Chrysippos

Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher.

Although Chrysippus believed in fate, divination and gods, he believed reason, sympathy and knowledge were the tools human beings should use when addressing ethical problems.

The British Museum, London contains a bust of Chrysippus.

See also…

• Wikipedia biograpy of Chrysippus

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.

Sometime during his adolescence, Matthew Arnold abandoned Christianity, apparently on ethical grounds and turned to agnosticism. He thereafter spent a good bit of his life trying to tell others about it in a gentle, gentlemanly way that would not upset them too much.

Arnold was an alumni of Balliol College, Oxford and his work inspired Thomas Hardy who went on to reject the idea that Christianity could be adapted to modern thought.

Scholars of Arnold’s works disagree on the nature of Arnold’s personal religious beliefs. He rejected the superstitious elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. Arnold seems to belong to a pragmatic middle ground that is more concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues and values for society than with the existence of God.

He wrote in the preface of God and the Bible in 1875

Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

He also wrote in Literature and Dogma:

The word ‘God’ is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

A blue plaque commemorates Arnold at 2 Chester Square, London where he lived and his portrait is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Also see…

• Victorian Webs entry on Arnold
• Portraits of Arnold at National Portrait Gallery
• Selected Poems
• Wikipedia biography on Arnold

Chapman Cohen was a leading English atheist and secularist writer and lecturer. He was the elder son of Enoch Cohen, a Jewish confectioner, and his wife, Deborah, and in his own words had “little religion at home and none at school”

Cohen moved to London in 1889, and soon became involved in the secularist movement. That year he accepted an invitation to speak against a Christian lecturer and shortly afterwards he was invited to speak the local branch of the National Secular Society (NSS).

After a year of lecturing for the freethought cause, he joined the NSS, becoming a popular and prolific lecturer for the Society. In 1893 Cohen spoke at the Leicester Secular Society. He was elected a vice-president of the NSS in 1895.

In 1897 Cohen began contributing weekly articles to G. W. Foote‘s Freethinker, in 1898 he became assistant editor, and after Foote’s death in 1915 he was appointed editor. Cohen also succeeded Foote as President of the NSS until 1949.

Cohen had written for other freethought journals before joining The Freethinker, and had edited The Truthseeker, owned by J.W. Gott.

Cohen remained editor of The Freethinker until 1951, when he retired and was replaced by Francis Ridley.

On his death, The Times printed a short obituary of Cohen, which said:

He was the author of many books setting forth the freethought philosophy of life, which had a large sale, and he was outstanding as a forthright, witty and courteous debater and lecturer.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Cohen

Jacob Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski was a humanist, polymath and all round Renaissance man.

He was born in Poland in 1908 to Jewish parents who moved to Germany during the first World War and then on to England in 1920.

Bronowski won a scholarship to study Mathematics at Cambridge but was also involved with editing a literary periodical called Experiment. This was an early sign that he would be one of the extraordinary few thinkers to straddle the divide between science and humanities – the ‘two cultures’ famously discussed by C.P. Snow in his 1959 lecture and paving the way to the ‘third culture (scientists who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public).

Bronowski’s interests ranged widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism, his commitment to which is evidenced in the following excerpt written in October 1968:

The notion that a man shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, is of course implicit in the outlook of science. But it begins before that as a positive and active constituent of humanism. For evidently the notion implies not only that man is free to judge, but that he is able to judge. This is an assertion of confidence which goes back to a contemporary of Socrates, and claims (as Plato quotes him) that “man is the measure of all things”. In humanism, man is all things: he is both the expression and the master of the creation.

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered for The Ascent of Man, a thirteen part TV series produced by the BBC in 1973, in which he explored the history of science and technology. It is said that it was this seminal TV series which inspired the late great American astronomer Carl Sagan to make his own documentary series, Cosmos, which also inspired a generation of humanists.

