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

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

Gustav Spiller was a member of the Ethical Societies that preceded the modern Humanist movement. He wrote a number of secular hymns and books including a history of these Societies, and on psychology.

Spiller was a Jew born in Budapest, Hungary but later naturalised as English.

By the late 1880’s Spiller worked for the Labour Office of the League of Nations at Geneva. In 1889 he was part of a meeting (along with F. J. Gould) in Hackney, London to plan an Ethical Society.

In 1908 he organised the First International Moral Education Congress in held in London.

Anti-racist

In 1911 Spiller was lead organiser of the First Universal Races Congress which met in London at the University of London. This was an early effort of anti-racism, at which distinguished speakers from over 50 countries for four days discussed race problems and ways to counter the work of the budding eugenics movement and improve interracial relations. Among the prominent scientists and scholars in attendance are Americans W.E.B. DuBois and anthropologist Franz Boas. Spiller summed up the group’s findings:

We are then under the necessity of concluding that an impartial investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples of the world as, to all intents and purposes, essentially equal in intellect, enterprise, morality and physique.

However, their work fell on deaf ears and had little impact.

Spiller edited the papers from the proceedings of these two symposia. He also wrote numerous books including: The Mind of Man (1902); Faith in Man: the religion of the twentieth century (1908); Hymns of Love and Duty for the Young (1910); The Training of the Child: A Parent’s Manual (1912); A New System of Scientific Procedure (1921); The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (1934); The Origin and Nature of Man (1935). He was author alternative words to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Also See…

• Selected works available online

Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet contemporary of Julius Caesar. Little is known of him apart from his name and his poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) which nevertheless reveals much about his beliefs and his character.

The main purpose of the work was to free Gaius Memmius (to whom he dedicated the poem) and presumably all of mankind of superstition and the fear of death.

His poem expounds the atomic theory of Democritus and the moral philosophy of Epicurus.

He argues against fear of gods/supernatural powers by demonstrating through observations and logical argument that the operations of the world can be accounted for entirely in terms of natural phenomena.

He argues against the fear of death by stating that death is the dissipation of a being’s material mind. Lucretius uses the analogy of a vessel, stating that the physical body is the vessel that holds both the mind and spirit of a human being. Neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body. So, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being.

According to Lucretius, fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel. Lucretius also puts forward the ‘symmetry argument’ against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.

Also see…

• On the Nature of Things
• Sir David Blatherwick’s tribute to Lucretius
• Wikipedia article on Lucretius
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Lucretius

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington

The Sheehy-Skeffingtons – the feminist and Irish nationalist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, her husband, the pacifist, suffragist and writer, Francis, and their son, Owen, a founder member of the Humanist Association or Ireland – were notable Irish atheists.

Hanna and Francis

Born into the Roman Catholic tradition and educated by Dominican nuns and Jesuits, Hanna Sheehy and Francis Skeffington had both already abandoned Catholicism and become avowed atheists when they married in 1903 (they took each other’s surnames as a sign of their shared commitment to gender equality).

When their son was born in 1909 they refused to have him baptised into the Catholic faith, making a public break with their religious backgrounds.

The Sheehy-Skeffingtons were founder members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and Hanna was imprisoned twice for suffrage militancy in 1912-13.

During the Easter Rising of 1916 the couple were not directly involved in the fighting due to their pacifist principles, but Hanna provided the republican insurgents with food, while Francis formed a group of volunteers to try to stop the looting of businesses in Dublin.

It was while doing this that he was arrested and shot without trial. The officer responsible was court martialed, and a public enquiry followed, but no-one was ever brought to justice.

After Francis’s death, Hanna became more overtly nationalistic in her campaigning against British influence in Ireland, becoming a member of Sinn Féin and being jailed on several occasions for her republican activities. Her feminist activism also continued and she was heavily involved with the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union. She died in Dublin, aged 68.

Owen

Owen Sheehy-Skeffington studied at the École Normale Supérieure and became a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin. After a spell in the Irish Labour Party, he was elected to the Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate) in 1954, after running as a liberal socialist independent.

He shared his parents’ atheism and, as well as being involved in the formation of the Humanist Association of Ireland, he sought to promote secular education in Ireland. He also led a long-running campaign to expose the abuse of children in institutions run by the Irish Christian Brothers and supported the efforts of victims to tell their stories.

Hanna, Francis and Owen are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Also see…

• Discovering women in Irish history
• wwww.hannashouse.ie
• Review of ‘Founded On Fear’ by Peter Tyrrell

William Morris

William Morris was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist.

Morris was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he developed an interest in art and the Middle Ages and became friends with artists such as Burne-Jones. He read a great deal of theology and ecclesiastical history. He was involved in the formation of a ‘Brotherhood’ for the creation of religious art. Influenced by Rossetti he painted and concerned himself with production of beautiful books and house decoration.

