebbing away by the time he came to review Lecky's volumes, complained of his imprecision. “What we want to know is, not what the ‘spirit of rationalism’ does, but what reasoning shows to be true.”Footnote 65 Lecky, through his hesitation fully to explain rather than simply describe changes of opinion, had been untenably reluctant to declare his allegiance to the sole source of progressive knowledge. Evidence, not non-ratiocinative conscience, was the test of religious truth.Footnote 66 George Eliot also found Lecky equivocal. The model writer for the muddle-headed Englishman, she thought, Lecky declined to accept the conclusions which to Eliot necessarily followed from a rationalist premise. The compromise involved in “a particular phase of Biblical interpretation” clung about Lecky's understanding of rationalism “with a misleading effect.” Lecky generally attributed progress to supposititious religious advances, not to their real cause. The actual motor of improvement, to which Lecky was curiously inattentive, was “the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law.”Footnote 67
Professed rationalists increasingly had more in common with Eliot than with Lecky. This more thoroughly anti-theological conception of rationalism had become the norm among its newly self-conscious supporters by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. There had been impulses in the same direction long before. George Holyoake, before he coined the term “secularism” in 1851, had attempted to reinvigorate Owenism under the banner of “rationalism” in the 1840s. He aimed to make rationalism synonymous with the ordering of external social influences so as to fit men to work for their individual improvement, achieved mutually and socially. That was not exactly what most Victorians associated with the term, though many rationalists shared Holyoake's sentiments in a general way.Footnote 68 What connected Holyoake's views with the core principle of later rationalism was his sharp curtailment of the proper social province and individual importance of religious belief, by means of a rigid epistemology. Rationalism, he wrote in such a way as implied the reverse, did not care a whit whether one believed in God or not. Rationalism was rather “the science of material circumstances.” It looked on man “to all practical purposes, as a purely material being,” who should always and everywhere “be guided by reason and regulated by science.”Footnote 69
Charles Robert Newman, John Henry's second and more reclusive brother, was also an Owenite sympathizer in his younger years and wrote for the magazine Holyoake edited, The Reasoner, between 1860 and 1861. These contributions were republished after Newman's death in 1884 as Essays in Rationalism. This text sketched out lines of argument heralding the more exclusive scientism, both as method and as the key to a civilizing process, which was to become typical of later rationalism. A biographical sketch prefixed to the work presented Newman—an outright atheist—as more truly representative of rationalism than his brother Francis.Footnote 70 With Holyoake, Newman stressed that the province of science included all human thought and activity, from morals to metaphysics to religion. Newman connectedly insisted that conscience had no peculiar independent authority. Authority instructed conscience, especially in the early ages of society, but authority was also subordinate to conscience. Conscience, in turn, pleaded before reason; but it was ultimately bound to respect reason as its judge. That reason was not merely individual. It was also the collective reason of advancing society, which was to say the reason of scientists and experts.Footnote 71 Thus Newman quietly adopted the creeping idea that rationalism was the inevitable outcome of history, calling religion “one of our inheritances from former times.”Footnote 72
The resolute secularity and scientism present in Holyoake and Newman were markedly characteristic of those proudly self-described rationalists who affiliated with the Rationalist Press Association upon and after its foundation in 1899. A successor organization to earlier committees which had aimed to disseminate freethinking literature, its founding subscribers—who included Holyoake and the publisher of the association's tracts, Charles Watts—agreed on a definition of the rationalism it was to promote which captured the change of tone: “Rationalism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority.”Footnote 73 “Rationalism” was here a more capacious word than “agnosticism,” “atheism,” “secularism” or “materialism”; it