Produced by Geetu Melwani, Dave Morgan, Susan Skinner and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian
Libraries)
LECTURES
ON
THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL
AND THE GOOD.
BY M. V. COUSIN.
INCREASED BY
An Appendix on French Art.
TRANSLATED, WITH THE APPROBATION OF M. COUSIN, BY
O. W. WIGHT,
TRANSLATOR OF COUSIN'S "COURSE OF THE HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY,"
AMERICAN EDITOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, BART.,
AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF ABELARD AND HELOISE," ETC., ETC.
"God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body."
THE PLATONISTS AND THE FATHERS.
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
549 & 551 BROADWAY.
1872.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854,
BY D. APPLETON & CO.,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.
TO
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, BART.,
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh:
WHO HAS CLEARLY ELUCIDATED, AND, WITH GREAT ERUDITION,
SKETCHED THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF
COMMON SENSE;
WHO, FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HIS ILLUSTRIOUS COUNTRYMAN, REID
HAS ESTABLISHED THE DOCTRINE OF THE
IMMEDIATENESS OF PERCEPTION,
THEREBY FORTIFYING PHILOSOPHY AGAINST THE ASSAULTS OF SKEPTICISM;
WHO, TAKING A STEP IN ADVANCE OF ALL OTHERS,
HAS GIVEN TO THE WORLD A DOCTRINE OF THE
CONDITIONED,
THE ORIGINALITY AND IMPORTANCE OF WHICH ARE ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE
FEW QUALIFIED TO JUDGE IN SUCH MATTERS; WHOSE
NEW ANALYTIC OF LOGICAL FORMS
COMPLETES THE HITHERTO UNFINISHED WORKS OF ARISTOTLE;
THIS TRANSLATION OF M. COUSIN'S
Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good,
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
IN ADMIRATION OF A PROFOUND AND INDEPENDENT THINKER,
OF AN INCOMPARABLE MASTER OF PHILOSOPHIC CRITICISM;
AS A TOKEN OF ESTEEM FOR A MAN IN WHOM GENIUS
AND ALMOST UNEQUALLED LEARNING
HAVE BEEN ADORNED BY
TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND GOODNESS OF LIFE.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
For some time past we have been asked, on various sides, to collect in a
body of doctrine the theories scattered in our different works, and to
sum up, in just proportions, what men are pleased to call our
philosophy.
This _resume_ was wholly made. We had only to take again the lectures
already quite old, but little known, because they belonged to a time
when the courses of the Faculte des Lettres had scarcely any influence
beyond the Quartier Latin, and, also, because they could be found only
in a considerable collection, comprising all our first instruction, from
1815 to 1821.[1] These lectures were there, as it were, lost in the
crowd. We have drawn them hence, and give them apart, severely
corrected, in the hope that they will thus be accessible to a greater
number of readers, and that their true character will the better appear.
The eighteen lectures that compose this volume have in fact the
particular trait that, if the history of philosophy furnishes their
frame-work, philosophy itself occupies in them the first place, and
that, instead of researches of erudition and criticism, they present a
regular exposition of the doctrine which was at first fixed in our mind,
which has not ceased to preside over our labors.
This book, then, contains the abridged but exact expression of our
convictions on the fundamental points of philosophic science. In it will
be openly seen the method that is the soul of our enterprise, our
principles, our processes, our results.
Under these three heads, the True, the Beautiful, the Good, we embrace
psychology, placed by us at the head of all philosophy, aesthetics,
ethics, natural right, even public right to a certain extent, finally
theodicea, that perilous _rendez-vous_ of all systems, where different
principles are condemned or justified by their consequences.
It is the affair of our book to plead its own cause. We only desire that
it may be appreciated and judged according to what it really is, and not
according to an opinion too much accredited.
Eclecticism is persistently represented as the doctrine to which men
deign to attach our name. We declare that eclecticism is very dear to
us, for it is in our eyes the light of the history of philosophy; but
the source of that light is elsewhere. Eclecticism is one of the most
important and most useful applications of the philosophy which we teach,
but it is not its principle.
Our true doctrine, our true flag is spiritualism, that philosophy as
solid as generous, which began with Socrates and Plato, which the Gospel
has spread abroad in the world, which Descartes put under the severe
forms of modern genius, which in the seventeenth century was one of the
glories and forces of our country, which perished with the national
grandeur in the eighteenth century, which at the commencement of the
present century M. Royer-Collard came to re-establish in public
instruction, whilst M. de Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, and M.
