absolute being. By dint of wishing to free God from all the conditions
of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of
existence itself; one has such a fear that the infinite may have
something in common with the finite, that he does not dare to recognize
that being is common to both, save difference of degree, as if all that
is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute
unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence; but,
once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is
destitute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What
constitutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is
itself only on the condition of not being another; it cannot but have
characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an
element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in
determination, it follows that God is the most determinate of beings.
Aristotle is much more Platonic than Plotinus, when he says that God is
the thought of thought,[89] that he is not a simple power, but a power
effectively acting, meaning thereby that God to be perfect, ought to
have nothing in himself that is not completed. To finite nature it
belongs to be, in a certain sense, indeterminate, since being finite, it
has always in itself powers that are not realized; this indetermination
diminishes as these powers are realized. So true divine unity is not
abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every
thing is accomplished. At the summit of existence, still more than at
its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed,
every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of
determinations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection
distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not
necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us,
for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest
development divide the _me_ and alter the identity and the unity of the
person? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because
he possesses sensibility, reason, and will? No, surely. It is the same
with God. Not having employed a sufficient psychology, Alexandrian
mysticism imagined that diversity of attributes is incompatible with
simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure
essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared
that God would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his
perfections; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation,
creation as a fall; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is
forced to put in God what it calls failings, not having seen that these
pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfection.
The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the
condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without absolute unity as
the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of
knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man;
for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is
consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge
impossible; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of
knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the
simplest, most immediate, and most determinate knowledge.[90]
The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the profoundest of all
known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself,
it seems very far from popular superstitions; and yet the school of
Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two
things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same
principle, to the pretension of directly perceiving what inevitably
escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to
God by ecstasy; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by
the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the
foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily
spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tyanus is a
popular Alexandrianist, and Jamblicus is Plotinus become a priest,
mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles; the
ancient worship would have its own miracles, and philosophers boasted
that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had
demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders; the gods
were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy
for the crowd.
At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each
other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most
subtile idealism is taught, are not far from pagodas of the most abject
idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao-tseu[91] is read, an
indefinable God is taught, without essential and determinate attributes;
the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or
such a manifestation of this God, who, not having a form that belongs to
him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is
necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of
water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under
Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of
Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns
obscuring the _Timaeus_ and the _Republic_ by subtile commentaries, and
exhibiting to the eyes of the multitude sometimes the sacred vale,[92]
sometimes the shrine of the good goddess,[93] and in either function, as
priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under taking to
ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in
some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending
himself to the most shameless superstitions.
When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a
discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many
times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all
the extravagances of the religions of nature! It was to appear
especially at the _renaissance_ of the schools and of the genius of
Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the human mind had broken with
the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern
philosophy.[94] The Paracelsuses and the Von Helmonts renewed the
Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical
knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method,
altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in
the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his
own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the
way to those senseless[95] persons who contest with me in the morning
the solidest and best-established proofs of the existence of the soul
and God, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than
with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make
me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs,
promising me a superhuman science, on the condition of first losing
consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that constitutes me an
intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of
knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a
marvellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even
able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me:--a mysticism
at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and
physiology; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the
Alexandrine ecstasy; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a
little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of
ambition and impotence.
This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the conditions imposed
upon human nature. Charron first said, and after him Pascal repeated
it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for
all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what
it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses,
than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them
to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and
substantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always
interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment accompanies and
vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound
these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment.
Between a finite being like man and God, absolute and infinite
substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe
open to our gaze, and of those marvellous truths which reason conceives,
but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The
only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of
beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the
aid of a divine intermediary; that is to say, to consecrate ourselves to
the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the
contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, especially to the
practice of the good.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] See the preceding lectures.
[72] See the _Phaedrus_ and the _Banquet_, vol. vii. of our translation.
[73] We shall not be accused of perverting the holy Scriptures by these
analogies, for we give them only as analogies, and St. Augustine and
Bossuet are full of such.
[74] See part ii., _The Beautiful_, lecture 6, and part iii., lecture
13, on the _Morals of Sentiment_. See also our _Pascal_, preface of the
last edition, p. 8, etc., vol. i. of the 4th Series.
[75] See the admirable work of Bossuet, _Instruction sur les etats
d'Oraison_.
[76] Lecture 4.
