The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his
essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It
appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality
of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from
metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the
Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and
immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the
belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to
establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief
that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his
_Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of
his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume
holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul
rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its
mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon
the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon
the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow
degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside
world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other
accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that
death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our
birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after
our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position.
The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual
consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul
undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is
disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the
substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And
more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The
appellation phenomenon suffices.
Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely
by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not
idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this
matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the
doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the
persistence of personal consciousness after death.
In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more
than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea,
materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most
vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that
everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that
everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will
always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only
by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is
something substantially distinct and different from the other
manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
irrational, or rather contra-rational.
The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The
substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you
allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange
these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the
substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it
will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real
presence' on independent grounds."
Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good
theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside
the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body,
not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to
say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently
desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose
whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational
grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the
concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic
transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application
to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the
preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the
reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the
proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will
enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all
and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and
the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of
the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time
its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we
have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel
myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my
changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me,
which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the
concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a
thing in motion.
Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas
Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether
the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether
such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man,
whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is
incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
unnecessary to repeat it here.
Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.
In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
you please.
And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is
simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of
parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A,
B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and
C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the
soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is
divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a
perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed
among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be
conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a
whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of
consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think,
there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is
impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B
and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There
will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each
part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as
many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question
continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole,
cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A,
B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he
arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which
is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen,
upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he
endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts
among themselves.
Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to
rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only
rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a
resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which
agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from
the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which
supports these states, something that is not I but is within me.
The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a
complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my
previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor.
Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by
which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not
to think.
The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the
category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of
movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities.
Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has
external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when
he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only
observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The
idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that
horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals
of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of
myself is myself.
All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of
extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but
sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in
the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective
reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists
only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal
immortality--it is the continuation of this present life.
The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only
rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a
substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance
is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a
noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say,
according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its
transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly
irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an
unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic
application to which William James referred.
And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic
sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be
perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that
everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or
that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything
spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my
consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for
ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for
ever.
George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the
Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief
in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his
_Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us
that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to
those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the
existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the
soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather
a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own,
from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the
natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of
confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term
notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost
as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like
the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence
of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this,
there are still some who are doubtful!
The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the
soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a
substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic
functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
vegetative nor animal functions.
A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
confusions.
After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animæ_. It is
reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.
Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the
reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which
men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even
with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the
confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my
disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does
not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a
fundamental defect of method, of logic.
And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find
vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with
pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return
to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing
nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were
born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born,
then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And
since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of
Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the
guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to
be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they
were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical,
the most rational, system of pantheism.
Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and
submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which,
when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has
always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the
first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.
The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.
From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
life.
A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce
everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no
more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or
relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same
for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different
each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of
the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes
it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to
arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or
destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it,
to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas,
even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My
own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my
soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to
this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the
corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the
revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of
tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something
that is lived or that is comprehended?
It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to
arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both
itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and
are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is
irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is
essentially sceptical.
The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to
relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science,
inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not
real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the
sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree?
Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate
thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we
think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with
oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may
they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable
and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?
The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot
think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and
principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast
to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of
theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was
established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic
propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity,
the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations.
"The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in
form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and
based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate.
The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28]
And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality,
which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and
sophistry.
The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use
of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on
the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts,
the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or
not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is
important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that
progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy
always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
advocacy.
Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it
follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle
dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is
sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least
in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion,
and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory
use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes
contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism
of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology,
that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science
of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the
word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save
by the testing of hypotheses.
Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the
theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where
you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be
thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next
the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo
dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more
scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by
giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it,
therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am
left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above
all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes
that it does not know. It requires a solution.
To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of
necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based
on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of
apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see
how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous
consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a
doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it
is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which
suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a
pious wish. In his _Études sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the
two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is
not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced,
but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the
senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the
_mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth."
This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verité_--is a
proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It
would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a
Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which
means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing
consoling to me.
No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that
it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a
consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent
serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that
piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene
soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius
who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum
religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all
the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a
stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian
religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by
Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he
asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_).
Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely
rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame
Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we
must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with
him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his
sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than
that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on
the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black
hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged
against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and
Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a
unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this
grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which
he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt
enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30]
Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what
is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an
anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_.
Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call
themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.
The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out
of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason
satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being
able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the
_odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people
who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words
of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when
Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the
persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that
of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by
mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies."
The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say
scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached
scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics
of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of
faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the
Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of
Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet
of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with
not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that
there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in
it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who,
though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are
unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the
most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of
despair, we will speak later on.
And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are
bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and
consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time,
at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for
living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing
products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to
veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and
disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of
manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those
who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all
this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?
Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science,
of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these
beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions
of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist
to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth,
beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the
Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and
to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves
unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living,
even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe
diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in
its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral
conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both
attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to
the same as duty for duty's sake.
Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those
who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite
future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the
fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to
liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept!
Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist,
happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an
intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth
part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember
anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which
is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul
which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its
past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in
proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed
with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_,"
and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not
let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
mind. Everything is _sub æternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.
And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
happiness? Was he free?
In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic
part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew
of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the
truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that
they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to
fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down
after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not
for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope
alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they
are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their
impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the
prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear
infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe
that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there
was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of
piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations,
preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd
than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that
he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate
himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul
was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a
soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as
to be scarcely worth refuting (_quæ adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
mereantur_)."
When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the
problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in
Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt,
without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is
not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or
irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a
supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he
happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and
of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit
thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?"
says à Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if
you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection
is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to
take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he
might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of
the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological
lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed
bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so,
and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the
selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever
know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for
happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is
reasoned about or defined.
And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like
Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less
bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have
Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the
immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which
is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number
of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe
eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must
at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must
be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I
shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived
it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that
stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one
stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it
happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it
is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and
completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a
finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary
elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits
in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the
concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of
ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in
the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite
number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not
less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
the same lion again.
But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.
Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
object of desire--_nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, there can be no
volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he
who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief
space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will
ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth
there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange
aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration
and nothing but an aberration.
More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk
about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our
will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this
sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by
saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about
it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human
action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal
disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about
it.
_Meglio oprando obliar, senzá indagarlo,
Questo enorme mister del universo!_
"Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of
the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same
Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the
earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory
and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by
the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a
single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods,
surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O
sun, set across the immense frozen waste."
But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting
work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all
attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All
with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are
conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no
longer be reflected in any human consciousness?
Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals,
"Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions
again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No;
art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister
and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no
other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know
nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer
answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is
to say, to nothingness.
To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations,
the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_,
is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_.
Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest,
says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this
wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on
one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his
Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and
philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always
reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we
find in it consolation or despair.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be
scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science.
For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for
faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and
in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or
intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but
science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far
from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational
truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible
that there is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within
its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is
immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its
indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves
rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness
cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it
depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves
this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration.
Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the
super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the
same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the
impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd
can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty.
The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in
the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the
doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent
and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the
analytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast
doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by
digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and
absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of
necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no
absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general
system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not
contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as
regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of
it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not.
It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of
our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although
this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards
necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely
that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more
transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent
of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a
universe or anything else at all?
Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in
the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the
reasoning reason.
Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does
reason succeed in converting truth into consolation. But reason going
beyond truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in
plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the
scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of the heart, and this
encounter leads to the discovery of a basis--a terrible basis!--for
consolation to build on.
Let us examine it.