Quatremere de Quincy transferred it into literature and the arts. To it
is rightly given the name of spiritualism, because its character in fact
is that of subordinating the senses to the spirit, and tending, by all
the means that reason acknowledges, to elevate and ennoble man. It
teaches the spirituality of the soul, the liberty and responsibility of
human actions, moral obligation, disinterested virtue, the dignity of
justice, the beauty of charity; and beyond the limits of this world it
shows a God, author and type of humanity, who, after having evidently
made man for an excellent end, will not abandon him in the mysterious
development of his destiny. This philosophy is the natural ally of all
good causes. It sustains religious sentiment; it seconds true art, poesy
worthy of the name, and a great literature; it is the support of right;
it equally repels the craft of the demagogue and tyranny; it teaches all
men to respect and value themselves, and, little by little, it conducts
human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls
which in our times can be realized in Europe only by constitutional
monarchy.
To aid, with all our power, in setting up, defending, and propagating
this noble philosophy, such is the object that early inspired us, that
has sustained during a career already lengthy, in which difficulties
have not been wanting. Thank God, time has rather strengthened than
weakened our convictions, and we end as we began: this new edition of
one of our first works is a last effort in favor of the holy cause for
which we have combated nearly forty years.
May our voice be heard by new generations as it was by the serious youth
of the Restoration! Yes, it is particularly to you that we address this
work, young men whom we no longer know, but whom we bear in our heart,
because you are the seed and the hope of the future. We have shown you
the principle of our evils and their remedy. If you love liberty and
your country, shun what has destroyed them. Far from you be that sad
philosophy which preaches to you materialism and atheism as new
doctrines destined to regenerate the world: they kill, it is true, but
they do not regenerate. Do not listen to those superficial spirits who
give themselves out as profound thinkers, because after Voltaire they
have discovered difficulties in Christianity: measure your progress in
philosophy by your progress in tender veneration for the religion of the
Gospel. Be well persuaded that, in France, democracy will always
traverse liberty, that it brings all right into disorder, and through
disorder into dictatorship. Ask, then, only a moderated liberty, and
attach yourself to that with all the powers of your soul. Do not bend
the knee to fortune, but accustom yourselves to bow to law. Entertain
the noble sentiment of respect. Know how to admire,--possess the worship
of great men and great things. Reject that enervating literature, by
turns gross and refined, which delights in painting the miseries of
human nature, which caresses all our weaknesses, which pays court to the
senses and the imagination, instead of speaking to the soul and
awakening thought. Guard yourselves against the malady of our century,
that fatal taste of an accommodating life, incompatible with all
generous ambition. Whatever career you embrace, propose to yourselves an
elevated aim, and put in its service an unalterable constancy. _Sursum
corda_, value highly your heart, wherein is seen all philosophy, that
which we have retained from all our studies, which we have taught to
your predecessors, which we leave to you as our last word, our final
lecture.
V. COUSIN.
_June 15, 1853._
* * * * *
A too indulgent public having promptly rendered necessary a new edition
of this book, we are forced to render it less unworthy of the suffrages
which it has obtained, by reviewing it with severe attention, by
introducing a mass of corrections in detail, and a considerable number
of additions, among which the only ones that need be indicated here are
some pages on Christianity at the end of Lecture XVI., and the notes
placed as an Appendix[2] at the end of the volume, on various works of
French masters which we have quite recently seen in England, which have
confirmed and increased our old admiration for our national art of the
seventeenth century.
_November 1, 1853._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 1st Series of our work, _Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie
Moderne_, five volumes.
[2] The Appendix has been translated by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the
British Museum, who is alone entitled to credit and alone
responsible.--TR.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
The nature of this publication is sufficiently explained in the preface
of M. Cousin.
We have attempted to render his book, without comment, faithfully into
English. Not only have we endeavored to give his thought without
increase or diminution, but have also tried to preserve the main
characteristics of his style. On the one hand, we have carefully shunned
idioms peculiar to the French; on the other, when permitted by the laws
of structure common to both languages, we have followed the general
order of sentences, even the succession of words. It has been our aim to
make this work wholly Cousin's in substance, and in form as nearly his
as possible, with a total change of dress. That, however, we may have
nowhere missed a shade of meaning, nowhere introduced a gallicism, is
too much to be hoped for, too much to be demanded.
M. Cousin, in his Philosophical Discussions, defines the terms that he
uses. In the translation of these we have maintained uniformity, so that
in this regard no farther explanation is necessary.
This is, perhaps, in a philosophical point of view, the most important
of all M. Cousin's works, for it contains a complete summary and lucid
exposition of the various parts of his system. It is now the last word
of European philosophy, and merits serious and thoughtful attention.
This and many more like it, are needed in these times, when noisy and
pretentious demagogues are speaking of metaphysics with idiotic
laughter, when utilitarian statesmen are sneering at philosophy, when
undisciplined sectarians of every kind are decrying it; when, too,
earnest men, in state and church, men on whose shoulders the social
world really rests, are invoking philosophy, not only as the best
instrument of the highest culture and the severest mental discipline,
but also as the best human means of guiding politics towards the
eternally true and the eternally just, of preserving theology from the
aberrations of a zeal without knowledge, and from the perversion of the
interested and the cunning; when many an artist, who feels the nobility
of his calling, who would address the mind of man rather than his
senses, is asking a generous philosophy to explain to him that ravishing
and torturing Ideal which is ever eluding his grasp, which often
discourages unless understood; when, above all, devout and tender souls
are learning to prize philosophy, since, in harmony with Revelation, it
strengthens their belief in God, freedom, immortality.
