Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/267

Rh Royce rejected all the current arguments for God and immortality and argues for the mysticism of internal experience. Eucken offers no support to theologians; and Bergson does not seem to express a clear belief in a personal god or personal immortality.

Coming to the more popular of contemporary philosophers one finds that, just as the Greek philosophers reasoned outside the pale of the then held beliefs which were theistic, so do these modern philosophers reach conclusions that are outside the pale of organized religion of today. George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality. "It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to tie obeyed blindly and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most exhorbitant scale. The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not "come within the region of profitable philosophizing on that subject."

Bertrand Russell, considered by some the keenest philosophical mind of the present age, is an agnostic who maintains "The objections to religion are of two sorts, intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow."

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce is an atheist