Contrary to David Hume, Bronowski championed the idea that the ethical ‘ought’ could be derived from the scientific exploration of what ‘is’ . A particularly poignant and moving part of the series was filmed at the Auschwitz concentration camp and begins with the following:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Bronowski taught mathematics at the University College Hull from 1934 to 1942. The economist Eric Roll who worked with Bronowski in Hull said of him:

He was … a warm and vibrant human being. Every encounter with him was a powerful tonic which left one feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated and enhanced. He did not, however, suffer fools gladly and could be bitingly sardonic about human folly or about the glaring discrepancies so often to be found between public acclaim and true worth. But to his friends he was kind and affectionate, a companion whose gaiety and wit counterbalanced his serious approach to life.

Bronowski died in New York in 1974, a year after the completion of The Ascent of Man. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.

See also…

• Wikipedia biography of Bronowski
• Jacob Bronowski Humanist Heritage Campaign

C.E.M. Joad

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher and broadcasting personality.

Joad was born in Durham and shortly after he moved with his family to Southampton, where he received a very strict Christian upbringing. In 1910, Joad went up to Balliol College, Oxford where he developed his skills as a philosopher and debater.

After completing his course at Balliol he entered the Civil Service in the Department for Board of Trade in 1914, which later became the Ministry of Labour. In the months leading up to the First World War, like Bertrand Russell and others, he displayed “ardent” pacifism, which resulted in political controversy.

Personal life

Joad was married to Mary White between 1915 and 1921 in which time they had three children. They lived  in Westhumble near Dorking in Surrey although Joad fled conscription to Snowdonia, Wales until it was safe to return. After their separation Joad moved to Hampstead in London with a student teacher named Marjorie Thomson, the  first of many mistresses. Joad believed that female minds lacked objectivity, and he had no interest in talking to women who would not go to bed with him.

Popularising philosophy

In 1930, Joad left the Civil Service to fill the post of Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London where he popularised philosophy with many, and many other great philosophers of the day were beginning to take him seriously. With his two books, Guide to Modern Thought (1933) and Guide to Philosophy (1936) he became a well known figure in public society.

Politics

In his early life, Joad very much shared the desire for the destruction of the Capitalist system. He was expelled from the Fabian Society in 1925, because of sexual misbehaviour at its summer school and did not rejoin until 1943.

In 1931, disenchanted with Labour in office, Joad became Director of Propaganda for the New Party. Owing to the rise of Oswald Mosley’s Pro-Fascist sympathies, Joad resigned and soon after he became bitterly opposed to Nazism, but continued to be  a pacifist and refuse military service.

The Brains Trust

In January 1940, Joad was elected onto a wartime discussion programme called The Brains Trust which featured a small group that included Commander A B Campbell and Julian Huxley. The programme came to deal with difficult questions posed by listeners, and the panellists would discuss the question in great detail, and render a philosophical opinion. Joad became star of the show and the general public generally considered him the greatest British philosopher of the day. His catchphrase was “It all depends on what you mean by…” with was how he always began his answers.

In April 1948, Joad was convicted of travelling on a Waterloo-Exeter train without a valid ticket. It turned out that he had a long-standing obsession about trying to defraud the railways. The conviction made front-page headlines in the national newspapers, and the fine of £2 (£54 as of 2010) destroyed all hopes of a peerage and resulted in his dismissal from the BBC. The humiliation of this had a severe effect on his health, and he soon became bed-confined at his home in Hampstead.

Beliefs

Joad was also interested in the supernatural and partnered Harry Price on a number of ghost-hunting expeditions, also joining the Ghost Club of which Price was the president. However he spent much of his life as an agnostic.

After the bed-confining thrombosis following his dismissal from the BBC in 1948, Joad developed cancer, and by 1952 he realised he was dying. He published the book The Recovery of Belief in this year, which described his return to Christianity. Joad died on 9 April 1953 at his home, 4 East Heath Road, Hampstead. He was 61. He is buried at Saint John’s-at-Hampstead Church in London.

See also…

• Wikipedia biography of Joad

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an English republican, anticlerical deist and social reformer who became involved in the American and French revolutions.

“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

Early years

Thomas Pain, as his name was most often spelt before his emigration to the American colonies in 1774, was born in Thetford, Norfolk.

He was apprenticed to his father’s profession of staymaker, which was later a gift to the caricaturists such as James Gilray.

