Manet example, I would have validated his interpretation. A difficult business!

In listing his three preoccupations, Wollheim, as noted above, puts painting first and in assessing the merits of this ambitious and not wholly satisfactory book, we should respect his priorities. The paintings he discusses I know better than I did before. Even while scratching my head over the “internal spectator”, I came to notice details that had escaped me. A more general point: criticism is an art, though, like pedagogy, not a wholly autonomous art. It follows - at least on a view that I have defended in Beauty Restored (Clarendon Press, 1984. See Chs. 3 , 4 and 5 ) that there are and can be no “principles of criticism”, not even primafacie ones, and no lawlike generalisations that have any logical bearing on the interpretation of works of art. The difference between good criticism and useless criticism is a genuine difference but has to be made out on a case to case basis. Critics bring to their task a certain amount of theoretical apparatus and if it serves their purpose, it does not much matter what the theory is or whether it is true. Here again there is a parallel with the arts. Understanding Masonic twaddle helps with The Mapc Flute; Christian theology provides a key to what is obscure in Dante or Milton. In the same way, debased Kantian doctrine yields, in Coleridge’s hands, good critical insights and William Empson was carried along by his crude misreading of G. E. Moore. But if bad theory need not be a hindrance, good theory need not be a help. In my opinion, psychoanalytic theory, contrary to what its detractors claim, embodies important insights about human experience and destiny. Richard Wollheim knows that theory much better than I do. His commitments sometimes serve him well but on occasion, as I have suggested, lead him astray, In the nature of the case, that is what one would expect. BARNARD COLLEGE MARY MOTHERSILL

A History ofAthebm in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell

Croom Helm, 1988. xii -I- 253 pp. €30.00 By DAVID BERMAN

This is a book which has been awaited eagerly by readers of Berman’s earlier articles. Although the publishers present it as “the first history of British atheism” the author’s Preface is more modest: “There is still much field-work to be done. . . The study of early atheism is still at the archaeological or natural history stage” (p. viii). One kind of trophy brought back from his own extensive field-work consists in cases for identifying Hobbes, various “foundling followers of Hobbes”, and Anthony Collins as covert atheists; their atheism “disguised by esoteric presentation, confined . . . to ‘the private study and select conversation’, or condemned retrospectively” by themselves after their own apostate returns to religion (p. 110). Of another kind is Berman’s discovery, or

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perhaps it should be rediscovery, of the first overtly and avowedly atheist book to be published in Britain. This was the anonymous Answer to Dr Priestley’s letters to a philosophical unbeliever appearing in 1782.

Berman is right to make much of the remarkable lateness of this first public avowal. Deafened by the clamour of accusations of atheism, historians of ideas have been tempted to overlook the lack of confessions. Even after the first breaking of the ice it was a further fourteen years before “the Watson refuted” which J. M. Robertson’s History of Freethought credited with “‘the first explicit avowal of atheism in English controversy”’ (quoted p. 120). Simultaneous with the clamour of accusations we find abundant authorities, including some of the accusers, who question or outright deny the possibility of any sincere theoretical commitment to atheism - as opposed, that is, to a practical refusal to allow the alleged existence of God to affect one’s everyday living.

Understandably enough Berman devotes the whole of his first and longest chapter to this threat to the reality of his subject-matter. Since no one wanted to deny the possibility of either practical or unthinking atheists, Berman suggests that such doubting of the possibility of sincere and thinking atheism should be construed as an exercise in repression: repression (unconscious) here being contrasted with suppression (conscious). He also indicates an inverse relationship between the two: in so far as repression is effective there is less need for what Leninists in power call ‘administrative measures’.

This bumper chapter on ‘The Repression of Atheism’ has, it would seem, taken the place of an essential preliminary - a philosophical discussion establishing the relevant criteria for ‘atheism’. Precisely what does anyone have to believe or to disbelieve in order to be admitted into the company of British atheists? The qualifying adjective is, surely, crucial? For disbelief is essentially relative to belief. In the early Roman Empire Christians used to be denounced as atheists because they rejected the theology of Mt. Olympus. So, in the context of modern British history the atheist will presumably be required to deny the existence of the God of Mosaic theism. In that conception - the conception common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam - God not only creates the Universe but takes sides in conflicts internal to it.

Under the corresponding conception of atheism there can be no dispute but that Hume, on the second count, with Spinoza and all pantheists, on both counts, have all to be accounted atheists. Both conclusions are acceptable to Berman. By arguing in this way the first can be established without appealing to winks and nods of biographical evidence. The reason why the second is paradoxical is that so many widely and often wildly different conceptions or misconceptions are confidently offered and generally accepted as conceptions of God.

Again, the question of the existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel might at first blush appear analogous to the question whether there are such things as unicorns or Abominable Snowmen. Yet it soon

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emerges that those who introduced this notion provided no means by which it would be possible, even in principle, to settle whether or not their favoured concept does in fact have application. There have even been Hobbists daring to maintain that talk of an incorporeal personal being is nothing more nor less than incoherent. Notoriously, all this leads some to the conclusion that it is impossible either to prove or to disprove the existence of this God.

In the years immediately after World War I1 it used to be said that Oxford philosophers had invented a new cure for atheism. Young people coming up as shining-eyed atheists found after a term or two that they no longer knew in what atheists are essentially required to disbelieve. Berman’s quotations from Charles Bradlaugh and others make it dear that we were wrong in our brash assurance that we were members of the first generation to think such thoughts. For in A plea for atheism Bradlaugh wrote: “The atheist does not say ‘there is no God‘ but he says: ‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God . . . I do not deny, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception”’ (quoted, p. 214).

We need, surely, some distinction: between, on the one hand, positive atheism - an atheism involving a categorical and unqualified denial that some admitted and legitimate concept of God has application; and, on the other hand, a negative atheism - an atheism which has either never been introduced to or has never admitted and entertained any such conception. Nor shall we have completed the conceptual under- labouring needed for the definitive History of British Atheism before we have tied up the usage of the term ‘agnosticism’, and introduced some distinctions. We need, for instance, to distinguish aggressive agnosticism of the kind propounded in Hume’s first Enquiry - agnqsticism which denies that knowledge is in certain areas humanly possible - from meek and mild agnosticism - agnosticism which admits temporary bafflement while enquiries are still proceeding. Nowadays the word is customarily employed to refer to practical atheism resulting from theoretical indifference.

In sum: Berman has produced a valuable contribution towards a future, definitive study of British atheism; a study which should, and hopefully will, eventually be written by Berman himself. SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY A N D POLICY CENTER,

BOWLING GREEN, OHIO

ANTONY FLEW

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