question is to know whether the idea of subject, of substance, precedes
or follows the exercise of the principle. Upon what ground could the
idea of substance be anterior to the principle that every quality
supposes a substance? Upon the ground alone that substance be the object
of self-observation, as cause is said to be. When I produce a certain
effect, I may perceive myself in action and as cause; in that case,
there would be no need of the intervention of any principle; but it is
not, it cannot be, the same, when the question is concerning the
substance which is the basis of the phenomena of consciousness, of our
qualities, our acts, our faculties even; for this substance is not
directly observable; it does not perceive itself, it conceives itself.
Consciousness perceives sensation, volition, thought, it does not
perceive their subject. Who has ever perceived the soul? Has it not been
necessary, in order to attain this invisible essence, to set out from a
principle which has the power to bind the visible to the invisible,
phenomenon to being, to wit, the principle of substances?[33] The idea
of substance is necessarily posterior to the application of the
principle, and, consequently, it cannot explain its formation.
Let us be well understood. We do not mean to say that we have in the
mind the principle of substances before perceiving a phenomenon, quite
ready to apply the principle to the phenomenon, when it shall present
itself; we only say that it is impossible for us to perceive a
phenomenon without conceiving at the same instant a substance, that is
to say, to the power of perceiving a phenomenon, either by the senses or
by consciousness, is joined that of conceiving the substance in which it
inheres. The facts thus take place:--the perception of phenomena and the
conception of the substance which is their basis are not successive,
they are simultaneous. Before this impartial analysis fall at once two
equal and opposite errors--one, that experience, exterior or interior,
can beget principles; the other, that principles precede experience.[34]
To sum up, the pretension of explaining principles by the ideas which
they contain, is a chimerical one. In supposing that all the ideas which
enter into principles are anterior to them, it is necessary to show how
principles are deduced from these ideas,--which is the first and radical
difficulty. Moreover, it is not true that in all cases ideas precede
principles, for often principles precede ideas,--a second difficulty
equally insurmountable. But whether ideas are anterior or posterior to
principles, principles are always independent of them; they surpass them
by all the superiority of universal and necessary principles over simple
ideas.[35]
We should, perhaps, beg your pardon for the austerity of this lecture.
But philosophical questions must be treated philosophically: it does not
belong to us to change their character. On other subjects, another
language. Psychology has its own language, the entire merit of which is
a severe precision, as the highest law of psychology itself is the
shunning of every hypothesis, and an inviolable respect for facts. This
law we have religiously followed. While investigating the origin of
universal and necessary principles, we have especially endeavored not to
destroy the thing to be explained by a systematic explanation. Universal
and necessary principles have come forth in their integrity from our
analysis. We have given the history of the different forms which they
successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they
remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter
spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to
particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon
themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or
abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality
and their necessity are manifest. Their certainty is the same under all
their forms, in all their applications; it has neither generation nor
origin; it is not born such or such a day, and it does not increase with
time, for it knows no degrees. We have not commenced by believing a
little in the principle of causality, of substances, of time, of space,
of the infinite, etc., then believing a little more, then believing
wholly. These principles have been, from the beginning, what they will
be in the end, all-powerful, necessary, irresistible. The conviction
which they give is always absolute, only it is not always accompanied by
a clear consciousness. Leibnitz himself has no more confidence in the
principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient
reason, than the most ignorant of men; but the latter applies these
principles without reflecting on their power, by which he is
unconsciously governed, whilst Leibnitz is astonished at their power,
studies it, and for all explanation, refers it to the human mind, and to
the nature of things, that is to say, he elevates, to borrow the fine
expression of M. Royer-Collard,[36] the ignorance of the mass of men to
its highest source. Such is, thank heaven, the only difference that
separates the peasant from the philosopher, in regard to those great
principles of every kind which, in one way or another, discover to men
the same truths indispensable to their physical, intellectual, and moral
existence, and, in their ephemeral life, on the circumscribed point of
space and time where fortune has thrown them, reveal to them something
of the universal, the necessary, and the infinite.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] First Series, vol. iv., lectures 1, 2, and 3.
[26] _Ibid._, vol. iv., etc.
[27] _Ibid._, vol. v., lecture 8.
[28] We have everywhere called to mind, maintained, and confirmed by the
errors of those who have dared to break it, this rule of true
psychological analysis, that, before passing to the question of the
origin of an idea, a notion, a belief, any principle whatever, the
actual characters of this idea, this notion, this belief, this
principle, must have been a long time studied and well established, with
the firm resolution of not altering them under any pretext whatever in
wishing to explain them. We believe that we have, as Leibnitz says,
settled this point. See 1st Series, vol. i., Programme of the Course of
1817, and the Opening Discourse; vol. iii., lecture 1, _Locke_; lecture
2, _Condillac_; lecture 3, almost entire, and lecture 8, p. 260; 2d
Series, vol. iii., _Examen du Systeme de Locke_, lecture 16, p. 77-87;
3d Series, vol. iv., _Examination of the Lectures of M. Loremquiere_, p.
