Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Realism 19
Thus, I blush to add, you cannot be a philosopher and a good man,
though you may be a philosopher and a great one. (568–69)
This is not what one would expect from “the most complete and instinctive
apriorist of recorded time,” as Archer was pleased to call him; rather it
would seem a radical statement of the empiricist faith: you must start with
no principles or convictions of any kind, including moral or ethical ones,
but must learn all in the school of experience. Shaw goes on to berate
Nietzsche precisely for the “professorial folly” of proclaiming about art
from bookish imaginings rather than direct observation. Shaw is here revealing
his intellectual roots, roots that surprisingly have been neglected
by Shavian scholars. If the core of Shaw’s thinking has been misunderstood,
its germination has simply been ignored.
Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Rationalism
Again, Shaw has misled us. His plays (especially the early ones) are filled
with unflattering references to the passé radicalism of the mid-nineteenth
century, represented by the likes of John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, Charles
Darwin, and George Eliot. But of these at least Tyndall, Huxley, and Eliot
were Shaw’s heroes too, when he was young. He implies that he has since
thrown them over and acquired an entirely new outlook, dumping rationalism
and materialism for mysticism and the Life Force. The impressions
of adolescence, however, are apt to be more indelible than we, in our mature
recollection, are inclined to believe. The fact is that Shaw did not abandon
rationalism as much as he enlarged upon it. He did not embrace its
opposite but created something new, something that included many of the
basic assumptions of rationalism. In a sense he developed a Hegelian synthesis
of scientific materialism and mystical idealism, but he never fully
articulated it as such. Rather, he presented himself as a mystic who repudiated
rationalism. In Hegelian terms, he insisted that he was fighting for the
antithesis of rationalism (or at least of materialism), while in truth his
philosophy accepted what was valid of nineteenth-century materialism
and rejected the false.
To understand Shaw’s roots in materialism we must first revise our
view of nineteenth-century science and its way of seeing the world. Shaw
has helped us to see Victorian scientists as dogmatic, materialistic, antihumanitarian
fact worshipers, of whom Charles Dickens’s notorious Gradgrind
is only a slight caricature, but Shaw was not alone. The conventional
view that Victorian science was “a dreary and dehumanizing Mechanism