[77] See especially in our writings the regular and detailed refutation
of the double extravagance of considering substance apart from its
determinations and its qualities, or of considering its qualities and
its facilities apart from the being that possesses them. 1st Series,
vol. iii., lecture 3, _On Condillac_, and vol. v., lectures 5 and 6, _On
Kant_. We say, the same Series, vol. iv., p. 56: "There are philosophers
beyond the Rhine, who, to appear very profound, are not contented with
qualities and phenomena, and aspire to pure substance, to being in
itself. The problem stated as follows, is quite insoluble: the knowledge
of such a substance is impossible, for this very simple reason, that
such a substance does not exist. Being in itself, _das Ding in sich_,
which Kant seeks, escapes him, and this does not humiliate Kant and
philosophy; for there is no being in itself. The human mind may form to
itself an abstract and general idea of being, but this idea has no real
object in nature. All being is determinate, if it is real; and to be
determinate is to possess certain modes of being, transitory and
accidental, or constant and essential. Knowledge of being in itself is
then not merely interdicted to the human mind; it is contrary to the
nature of things. At the other extreme of metaphysics is a powerless
psychology, which, by fear of a hollow ontology, is condemned to
voluntary ignorance. We are not able, say these philosophers, Mr. Dugald
Stewart, for example, to attain being in itself; it is permitted us to
know only phenomena and qualities: so that, in order not to wander in
search of the substance of the soul, they do not dare affirm its
spirituality, and devote themselves to the study of its different
faculties. Equal error, equal chimera! There are no more qualities
without being, than being without qualities. No being is without its
determinations, and reciprocally its determinations are not without it.
To consider the determinations of being independently of the being which
possesses them, is no longer to observe; it is to abstract, to make an
abstraction quite as extravagant as that of being considered
independently of its qualities."
[78] On the school of Alexandria, see 2d Series, vol. ii., _Sketch of a
General History of Philosophy_, lecture 8, p. 211, and 3d Series, vol.
i., _passim_.
[79] See the previous lecture.
[80] 3d Series, vol. i., _Ancient Philosophy_, article _Xenophanes_, and
article _Zeno_.
[81] _The Sophist_, vol. xi. of our translation, p. 261.
[82] _Timaeus_, vol. xii., p. 117.
[83] _Republic_, book vii., p. 70 of vol. x.
[84] _Phaedrus_, vol. vi., p. 55.
[85] _The Sophist_, p. 261, 262. The following little-known and decisive
passage, which we have translated for the first time, must be
cited:--"_Stranger._ But what, by Zeus! shall we be so easily persuaded
that in reality, motion, life, soul, intelligence, do not belong to
absolute being? that this being neither lives nor thinks, that this
being remains immobile, immutable, without having part in august and
holy intelligence?--_Theatetus._ That would be consenting, dear Eleatus,
to a very strange assertion.--_Stranger._ Or, indeed, shall we accord to
this being intelligence while we refuse him life?--_Theatetus._ That
cannot be.--_Stranger._ Or, again, shall we say that there is in him
intelligence and life, but that it is not in a soul that he possesses
them?--_Theatetus._ And how could he possess them otherwise?--_Stranger._
In fine, that, endowed with intelligence, soul, and life, all animated
as he is, he remains incomplete immobility.--_Theatetus._ All that seems
to me unreasonable."
[86] _Timaeus_, p. 119: "Let us say that the cause which led the supreme
ordainer to produce and compose this universe was, that he was good."
[87] _Bouquet_, discourse of Diotimus, vol. vi., and the 2d part of this
vol., _The Beautiful_, lecture 7.
[88] _Republic._ _Ibid._
[89] Book xii. of the _Metaphysics_. _De la Metaphysique d'Aristotle_,
2d edition, p. 200, etc.
[90] On this fundamental point, see lecture 3, in this vol.--2d Series,
vol. i., lecture 5, p. 97. "The peculiarity of intelligence is not the
power of knowing, but knowing in fact. On what condition is there
intelligence for us? It is not enough that there should be in us a
principle of intelligence; this principle must be developed and
exercised, and take itself as the object of its intelligence. The
necessary condition of intelligence is consciousness--that is to say,
difference. There can be consciousness only where there are several
terms, one of which perceives the other, and at the same time perceives
itself. That is knowing, and knowing self; that is intelligence.
Intelligence without consciousness is the abstract possibility of
intelligence, it is not real intelligence. Transfer this from human
intelligence to divine intelligence, that is to say, refer ideas, I mean
ideas in the sense of Plato, of St. Augustine, of Bossuet, of Leibnitz,
to the only intelligence to which they can belong, and you will have, if
I may thus express myself, the life of the divine intelligence ...,
etc."
[91] Vol. ii. of the 2d Series, _Sketch of a General History of
Philosophy_, lectures 5 and 6, _On the Indian Philosophy_.
[92] See the _Euthyphron_, vol. i. of our translation.
[93] Lucien, Apuleius, Lucius of Patras.
[94] 2d Series, vol. ii., _Sketch of a General History of Philosophy_,
lecture 10, _On the Philosophy of the Renaissance_.
[95] One was then ardently occupied with magnetism, and more than a
magnetizer, half a materialist, half a visionary, pretended to convert
us to a system of perfect clairvoyance of soul, obtained by means of
artificial sleep. Alas! the same follies are now renewed. Conjunctions
are the fashion. Spirits are interrogated, and they respond! Only let
there be consciousness that one does not interrogate, and superstition
alone counterpoises skepticism.
PART SECOND
THE BEAUTIFUL.
LECTURE VI.
THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN.
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.
Let us recall in a few words the results at which we have arrived.
Two exclusive schools are opposed to each other in the eighteenth
century; we have combated both, and each by the other. To empiricism we
have opposed the insufficiency of sensation, and its own inevitable
necessity to idealism. We have admitted, with Locke and Condillac, in
regard to the origin of knowledge, particular and contingent ideas,
which we owe to the senses and consciousness; and above the senses and
consciousness, the direct sources of all particular ideas, we have
recognized, with Reid and Kant, a special faculty, different from
sensation and consciousness, but developed with them,--reason, the lofty
source of universal and necessary truths. We have established, against
Kant, the absolute authority of reason, and the truths which it
discovers. Then, the truths that reason revealed to us have themselves
revealed to us their eternal principle,--God. Finally, this rational
spiritualism, which is both the faith of the human race and the doctrine
of the greatest minds of antiquity and modern times, we have carefully
distinguished from a chimerical and dangerous mysticism. Thus the
necessity of experience and the necessity of reason, the necessity of a
real and infinite being which is the first and last foundation of truth,
a severe distinction between spiritualism and mysticism, are the great
principles which we have been able to gather from the first part of this
course.
The second part, the study of the beautiful, will give us the same
results elucidated and aggrandized by a new application.
It was the eighteenth century that introduced, or rather brought back
into philosophy, investigations on the beautiful and art, so familiar to
Plato and Aristotle, but which scholasticism had not entertained, to
which our great philosophy of the seventeenth century had remained
almost a stranger.[96] One comprehends that it did not belong to the
empirical school to revive this noble part of philosophic science. Locke
and Condillac did not leave a chapter, not even a single page, on the
beautiful. Their followers treated beauty with the same disdain; not
knowing very well how to explain it in their system, they found it more
convenient not to perceive it at all. Diderot, it is true, had an
enthusiasm for beauty and art, but enthusiasm was never so ill placed.
Diderot had genius; but, as Voltaire said of him, his was a head in
which every thing fermented without coming to maturity. He scattered
here and there a mass of ingenious and often contradictory perceptions;
he has no principles; he abandons himself to the impression of the
moment; he knows not what the ideal is; he delights in a kind of nature,
at once common and mannered, such as one might expect from the author
of the _Interpretation de la Nature_, the _Pere de Famille_, the _Neveu
de Rameau_, and _Jacques le Fataliste_. Diderot is a fatalist in art as
well as in philosophy; he belongs to his times and his school, with a
grain of poetry, sensibility, and imagination.[97] It was worthy of the
Scotch[98] school and Kant[99] to give a place to the beautiful in their
doctrine. They considered it in the soul and in nature; but they did not
even touch the difficult question of the reproduction of the beautiful
by the genius of man. We will try to embrace this great subject in its
whole extent, and we are about to offer at least a sketch of a regular
and complete theory of beauty and art.
Let us begin by establishing well the method that must preside over
these investigations.
One can study the beautiful in two ways:--either out of us, in itself
and in the objects, whatever they may be, that bear its impress; or in
the mind of man, in the faculties that attain it, in the ideas or
sentiments that it excites in us. Now, the true method, which must now
be familiar to you, makes setting out from man to arrive at things a law
for us. Therefore psychological analysis will here again be our point of
departure, and the study of the state of the soul in presence of the
beautiful will prepare us for that of the beautiful considered in itself
and its objects.