Morris wrote long poems which indicated his move away from religion. The title of a long poem The Earthly Paradise shows a preference for a secular heaven. His lines ‘Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell ‘ from A Dream of John Bull suggest that the bond of friendship was human and of this life. ‘Fellowship’ also indicates his move towards the comradeship of socialism.

In the 1880s he took an active interest in socialism, which he considered meant the creation of an ideal society. His Utopian novel News From Nowhere depicts such a society. By this time he was quite critical of religion and is said to have attacked Christianity with zest. Yet he always took a greater interest in socialism than in freethought. However in the latter part of his life he devoted himself almost entirely to artistic and literary work.

A famous quotation comes from Hopes and Fears for Art : ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ A very secular ideal.

William Morris gave a famous address ‘Art and Socialism’ at Leicester’s Secular Hall on 23 January 1884. He also met Ernest Gimson there who later became a follower of his ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, and a craftsman in his own right.

Legacy

A number of galleries and museums house important collections of Morris’s work including

• the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London
• the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton
• Morris’s homes Red House, Bexleyheath and Kelmscott Manor, London

Also see…

• The William Morris Internet Archive
• The William Morris Society
• Wikipedia biography on Morris
• Portraits of Morris at the National Portrait Gallery

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was a controversial English poet.

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Also see…

• Portraits of Swinburne at the National Portrait Gallery

Olaf Stapleton. Copyright © The University of Adelaide

William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey and educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA in Modern History in 1909 and a MA in 1913.

During World War I he served as a conscientious objector with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919.

Stapledon was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929).

Fiction and activism

However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.

After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroc?aw, Poland.

He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement.

Stapledon’s writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

Ideas

Stapledon was an agnostic who was hostile to religious institutions, but not to religious yearnings.

He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of “spiritual values”, which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context (“personality-in-community”).

A sudden death

After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.

Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium, and then his widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books.

The University of Liverpool now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive.

Also see…

• On line archive
• Liverpool University, Olaf Stapleton collection
• Wikipedia article on Stapleton

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad has been called one of the greatest writers of the English novel. Yet English was not his first language. He was born in the Ukraine into a Polish family and learned English only later in life.

He disliked the narrowness of his upbringing, particularly his father’s religious zeal. Later in life he wrote to a friend:

It’s strange how I always, from the age of 14, disliked the Christian religion, its doctrines, ceremonies and festivals … Christianity has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion … and has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls – on this earth.

The brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings

As a young man, he became fascinated by the sea and sailed to many places, especially in Africa and Asia, first as a sailor and then as a captain. He was saddened to see the divisions caused by religious belief in the many countries he visited. He came to look on humanity not as different nationalities or races but simply as people. It was the brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings that concerned him. He saw this broken by advocates of the many, and differing, religions practised in the world. His boyhood had made him distrust dogmatic attitudes of this kind.

He read an essay, A Free Man’s Worship, by the famous philosopher and humanist, Bertrand Russell, which said: ‘We should worship only the God created by our own love of the good.’ Conrad wrote to Russell saying, ‘For the marvellous pages on the worship of a free man, the only return one can make is that of deep admiring affection.”

Compassionate outsiders

In stories like Typhoon and Youth he used many of the experiences he went through. His books were very different in style and in content from conventional Victorian and Edwardian writing. He wrote compassionate, realistic portraits of people who were outsiders, detached from the mainstream of society – as he was himself. His experiences as a boy and at sea led him to a “penetrating scrutiny of honour, steadfastness and integrity in human conduct.” (Caxton Encyclopaedia)

Religious scepticism

His religious scepticism appears in his novels. In Under Western Eyes, he writes: “A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are capable of every wickedness.” In Heart of Darkness he says, “We live, as we dream – alone.” And Under Western Eyes shows his humanist morality: “All a man can betray is his conscience.”

One of the main histories of English literature says that although in his writing Conrad was a realist, he was also “a thinker and a poet”; that in his work there is “a profound ethical element”; and his “idealism lies in the sense of the unknown which we brush past at every moment,” an unusual way of referring to his agnostic view of life.

Joseph Conrad admired other writers with a humanistic, rationalist outlook. To John Galsworthy, the novelist and playwright, he wrote, making clear his own rejection of dogma: “Scepticism is the tonic of mind, the tonic of life, the agent of truth. It is the way of art and salvation.”

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Also see…

• Portraits of Conrad at the National Portrait Gallery

Viscount Morley

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn OM, PC was was Liberal Member of Parliament for Newcastle upon Tyne 1883 – 1895 and later Montrose Burghs.

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