Chapman Cohen

From Philosopedia

Cohen, Chapman (1 September 1868 - 1954)

British freethought advocate Cohen, at the age of 21, began a 50-year career as a popular and concise freethought writer and lecturer. When G.W. Foote died in 1915, Cohen succeeded him as president of the National Secular Society (NSS), and editor of its publication, The Freethinker. Cohen was an efficient manager who brought security to the National Secular Society.

Born of a Jewish family, he studied the history of freethought and by the age of eighteen had read works by Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Plato. When he moved from Leicester to London in 1889 Cohen knew little about the National Secular Society, coming across the Secularists entirely by accident. Hearing a Christian Evidence Society lecturer in Victoria Park mimicking an old man with a speech impediment, Cohen intervened to rebuke the lecturer. The following week he himself opposed the Christian, and the Secularists who were present invited the young stranger to join them. As was later remarked, the first freethought lecture he had ever heard was his own.

Cohen’s first experience of journalism was editing John Grange’s Bradford Truth Seeker while its editor was ill in 1896. The following year he became involved with the Freethinker, and following Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s death in 1898 Cohen became Foote’s loyal assistant. Cohen wrote the five-volume Essays in Freethinking, and in his Bradlaugh and Ingersoll (1933), he criticizes what David Berman calls

• the Spinozistic and metaphysical component of Bradlaugh’s atheism, the thesis that existence or substance can be ‘conceived in itself,’ with ‘no relation to any other thing.’ This Cohen calls ‘metaphysical moonshine’ and ‘unthinkable.’ If existence is the sum of phenomena [as Bradlaugh holds], then whether we use the one term or the other [i.e., substance or the sum of phenomena] we are saying the same thing.

Joseph McCabe considered Cohen’s God and the Universe (1931) to be among Cohen’s chief works. Cohen’s Theism and Atheism (1921) also has been rated as one of his best. Morality Without God was one of his more than sixty books and pamphlets.

Cohen has written,

• The agnostic sees that there is a definite amount of mystery about the working of the universe, and he frankly admits that there may be some motivating force animating that universe in a way which our minds cannot appreciate. . . . The whole Agnostic position is against dogmatism in any shape or form.”

In Meaning and Value of Freethought (1932), he wrote,

• Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing man will civilise

By the end of the war in 1945, Cohen was an old man who, having served the freethought movement for years, was loath to relinquish the leadership. At a stormy conference in 1948, however, he was urged to give up the presidency, which he did in 1949, and in 1951 he handed over the Freethinker to F. A. Ridley.

Cohen married happily, had a daughter who died at age 29, and a son who became a physician. Cohen is considered the "last great Victorian freethinker," according to Victor E. Neuburg in The Encyclopedia of Unbelief.

At his funeral, an officiant declared,

• . . . the name of Chapman Cohen will be linked in the history of human liberation with those of Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Charles Bradlaugh, and the whole glorious army of freedom-loving pioneers.

{EU, Victor E. Neuburg; FFRF; FUK; HAB; RE; RSR; TRI}