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. T h e 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 Coleridges 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, I n the nature of the
case, that is what one would expect.
BARNARD COLLEGE

MARY MOTHERSILL

A History ofAthebm in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell

By D A V I D BERMAN
Croom Helm, 1988. xii -I-253 pp. 30.00

This is a book which has been awaited eagerly by readers of Bermans

earlier articles. Although the publishers present it as the first history of
British atheism the authors Preface is more modest: There is still
much field-work to be done. . . T h e 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 Bermans 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 Priestleys 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. Robertsons 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 ones 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). H e 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. I n 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. I n 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. T h e
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 u p as shining-eyed atheists found after a term or two that they no
longer knew in what atheists are essentially required to disbelieve.
Bermans quotations from Charles Bradlaugh and others make it d e a r
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 underlabouring needed for the definitive History of British Atheism before we
have tied u p the usage of the term agnosticism, and introduced some
distinctions. We need, for instance, to distinguish aggressive agnosticism
of the kind propounded in Humes 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

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A N T O N Y FLEW