Grateful to an indulgent public, on both sides of the ocean, for a
kindly and very favorable reception of our version of M. Cousin's
"Course of the History of Modern Philosophy," we add this translation of
his "Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good," hoping that his
explanation of human nature will aid some in solving the grave problem
of life,--for there are always those, and the most gifted, too, who feel
the need of understanding themselves,--believing that his eloquence, his
elevated sentiment, and elevated thought, will afford gratification to a
refined taste, a chaste imagination, and a disciplined mind.
O. W. WIGHT.
LONDON, Dec. 21, 1853
ADVERTISEMENT.
The Publishers have to express their thanks to M. COUSIN for his cordial
concurrence, and especially for his kindness in transmitting the sheets
of the French original as printed, so that this translation appears
almost simultaneously with it.
EDINBURGH, 38 GEORGE-STREET,
Dec. 26, 1853.
THE STEM.
CONTENTS.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE _Page_ 7
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 15
DISCOURSE PRONOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE.--PHILOSOPHY
OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 25
Spirit and general principles of the Course.--Object of the
Lectures of this year:--application of the principles of which
an exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good.
PART FIRST.--THE TRUE.
LECTURE I.--THE EXISTENCE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES 39
Two great wants, that of absolute truths, and that of absolute
truths that may not be chimeras. To satisfy these two wants is
the problem of the philosophy of our time.--Universal and
necessary principles.--Examples of different kinds of such
principles.--Distinction between universal and necessary
principles and general principles.--Experience alone is
incapable of explaining universal and necessary principles, and
also incapable of dispensing with them in order to arrive at the
knowledge of the sensible world.--Reason as being that faculty
of ours which discovers to us these principles.--The study of
universal and necessary principles introduces us to the highest
parts of philosophy.
LECTURE II.--ORIGIN OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES 51
_Resume_ of the preceding Lecture. A new question, that of the
origin of universal and necessary principles.--Danger of this
question, and its necessity.--Different forms under which truth
presents itself to us, and the successive order of these forms:
theory of spontaneity and reflection.--The primitive form of
principles; abstraction that disengages them from that form,
and gives them their actual form.--Examination and refutation of
the theory that attempts to explain the origin of principles by
an induction founded on particular notions.
LECTURE III.--ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES 65
Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism.--Recurrence to
the theory of spontaneity and reflection.
LECTURE IV.--GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES 75
Object of the lecture: What is the ultimate basis of absolute
truth?--Four hypotheses: Absolute truth may reside either in us,
in particular beings and the world, in itself, or in God. 1. We
perceive absolute truth, we do not constitute it. 2. Particular
beings participate in absolute truth, but do not explain it;
refutation of Aristotle. 3. Truth does not exist in itself;
defence of Plato. 4. Truth resides in God.--Plato; St.
Augustine; Descartes; Malebranche; Fenelon; Bossuet;
Leibnitz.--Truth the mediator between God and man.--Essential
distinctions.
LECTURE V.--ON MYSTICISM 102
Distinction between the philosophy that we profess and
mysticism. Mysticism consists in pretending to know God without
an intermediary.--Two sorts of mysticism.--Mysticism of
sentiment. Theory of sensibility. Two sensibilities--the one
external, the other internal, and corresponding to the soul as
external sensibility corresponds to nature.--Legitimate part of
sentiment.--Its aberrations.--Philosophical mysticism. Plotinus:
God, or absolute unity, perceived without an intermediary by
pure thought.--Ecstasy.--Mixture of superstition and abstraction
in mysticism.--Conclusion of the first part of the course.
PART SECOND.--THE BEAUTIFUL.
LECTURE VI.--THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN 123
The method that must govern researches on the beautiful and art
is, as in the investigation of the true, to commence by
psychology.--Faculties of the soul that unite in the perception
of the beautiful.--The senses give only the agreeable; reason
alone gives the idea of the beautiful.--Refutation of
empiricism, that confounds the agreeable and the
beautiful.--Pre-eminence of reason.--Sentiment of the beautiful;
different from sensation and desire.--Distinction between the
sentiment of the beautiful and that of the
sublime.--Imagination.--Influence of sentiment on
imagination.--Influence of imagination on sentiment.--Theory of
taste.
LECTURE VII.--THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS 140
Refutation of different theories on the nature of the beautiful:
the beautiful cannot be reduced to what is useful.--Nor to
convenience.--Nor to proportion.--Essential characters of the
beautiful.--Different kinds of beauties. The beautiful and the
sublime. Physical beauty. Intellectual beauty. Moral
beauty.--Ideal beauty: it is especially moral beauty.--God, the
first principle of the beautiful.--Theory of Plato.
