A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Mechanistic materialism as a philosophy, of course, goes back to the Presocratics, specifically Leucippus and Democritus, the cofounders of atomism and very strong proponents of determinism. Among modern thinkers materialism made considerable headway in the seventeenth (Hobbes), eighteenth (Helvétius, La Mettrie, d’Holbach), and nineteenth centuries, in part through the rediscovery of the ancient materialists and much more importantly through increasing advances in science. Indeed, Lovecraft’s chief philosophical influences are all from the nineteenth century— Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and others who by their pioneering work in biology, chemistry, and physics systematically brought more and more phenomena under the realm of the known and the natural.

One of the greatest weapons Lovecraft found in his battle against religious metaphysics was anthropology. The anthropological thought of the later nineteenth century had, in Lovecraft’s mind, so convincingly accounted for the natural origin of religious belief that no further explanation was required for its tenacious hold on human beings. This conception is discussed at length in the essay ‘Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection’, which was published in an issue of the National Amateur dated July 1919. The notion that primitive human beings were, to put it crudely, merely bad philosophers who misapprehended the true nature of phenomena was evolved by a number of important anthropologists of the later nineteenth century. I would like to believe that Lovecraft read Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), a landmark work in its field that is still of value, but can find no evidence that he ever did so. We are on more certain ground if we contend that Lovecraft’s anthropology of religion comes from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872) and Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890f.), which he clearly did read (although Frazer perhaps not this early). Fiske’s book was in his library. Like Haeckel, John Fiske (1842–1901) has suffered somewhat of a decline in esteem, but in his day he was highly noted as an anthropologist, philosopher, and (in his later years) historian.

I want at last to address certain curious statements made in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’, wherein Lovecraft attests to his ‘cynical materialism’ and his ‘pessimistic cosmic views’, for they will provide a transition to a study of Lovecraft’s early ethics. Why cynical? why pessimistic? What is there in materialism or cosmicism that could lead to such an ethical stance? Well, as a matter of pure logic, nothing: materialism and cosmicism, as metaphysical principles, have no direct ethical corollaries, and it therefore becomes our task to ascertain how and why Lovecraft felt that they did. Let us consider some statements of the 1919–20 period:

There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth.⁸ The secret of true contentment … lies in the achievement of a cosmical point of view.⁹

Once again it must be emphasized that neither of these ethical precepts is a direct corollary of cosmicism; they are, rather, varying psychological responses to Lovecraft’s awareness of the cosmic insignificance of humanity in a boundless universe.

A passage in a letter of 1920 is one of his most poignant early ethical remarks, and here he explicitly ties Epicureanism, Schopenhauerianism, and cosmicism into a neat (if not logically defensible) whole: