limit ourselves to two citations. 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 25, p.
859: "It is impossible to know any phenomenon of consciousness, the
phenomena of sensation, or volition, or of intelligence, without
instantly referring them to a subject one and identical, which is the
_me_; so we cannot know the external phenomena of resistance, of
solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, of smell, of taste,
etc., without judging that these are not phenomena in appearance, but
phenomena which belong to something real, which is solid, impenetrable,
figured, colored, odorous, savory, etc. On the other hand, if you did
not know any of the phenomena of consciousness, you would never have the
least idea of the subject of these phenomena; if you did not know any of
the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability,
of figure, of color, etc., you would not have any idea of the subject of
these phenomena: therefore the characters, whether of the phenomena of
consciousness, or of exterior phenomena, are for you the only signs of
the nature of the subjects of these phenomena. In examining the
phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave
differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish
the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In the
first rank among the primary qualities is solidity, which is given to
you in the sensation of resistance, and inevitably accompanied by form,
etc. On the contrary, when you examine the phenomena of consciousness,
you do not therein find this character of resistance, of solidity, of
form, etc.; you do not find that the phenomena of your consciousness
have a figure, solidity, impenetrability, resistance; without speaking
of secondary qualities which are equally foreign to them, color, savor,
sound, smell, etc. Now, as the subject is for us only the collection of
the phenomena which reveal it to us, together with its own existence in
so far as the subject of the inherence of these phenomena, it follows
that, under phenomena marked with dissimilar characters and entirely
foreign to each other, the human mind conceives dissimilar and foreign
subjects. Thus as solidity and figure have nothing in common with
sensation, will, and thought, as every solid is extended for us, and as
we place it necessarily in space, while our thoughts, our volitions, our
sensations, are for us unextended, and while we cannot conceive them and
place them in space, but only in time, the human mind concludes with
perfect strictness that the subject of the exterior phenomena has the
character of the latter, and that the subject of the phenomena of
consciousness has the character of the former; that the one is solid and
extended, and that the other is neither solid nor extended. Finally, as
that which is solid and extended is divisible, and as that which is
neither solid nor extended is indivisible, hence divisibility is
attributed to the solid and extended subject, and indivisibility
attributed to the subject which is neither extended nor solid. Who of
us, in fact, does not believe himself an indivisible being, one and
identical, the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow? Well, the word
body, the word matter, signifies nothing else than the subject of
external phenomena, the most eminent of which are form, impenetrability,
solidity, extension, divisibility. The word mind, the word soul,
signifies nothing else than the subject of the phenomena of
consciousness, thought, will, sensation, phenomena simple, unextended,
not solid, etc. Behold the whole idea of spirit, and the whole idea of
matter! See, therefore, all that must be done in order to bring back
matter to spirit, and spirit to matter: it is necessary to pretend that
sensation, volition, thought, are reducible in the last analysis to
solidity, extension, figure, divisibility, etc., or that solidity,
extension, figure, etc., are reducible to thought, volition, sensation."
1st Series, vol. iii., lecture I, _Locke_. "Locke pretends that we
cannot be certain _by the contemplation of our own ideas_, that matter
cannot think; on the contrary, it is in the contemplation itself of our
ideas that we clearly perceive that matter and thought are incompatible.
What is thinking? Is it not uniting a certain number of ideas under a
certain unity? The simplest judgment supposes several terms united in a
subject, one and identical, which is _me_. This identical _me_ is
implied in every real act of knowledge. It has been demonstrated to
satiety that comparison exacts an indivisible centre that comprises the
different terms of the comparison. Do you take memory? There is no
memory possible without the continuation of the same subject that refers
to self the different modifications by which it has been successively
affected. Finally, consciousness, that indispensable condition of
intelligence,--is it not the sentiment of a single being? This is the
reason why each man cannot think without saying _me_, without affirming
that he is himself the identical and one subject of his thoughts. I am
_me_ and always _me_, as you are always yourself in the most different
acts of your life. You are not more yourself to-day than you were
yesterday, and you are not less yourself to-day than you were yesterday.
This identity and this indivisible unity of the _me_ inseparable from
the least thought, is what is called its spirituality, in opposition to
the evident and necessary characters of matter. By what, in fact, do you
know matter? It is especially by form, by extension, by something solid
that stops you, that resists you in different points of space. But is
not a solid essentially divisible? Take the most subtile fluids,--can
you help conceiving them as more or less susceptible of division? All
thought has its different elements like matter, but in addition it has
its unity in the thinking subject, and the subject being taken away,
which is one, the total phenomenon no longer exists. Far from that, the
unknown subject to which we attach material phenomena is divisible, and
divisible _ad infinitum_; it cannot cease to be divisible without
ceasing to exist. Such are the ideas that we have, on the one side, of
mind, on the other, of matter. Thought supposes a subject essentially
one; matter is infinitely divisible. What is the need of going farther?
If any conclusion is legitimate, it is that which distinguishes thought
from matter. God can indeed make them exist together, and their
co-existence is a certain fact, but he cannot confound them. God can
unite thought and matter, he cannot make matter thought, nor what is
extended simple."
[254] See 1st part, lecture 1.
[255] See lecture 5, _Mysticism_.
[256] 4th Series, vol. iii., _Santa-Rosa_: "After all, the existence of
a divine Providence is, to my eyes, a truth clearer than all lights,
more certain than all mathematics. Yes, there is a God, a God who is a
true intelligence, who consequently has a consciousness of himself, who
has made and ordered every thing with weight and measure, whose works
are excellent, whose ends are adorable, even when they are veiled from
our feeble eyes. This world has a perfect author, perfectly wise and
good. Man is not an orphan; he has a father in heaven. What will this
father do with his child when he returns to him? Nothing but what is
good. Whatever happens, all will be well. Every thing that he has done
has been done well; every thing that he shall do, I accept beforehand,
and bless. Yes, such is my unalterable faith, and this faith is my
support, my refuge, my consolation, my solace in this fearful moment."
[257] See our discussion on the _Pensees de Pascal_, vol. i. of the 4th
Series.
[258] See the end of the first book of the _Republic_, vol. ix. of our
translation.
[259] _Esprit des Lois_, _passim_.
[260] Works of Turgot, vol. ii., _Discours en Sorbonne sur les Avantages
que l'etablissement du Christianism a procures au Genre Humain_, etc.
[261] In the _Correspondence_, the letter to Dr. Stiles, March 9, 1790,
written by Franklin a few months before his death: "I am convinced that
the moral and religious system which Jesus Christ has transmitted to us
is the best that the world has seen or can see."--We here re-translate,
not having the works of Franklin immediately at hand.
[262] We have not ceased to claim, to earnestly call for, the alliance
between Christianity and philosophy, as well as the alliance between the
monarchy and liberty. See particularly 3d Series, vol. iv., _Philosophie
Contemporaine_, preface of the second edition; 4th Series, vol. i.,
_Pascal_, 1st and 2d preface, _passim_; 5th Series, vol. ii., _Discours
a la Chambre des Paris pour le Defence de l'Universite et de la
Philosophie_. We everywhere profess the most tender veneration for
Christianity,--we have only repelled the servitude of philosophy, with
Descartes, and the most illustrious doctors of ancient and modern times,
from St. Augustine and St. Thomas, to the Cardinal de la Lucerne and the
Bishop of Hermopolis. Moreover, we love to think that those quarrels,
originating in other times from the deplorable strife between the clergy
and the University, have not survived it, and that now all sincere
friends of religion and philosophy will give each other the hand, and
will work in concert to encourage desponding souls and lift up burdened
characters.
LECTURE XVII.
RESUME OF DOCTRINE.
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.
Having arrived at the limit of this course, we have a final task to
perform,--it is necessary to recall its general spirit and most
important results.
From the first lecture, I have signalized to you the spirit that should
animate this instruction,--a spirit of free inquiry, recognizing with
joy the truth wherever found, profiting by all the systems that the
eighteenth century has bequeathed to our times, but confining itself to
none of them.
The eighteenth century has left to us as an inheritance three great
schools which still endure--the English and French school, whose chief
is Locke, among whose most accredited representatives are Condillac,
Helvetius, and Saint-Lambert; the Scotch school, with so many celebrated
names, Hutcheson, Smith, Reid, Beattie, Ferguson, and Dugald
Stewart;[263] the German school, or rather school of Kant, for, of all
the philosophers beyond the Rhine, the philosopher of Koenigsberg is
almost the only one who belongs to history. Kant died at the beginning
of the nineteenth century;[264] the ashes of his most illustrious
disciple, Fichte,[265] are scarcely cold. The other renowned
philosophers of Germany still live,[266] and escape our valuation.
But this is only an ethnographical enumeration of the schools of the
eighteenth century. It is above all necessary to consider them in their
characters, analogous or opposite. The Anglo-French school particularly
represents empiricism and sensualism, that is to say, an almost
exclusive importance attributed in all parts of human knowledge to
experience in general, and especially to sensible experience. The Scotch
school and the German school represent a more or less developed
spiritualism. Finally, there are philosophers, for example, Hutcheson,
Smith, and others, who, mistrusting the senses and reason, give the
supremacy to sentiment.
Such are the philosophic schools in the presence of which the nineteenth
century is placed.
We are compelled to avow, that none of these, to our eyes, contains the
entire truth. It has been demonstrated that a considerable part of
knowledge escapes sensation, and we think that sentiment is a basis
neither sufficiently firm, nor sufficiently broad, to support all human
science. We are, therefore, rather the adversary than the partisan of
the school of Locke and Condillac, and of that of Hutcheson and Smith.
Are we on that account the disciple of Reid and Kant? Yes, certainly, we
declare our preference for the direction impressed upon philosophy by
these two great men. We regard Reid as common sense itself, and we
believe that we thus eulogize him in a manner that would touch him most.
Common sense is to us the only legitimate point of departure, and the
constant and inviolable rule of science. Reid never errs; his method is
true, his general principles are incontestable, but we will willingly
say to this irreproachable genius,--_Sapere aude_. Kant is far from
being as sure a guide as Reid. Both excel in analysis; but Reid stops
there, and Kant builds upon analysis a system irreconcilable with it. He
elevates reason above sensation and sentiment; he shows with great skill
how reason produces by itself, and by the laws attached to its exercise,
nearly all human knowledge; there is only one misfortune, which is that
all this fine edifice is destitute of reality. Dogmatical in analysis,
Kant is skeptical in his conclusions. His skepticism is the most
learned, most moral, that ever existed; but, in fine, it is always
skepticism. This is saying plainly enough that we are far from belonging
to the school of the philosopher of Koenigsberg.
In general, in the history of philosophy, we are in favor of systems
that are themselves in favor of reason. Accordingly, in antiquity, we
side with Plato against his adversaries; among the moderns, with
Descartes against Locke, with Reid against Hume, with Kant against both
Condillac and Smith. But while we acknowledge reason as a power superior
to sensation and sentiment, as being, _par excellence_, the faculty of
every kind of knowledge, the faculty of the true, the faculty of the
beautiful, the faculty of the good, we are persuaded that reason cannot
be developed without conditions that are foreign to it, cannot suffice
for the government of man without the aid of another power: that power
which is not reason, which reason cannot do without, is sentiment; those
conditions, without which reason cannot be developed, are the senses. It
is seen what for us is the importance of sensation and sentiment: how,
consequently, it is impossible for us absolutely to condemn either the
philosophy of sensation, or, much more, that of sentiment.
Such are the very simple foundations of our eclecticism. It is not in us
the fruit of a desire for innovation, and for making ourself a place
apart among the historians of philosophy; no, it is philosophy itself
that imposes on us our historical views. It is not our fault if God has
made the human soul larger than all systems, and we also aver that we
are also much rejoiced that all systems are not absurd. Without giving
the lie to the most certain facts signalized and established by ourself,
it was indeed necessary, on finding them scattered in the history of
philosophy, to recognize and respect them, and if the history of
philosophy, thus considered, no longer appeared a mass of senseless
systems, a chaos, without light, and without issue; if, on the contrary,
it became, in some sort, a living philosophy, that was, it should seem,
a progress on which one might felicitate himself, one of the most
fortunate conquests of the nineteenth century, the very triumphing of
the philosophic spirit.
We have, therefore, no doubt in regard to the excellence of the
enterprise; the whole question for us is in the execution. Let us see,
let us compare what we have done with what we have wished to do.
Let us ask, in the first place, whether we have been just towards that
great philosophy represented in antiquity by Aristotle, whose best model
among the moderns is the wise author of the Essay on the _Human
Understanding_.
There is in the philosophy of sensation what is true and what is false.
The false is the pretension of explaining all human knowledge by the
acquisitions of the senses; this pretension is the system itself; we
reject it, and the system with it. The true is that sensibility,
considered in its external and visible organs, and in its internal
organs, the invisible seats of the vital functions, is the indispensable
condition of the development of all our faculties, not only of the
faculties that evidently pertain to sensibility, but of those that seem
to be most remote from it. This true side of sensualism we have
everywhere recognized and elucidated in metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics,
and theodicea.
For us, theodicea, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, rest on psychology,
and the first principle of our psychology is that the condition of all
exercise of mind and soul is an impression made on our organs, and a
movement of the vital functions.
Man is not a pure spirit; he has a body which is for the spirit
sometimes an obstacle, sometimes a means, always an inseparable
companion. The senses are not, as Plato and Malebranche have too often
said, a prison for the soul, but much rather windows looking out upon
nature, through which the soul communicates with the universe. There is
an entire part of Locke's polemic against the theories of innate ideas
that is to our eyes perfectly true. We are the first to invoke
experience in philosophy. Experience saves philosophy from hypothesis,
from abstraction, from the exclusively deductive method, that is to say,
from the geometrical method. It is on account of having abandoned the
solid ground of experience, that Spinoza, attaching himself to certain
sides of Cartesianism,[267] and closing his eyes to all the others,
forgetting its method, its essential character, and its most certain
principles, reared a hypothetical system, or made from an arbitrary
definition spring with the last degree of rigor a whole series of
deductions, which have nothing to do with reality. It is also on account
of having exchanged experience for a systematic analysis, that
Condillac, an unfaithful disciple of Locke, undertook to draw from a
single fact, and from an ill-observed fact, all knowledge, by the aid of
a series of verbal transformations, whose last result is a nominalism,
like that of the later scholastics. Experience does not contain all
science, but it furnishes the conditions of all science. Space is
nothing for us without visible and tangible bodies that occupy it, time
is nothing without the succession of events, cause without its effects,
substance without its modes, law without the phenomena that it
rules.[268] Reason would reveal to us no universal and necessary truth,
if consciousness and the senses did not suggest to us particular and
contingent notions. In aesthetics, while severely distinguishing between
the beautiful and the agreeable, we have shown that the agreeable is the
constant accompaniment of the beautiful,[269] and that if art has for
its supreme law the expression of the ideal, it must express it under an
animated and living form which puts it in relation with our senses,
with our imagination, above all, with our heart. In ethics, if we have
placed Kant and stoicism far above epicureanism and Helvetius, we have
guarded ourselves against an insensibility and an asceticism which are
contrary to human nature. We have given to reason neither the duty nor
the right to smother the natural passions, but to rule them; we have not
wished to wrest from the soul the instinct of happiness, without which
life would not be supportable for a day, nor society for an hour; we
have proposed to enlighten this instinct, to show it the concealed but
real harmony which it sustains with virtue, and to open to it infinite
prospects.[270]
With these empirical elements, idealism is guarded from that mystical
infatuation which, little by little, gains and seizes it when it is
wholly alone, and brings it into discredit with sound and severe minds.
In our works--and why should we not say it?--we have often presented the
thought of Locke, whom we regard as one of the best and most sensible
men that ever lived. He is among those secret and illustrious advisers
with whom we support our weakness. More than one happy thought we owe to
him; and we often ask ourself whether investigations directed with the
circumspect method which we try to carry into ours, would not have been
accepted by his sincerity and wisdom. Locke is for us the true
representative, the most original, and altogether the most temperate of
the empirical school. Tied to a system, he still preserves a rare spirit
of liberty,--under the name of reflection he admits another source of
knowledge than sensation; and this concession to common sense is very
important. Condillac, by rejecting this concession, carried to extremes
and spoiled the doctrine of Locke, and made of it a narrow, exclusive,
entirely false system,--sensualism, to speak properly. Condillac works
upon chimeras reduced to signs, with which he sports at his ease. We
seek in vain in his writings, especially in the last, some trace of
human nature. One truly believes himself to be in the realm of shades,
_per inania regna_.[271] The _Essay on the Human Understanding_ produces
the opposite impression. Locke is a disciple of Descartes, whom the
excesses of Malebranche have thrown to an opposite excess: he is one of
the founders of psychology, he is one of the finest and most profound
connoisseurs of human nature, and his doctrine, somewhat unsteady but
always moderate, is worthy of having a place in a true eclecticism.[272]
By the side of the philosophy of Locke, there is one much greater, which
it is important to preserve from all exaggeration, in order to maintain
it in all its height. Founded in antiquity by Socrates, constituted by
Plato, renewed by Descartes, idealism embraces, among the moderns, men
of the highest renown. It speaks to man in the name of what is noblest
in man. It demands the rights of reason; it establishes in science, in
art, and in ethics fixed and invariable principles, and from this
imperfect existence it elevates us towards another world, the world of
the eternal, of the infinite, of the absolute.
This great philosophy has all our preferences, and we shall not be
accused of having given it too little place in these lectures. In the
eighteenth century it was especially represented in different degrees by
Reid and Kant. We wholly accept Reid, with the exception of his
historical views, which are too insufficient, and often mixed with
error.[273] There are two parts in Kant,--the analytical part, and the
dialectical part, as he calls them.[274] We admit the one and reject the
other. In this whole course we have borrowed much from the _Critique of
Speculative Reason_, the _Critique of Judgment_, and the _Critique of
Practical Reason_. These three works are, in our eyes, admirable
monuments of philosophic genius,--they are filled with treasures of
observation and analysis.[275]
With Reid and Kant, we recognize reason as the faculty of the true, the
beautiful, and the good. It is to its proper virtue that we directly
refer knowledge in its humblest and in its most elevated part. All the
systematic pretensions of sensualism are broken against the manifest
reality of universal and necessary truths which are incontestably in our
mind. At each instant, whether we know it or not, we bear universal and
necessary judgments. In the simplest propositions is enveloped the
principle of substance and being. We cannot take a step in life without
concluding from an event in the existence of its cause. These principles
are absolutely true, they are true everywhere and always. Now,
experience apprises us of what happens here and there, to-day or
yesterday; but of what happens everywhere and always, especially of what
cannot but happen, how can it apprise us, since it is itself always
limited to time and space? There are, then, in man principles superior
to experience.