LECTURE VIII.--ON ART 154
Genius:--its attribute is creative power.--Refutation of the
opinion that art is the imitation of nature--M. Emeric David,
and M. Quatremere de Quincy.--Refutation of the theory of
illusion. That dramatic art has not solely for its end to excite
the passions of terror and pity.--Nor even directly the moral
and religious sentiment.--The proper and direct object of art is
to produce the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful; this
idea and this sentiment purify and elevate the soul by the
affinity between the beautiful and the good, and by the relation
of ideal beauty to its principle, which is God.--True mission of
art.
LECTURE IX.--THE DIFFERENT ARTS 165
Expression is the general law of art.--Division of
arts.--Distinction between liberal arts and trades.--Eloquence
itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine
arts.--That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each
other, and usurping each other's means and
processes.--Classification of the arts:--its true principle is
expression.--Comparison of arts with each other.--Poetry the
first of arts.
LECTURE X.--FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 178
Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but
the different schools of art. Example:--French art in the
seventeenth century. French poetry:--Corneille. Racine. Moliere.
La Fontaine. Boileau.--Painting:--Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain.
Champagne.--Engraving.--Sculpture:--Sarrazin. The Anguiers.
Girardon. Pujet.--Le Notre.--Architecture.
PART THIRD.--THE GOOD.
LECTURE XI.--PRIMARY NOTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 215
Extent of the question of the good.--Position of the question
according to the psychological method: What is, in regard to the
good, the natural belief of mankind?--The natural beliefs of
humanity must not be sought in a pretended state of nature.--
Study of the sentiments and ideas of men in languages, in life,
in consciousness.--Disinterestedness and devotedness.--Liberty.--
Esteem and contempt.--Respect.--Admiration and indignation.--
Dignity.--Empire of opinion.--Ridicule.--Regret and repentance.--
Natural and necessary foundations of all justice.--Distinction
between fact and right.--Common sense, true and false philosophy.
LECTURE XII.--THE ETHICS OF INTEREST 229
Exposition of the doctrine of interest.--What there is of truth
in this doctrine.--Its defects. 1st. It confounds liberty and
desire, and thereby abolishes liberty. 2d. It cannot explain the
fundamental distinction between good and evil. 3d. It cannot
explain obligation and duty. 4th. Nor right. 5th. Nor the
principle of merit and demerit.--Consequences of the ethics of
interest: that they cannot admit a providence, and lead to
despotism.
LECTURE XIII.--OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES 255
The ethics of sentiment.--The ethics founded on the principle of
the interest of the greatest number.--The ethics founded on the
will of God alone.--The ethics founded on the punishments and
rewards of another life.
LECTURE XIV.--TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS 274
Description of the different facts that compose the moral
phenomena.--Analysis of each of these facts:--1st, Judgment and
idea of the good. That this judgment is absolute. Relation
between the true and the good.--2d, Obligation. Refutation of
the doctrine of Kant that draws the idea of the good from
obligation instead of founding obligation on the idea of the
good.--3d, Liberty, and the moral notions attached to the notion
of liberty.--4th, Principle of merit and demerit. Punishments
and rewards.--5th, Moral sentiments.--Harmony of all these facts
in nature and science.
LECTURE XV.--PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS 301
Application of the preceding principles.--General formula of
interest,--to obey reason.--Rule for judging whether an action
is or is not conformed to reason,--to elevate the motive of this
action into a maxim of universal legislation.--Individual
ethics. It is not towards the individual, but towards the moral
person that one is obligated. Principle of all individual
duties,--to respect and develop the moral person.--Social
ethics,--duties of justice and duties of charity.--Civil
society. Government. Law. The right to punish.
LECTURE XVI.--GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 325
Principle on which true theodicea rests. God the last foundation
of moral truth, of the good, and of the moral person.--Liberty
of God.--The divine justice and charity.--God the sanction of
the moral law. Immortality of the soul; argument from merit and
demerit; argument from the simplicity of the soul; argument from
final causes.--Religious sentiment.--Adoration.--Worship.--Moral
beauty of Christianity.
LECTURE XVII.--RESUME OF DOCTRINE 346
Review of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the
three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the
relation of each one of them to the modern school that has
recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated
it.--Experience and empiricism.--Reason and idealism.--Sentiment
and mysticism.--Theodicea. Defects of different known
systems.--The process that conducts to true theodicea, and the
character of certainty and reality that this process gives to
it.
APPENDIX 371
LECTURES
ON
THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE GOOD.
DISCOURSE
PRONOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE,
DECEMBER 4, 1817.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Spirit and general principles of the Course.--Object of the
Lectures of this year:--application of the principles of which
an exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good.