committed its adherents more to a certain method than to a particular set of conclusions.Footnote 74 But the proclaimed method established the criteria for a more broadly based public assault, under the association's auspices, on the credibility of all theology—spanning biblical criticism, science, history and ethics—than earlier readings of rationalism had encouraged. Joseph McCabe, a former Roman Catholic priest and founding director of the association who became one of its most prolific authors, exemplified the transition. In his Modern Rationalism, published in 1909, McCabe defined what distinguished it from earlier varieties. It was not “a certain theological school that professes to remain within the precincts of the orthodox temple,” nor was it “a destructive system of Biblical criticism”; “Modern rationalism is a system which rejects both natural and supernatural theology, and is antagonistic to the orthodox Churches on every point. The term is, however, still often used in its earlier senses.”Footnote 75 In common with many later rationalists, McCabe situated his own views at an advanced point in a grand sweep of intellectual emancipation stretching back to the Renaissance—more than the Reformation—which had first allowed science and history to breathe freely.Footnote 76 Rationalism was thus a movement felt in all intellectual spheres. McCabe placed a particular emphasis on the long struggle between science and religion.Footnote 77 This had “practically ended in the nineteenth century”; “correctly speaking, the entire movement of the Rationalists is a scientific movement.” Modern astronomy and geology had overthrown the Christian cosmogony. There was no longer any need to presuppose an underlying spiritual reality. Evolution not only explained the origin of species, but the evolution of social affections among humans. “Altruism”—a term with Comtean origins—was the enlightened self-interest of the species. The notion that ethical commitment arose from intuition, beyond the ken of scientific understanding, had been firmly superseded.Footnote 78 In epistemology, agnosticism now reigned in “all but the very lowest classes.”Footnote 79
A new generation of anti-rationalists recognized the new confidence of their opponents. The botanist George Henslow, a critic of what he called “modern rationalists,” specifically targeted the Rationalist Press Association and the “Materialistic Monists” to whom it gave oxygen, such as the radical Darwinian Ernst Haeckel.Footnote 80 Herbert Hensley Henson, a future Bishop of Durham, treated the “popular rationalism” of which he published a rebuttal in 1904 as animated by a “crusade” in support of “materialism or naturalism.”Footnote 81
The correlative of this newly strident rationalism, and the grouping of a wide range of contemporary sciences under its banner, was a notable diminution in rationalists’ stated reverence for Christianity. The Liberal politician John Mackinnon Robertson, whose works the Rationalist Press Association keenly disseminated, came to believe that the balance of evidence showed that Jesus had never existed.Footnote 82 His antipathy to dogmatic religion sometimes veered into Grub Street scatology; in his 1912 introduction to Rationalism, which had come to merit a separate volume in a series dedicated to ancient and modern philosophies, he labelled later stages of theistic belief “but defecations of the former.”Footnote 83 While Robertson did not believe the true rationalist could state that there was no God, he certainly could show that all defined god-beliefs were untenable. “Rationalism, when all is said, is the undertaking, in George Eliot's phrase, to do without opium.”Footnote 84 These later rationalists did regard rationalism as a movement that swept through the Church, but only as a temporary and unsustainable halting point on the way to full secularity. McCabe wrote that doctrines that had once shocked the clergy, such as the idea that the Old Testament was merely the accidental soil of Christianity, and the denial of eternal punishment, had now won acceptance among them as waves of German criticism had entered England.Footnote 85 But the “more fundamental changes” lay elsewhere.Footnote 86