His first marriage, to Mary Lambert, while working as a staymaker at 20 New Street, Sandwich, Kent from 1759 ended in the tragedy of his wife’s death in childbirth. Following the advice of his father-in-law he joined the excisemen and was appointed to a post in Lincolnshire.

His uncovering of corruption however led to his dismissal, and for a while he tried working as a teacher in London.

In 1768 he was reinstated to the excise service and moved to Lewes, in Sussex. His second marriage was to Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his landlord at Bull House, High Street, Lewes Sussex. There he attended meetings of the Headstrong Club which met at the White Hart Inn and debated philosophical and political issues. His colleagues called on him to write a petition to the government to improve their pay and conditions. This was his first published pamphlet The Case of the Officers of Excise. However it led once more to his dismissal.

To America and revolution

He resolved to emigrate to the American colonies, and Elizabeth agreed to a separation. He had been fortunate to make the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, who was at that time the American representative in London, who was willing to give him a letter of introduction to people of influence in Philadelphia.

Despite becoming severely ill with typhus on the voyage, Paine recovered and found his true vocation as a writer for the Pennsylvania Magazine. Early articles advocated the abolition of slavery and equality for women.

The beginnings of the American revolution (1774-1787) led him to write Common Sense which advocated a complete break from the British monarchy, and the establishment of a republic, and once the struggle was underway he wrote a series of pamphlets The American Crisis, the first of which General Washington ordered to be read to his troops before a crucial battle. He also served as a footsoldier in the war, and was sent to France in 1781 to obtain financial support for the cause. Congress and the State of New York recognized his services by a grant of land at New Rochelle.

In 1787 he returned to England with a view to having his design for an iron bridge built. It was in London, at the premises of the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson that he encountered Mary Wollstonecraft and other radical thinkers and artists like William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, and William Blake.

The French Revolution

The French revolution of 1789, disrupted Paine’s plans. The writings of his former friend Edmund Burke against the revolution, inspired first Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindicaton of the Rights of Men (1790) and the first part of Paine’s own Rights of Man 1791. Its advocacy of republicanism resulted in the authorities issuing an order for his arrest. According to a possibly apocryphal tale it was William Blake who warned him to escape to France before being charged with treason.

In 1792, Wollstonecraft followed up with her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man anticipated many aspects of the modern welfare state. He allowed it to be printed freely, and although banned the work was read widely and influenced campaigners such as Thomas Hardy of the London Correspondence Society and later Richard Carlile among many others.

In France Paine was elected to the National Convention. There, since he argued against the terror, he fell foul of Robespierre. Despite being seriously ill he was kept in prison, under threat of the guillotine, for nearly a year 1793-4, and was only released when the new American Ambassador James Monroe, petitioned for his release as an American citizen. While in jail he wrote part of his anti-religious work the Age of Reason. The Monroes also nursed him until he recovered, and he retired to his farm the United States in 1802.

In a strange turn of events, his bones were dug up and sent to England by his admirer William Cobbett in 1819, but were somehow lost.

The first memorial to him in England was the bust on the frontage of Leicester’s Secular Hall, erected in 1881. A statue in Thetford was commissioned, with funding from US airmen stationed nearby, in 1963. Another statue was unveiled in Lewes on 4 July 2010.

See also…

• Spartacus Educational biography of Paine
• Selected Writings
• Mark Steel documentary video on Paine
• Video lecture on Paine
• Portraits of Paine at the National Portrait Gallery

William Johnson Fox

William Johnson Fox was a religious and political orator, born near Southwold, Suffolk.

He was trained for the Independent ministry, at Homerton College (then in London). He later seceded to the Unitarians, and in 1817 Fox became minister of a nonconformist congregation which subsequently went on to become the non-religious South Place Ethical Society.

In 1831, Fox bought the journal of the Unitarian Association, The Monthly Repository, of which he was already editor; for five years this was effectively the first ancestor of the Ethical Record, the Society’s current journal.