It seems natural that a century, in its beginning, should borrow its
philosophy from the century that preceded it. But, as free and
intelligent beings, we are not born merely to continue our predecessors,
but to increase their work, and also to do our own. We cannot accept
from them an inheritance except under the condition of improving it. Our
first duty is, then, to render to ourselves an account of the philosophy
of the eighteenth century; to recognize its character and its
principles, the problems which it agitated, and the solutions which it
gave of them; to discern, in fine, what it transmits to us of the true
and the productive, and what it also leaves of the sterile and the
false, in order that, with reflective choice, we may embrace the former
and reject the latter.[3] Placed at the entrance of the new times, let
us know, first of all, with what views we would occupy ourselves.
Moreover,--why should I not say it?--after two years of instruction, in
which the professor, in some sort, has been investigating himself, one
has a right to demand of him what he is; what are his most general
principles on all the essential parts of philosophic science; what flag,
in fine, in the midst of parties which contend with each other so
violently, he proposes for you, young men, who frequent this auditory,
and who are called upon to participate in a destiny still so uncertain
and so obscure in the nineteenth century, to follow.
* * * * *
It is not patriotism, it is a profound sentiment of truth and justice,
which makes us place the whole philosophy now expanded in the world
under the invocation of the name of Descartes. Yes, the whole of modern
philosophy is the work of this great man, for it owes to him the spirit
that animates it, and the method that constitutes its power.
After the downfall of scholasticism and the mournful disruptures of the
sixteenth century, the first object which the bold good sense of
Descartes proposed to itself was to make philosophy a human science,
like astronomy, physiology, medicine, subject to the same uncertainties
and to the same aberrations, but capable also of the same progress.
Descartes encountered the skepticism spread on every side in the train
of so many revolutions, ambitious hypotheses, born out of the first use
of an ill-regulated liberty, and the old formulas surviving the ruins of
scholasticism. In his courageous passion for truth, he resolved to
reject, provisorily at least, all the ideas that hitherto he had
received without controlling them, firmly decided not to admit any but
those which, after a serious examination, might appear to him evident.
But he perceived that there was one thing which he could not reject,
even provisorily, in his universal doubt,--that thing was the existence
itself of his doubt, that is to say, of his thought; for although all
the rest might be only an illusion, this fact, that he thought, could
not be an illusion. Descartes, therefore, stopped at this fact, of an
irresistible evidence, as at the first truth which he could accept
without fear. Recognizing at the same time that thought is the necessary
instrument of all the investigations which he might propose to himself,
as well as the instrument of the human race in the acquisition of its
natural knowledges,[4] he devoted himself to a regular study of it, to
the analysis of thought as the condition of all legitimate philosophy,
and upon this solid foundation he reared a doctrine of a character at
once certain and living, capable of resisting skepticism, exempt from
hypotheses, and affranchised from the formulas of the schools.
Thus the analysis of thought, and of the mind which is the subject of
it, that is to say, psychology, has become the point of departure, the
most general principle, the important method of modern philosophy.[5]
Nevertheless, it must indeed be owned, philosophy has not entirely lost,
and sometimes still retains, since Descartes and in Descartes himself,
its old habits. It rarely belongs to the same man to open and run a
career, and usually the inventor succumbs under the weight of his own
invention. So Descartes, after having so well placed the point of
departure for all philosophical investigation, more than once forgets
analysis, and returns, at least in form, to the ancient philosophy.[6]
The true method, again, is more than once effaced in the hands of his
first successors, under the always increasing influence of the
mathematical method.
Two periods may be distinguished in the Cartesian era,--one in which the
method, in its newness, is often misconceived; the other, in which one
is forced, at least, to re-enter the salutary way opened by Descartes.
To the first belong Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz himself; to the
second, the philosophers of the eighteenth century.
Without doubt Malebranche, upon some points, descended very far into
interior investigation; but most of the time he gave himself up to
wander in an imaginary world, and lost sight of the real world. It is
not a method that is wanting to Spinoza, but a good method; his error
consists in having applied to philosophy the geometrical method, which
proceeds by axioms, definitions, theorems, corollaries; no one has made
less use of the psychological method; that is the principle and the
condemnation of his system. The _Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement
Humain_ exhibit Leibnitz opposing observation to observation, analysis
to analysis; but his genius usually hovers over science, instead of
advancing in it step by step; hence the results at which he arrives are
often only brilliant hypotheses, for example, the pre-established
harmony, now relegated among the analogous hypotheses of occasional
causes and a plastic mediator. In general, the philosophy of the
seventeenth century, by not employing with sufficient rigor and firmness
the method with which Descartes had armed it, produced little else than
systems, ingenious without doubt, bold and profound, but often also
rash,--systems that have failed to keep their place in science.[7] In
fact, nothing is durable except that which is founded upon a sound
method; time destroys all the rest; time, which re-collects,
fecundates, aggrandizes the least germs of truth deposited in the
humblest analyses, strikes without pity, engulfs hypotheses, even those
of genius. Time takes a step, and arbitrary systems are overturned; the
statues of their authors alone remain standing over their ruins. The
task of the friend of truth is to search for the useful remains of them,
that survive and can serve for new and more solid constructions.
