Rationalism

Abstract

Like Clough, Hardy could not morally, emotionally and temperamentally — not, that is, in all rational honesty — be an intransigent, militant atheist. Hardy felt too deeply the need for absolute intellectual integrity and too keenly the loss of traditional religious assumptions, a loss (as far as Hardy was concerned) traumatic both to himself and to society at large. Hardy was prepared to endure the inevitable sacrifice of solace that doubt entailed; but with the stakes so high, he was equally committed to questioning his own iconoclastic conclusions, so keeping the process of his thought alive and genuinely critical.