This characteristic hardening of attitudes led new rationalists to construct new lineages for themselves in modern intellectual history. Robertson, who often preferred to couch his rationalist arguments in historical form, felt more affinity with eighteenth-century philosophy, which prioritized the sifting and comparing of sense data, than with contemporary and subsequent distortions of or reactions against it. His rereading of the eighteenth century, in a markedly different intellectual context from that of Pusey and Rose, consecrated Thomas Paine more than the anti-democratic Hume and Gibbon.Footnote 87 He praised the vigorously anti-theological historian Henry Thomas Buckle, whose History of Civilization offered a resolutely secular account of progress, for having revived Enlightenment-era conjectural history.Footnote 88 Robertson conversely disparaged the “so-called” rationalism of eighteenth-century Germany—“the theological method of compromise with reason”—and animadverted on Kant, Hegel and Fichte.Footnote 89 Alfred Benn, an associate of the Rationalist Press Association, argued similarly in his History of English Rationalism, criticizing, in common with Robertson, the alleged mysticism of Coleridge.Footnote 90 Benn took the British Idealist philosophers, who made God indistinguishable from the world, to exemplify the slow, unwilling retreat of theology.Footnote 91 At one point, Benn characterized the spread of rationalism in the nineteenth century as “the return to eighteenth-century traditions.”Footnote 92
In ethics, both Robertson and Benn were strongly utilitarian. Robertson put Jeremy Bentham on the frontispiece of the first part of his history of nineteenth-century freethought.Footnote 93 This moral system did not, as Robertson thought its opponents falsely claimed, subordinate sympathy to calculations of profit; but it did test established moral canons lest they should prove serviceable to barbarism.Footnote 94 His unflattering Short History of Christianity anticipated that future progress would come from sociology and political science, not from religion.Footnote 95 Benn credited utilitarianism, not religion, with nineteenth-century social and political improvements such as the abolition of slavery and Poor Law reform; he represented it as the main channel through which eighteenth-century rationalism flowed into the nineteenth century.Footnote 96 Admiration for utilitarianism formed part of a broader rationalist challenge to those who privileged Christianity as the primary cause of the moral advances of modern civilization. Henson believed that “of all the prejudices which obstruct the acceptance of Christianity, none is more powerful” than that which supposed the moral inadequacy of historic Christianity.Footnote 97
If these later rationalists extinguished the divine inner light of the soul for which rationalism as defined by Mansel, Lecky and Cobbe left space, then a certain religiosity remained; the evangelical revival shaped even the rationalist ideal of the self. All rationalists stressed personal sincerity and the importance of proselytization and personal conversion. Joseph McCabe composed an apologia for his own conversion from Catholicism to rationalism which spoke of “the wrestling of a strong soul with a vanishing belief” and “the history of a mind that has traversed painfully the whole field of religious controversy.”Footnote 98 Truth was only obtainable by fearless struggle. Robertson faulted Lecky's History of Rationalism for its insufficiently combative explanation of intellectual change as the result of mental habits and social predisposition. “I never found that any truth got into the air and so did its work unless men put it there and kept it there.”Footnote 99 Rationalism demanded constant internal self-examination, to ensure than one's convictions in a given sphere were absolutely consistent with those in any other. Inconsistency, wrote Robertson, was “intellectual immorality.”Footnote 100
The perceived result of such honesty was too often persecution and social ostracism. Charles Robert Newman's biographer, after recounting his subject's retreat into seclusion in Tenby after his religious opinions prevented him from becoming a tutor, concluded his sketch by musing on the meeting between the hermit and his cardinal brother two years before the rationalist's death. He contrasted the “saintly cardinal,” who had “rare urbanity” and “the respect of all,” with his “poor, solitary, unknown and despised” brother, “a scorn and wonderment to his nearest neighbours”—“and all from following his own thought.”Footnote 101 Those who were allegedly not honest and sincere, conversely, were sternly reprimanded. Benn called Coleridge “a slothful, pusillanimous dreamer, in whom sincerity, if it ever existed, had been destroyed by the use of laudanum.”Footnote 102 Despite their historical optimism, rationalists liked to see themselves as an embattled remnant, struggling against obscurantism to let in the light that would surely finish it.
While such emphasis on conversion and honesty were common to all rationalists, some were distinctly uneasy with the suggestion that rationalism ought essentially to involve religious emotions. The anonymous author of Constructive Rationalism, published in 1876, revealed the interface between one strand of rationalism and positivism when he declared that “the destruction of orthodox Christianity” would have to be succeeded by “the religion of humanity.”Footnote 103 There are signs that this emphasis on the religious character of rationalism was becoming harder to maintain by the early twentieth century. A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, John Russell, in a lecture published by Watts's company in 1910, was moved to criticize those rationalists who refused to see rationalism as a religion. This was because the great task of rationalism, now that its intellectual work had been accomplished, was to make it the practical basis of life and politics. To do so, he insisted, required a network of “chapels” and endowed preachers.Footnote 104
This was an increasingly controversial line. Benn remarked disapprovingly that “in Comte there is still a large element of romanticism.”Footnote 105 He happily declared himself on the side of “destructive” rationalism, which demanded that religious beliefs ought to be tested by the same criteria one would apply to any other claim to knowledge. Perhaps targeting more hesitant rationalists, and not simply religious reactionaries, Benn thought the nineteenth century's prejudice against purely negative criticism “childish.”Footnote 106 Robertson held similar views. Addressing the freethinking congregation at London's South Place Ethical Society in 1923, Robertson acknowledged that a previous generation of rationalists—often under Comte's influence—had been unwilling to forego religion completely, because it had provided names and symbols for their ethical aspirations. Comte was right, Robertson thought, to identify a law of three stages as the normative process by which theology lost its power. But his prediction of the necessity of a future religion of humanity was falsified by the very fact that many rationalists carried on without it. He was also insufficiently antagonistic to traditional religion: Comte, like Lecky, made the mistake of assuming that the battle for rationalism was won and no longer needed to be fought.Footnote 107
Rationalism not only grew to involve criticism of Comte and the diverse Victorian essays in secular religion.Footnote 108 At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new wave of epistemological scepticism, and the emergence of the psychology of religion as a distinctive field in its own right, risked undermining rationalists’ presumption in favour of the explanatory power of scientific reason. Arthur Balfour's Foundations of Belief became a regular target for rationalist scorn after its appearance in 1895.Footnote 109 The Tory sceptic and Anglican apologist had argued, along Humean lines, that the conclusions of natural science were equally susceptible to doubt as theological orthodoxy; and that intellect alone could give neither force to moral obligation nor meaning to aesthetic experience. Robertson thought it spurious, even flippant, for “skeptico-religious literature” to maintain that simply because some present scientific theories may turn out to be false, it was acceptable to dispense with the need to test religious claims by their consistency with our ascertained experience.Footnote 110
New directions in psychology generated a similar kind of rationalist hostility. Rationalists had welcomed earlier mid-Victorian movements towards associationism and physiology in psychology because of the potential these held for clearing away imprecise notions of a soul.Footnote 111 But later developments in the study of psychology, often shaped by deliberate resistance to scientific naturalism, were harder to press into the service of an irreligious message.Footnote 112 Rationalists became notably frustrated with the Harvard philosopher William James. Heralding twentieth-century psychology in important respects, James believed that human behaviour could not convincingly be accounted for as the product of external stimuli or anatomical features, and preferred to think of humans as adaptive and capable of autonomous purpose.Footnote 113 He came to see religious motivation as an important factor in human fulfilment. More than that, James's 1897 Will to Believe and his 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience marked out his justification for individual religious belief and practice on these pragmatic grounds.
According to James's “radical empiricism,” absolute knowledge of the unity underlying reality was unattainable. “‘Ever not quite’ must be the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it.”Footnote 114 In a choice between two views of the world which could not be decided by intellect alone, a decision in favour of a religious system which yielded what James provocatively called “the sentiment of rationality” was not merely admissible. It was psychologically beneficial, and hence commendable.Footnote 115 The more vociferous rationalists took exception to the argument; the subsuming of reason into emotion was what they were most concerned to resist. Robertson interpreted James's argument as a revival of the “old formula” that unbelief was the result of perverse will.Footnote 116 Benn rejected the idea that psychology, in showing that emotion influenced belief, thereby legitimized whatever beliefs were in fact held; the will that determined final assent ought to be determined by the balance of evidence.Footnote 117
Despite resistance, the challenge posed by newly forming disciplines wrought a change within rationalism. Psychology, together with the new anthropological researches of Emile Durkheim and others, brought home the psychological and cultural permanence of religious associations to some members of a late Victorian generation just as Comte had to a number of earlier rationalists. The experience of the Great War encouraged rationalists first socialized during the nineteenth century to grapple with these intellectual dislocations. In March 1919, a meeting of the South Place Ethical Society gathered to hear an address on “rationalism and religious reaction” by Jane Harrison, the self-described rationalist who had established herself as an authority on ancient Greek art and religion. Introducing her lecture, the classicist Gilbert Murray worriedly pleaded, “I can only cling to my faith in Rationalism,” as the heroism and self-sacrifice of war gave way to peacetime fear and rage.Footnote 118 Against this backdrop, Harrison delivered her confession that “our old Rationalism, which lit such a glow in our hearts that were once young, somehow chills the rising generation.”Footnote 119 The time had come to broaden its scope, now that psychologists had shown that religion was no dead relic but a source of living emotion and social solidarity. God and new religious revivals ought to be welcomed, thought Harrison, not because they carried intellectual content, but because they sustained “emotional values.”Footnote 120 This was not a rationalist recanting her rationalism. But it was a claim that rationalism alone could not discover the judgements of worth upon which individual and social life relied. The experiment of a totalizing rationalism, which had come into its own late in the Victorian period, was leaving a number of its erstwhile sympathizers incompletely convinced as the nineteenth century met the twentieth.