268.
[29] This theory of spontaneity and of reflection, which in our view is
the key to so many difficulties, continually recurs in our works. One
may see, vol. i. of the 1st Series, in a programme of the Course of
1817, and in a fragment entitled _De la Spontaneite et de la Reflexion_;
vol. iv. of the same Series, Examination of Reid's Philosophy, _passim_;
vol. v., Examination of Kant's System, lecture 8; 2d Series, vol. i.,
_passim_; vol. iii., Lectures on Judgment; 3d Series, _Fragments
Philosophiques_, vol. iv., preface of the first edition, p. 37, etc.; it
will be found in different lectures of this volume, among others, in the
third, On the value of Universal and Necessary Principles; in the fifth,
On Mysticism; and in the eleventh, Primary Data of Common Sense.
[30] On immediate abstraction and comparative abstraction, see 1st
Series, vol. i., Programme of the Course of 1817, and everywhere in our
other Courses.
[31] On M. de Biran, on his merits and defects, see our _Introduction_
at the head of his Works.
[32] See lecture 1.
[33] See vol. i. of the 1st Series, course of 1816, and 2d Series, vol.
iii., lecture 18, p. 140-146.
[34] We have developed this analysis, and elucidated these results in
the 17th lecture of vol. ii. of the 2d Series.
[35] We have already twice recurred, and more in detail, to the
impossibility of legitimately explaining universal and necessary
principles by any association or induction whatever, founded upon any
particular idea, 2d Series, vol. iii., _Examen du Systeme de Locke_,
lecture 19, p. 166; and 3d Series, vol. iv., _Introduction aux Oeuvres
de M. de Biran_, p. 319. We have also made known the opinion of Reid,
1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 489. Finally, the profoundest of
Reid's disciples, the most enlightened judge that we know of things
philosophical, Sir W. Hamilton, professor of logic in the University of
Edinburgh, has not hesitated to adopt the conclusions of our discussion,
to which he is pleased to refer his readers:--_Discussions on Philosophy
and Literature, etc._, by Sir William Hamilton, London, 1852. Appendix
I, p. 588.
[36] _Oeuvres de Reid_, vol. iv., p. 435. "When we revolt against
primitive facts, we equally misconceive the constitution of our
intelligence and the end of philosophy. Is explaining a fact any thing
else than deriving it from another fact, and if this kind of explanation
is to terminate at all, does it not suppose facts inexplicable? The
science of the human mind will have been carried to the highest degree
of perfection it can attain, it will be complete, when it shall know how
to derive ignorance from the most elevated source."
LECTURE III.
ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.
Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism.--Recurrence to
the theory of spontaneity and reflection.
After having recognized the existence of universal and necessary
principles, their actual characters, and their primitive characters, we
have to examine their value, and the legitimacy of the conclusions which
may be drawn from them,--we pass from psychology to logic.
We have defended against Locke and his school the necessity and
universality of certain principles. We now come to Kant, who recognizes
with us these principles, but confines their power within the limits of
the subject that conceives them, and, so far as subjective, declares
them to be without legitimate application to any object, that is to say,
without objectivity, to use the language of the philosopher of
Koenigsberg, which, right or wrong, begins to pass into the
philosophic language of Europe.
Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles
that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule
our actions,--have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they
only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it
is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality
a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every
succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality
has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a
soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness
attests. If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the
external world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality,
it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over
each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our
senses are destitute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul.
Nothing exists; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up
to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where,
since in reality there is neither time nor space. Since the principle of
sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in
possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this
curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons
which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which
correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least
correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of
causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are
only our modes of conception, God, whom all these principles reveal to
us, will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes
with all the others in the breath of the Critique.
Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of
universal and necessary principles; but an involuntary disciple of his
century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he
places himself in the attitude of an adversary, he makes to it the
immense concession that these principles are applied only to the
impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions
in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond
experience, their power expires. This concession has ruined the whole
enterprise of the German philosopher.
This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the
skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meeting it. He
thought to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions
do not extend themselves beyond the inclosure of the human mind; and at
the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human
mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which
direct it. But, according to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard,
"one does not encounter skepticism,--as soon as he has penetrated into
the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe
circumspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only
permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the employment and
legitimate applications of our different faculties; but when it is
applied to the legitimacy itself of our faculties, it no longer
elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. In fact, with what would you have
reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question? Kant
himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to
restrain and save, at least in morals, and he put German philosophy upon
a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great
man--for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his
genius, merit for him this name--undertaken with Hume an ingenious and
learned controversy; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and
Hume remains master of the field of battle.
What matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human
mind universal and necessary principles, if these principles only serve
to classify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to
ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality? The
human mind is, then, as Kant himself well expressed it, like a banker
who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values;--he
possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that
conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the
human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence
projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and
impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.[37]
The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to
Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy
can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of
facts; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the
explanation destroy what it pretends to explain; otherwise it does not
explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question
to explain is the belief of the human mind, and the system of Kant
annihilates it.