Among the causes with which Fox identified himself and the Society were the spread of popular education and the repeal of the Corn Laws. From 1847 to 1862 he intermittently represented Oldham in Parliament as a Liberal whilst remaining minister at South Place for several more years.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Fox
• History of South Place Ethical Society

Ernest William Gimson was a furniture designer and architect. His brother Sydney Gimson was president of Leicester Secular Society and their father Josiah was the main force behind the building of Leicester’s Secular Hall.

Ernest met William Morris at the Hall and later became one of the most influential designers in Morris’s ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement.

See Also…

• Wikipedia biography of Gimson

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest figures in the American Enlightenment and the struggle for American independence.

He was born in Boston and was apprenticed to the printing trade — where he educated himself. He set up his own printing trade after a brief spell in Britain. He bought and ran the Philadelphia Gazette. He founded the Philadelphia library and in 1744 set up the American Philosophical Society.

He was an inventor and philosopher. He proved that lightning was electrical by a famous experiment with a key tied to a kite. He invented bi-focals and the water-harmonica.He was interested in education and civil liberties.

Between 1764 and 1775 he was representative of the American colonies in London. While there he encouraged Thomas Paine to visit America, an action which was to have lasting influence. Frankllin was, like Paine, a participator in the American revolution and played his part in writing the American Constitution.

Franklin was brought up as a Presbyterian, but became a deist. He respected religion but thought it had been corrupted. He wrote:

I believe in one God, the creator of the universe; that he governs it by his Providence; that he ought to be worshipped; that the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children; that the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.

He later became more sceptical of religion and firmly believed in the separation of church and state. Such views were typical of thoughtful and educated people in the eighteenth century.

Today, Benjamin Franklin House, London where where he lived between 1757 and 1775, is open to the public as a museum.

See Also…

• Wikipedia biography of Franklin

Joseph Mccabe

Joseph Martin McCabe was born at 14 Chestergate, Macclesfield, Cheshire, but his family moved to Manchester, near Gorton Monastery, while he was a child. He trained there as a Franciscan Friar from the age of 15.

Father Antony

His novitiate year took place in Killarney, after which he was moved to St Bonaventure’s School, Forest Gate in London. He was ordained as a priest in 1890 and given the name ‘Father Antony’. He studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain for a year, and in 1895 was appointed rector of the newly founded St Bernardine’s College, Buckingham, but he had gradually lost his faith and on Ash Wednesday, 19 February, 1896 he resigned and renounced the church.

He wrote about this period of his life in the first of his many books Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897), and also in a novel In the Shade of the Cloister (1907) published under the name “Arnold Wright”.

Union of Ethical Societies

From 1896 he worked with Stanton Coit and F. J. Gould in the Union of Ethical Societies, founded that year in London, but in 1898 moved to Leicester as secretary of the Secular Society. It was there that he met Beatrice Lee, a hosiery worker, who became his wife. They were married 17 August 1899. He found he was not suited to the pastoral work required of him, and after a year returned to London to become the first director of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), until 1902.

Many of his earliest works were written for the RPA, including The Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (1908).

Writer and speaker

For the rest of his long life he made a living as a freelancer, writing particularly on the history of the Catholic church. He was also a pioneer in the popularisation of science, with his translation of Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe (1900), and titles such as Evolution of Mind (1910), The Story of Evolution (1912) and “The Evolution of Civilization” (1922).

McCabe was also in demand as a speaker, and gave 3- 4,000 lectures in his lifetime, making speaking tours in North America and Australia, as well as Great Britain.

In 1925 he and his wife separated, they had raised two sons and two daughters. About the same time he also made a break with the RPA, and from 1926 wrote many works for the American freethought publisher E. Haldeman-Julius in his Blue Book series. Many of these were published in part-work format, accumulating to form a larger work.

McCabe wrote in 1926:

I am what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

One of his last works was A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948). In it he wrote: “The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism.” (p.114). It was McCabe who started the controversy over the pro-Catholic censorship of the later editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, which omit sections from the 11th edition that were critical of the church.

McCabe died aged 87 at 22 St George’s Road, Golders Green. The epitaph he requested was: “He was a rebel to his last day.”

Also See…

• Works online (1)
• Works online (2)
• Issac Goldberg’s Joseph McCabe: Fighter For Freethought
• Wikipedia biography of McCabe