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insights from the Humanist tradition.

An Instinctive Conviction

I see philosophy after philosophy falling into the unproven belief in the friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages.

We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there - the pack which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens.

It is a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious animal for the herd of friends who are not there, and it may very possibly be, that in the matter of this friend behind phenomena, our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable instinctive conviction since they are not founded on either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely souled gregarious animal to find its herd, or its herd-leader in the great spaces between the stars.

Gilbert Murray (The Stoic Philosophy, Conway Memorial Lecture, 1915).

Chance

In human affairs everything happens by chance - that is, in defiance of human ideas, and without any direction of an intelligence.

A man bathes in a pool, a crocodile seizes and lacerates his flesh. If any one maintains that an intelligence directed that cruelty, I can only reply that his mind is under an illusion. A man is caught by a revolving shaft and torn to pieces, limb from limb. There is no directing intelligence in human affairs, no protection, and no assistance.

Those who act up-rightly are not rewarded, but they and their children often wander in the utmost indigence. Those who do evil are not always punished, but frequently flourish and have happy children. Rewards and punishments are purely human institutions, and if government be relaxed they entirely disappear.

No intelligence whatever interferes in human affairs. There is a most senseless belief now prevalent that effort, and work, and cleverness, perseverance and industry, are invariably successful. Were this the case, every man would enjoy a competence, at least, and be free from the cares of money. This is an illusion almost equal to the superstition of a directing intelligence, which every fact and every consideration disproves.

How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a humane intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race.

Richard Jefferies (The Story of My Heart, 1883).

Finding the Truth by Discussion

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted, and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of ; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us ; if the lists are kept open, we may hope that, if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely upon having attained such approach to truth as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859).

Fear

Fear paralyses the brain. Progress is born of courage. Fear believes - courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays - courage stands erect and thinks. Fear retreats - courage advances. Fear is barbarism - courage is civilisation. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils, and in ghosts. Fear is religion — courage is science.

Robert G. Ingersoll (The Ghosts, 1881).

Intelligent Design?

For aught I know to the contrary, there may be a Being of infinite power who chooses that children should die of meningitis, and old people of cancer; these things occur and occur as the result of evolution. If, therefore, evolution embodies a Divine Plan, these occurrences must also have been planned. I have been informed that suffering is sent as a purification for sin, but I find it difficult to think that a child of four or five years old can sink in such black depths of iniquity as to deserve the punishment that befalls not a few of the children whom our optimistic divines might see any day, if they chose, suffering torments in children’s hospitals.

Again, I am told that though the child himself may not have sinned very deeply, he deserves to suffer on account of his parents' wickedness. I can only repeat that if this is the Divine sense of justice it differs from mine, and that I think mine superior. If indeed the world in which we live has been produced in accordance with a Plan, we shall have to reckon Nero a saint in comparison with the Author of that Plan.

Fortunately, however, the evidence of Divine Purpose is non-existent; so at least one must infer from the fact that no evidence is adduced by those who believe in it. We are therefore, spared the necessity for that impotent hatred which every brave and humane man would be called upon to adopt towards the Almighty Tyrant.

Bertrand Russell (The Scientific Outlook, 1931).

Nothing Human in Nature

There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved so dearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water. Burning in the sky the great sun, of whose company I have been so fond, would merely burn on and make no motion to assist me. Those who have been in an open boat at sea without water have proved the mercies of the sun, and of the deity who did not give them one drop of rain, dying in misery under the same rays that smile so beautifully on the flowers. In the south the sun is the enemy; night and coolness and rain are the friends of man. As for the sea, it offers us salt water which we cannot drink. The trees care nothing for us; the hill I visited so often in days gone by has not missed me. The sun scorches man, and will in his naked state roast him alive. The sea and the fresh water alike make no effort to uphold him if the vessel founders ; he casts up his arms in vain, they come to their level over his head, filling the spot his body occupied. If he falls from a cliff the air parts; the earth beneath dashes him to pieces. . . .

There is nothing human in the whole round of nature. All nature, all the universe that we can see, is absolutely indifferent to us, and except to us human life is of no more value than grass. If the entire human race perished at this hour, what difference would it make to the earth? What would the earth care? As much as for the extinct dodo, or for the fate of the elephant now going.

Richard Jeffrey (The Story of My Heart, 1883).

Only the Wicked Get Immortal Life

What man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself?

Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.

Thus, oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in Hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to say their individuality.

George Bernard Shaw (Parents and Children, 1914).

Persecution

That religious persecution is a greater evil than any other, is apparent, not so much from the enormous and almost incredible number of its known victims, as from the fact that the unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives no account of those who have been spared in the body, in order that they might suffer in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors - of those who were slain by the sword, or consumed in the fire ; but we know little of that still larger number who, by the mere threat of persecution, have been driven into an outward abandonment of their real opinions ; and who, thus forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have passed the remainder of their life in the practice of a constant and humiliating hypocrisy. It is this which is the real curse of persecution. For in this way, men being constrained to mask their thoughts, there arises a habit of securing safety by falsehood, and of purchasing immunity with deceit.

H. T. Buckle (History of Civilisation in England, 1857).

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