In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and necessary
principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:--we believe
them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no minds of
ours to conceive them. We regard them as independent of us; they seem to
us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth
that is in them. So, in order to express faithfully what passes within
us, it would be necessary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and
instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws
of our mind, therefore they have no absolute value out of mind; we
should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in
themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them.
And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms
itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of
principles. We have established[38] that the necessity of believing
supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of
power to do it; but before all reflection, intelligence spontaneously
seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, is not the
sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity
of which the German school speaks so much.
Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which
Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflective and
somewhat scholastic habits held him captive.
Is it true that there is no judgment, even affirmative in form, which is
not mixed with negation?
It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time
negative; in fact, to affirm that a thing exists, is to deny its
non-existence; as every negative judgment is at the same time
affirmative; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its
non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its
form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each
other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of
the thing in question, supposes some exercise of reflection, in the
course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a
judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment
seems to be in its necessity; and then recurs the celebrated
objection:--if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not
to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and
your own ways of conceiving; it is the human mind that transports its
laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its
own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity.
We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty:--it is not
true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the
reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative
judgment, and reciprocally. But is reason exercised only on the
condition of reflection? Is there not a primitive affirmation which
implies no negation? As we often act without deliberating on our action,
without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity
that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective; so
reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error.
Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly
different from it. We do not find, then, in any primitive fact, that
every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not.
We thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation
without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the
legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration
of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet.
Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing. If one contradicts this
primitive affirmation, the faculty of knowing falls back up upon itself,
examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived;
it cannot; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first; it adheres to
the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment
that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this
same truth; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and
subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth
could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and
there triumphing over doubt; as though reflective evidence of it were
the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it
were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The
skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is
driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the
distinction between spontaneous reason and reflective reason. Reflection
is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with
doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and
peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the
sole reason that truth is truth, and because God has made the reason to
perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear.
Analyze, in fact, with impartiality, the fact of spontaneous
apperception, and you will be sure that it has nothing subjective in it
except what it is impossible it should not have, to wit, the _me_ which is
mingled with the fact without constituting it. The _me_ inevitably enters
into all knowledge, since it is the subject of it. Reason directly
perceives truth; but it is in some sort augmented, in consciousness, and
then we have knowledge. Consciousness is there its witness, and not its
judge; its only judge is reason, a faculty subjective and objective
together, according to the language of Germany, which immediately
attains absolute truth, almost without personal intervention on our
part, although it might not enter into exercise if personality did not
precede or were not added to it.[39]
Spontaneous apperception constitutes natural logic. Reflective
conception is the foundation of logic properly so called. One is based
upon itself, _verum index sui_; the other is based upon the
impossibility of the reason, in spite of all its efforts, not betaking
itself to truth and believing in it. The form of the first is an
affirmation accompanied with an absolute security, and without the least
suspicion of a possible negation; the form of the second is reflective
affirmation, that is to say, the impossibility of denying and the
necessity of affirming. The idea of negation governs ordinary logic,
whose affirmations are only the laborious product of two negations.
Natural logic proceeds by affirmations stamped with a simple faith,
which instinct alone produces and sustains.
Now, will Kant reply that this reason, which is much purer than that
which he has known and described, which is wholly pure, which is
conceived as something disengaged from reflection, from volition, from
every thing that constitutes personality, is nevertheless personal,
since we have a consciousness of it, and since it is thus marked with
subjectivity? To this argument we have nothing to respond, except that
it is destroyed in the excess of its pretension. In fact, if, that
reason may not be subjective, we must in no way participate in it, and
must not have even a consciousness of its exercise, then there is no
means of ever escaping this reproach of subjectivity, and the ideal of
objectivity which Kant pursued is a chimerical, extravagant ideal,
above, or rather beneath, all true intelligence, all reason worthy the
name; for it is demanding that this intelligence and this reason should
cease to have consciousness of themselves, whilst this is precisely what
characterizes intelligence and reason.[40] Does Kant mean, then, that
reason, in order to possess a really objective power, cannot make its
appearance in a particular subject, that it must be, for example, wholly
outside of the subject which I am? Then it is nothing for me; a reason
that is not mine, that, under the pretext of being universal, infinite,
and absolute in its essence, does not fall under the perception of my
consciousness, is for me as if it were not. To wish that reason should
wholly cease to be subjective, is to demand something impossible to God
himself. No, God himself can understand nothing except in knowing it,
with his intelligence and with the consciousness of this intelligence.
There is subjectivity, then, in divine knowledge itself; if this
subjectivity involves skepticism, God is also condemned to skepticism,
and he can no more escape from it than men; or indeed, if this is too
ridiculous, if the knowledge which God has of the exercise of his own
intelligence does not involve skepticism for him, neither do the
knowledge which we have of the exercise of our intelligence, and the
subjectivity attached to this knowledge, involve it for us.