IV
David Nash has remarked that “blasphemy has concerned societies when they have been conscious of widespread upheavals that threatened to undermine their very existence and identity”;Footnote 121 one might say the same of rationalism. Rationalism consistently carried the connotation of a high view of the powers of human reasoning, in a way that grated against religious traditionalism. Within this broad continuity, differing meanings overlapped and coexisted, but the emergence of relatively specific connotations at certain moments shows the fragility of successive Victorian attempts to stabilize the relationship between reason and religion. At first, as German biblical criticism came to be understood and misunderstood by British audiences, rationalism denoted the use of reason to explain away the supernatural elements of the scriptural record. In mid-century, in the hands of thinkers such as Lecky, Mansel and Cobbe, the term's specifically biblical referent dropped away, to be replaced by an emphasis on reason, understood to incorporate conscience or intuition, as a guide to God and divinity. Though a rationalizing process now became discernible in history, rationalism was not, at mid-century as in its earlier incarnation, typically agnostic or wholly anti-theological. Such a development came later, especially after 1890, among those who integrated biblical criticism, natural science, history and new approaches to ethics in an open assault on all positive theological or theistic claims, including conscience when conscience was given a theistic gloss. The new rationalists were anti-Idealist, and looked back to eighteenth-century radical and empiricist traditions. But the occasional surfacing of Comtean motifs among professed rationalists, followed by the percolation of positive psychological readings of religion into later rationalism, exposed abiding tensions over the status of religion in the post-theological world towards which, it was commonly believed, mankind was progressing.
This radicalizing trajectory invites three concluding reflections. First, the movement by which rationalism became naturalized and systematized in late Victorian Britain can be seen as representing one neglected intellectual constellation's rejection of earlier German and, to an extent, French routes into religious criticism, not on the grounds that they were too extreme, but because they presented obstacles to complete secularity. Older, national intellectual traditions came to invite reappraisal in a context where Victorian essays in religious or quasi-religious apologetic had to be actively countered rather than simply ignored. Second, this deliberate interest in the construction of intellectual lineage is one sign of the wider importance that different historical narratives, and their undergirding philosophies, bore in Victorian thinking about rationality, experience and their relations to religion. This feature united all three stages of the discussion charted here. Finally, the history of rationalism is relevant to the generalization that modern scholarly debate has often been conditioned by categories inherited from historically specific Victorian controversies, from the study of the English Civil War to narratives of “secularization.”Footnote 122 Late Victorian “modern rationalism” made imperious claims to normativity, to which modern historians are in some ways the heirs. But the avowedly secular construction of rationalism was in fact one particular outcome of a complex history, in which distinctive conceptions of rationalism were both fleeting and disputed. That history reveals a Victorian world in which belief was as dynamic an intellectual agent as unbelief; and where theology, and reflection on the intellectual status of religion, were integral rather than epiphenomenal to the development of contemporary approaches to reasoning. The ways in which competing ideas of rationality moulded ethical, historical and scientific argument in the nineteenth century constitute a fruitful subject for reflection in continuing debates over the nature and limits of secularization in Western intellectual history.
