the objects of science only so far as they reveal something superior to
themselves, that is to say, laws. Natural history does not study such or
such an individual, but the generic type that every individual bears in
itself, that alone remains unchangeable, when the individuals pass away
and vanish. If there is in us no other faculty of knowing than
sensation, we never know aught but what is passing in things, and that,
too, we know only with the most uncertain knowledge, since sensibility
will be its only measure, which is so variable in itself and so
different in different individuals. Each of us will have his own
science, a science contradictory and fragile, which one moment produces
and another destroys, false as well as true, since what is true for me
is false for you, and will even be false for me in a little while. Such
are science and truth in the doctrine of sensation. On the contrary,
necessary and immutable principles found a science necessary and
immutable as themselves,--the truth which they gave as is neither mine
nor yours, neither the truth of to-day, nor that of to-morrow, but truth
in itself.
The same spirit transferred to aesthetics has enabled us to seize the
beautiful by the side of the agreeable, and, above different and
imperfect beauties which nature offers to us, to seize an ideal beauty,
one and perfect, without a model in nature, and the only model worthy of
genius.
In ethics we have shown that there is an essential distinction between
good and evil; that the idea of the good is an idea just as absolute as
the idea of the beautiful and that of the true; that the good is a
universal and necessary truth, marked with the particular character that
it ought to be practised. By the side of interest, which is the law of
sensibility, reason has made us recognize the law of duty, which a free
being can alone fulfil. From these ethics has sprung a generous
political doctrine, giving to right a sure foundation in the respect due
to the person, establishing true liberty, and true equality, and calling
for institutions, protective of both, which do not rest on the mobile
and arbitrary will of the legislator, whether people or monarch, but on
the nature of things, on truth and justice.
From empiricism we have retained the maxim which gives empiricism its
whole force--that the conditions of science, of art, of ethics, are in
experience, and often in sensible experience. But we profess at the same
time this other maxim, that the foundation of science is absolute truth,
that the direct foundation of art is absolute beauty, that the direct
foundation of ethics and politics is the good, is duty, is right, and
that what reveals to us these absolute ideas of the true, the
beautiful, and the good, is reason. The foundation of our doctrine is,
therefore, idealism rightly tempered by empiricism.
But what would be the use of having restored to reason the power of
elevating itself to absolute principles, placed above experience,
although experience furnishes their external conditions, if, to adopt
the language of Kant,[276] these principles have no objective value?
What good could result from having determined with a precision until
then unknown the respective domains of experience and reason, if, wholly
superior as it is to the senses and experience, reason is captive in
their inclosure, and we know nothing beyond with certainty? Thereby,
then, we return by a _detour_ to skepticism to which sensualism conducts
us directly, and at less expense. To say that there is no principle of
causality, or to say that this principle has no force out of the subject
that possesses it,--is it not saying the same thing? Kant avows that man
has no right to affirm that there are out of him real causes, time, or
space, or that he himself has a spiritual and free soul. This
acknowledgment would perfectly satisfy Hume; it would be of very little
importance to him that the reason of man, according to Kant, might
conceive, and even could not but conceive, the ideas of cause, time,
space, liberty, spirit, provided these ideas are applied to nothing
real. I see therein, at most, only a torment for human reason, at once
so poor and so rich, so full and so void.
A third doctrine, finding sensation insufficient, and also discontented
with reason, which it confounds with reasoning, thinks to approach
common sense by making science, art, and ethics rest on sentiment. It
would have us confide ourselves to the instinct of the heart, to that
instinct, nobler than sensation, and more subtle than reasoning. Is it
not the heart, in fact, that feels the beautiful and the good? Is it not
the heart that, in all the great circumstances of life, when passion and
sophism obscure to our eyes the holy idea of duty and virtue, makes it
shine forth with an irresistible light, and, at the same time, warms us,
animates us, and gives us the courage to practise it?
We also have recognized that admirable phenomenon which is called
sentiment; we even believe that here will be found a more precise and
more complete analysis of it than in the writings where sentiment reigns
alone. Yes, there is an exquisite pleasure attached to the contemplation
of the truth, to the reproduction of the beautiful, to the practice of
the good; there is in us an innate love for all these things; and when
great rigor is not aimed at, it may very well be said that it is the
heart which discerns truth, that the heart is and ought to be the light
and guide of our life.
To the eyes of an unpractised analysis, reason in its natural and
spontaneous exercise is confounded with sentiment by a multitude of
resemblances.[277] Sentiment is intimately attached to reason; it is its
sensible form. At the foundation of sentiment is reason, which
communicates to it its authority, whilst sentiment lends to reason its
charm and power. Is not the widest spread and the most touching proof of
the existence of God that spontaneous impulse of the heart which, in the
consciousness of our miseries, and at the sight of the imperfections of
our race which press upon our attention, irresistibly suggests to us the
confused idea of an infinite and perfect being, fills us, at this idea,
with an inexpressible emotion, moistens our eyes with tears, or even
prostrates us on our knees before him whom the heart reveals to us, even
when the reason refuses to believe in him? But look more closely, and
you will see that this incredulous reason is reasoning supported by
principles whose bearing is insufficient; you will see that what reveals
the infinite and perfect being is precisely reason itself;[278] and
that, in turn, it is this revelation of the infinite by reason, which,
passing into sentiment, produces the emotion and the inspiration that we
have mentioned. May heaven grant that we shall never reject the aid of
sentiment! On the contrary, we invoke it both for others and ourself.
Here we are with the people, or rather we are the people. It is to the
light of the heart, which is borrowed from that of reason, but reflects
it more vividly in the depths of the soul, that we confide ourselves, in
order to preserve all great truths in the soul of the ignorant, and even
to save them in the mind of the philosopher from the aberrations or
refinements of an ambitious philosophy.
We think, with Quintilian and Vauvenargues, that the nobility of
sentiment makes the nobility of thought. Enthusiasm is the principle of
great works as well as of great actions. Without the love of the
beautiful, the artist will produce only works that are perhaps regular
but frigid, that will possibly please the geometrician, but not the man
of taste. In order to communicate life to the canvas, to the marble, to
speech, it must be born in one's self. It is the heart mingled with
logic that makes true eloquence; it is the heart mingled with
imagination that makes great poetry. Think of Homer, of Corneille, of
Bossuet,--their most characteristic trait is pathos, and pathos is a cry
of the soul. But it is especially in ethics that sentiment shines forth.
Sentiment, as we have already said, is as it were a divine grace that
aids us in the fulfilment of the serious and austere law of duty. How
often does it happen that in delicate, complicated, difficult
situations, we know not how to ascertain wherein is the true, wherein is
the good! Sentiment comes to the aid of reasoning which wavers; it
speaks, and all uncertainties are dissipated. In listening to its
inspirations, we may act imprudently, but we rarely act ill: the voice
of the heart is the voice of God.
We, therefore, give a prominent place to this noble element of human
nature. We believe that man is quite as great by heart as by reason. We
have a high regard for the generous writers who, in the looseness of
principles and manners in the eighteenth century, opposed the baseness
of calculation and interest with the beauty of sentiment. We are with
Hutcheson against Hobbes, with Rousseau against Helvetius, with the
author of Woldemar[279] against the ethics of egoism or those of the
schools. We borrow from them what truth they have, we leave their
useless or dangerous exaggerations. Sentiment must be joined to reason;
but reason must not be replaced by sentiment. In the first place, it is
contrary to facts to take reason for reasoning, and to envelop them in
the same criticism. And then, after all, reasoning is the legitimate
instrument of reason; its value is determined by that of the principles
on which it rests. In the next place, reason, and especially spontaneous
reason, is, like sentiment, immediate and direct; it goes straight to
its object, without passing through analysis, abstraction, and
deduction, excellent operations without doubt, but they suppose a
primary operation, the pure and simple apperception of the truth.[280]
It is wrong to attribute this apperception to sentiment. Sentiment is an
emotion, not a judgment; it enjoys or suffers, it loves or hates, it
does not know. It is not universal like reason; and as it still pertains
on some side to organization, it even borrows from the organization
something of its inconstancy. In fine, sentiment follows reason, and
does not precede it. Therefore, in suppressing reason, we suppress the
sentiment which emanates from it, and science, art, and ethics lack firm
and solid bases.
Psychology, aesthetics, and ethics, have conducted us to an order of
investigations more difficult and more elevated, which are mingled with
all the others, and crown them--theodicea.
We know that theodicea is the rock of philosophy. We might shun it, and
stop in the regions--already very high--of the universal and necessary
principles of the true, the beautiful, and the good, without going
farther, without ascending to the principles of these principles, to the
reason of reason, to the source of truth. But such a prudence is, at
bottom, only a disguised skepticism. Either philosophy is not, or it is
the last explanation of all things. Is it, then, true that God is to us
an inexplicable enigma,--he without whom the most certain of all things
that thus far we have discovered would be for us an insupportable
enigma? If philosophy is incapable of arriving at the knowledge of God,
it is powerless; for if it does not possess God, it possesses nothing.
But we are convinced that the need of knowing has not been given us in
vain, and that the desire of knowing the principle of our being bears
witness to the right and power of knowing which we have. Accordingly,
after having discoursed to you about the true, the beautiful, and the
good, we have not feared to speak to you of God.
More than one road may lead us to God. We do not pretend to close any of
them; but it was necessary for us to follow the one that was open to us,
that which the nature and subject of our instruction opened to us.
Universal and necessary truths are not general ideas which our mind
draws by way of reasoning from particular things; for particular things
are relative and contingent, and cannot contain the universal and
necessary. On the other hand, these truths do not subsist by themselves;
they would thus be only pure abstractions, suspended in vacuity and
without relation to any thing. Truth, beauty, and goodness are
attributes and not entities. Now there are no attributes without a
subject. And as here the question is concerning absolute truth, beauty
and goodness, their substance can be nothing else than absolute being.
It is thus that we arrive at God. Once more, there are many other means
of arriving at him; but we hold fast to this legitimate and sure way.
For us, as for Plato, whom we have defended against a too narrow
interpretation,[281] absolute truth is in God,--it is God himself under
one of his phases. Since Plato, the greatest minds, Saint Augustine,
Descartes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, agree in putting in God, as in their
source, the principles of knowledge as well as existence. From him
things derive at once their intelligibility and their being. It is by
the participation of the divine reason that our reason possesses
something absolute. Every judgment of reason envelops a necessary truth,
and every necessary truth supposes necessary being.
If all perfection belongs to the perfect being, God will possess beauty
in its plenitude. The father of the world, of its laws, of its ravishing
harmonies, the author of forms, colors, and sounds, he is the principle
of beauty in nature. It is he whom we adore, without knowing it, under
the name of the ideal, when our imagination, borne on from beauties to
beauties, calls for a final beauty in which it may find repose. It is to
him that the artist, discontented with the imperfect beauties of nature
and those that he creates himself, comes to ask for higher inspirations.
It is in him that are summed up the main forms of every kind of beauty,
the beautiful and the sublime, since he satisfies all our faculties by
his perfections, and overwhelms them with his infinitude.
God is the principle of moral truths, as well as of all other truths.
All our duties are comprised in justice and charity. These two great
precepts have not been made by us; they have been imposed on us; from
whom, then, can they come, except from a legislator essentially just and
good? Therein, in our opinion, is an invincible demonstration of the
divine justice and charity:--this demonstration elucidates and sustains
all others. In this immense universe, of which we catch a glimpse of a
comparatively insignificant portion, every thing, in spite of more than
one obscurity, seems ordered in view of general good, and this plan
attests a Providence. To the physical order which one in good faith can
scarcely deny, add the certainty, the evidence of the moral order that
we bear in ourselves. This order supposes the harmony of virtue and
goodness; it therefore requires it. Without doubt this harmony already
appears in the visible world, in the natural consequences of good and
bad actions, in society which punishes and rewards, in public esteem and
contempt, especially in the troubles and joys of conscience. Although
this necessary law of order is not always exactly fulfilled, it
nevertheless ought to be, or the moral order is not satisfied, and the
intimate nature of things, their moral nature, remains violated,
troubled, perverted. There must, then, be a being who takes it upon
himself to fulfil, in a time that he has reserved to himself, and in a
manner that will be proper, the order of which he has put in us the
inviolable need; and this being is again, God.
Thus, on all sides, on that of metaphysics, on that of aesthetics,
especially on that of ethics, we elevate ourselves to the same
principle, the common centre, the last foundation, of all truth, all
beauty, all goodness. The true, the beautiful, and the good, are only
different revelations of the same being. Human intelligence,
interrogated in regard to all these ideas which are incontestably in it,
always makes us the same response; it sends us back to the same
explanation,--at the foundation of all, above all, God, always God.
We have arrived, then, from degree to degree, at religion. We are in
fellowship with the great philosophies which all proclaim a God, and, at
the same time, with the religions that cover the earth, with the
Christian religion, incomparably the most perfect and the most holy. As
long as philosophy has not reached natural religion,--and by this we
mean, not the religion at which man arrives in that hypothetical state
that is called the state of nature, but the religion which is revealed
to us by the natural light accorded to all men,--it remains beneath all
worship, even the most imperfect, which at least gives to man a father,
a witness, a consoler, a judge. A true theodicea borrows in some sort
from all religious beliefs their common principle, and returns it to
them surrounded with light, elevated above all uncertainty, guarded
against all attack. Philosophy may present itself in its turn to
mankind; it also has a right to man's confidence, for it speaks to him
of God in the name of all his needs and all his faculties, in the name
of reason and sentiment.
Observe that we have arrived at these high conclusions without any
hypothesis, by the aid of processes at once very simple and perfectly
rigorous. Truths of different orders being given, truths which have not
been made by us, and are not sufficient for themselves, we have ascended
from these truths to their author, as one goes from the effect to the
cause, from the sign to the thing signified, from phenomenon to being,
from quality to subject. These two principles--that every effect
supposes a cause, and every quality a subject--are universal and
necessary principles. They have been put by us in their full light, and
demonstrated in the manner in which principles undemonstrable, because
they are primitive, can be demonstrated. Moreover, to what are these
necessary principles applied? To metaphysical and moral truths, which
are also necessary. It was therefore necessary to conclude in the
existence of a cause and a necessary being, or, indeed, it was necessary
to deny either the necessity of the principle of cause and the principle
of substance, or the necessity of the truths to which we applied them,
that is to say, to renounce all notions of common sense; for these very
principles and these truths, with their character of universality and
necessity, compose common sense.
Not only is it certain that every effect supposes a cause, and every
quality a being, but it is equally certain that an effect of such a
nature supposes a cause of the same nature, and that a quality or an
attribute marked with such or such essential characters supposes a being
in which these same characters are again found in an eminent degree.
Whence it follows, that we have very legitimately concluded from truth
in an intelligent cause and substance, from beauty in a being supremely
beautiful, and from a moral law composed at once of justice and charity
in a legislator supremely just and supremely good.
And we have not made a geometrical and algebraical theodicea, after the
example of many philosophers, and the most illustrious. We have not
deduced the attributes of God from each other, as the different terms of
an equation are converted, or as from one property of a triangle the
other properties are deduced, thus ending at a God wholly abstract,
good perhaps for the schools, but not sufficient for the human race. We
have given to theodicea a surer foundation--psychology. Our God is
doubtless also the author of the world, but he is especially the father
of humanity; his intelligence is ours, with the necessity of essence and
infinite power added. So our justice and our charity, related to their
immortal exemplar, give us an idea of the divine justice and charity.
Therein we see a real God, with whom we can sustain a relation also
real, whom we can comprehend and feel, and who in his turn can
comprehend and feel our efforts, our sufferings, our virtues, our
miseries. Made in his image, conducted to him by a ray of his own being,
there is between him and us a living and sacred tie.
Our theodicea is therefore free at once from hypothesis and abstraction.
By preserving ourselves from the one, we have preserved ourselves from
the other. Consenting to recognize God only in his signs visible to the
eyes and intelligible to the mind, it is on infallible evidence that we
have elevated ourselves to God. By a necessary consequence, setting out
from real effects and real attributes, we have arrived at a real cause
and a real substance, at a cause having in power all its essential
effects, at a substance rich in attributes. I wonder at the folly of
those who, in order to know God better, consider him, they say, in his
pure and absolute essence, disengaged from all limitative determination.
I believe that I have forever removed the root of such an
extravagance.[282] No; it is not true that the diversity of
determinations, and, consequently, of qualities and attributes, destroys
the absolute unity of a being; the infallible proof of it is that my
unity is not the least in the world altered by the diversity of my
faculties. It is not true that unity excludes multiplicity, and
multiplicity unity; for unity and multiplicity are united in me. Why
then should they not be in God? Moreover, far from altering unity in me,
multiplicity develops it and makes its productiveness appear. So the
richness of the determinations and the attributes of God is exactly the
sign of the plenitude of his being. To neglect his attributes, is
therefore to impoverish him; we do not say enough, it is to annihilate
him,--for a being without attributes exists not; and the abstraction of
being, human or divine, finite or infinite, relative or absolute, is
nonentity.
Theodicea has two rocks,--one, which we have just signalized to you, is
abstraction, the abuse of dialectics; it is the vice of the schools and
metaphysics. If we are forced to shun this rock, we run the risk of
being dashed against the opposite rock, I mean that fear of reasoning
that extends to reason, that excessive predominance of sentiment, which
developing in us the loving and affectionate faculties at the expense of
all the others, throws us into anthropomorphism without criticism, and
makes us institute with God an intimate and familiar intercourse in
which we are somewhat too forgetful of the august and fearful majesty of
the divine being. The tender and contemplative soul can neither love nor
contemplate in God the necessity, the eternity, the infinity, that do
not come within the sphere of imagination and the heart, that are only
conceived. It therefore neglects them. Neither does it study God in
truth of every kind, in physics, metaphysics, and ethics, which manifest
him; it considers in him particularly the characters to which affection
is attached. In adoration, Fenelon retrenches all fear that nothing but
love may subsist, and Mme. Guyon ends by loving God as a lover.
We escape these opposite excesses of a refined sentimentality and a
chimerical abstraction, by always keeping in mind both the nature of
God, by which he escapes all relation with us,--necessity, eternity,
infinity, and at the same time those of his attributes which are our own
attributes transferred to him, for the very simple reason that they came
from him.
I am able to conceive God only in his manifestations and by the signs
which he gives of his existence, as I am able to conceive any being only
by the attributes of that being, a cause only by its effects, as I am
able to conceive myself only by the exercise of my faculties. Take away
my faculties and the consciousness that attests them to me, and I am not
for myself. It is the same with God,--take away nature and the soul, and
every sign of God disappears. It is therefore in nature and the soul
that he must be sought and found.