The philosophy of the eighteenth century opens the second period of the
Cartesian era; it proposed to itself to apply the method already
discovered and too much neglected,--it applied itself to the analysis of
thought. Disabused of ambitious and sterile attempts, and, like
Descartes, disdainful of the past, the eighteenth century dared to think
that every thing in philosophy was to be done over again, and that, in
order not to wander anew, it was necessary to set out with the modest
study of man. Instead, therefore, of building up all at once systems
risked upon the universality of things, it undertook to examine what man
knows, what he can know; it brought back entire philosophy to the study
of our faculties, as physics had just been brought back to the study of
the properties of bodies,--which was giving to philosophy, if not its
end, at least its true beginning.
The great schools which divide the eighteenth century are the English
and French school, the Scotch school, and the German school, that is to
say, the school of Locke and Condillac, that of Reid, that of Kant. It
is impossible to misconceive the common principle which animates them,
the unity of their method. When one examines with impartiality the
method of Locke, he sees that it consists in the analysis of thought;
and it is thereby that Locke is a disciple, not of Bacon and Hobbes, but
of our great countryman, Descartes.[8] To study the human understanding
as it is in each one of us, to recognize its powers, and also its
limits, is the problem which the English philosopher proposed to
himself, and which he attempted to solve. I do not wish to judge here
of the solution which he gave of this problem; I limit myself to
indicating clearly what was for him the fundamental problem. Condillac,
the French disciple of Locke, made himself everywhere the apostle of
analysis; and analysis was also in him, or at least should have been,
the study of thought. No philosopher, not even Spinoza, has wandered
farther than Condillac[9] from the true experimental method, and has
strayed farther on the route of abstractions, even verbal abstractions;
but, strange enough, no one is severer than he against hypotheses, save
that of the statue-man. The author of the _Traite des Sensations_ has
very unfaithfully practised analysis; but he speaks of it without
cessation. The Scotch school combats Locke and Condillac; it combats
them, but with their own arms, with the same method which it pretends to
apply better.[10] In Germany, Kant wishes to replace in light and honor
the superior element of human consciousness, left in the shade, and
decried by the philosophy of his times; and for that end, what does he
do? He undertakes a profound examination of the faculty of knowing; the
title of his principal work is, _Critique of Pure Reason_;[11] it is a
critique, that is to say again, an analysis; the method of Kant is then
no other than that of Locke and Reid. Follow it until it reaches the
hands of Fichte,[12] the successor of Kant, who died but a few years
since; there, again, the analysis of thought is given as the foundation
of philosophy. Kant was so firmly established in the subject of
knowledge, that he could scarcely go out of it--that, in fact, he never
did legitimately go out of it. Fichte plunged into the subject of
knowledge so deeply that he buried himself in it, and absorbed in the
human _me_ all existences, as well as all sciences--sad shipwreck of
analysis, which signalizes at once its greatest effort and its rock!
The same spirit, therefore, governs all the schools of the eighteenth
century; this century disdains arbitrary formulas; it has a horror for
hypotheses, and attaches itself, or pretends to attach itself, to the
observation of facts, and particularly to the analysis of thought.
Let us acknowledge with freedom and with grief, that the eighteenth
century applied analysis to all things without pity and without measure.
It cited before its tribunal all doctrines, all sciences; neither the
metaphysics of the preceding age, with their imposing systems, nor the
arts with their prestige, nor the governments with their ancient
authority, nor the religions with their majesty,--nothing found favor
before it. Although it spied abysses at the bottom of what it called
philosophy, it threw itself into them with a courage which is not
without grandeur; for the grandeur of man is to prefer what he believes
to be truth to himself. The eighteenth century let loose tempests.
Humanity no more progressed, except over ruins. The world was again
agitated in that state of disorder in which it had already been once
seen, at the decline of the ancient beliefs, and before the triumphs of
Christianity, when men wandered through all contraries, without power to
rest anywhere, given up to every disquietude of spirit, to every misery
of heart, fanatical and atheistical, mystical and incredulous,
voluptuous and sanguinary.[13] But if the philosophy of the eighteenth
century has left us a vacuity for an inheritance, it has also left us an
energetic and fecund love of truth. The eighteenth century was the age
of criticism and destructions; the nineteenth should be that of
intelligent rehabilitations. It belongs to it to find in a profounder
analysis of thought the principles of the future, and with so many
remains to raise, in fine, an edifice that reason may be able to
acknowledge.
