If Keynes’s immediate reaction was totally uncritical, a year’s reflection made his enthusiasm more selective. In 1904, still an undergraduate, he read a paper to the ‘Apostles’ – that Cambridge collection of intellectual exquisites – which attacked Moore’s view on the management of uncertainty. The theory which he then laid down was to develop into his Treatise on Probability – published in 1913 but written years earlier – and it formed much of the philosophical underpinning of his later work. But, despite that area of disagreement, Keynes acknowledged his debt to Moore throughout his life. Indeed he believed that because of Principia Ethica the world – or his view of the world – changed out of all recognition. Indeed, during the decade before the First World War he got very near to sharing Lytton Strachey’s gushing view that Moore had ‘shattered all writers on Ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer … Truth’, Strachey added, ‘is really now on the march. I date from October 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason.’2 To Strachey, and people like him, ‘reason’ was defined as morality without superstition. ‘They wanted metaphysics without God. Platonism was an alternative to Christianity.’3 Moore helped to meet a long-felt want.
Bertrand Russell’s work – in particular Principia Mathematica, the development, in 1912, of the idea that ‘logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic’ – is, these days, regarded as far more important than anything which Moore produced. But the intense intellectuals of Edwardian Britain – particularly ‘Bloomsbury’, to whom he became resident philosopher – believed that Moore had found the secret of the universe and, at the same time, mounted a challenge to orthodox religion which maintained the atheists’ position on the high ground of both aesthetics and morality.
Moore’s ideas were enhanced by his literary style. Keynes believed that he had ‘carried the use of ordinary speech as far as it could ever be able to carry it in conveying meaning’.4 But his real claim to attention was his success in establishing a framework of ethical principles which were in tune, if not with Edwardian Britain as a whole, at least with those men and women who believed themselves to represent the ideas and spirit of the new age. Moore’s importance lay not so much in his analysis of what the best ethical system might be as in his description of how an ethical system should be determined. To his contemporary enthusiasts, his great attraction was that he wrote – with the authority of Cambridge philosophy – what they wanted to read.
Moore refuted philosophic ‘idealism’ – the doctrine that the external world is created, as well as perceived, by our senses – in all its forms. His rejection was accompanied by an impatience with idealists, from Kant to Bishop Berkeley, who wanted to argue about the existence of material things. He wrote ‘in defence of common sense’ and was ‘more sure that he had two hands than he could be sure of any argument to the contrary’.5 His critics claimed that he had once illustrated the point by waving towards the far end of the lecture room with the words, ‘We know that to be a window.’ It was, in fact, trompe l’oeil.
Although his first contention sounded like a plain man’s philosophy – not at all the sort of thing to appeal to Keynes and Lytton Strachey – his second proposition both reflected a more complicated view of existence and demanded a higher level of understanding. Moore believed that many ethical systems were built on a fundamental error – the notion that ‘goodness’, the central object of ethical energy, could be best defined by listing the ‘natural’ properties with which it was associated. The so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ confused ‘identification’ with ‘attribution’. There is a fundamental difference between the two statements, ‘water is wet’ and ‘water is H2O’. The mistake which Moore claimed to identify confused attributes of ‘goodness’ with the nature of ‘goodness’ itself
The result, he argued, was a philosophic tautology. The utilitarians argued that ‘goodness’ was achieved by the pursuit of happiness. If that were true, it would make no sense to ask, ‘Is this good as well as pleasant?’ Yet that question is essential to the philosophic argument about morality. Moore concluded that ‘good’, unlike pleasure, was not ‘natural’ to the human species. In consequence, the definition of good must be influenced by the mores of the time. That doctrine was irresistible to intellectuals and aesthetes far beyond Bloomsbury, for it contained the clear implication that superior people are likely to have superior intuition and are therefore entitled to lay down the ethical standards of their age. It was less attractive to Christians whose faith was based on received truth which, in turn, laid down immutable standards of ethical behaviour – standards which remain constant over time and space because they are divinely inspired.*
Bertrand Russell, whose most original philosophic work was completed before the outbreak of the First World War, broke brilliant new ground in the application of mathematical reasoning to the examination of ethical questions. The three volumes of Principia Mathematica – written in co-operation with Alfred Whitehead – were filled with proposals for improved analyses which simultaneously enhanced the prospects of understanding. It also contained formulations which fascinated the intellectually ingenious – even to the point of employing, to illustrate one of his more complex formulations, the ‘liar paradox’ of Epimenides the Cretan. The statement ‘I am a liar’ is only true if it is false.
The ‘liar paradox’, turned into ‘Russell’s paradox’ in 1903, was meant to exemplify the ‘theory of classes’ in ‘set theory’. Some sets (collections or classes) are members of themselves. A set of horses is not a member of itself because it is a set not a horse. On the other hand, a set of non-horses is a member of itself. Russell asked if a set of all sets which are not members of themselves is a member of itself? If it is, it is not. If it is not, it is. The conclusion which Russell drew from this analysis was that ‘sets’ and ‘classes’ should be determined by their composition rather than by their characteristics. Views of such complexity, although appealing to a certain sort of mind, were less immediately influential than the parallel view on religion which was either inherent or explicit in Russell’s work.
The existence of God and the possibility of personal immortality were, Russell asserted, logical possibilities at best. Indeed no evidence to support the belief can be found in the experience of the human race. But, without making an irrefutable logical connection, Russell went further. Religion was positively harmful, intellectually, socially and morally. Despite the difference in discipline and methodology, Moore and Russell combined as eloquent opponents of the Christian beliefs which had held Victorian society together. And the philosophers’ assault on simple faith was reinforced, perhaps inadvertently, by the advance of science.
The sure and certain world of the nineteenth century had been rocked by the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the passionate advocacy of his theory of evolution by his fearsome ‘bulldog’, Thomas Huxley. Twenty years later, the campaign against religion seemed to turn into a conspiracy in which philosophy combined with every sort of science to promote the notion that no thinking man or woman could possibly accept the teaching, either moral or spiritual, of any church. For the intelligent believers wracked by doubt, there was very little consolation to be gained from the discovery that anthropologists could trace the path of error into which British Christians, like every other religious community, had fallen.
Back in 1890, James Frazer had described the process by which modern man had reached the religious phase in the progress towards genuine and complete civilisation. The Golden Bough told enchanting stories of ritual killings, dying gods and the eternally mysterious fisher king. It was the tales of romance which made it an Edwardian bestseller – reprinted in three extended volumes in 1900 and twelve volumes between 1911 and 1915. The explanation that all societies evolve first through magic to religion and that the West had progressed to the final scientific stage of civilisation’s development, did more than identify religion’s place in the ascent of man. It diminished the notion of an ete
rnal father who was strong to save. And it reduced the island race to the level of other tribes who were travelling the same route, albeit at different rates of progress. It was offensive to think of Britain as merely a development of, say, Fiji where ‘the chief of the Namosi always ate a man as a precaution before he had his hair cut’, in order to ensure that he lost none of his mystic power.6 But it was science, not anthropology, that stood the Edwardian idea of the world on its head. Ernest Rutherford reidentified the properties, and therefore the very nature, of matter.
Rutherford was a New Zealander who, in 1894, won an ‘1850 Exhibition’ Scholarship to Cambridge. There he immediately demonstrated his ability as an inventor as well as a theoretical physicist by constructing apparatus for the detection of electromagnetic waves. He also worked on the properties of ions – electrically charged atoms or groups of atoms which are formed when they attract or repel electrons – and identified alpha and beta rays in uranium radiation. After four years in England he was appointed Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, and his real life’s work began.
In Montreal – working with Frederick Snoddy, an Oxford physicist who had followed him there – Rutherford developed the ‘disintegration theory’. Radioactivity, the two men argued, was an atomic, not a molecular or chemical process. Until then, the molecule was thought to be the simplest unit of a chemical compound that can exist, made up of two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds. The atom was thought to be indivisible. Indeed its name, taken from the Greek, is a statement of its indivisibility.
Victorian physicists convinced themselves that their science had progressed as far as it could go – that there was nothing to learn about the physical world that had not been learned already. Rutherford and Snoddy broke new ground by demonstrating that atoms could change their nature and structure. Radioactivity, they claimed, was a process in which atoms of one element spontaneously disintegrated into atoms of an entirely different element. Rutherford summarised the findings in Radioactivity, which he published in 1904. The ‘force’ that he defined was unaffected by changes in temperature, generated more heat than a normal chemical reaction and produced new types of matter.
In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain and became Longworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester. Then he worked with Hans Geiger to find a method of counting the number of alpha particles emitted from radium samples. It was a mark of his distinction as a scientist of unlimited scope and vision that in 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, for chemistry – though he believed that science, apart from physics, was ‘just stamp collecting’, and chemistry ‘no more than stinks’. However, his great achievement was still three years ahead.
In Montreal, Rutherford’s work on the scattering of alpha rays had led him to speculate on the composition of the atom. In Manchester during 1910 he demonstrated that the pattern of that scattering resulted from the composition of the atom’s inner core. The intense electric field that caused and accompanied the scattering was, he concluded, the consequence of all the positive charge, and therefore almost all the mass of the atom, being concentrated in a nucleus 10,000 times smaller in diameter than the atom itself. Three years later he examined the atom’s inner structure and labelled elements with ‘atomic numbers’, which identified their properties.*
Rutherford described his work as ‘turning out the facts of nature’ – by which he meant that he had revealed simple facts of life that were available to any scientist who conscientiously searched for them. By searching and finding – and introducing the concepts of the ‘nucleus’ and ‘radioactivity’ to a far wider public than the community of academic physicists – Rutherford added another element of uncertainty to the thinking Edwardians’ picture of a steady world. There is no reason to believe that he was intentionally or even consciously eroding confidence in religion. Nor did his work directly and necessarily have that result. But he demonstrated that the world was more complicated than the Victorians had realised. And religion depends on faith in simple explanations.
It was not only the steady pressure of new philosophic argument and scientific discovery that undermined Edwardian religion. All the churches felt the effect of the secularism that is the companion of progress. Some men and women, more prosperous than ever before, no longer needed the consolation of a better life to come. Because economic progress was modest and patchy, rather more found new material wonders – flight, wireless, telegraph, radio – to replace the magic and mysteries on which religion depended. The Labour Party – although in part almost indistinguishable from the Nonconformist Church – offered to some men and women a new view of moral and social improvement. Instead of attempting to build a new world through conversion to Christ of sinful men and women, more and more of the disadvantaged and dispossessed began to believe that it was society itself, not its members, which must be changed.
The Church of England, always anxious to encompass a broad spectrum of Christian belief, saw its task in Edwardian England as embracing and accommodating the new age. And because of its historic association with the scholarship of the ancient universities – the very places from which the intellectual heresies came – it felt a particular obligation to combat the philosophies of doubt. It did not face them head-on but attempted to argue for God in the language which Moore and Russell had used to argue against Him. Sir Oliver Lodge – the personification of advanced Edwardian thinking, Professor of Physics in Liverpool and first principal of Birmingham University – defined the moral make-up of what came to be called ‘the higher man’ – educated doubters whose certainty the Church had to restore: ‘The higher man of today is not worrying about sin at all. As for Original or Birth Sin, or any other notion of that kind, that sits lightly on him. As a matter of fact it is non-existent and no one but a monk could have invented it.’
Lodge was doing no more than describing in lurid terms the loss of faith which many serious theologians predicted would inevitably follow the advance of education and prosperity. A society which exhibited ‘the vigour of early manhood, possessing contentment still charged with ambition’ – the characteristics of a ‘race in England and Europe which was full of energy and purpose’ – enjoyed more material prosperity than ever before.7 As a result, the nation was ‘losing its old religion’. C. F. G. Masterman, in The Condition of England, announced that ‘the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never felt the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet or the wonder and terror of elemental fire’.8 He was writing of the earthquake which follows moral uncertainty. The solid ground of natural science was shaken by Ernest Rutherford in a way which provoked impatience with archaic worship. In Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw, the most famous iconoclast and atheist of his age, scoffed at the idea of a superior being. Within the Church of England, influential voices argued that a new Christianity was needed for the new age of the higher man. It was the Churches which saw the need to change – Roman Catholicism at one end of the spectrum and the Salvation Army at the other – which successfully survived Edwardian scepticism.
The argument that the Church of England must change or die was not supported by the figures of church attendance. On Easter Day 1901, 1,945,000 men and women (9.4 per cent of the adult population) took Holy Communion. By 1914, the total had risen to 2,226,000, though the percentage had fractionally fallen. However, 9.2 per cent was a considerable improvement on the second half of the nineteenth century, when the figure hovered around 8 per cent.9 Membership of the Roman Catholic Church in England was inflated by Irish immigration. In 1891 there were 1,357,000 Catholics in Great Britain. By 1913 there were 1,793,000. Over the same period the number of churches grew from 1,387 to 1,845.10 The Methodists, on the other hand, experienced a slightly greater decline than that which the Church of England suffered. Between 1901 and 1914 the several branches of that faith – Wesleyan, New Connexion, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians and the United Free Church – accounted for 3.6 per cent of the
population. By 1914 the figure had fallen to 3.2 per cent.11 Methodists insisted they were not in retreat; Catholics were equally sure their advance was irresistible. In both cases the complacency was misplaced.
In 1904, the Church of England began work on the new Liverpool Cathedral. A year earlier, the Roman Catholic Church, after several false starts and reluctant postponements, had at last felt sufficient confidence to confirm that it would build the symbol of its permanent place in British life which had been the hierarchy’s dream ever since it had been re-established in 1856. In 1865, Cardinal Manning had declared that ‘The See of Westminster needed a cathedral proportionate to the chief diocese of the Catholic Church of the British Empire.’12 In anticipation of that achievement he had bought land (including the old Middlesex County Prison) in Tothill Fields, close to Victoria Station. The new basilica would, he announced, be dedicated to Cardinal Wiseman. But his priorities changed. There were Catholic foundlings in Protestant workhouses and he ‘could not leave twenty thousand children without education and drain funds and neglect my flock for piles of stone and brick’.13 It needed Herbert Vaughan, the son of a landowner from Ross-on-Wye (whose father intended him for the Army, not the Church), to make the great leap forward.
Vaughan was a gentleman and an ‘ultramontane’ who believed in the absolute authority of Rome. Long before he became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster he bought control of the Tablet to ensure that it maintained its unswerving support for the doctrine of papal infallibility. He opposed Irish Home Rule (an extraordinary position to be taken up by the head of the Catholic Church in England) and complained bitterly about what he called ‘the Canonisation of Charles Stewart Parnell’. He had been passionately opposed to Cardinal Manning’s intervention in the London Dock Strike of 1889 and accepted (as did his biographer) that he was deeply unpopular wit? part of his flock. It needed a man of his disposition to insist that a mighty cathedral must be built to proclaim the glory of God and emphasise the importance of the London archdiocese and its cardinal. On 12 March 1892, Herbert Vaughan was chosen as Archbishop of Westminster. He immediately announced that building would begin that year. The foundation stone was laid in June 1895.
The Edwardians Page 43