Let us interrogate the soul in the presence of beauty.
Is it not an incontestable fact that before certain objects, under very
different circumstances, we pronounce the following judgment:--This
object is beautiful? This affirmation is not always explicit. Sometimes
it manifests itself only by a cry of admiration; sometimes it silently
rises in the mind that scarcely has a consciousness of it. The forms of
this phenomenon vary, but the phenomenon is attested by the most common
and most certain observation, and all languages bear witness of it.
Although sensible objects, with most men, oftenest provoke the judgment
of the beautiful, they do not alone possess this advantage; the domain
of beauty is more extensive than the domain of the physical world
exposed to our view; it has no bounds but those of entire nature, and of
the soul and genius of man. Before an heroic action, by the remembrance
of a great sacrifice; even by the thought of the most abstract truths
firmly united with each other in a system admirable at once for its
simplicity and its productiveness; finally, before objects of another
order, before the works of art, this same phenomenon is produced in us.
We recognize in all these objects, however different, a common quality
in regard to which our judgment is pronounced, and this quality we call
beauty.
The philosophy of sensation, in faithfulness to itself, should have
attempted to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable.
Without doubt, beauty is almost always agreeable to the senses, or at
least it must not wound them. Most of our ideas of the beautiful come to
us by sight and hearing, and all the arts, without exception, are
addressed to the soul through the body. An object which makes us suffer,
were it the most beautiful in the world, very rarely appears to us such.
Beauty has little influence over a soul occupied with grief.
But if an agreeable sensation often accompanies the idea of the
beautiful, we must not conclude that one is the other.
Experience testifies that all agreeable things do not appear beautiful,
and that, among agreeable things, those which are most so are not the
most beautiful,--a sure sign that the agreeable is not the beautiful;
for if one is identical with the other, they should never be separated,
but should always be commensurate with each other.
Far from this, whilst all our senses give us agreeable sensations, only
two have the privilege of awakening in us the idea of beauty. Does one
ever say: This is a beautiful taste, this is a beautiful smell?
Nevertheless, one should say it, if the beautiful is the agreeable. On
the other hand, there are certain pleasures of odor and taste that move
sensibility more than the greatest beauties of nature and art; and even
among the perceptions of hearing and sight, those are not always the
most vivid that most excite in us the idea of beauty. Do not pictures,
ordinary in coloring, often move us more deeply than many dazzling
productions, more seductive to the eye, less touching to the soul? I say
farther; sensation not only does not produce the idea of the beautiful,
but sometimes stifles it. Let an artist occupy himself with the
reproduction of voluptuous forms; while pleasing the senses, he
disturbs, he repels in us the chaste and pure idea of beauty. The
agreeable is not, then, the measure of the beautiful, since in certain
cases it effaces it and makes us forget it; it is not, then, the
beautiful, since it is found, and in the highest degree, where the
beautiful is not.
This conducts us to the essential foundation of the distinction between
the idea of the beautiful and the sensation of the agreeable, to wit,
the difference already explained between sensibility and reason.
When an object makes you experience an agreeable sensation, if one asks
you why this object is agreeable to you, you can answer nothing, except
that such is your impression; and if one informs you that this same
object produces upon others a different impression and displeases them,
you are not much astonished, because you know that sensibility is
diverse, and that sensations must not be disputed. Is it the same when
an object is not only agreeable to you, but when you judge that it is
beautiful? You pronounce, for example, that this figure is noble and
beautiful, that this sunrise or sunset is beautiful, that
disinterestedness and devotion are beautiful, that virtue is beautiful;
if one contests with you the truth of these judgments, then you are not
as accommodating as you were just now; you do not accept the dissent as
an inevitable effect of different sensibilities, you no longer appeal to
your sensibility which naturally terminates in you, you appeal to an
authority which is made for others as well as you, that of reason; you
believe that you have the right of accusing him with error who
contradicts your judgment, for here your judgment rests no longer on
something variable and individual, like an agreeable or painful
sensation. The agreeable is confined for us within the inclosure of our
own organization, where it changes every moment, according to the
perpetual revolutions of this organization, according to health and
sickness, the state of the atmosphere, that of our nerves, etc. But it
is not so with beauty; beauty, like truth, belongs to none of us; no one
has the right to dispose of it arbitrarily, and when we say: this is
true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and variable
impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute
judgment that reason imposes on all men.