A feeble but zealous workman, I come to bring my stone; I come to do my
work; I come to extract from the midst of the ruins what has not
perished, what cannot perish. This course is at once a return to the
past, an effort towards the future. I propose neither to attack nor to
defend any of the three great schools that divide the eighteenth
century. I will not attempt to perpetuate and envenom the warfare which
divides them, complacently designating the differences which separate
them, without taking an account of the community of method which unites
them. I come, on the contrary, a devoted soldier of philosophy, a common
friend of all the schools which it has produced, to offer to all the
words of peace.
The unity of modern philosophy, as we have said, resides in its method,
that is to say, in the analysis of thought--a method superior to its own
results, for it contains in itself the means of repairing the errors
that escape it, of indefinitely adding new riches to riches already
acquired. The physical sciences themselves have no other unity. The
great physicians who have appeared within two centuries, although united
amongst themselves by the same point of departure and by the same end,
generally accepted, have nevertheless proceeded with independence and in
ways often opposite. Time has re-collected in their different theories
the part of truth that produced them and sustained them; it has
neglected their errors from which they were unable to extricate
themselves, and uniting all the discoveries worthy of the name, it has
little by little formed of them a vast and harmonious whole. Modern
philosophy has also been enriched during the two centuries with a
multitude of exact observations, of solid and profound theories, for
which it is indebted to the common method. What has hindered her from
progressing at an equal pace with the physical sciences whose sister she
is? She has been hindered by not understanding better her own interests,
by not tolerating diversities that are inevitable, that are even
useful, and by not profiting by the truths which all the particular
doctrines contain, in order to deduce from them a general doctrine,
which is successively and perpetually purified and aggrandized.
Not, indeed, that I would recommend that blind syncretism which
destroyed the school of Alexandria, which attempted to bring contrary
systems together by force; what I recommend is an enlightened
eclecticism, which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all
schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true, and neglects
what in them is false. Since the spirit of party has hitherto succeeded
so ill with us, let us try the spirit of conciliation. Human thought is
immense. Each school has looked at it only from its own point of view.
This point of view is not false, but it is incomplete, and moreover, it
is exclusive. It expresses but one side of truth, and rejects all the
others. The question is not to decry and recommence the work of our
predecessors, but to perfect it in reuniting, and in fortifying by that
reunion, all the truths scattered in the different systems which the
eighteenth century has transmitted to us.
Such is the principle to which we have been conducted by two years of
study upon modern philosophy, from Descartes to our times. This
principle, badly disengaged at first, we applied for the first time
within the narrowest limits, and only to theories relative to the
question of personal existence.[14] We then extended it to a greater
number of questions and theories; we touched the principal points of the
intellectual and moral order,[15] and at the same time that we were
continuing the investigations of our illustrious predecessor, M.
Royer-Collard, upon the schools of France, England, and Scotland, we
commenced the study new among us, the difficult but interesting and
fecund study, of the philosophy of Koenigsberg. We can at the present
time, therefore, embrace all the schools of the eighteenth century, and
all the problems which they agitated.
Philosophy, in all times, turns upon the fundamental ideas of the true,
the beautiful, and the good. The idea of the true, philosophically
developed, is psychology, logic, metaphysic; the idea of the good is
private and public morals; the idea of the beautiful is that science
which, in Germany, is called aesthetics, the details of which pertain to
the criticism of literature, the criticism of arts, but whose general
principles have always occupied a more or less considerable place in the
researches, and even in the teaching of philosophers, from Plato and
Aristotle to Hutcheson and Kant.
Upon these essential points which constitute the entire domain of
philosophy, we will successively interrogate the principal schools of
the eighteenth century.
When we examine them all with attention, we can easily reduce them to
two,--one of which, in the analysis of thought, the common subject of
all their works, gives to sensation an excessive part; the other of
which, in this same analysis, going to the opposite extreme, deduces
consciousness almost wholly from a faculty different from that of
sensation--reason. The first of these schools is the empirical school,
of which the father, or rather the wisest representative, is Locke, and
Condillac the extreme representative; the second is the spiritualistic
or rationalistic school, as it is called, which reckons among its
illustrious interpreters Reid, who is the most irreproachable, and Kant,
who is the most systematic. Surely there is truth in these two schools,
and truth is a good which must be taken wherever one finds it. We
willingly admit, with the empirical school, that the senses have not
been given us in vain; that this admirable organization which elevates
us above all other animate beings, is a rich and varied instrument,
which it would be folly to neglect. We are convinced that the spectacle
of the world is a permanent source of sound and sublime instruction.
Upon this point neither Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor Locke, has in us an
adversary, but a disciple. We acknowledge, or rather we proclaim, that
in the analysis of human knowledge, it is necessary to assign to the
senses an important part. But when the empirical school pretends that
all that passes beyond the reach of the senses is a chimera, then we
abandon it, and go over to the opposite school. We profess to believe,
for example, that, without an agreeable impression, never should we have
conceived the beautiful, and that, notwithstanding, the beautiful is not
merely the agreeable; that, thank heaven, happiness is usually added to
virtue, but that the idea itself of virtue is essentially different from
that of happiness. On this point we are openly of the opinion of Reid
and Kant. We have also established, and will again establish, that the
reason of man is in possession of principles which sensation precedes
but does not explain, and which are directly suggested to us by the
power of reason alone. We will follow Kant thus far, but not farther.
Far from following him, we will combat him, when, after having
victoriously defended the great principles of every kind against
empiricism, he strikes them with sterility, in pretending that they have
no value beyond the inclosure of the reason which possesses them,
condemning also to impotence that same reason which he has just elevated
so high, and opening the way to a refined and learned skepticism which,
after all, ends at the same abyss with ordinary skepticism.
You perceive that we shall be by turns with Locke, with Reid, and with
Kant, in that just and strong measure which is called eclecticism.
Eclecticism is in our eyes the true historical method, and it has for us
all the importance of the history of philosophy; but there is something
which we place above the history of philosophy, and, consequently, above
eclecticism,--philosophy itself.
The history of philosophy does not carry its own light with it, it is
not its own end. How could eclecticism, which has no other field than
history, be our only, our primary, object?
It is, doubtless, just, it is of the highest utility, to discriminate in
each system what there is true in it from what there is false in it;
first, in order to appreciate this system rightly; then, in order to
render the false of no account, to disengage and re-collect the true,
and thus to enrich and aggrandize philosophy by history. But you
conceive that we must already know what truth is, in order to recognize
it, and to distinguish it from the error with which it is mixed; so that
the criticism of systems almost demands a system, so that the history of
philosophy is constrained to first borrow from philosophy the light
which it must one day return to it with usury.
In fine, the history of philosophy is only a branch, or rather an
instrument, of philosophical science. Surely it is the interest which we
feel for philosophy that alone attaches us to its history; it is the
love of truth which makes us everywhere pursue its vestiges, and
interrogate with a passionate curiosity those who before us have also
loved and sought truth.
Thus philosophy is at once the supreme object and the torch of the
history of philosophy. By this double title it has a right to preside
over our instruction.
In regard to this, one word of explanation, I beg you.
He who is speaking before you to-day is, it is true, officially charged
only with the course of the history of philosophy; in that is our task,
and in that, once more, our guide shall be eclecticism.[16] But, we
confess, if philosophy has not the right to present itself here in some
sort on the first plan; if it should appear only behind its history, it
in reality holds dominion; and to it all our wishes, as well as all our
efforts, are related. We hold, doubtless, in great esteem, both Brucker
and Tennemann,[17] so wise, so judicious; nevertheless our models, our
veritable masters, always present to our thought, are, in antiquity,
Plato and Socrates, among the moderns, Descartes, and, why should I
hesitate to say it, among us, and in our times, the illustrious man who
has been pleased to call us to this chair. M. Royer-Collard was also
only a professor of the history of philosophy; but he rightly pretended
to have an opinion in philosophy; he served a cause which he has
transmitted to us, and we will serve it in our turn.
This great cause is known to you; it is that of a sound and generous
philosophy, worthy of our century by the severity of its methods, and
answering to the immortal wants of humanity, setting out modestly from
psychology, from the humble study of the human mind, in order to elevate
itself to the highest regions, and to traverse metaphysics, aesthetics,
theodicea, morals, and politics.
Our enterprise is not then simply to renew the history of philosophy by
eclecticism; we also wish, we especially wish, and history well
understood, thanks to eclecticism, will therein powerfully assist us, to
deduce from the study of systems, their strifes, and even their ruins, a
system which may be proof against criticism, and which can be accepted
by your reason, and also by your heart, noble youth of the nineteenth
century!
In order to fulfil this great object, which is our veritable mission to
you, we shall dare this year, for the first and for the last time, to go
beyond the narrow limits which are imposed upon us. In the history of
the philosophy of the eighteenth century, we have resolved to leave a
little in the shade the history of philosophy, in order to make
philosophy itself appear, and while exhibiting to you the distinctive
traits of the principal doctrines of the last century, to expose to you
the doctrine which seems to us adapted to the wants and to the spirit of
our times, and still, to explain it to you briefly, but in its full
extent, instead of dwelling upon some one of its parts, as hitherto we
have done. With years we will correct, we will task ourselves to
aggrandize and elevate our work. To-day we present it you very imperfect
still, but established upon foundations which we believe solid, and
already stamped with a character that will not change.
You will here see, then, brought together in a short space, our
principles, our processes, our results. We ardently desire to recommend
them to you, young men, who are the hope of science as well as of your
country. May we at least be able, in the vast career which we have to
run, to meet in you the same kindness which hitherto has sustained us.
FOOTNOTES: