But is this equivalent to saying that we blame our author for his
enterprise, and for the attempt he has made to reconcile criticism with
dogmatism? By no means; for we are inclined to believe that this is the
very aim that all metaphysic should set before itself at the present
day. How, indeed, could we possibly admit that so powerful, so lofty an
intellectual effort as that initiated by Kant, which under the name of
criticism, of subjective or objective idealism, or even of positivism,
has but been the development of his primary thought; that so prodigious
a mental movement as this should be absolutely void of meaning, and
destined to leave no trace in science? How believe that since the days
of Descartes the human intellect has gone mad? Would not this be to
express ourselves in the same way as those who, including Descartes
himself in this condemnation, have maintained that since St. Thomas the
whole course of human thought has been only one long error? Can there be
anything more contrary to the laws of the human mind than this
hypothesis of absolute truth discovered once for all, leaving no room
beside it for anything but error? And besides, what more did Kant do
than, under the form of a system (a defective form, no doubt, but
hitherto the only one known to philosophy)--what more, we ask, did he
than develop and render prominent what had been implicitly contained in
the teaching of all preceding metaphysicians? Had not they all assigned
a share in human consciousness to the subjective and relative, and very
often a larger share than we are led to think, if we only regard their
conclusions? Has there, for example, been since the days of Plato a
single metaphysician who has denied the knowledge of the senses to be
relative, and has the full scope and bearing of this principle been
accurately measured? Can that be denied which has been scientifically
demonstrated, which Descartes already affirmed, _i.e._, that light and
sound--Nature's two great languages--are only the products of our
physical organization, and that outside of the eye that sees, and the
ear that hears, there is nothing external to us but a series of
vibrations and undulations, which are neither luminous nor sonorous?
Reduced to itself, without the presence of men or animals, matter is
merely darkness and silence! What sort of matter may this be, and how
little resembling the one we know? But is not, it may be said, the
reality of that matter attested at least by resistance, by impact? The
reality--yes; but is the very nature of the external thing, as it is in
itself, manifested thereby? What is impact, what is resistance, if not a
mode of our sensations? To be assured of this, we have but to turn to
all that metaphysicians teach us as to the nature of God. All agree in
saying that God has no sensations. If God be cognizant of matter, as is
indubitable, it follows that He does not know it through sensations
similar to ours. The _argumentum baculinum_ which appears so convincing
to Sganarelle, would be powerless with regard to a pure spirit, still
more an infinite spirit. Now is not this as much as to say that impact
is the mode of action bodies exercise on each other, and by which
sentient beings are made aware of their existence, but that it is a mode
purely relative to the sensibility of finite beings? Say that, we at
least admit with Descartes the reality of extension. But what is the
real size of the extended things by which we are surrounded, and which
according to the shape of our lenses we see enlarged, diminished, or
even distorted in a thousand ways? Were it to please God, as Leibnitz
has said, to collect the immensity of worlds into a walnut-shell, while
preserving the proportion of objects, we should never find it out; and
such diminution might be carried on infinitely, without ever reaching
any term of smallness. 'We grant it,' will be the reply--'all sensible
knowledge is relative; Plato, Malebranche, Leibnitz, have sufficiently
told us this; but above the senses there is the understanding, which
alone is made for truth. Our senses give us the appearance of things,
our understanding makes us see them as they are in themselves.' Nothing
more true, and this is the basis of metaphysics. But the question is, to
what point the understanding is separated and separable from
sensibility, and reciprocally, to what point sensibility enters into the
understanding. Is there anything in us which can really be called
understanding pure? Understanding--yes; but pure--no! Man cannot think
without images, says Aristotle; this alone demonstrates that our
understanding is always obliged to sensibilize its most abstract
concepts. Moreover, between pure concepts and the data of sensibility
there is still a debatable and obscure region--that, namely, of space
and time. And here it is that Kant has made his mark ineffaceably. It is
by so doing that he renovated metaphysics. He believed, thought, that
both these domains belonged to sensibility and not to intelligence, that
they too were only modes of representation--that is to say, modes purely
relative to the nature of our mind. On this point also traditional
metaphysics came to his support, at least as regards time. For is it not
said by all schools whatever that God is not in time, that He is an
eternal _Now_, that past and future are nothing to Him? Is it not this
conception which is constantly appealed to as affording the solution of
the conflict between divine prescience and human liberty? Now to affirm
that God is not in time, and that He sees all portions of time in one
sole and eternal present, is not this as much as to say that time is
only the mode of representation of finite beings with regard to
themselves; that, consequently, it is an image belonging to their
finitude, but not to what they are in themselves, since God, who must
see them as they are, sees them in an absolutely and radically different
manner? Let us add another difference between the human and divine
intelligence, pointed out by Bossuet, when he said, "We see things
because they are, but they are because God sees them." Therefore in God
intelligence is anterior to things, in us posterior. Now, though we can,
through artistic creation, form some idea of an intelligence anterior to
things, the analogy is, after all, a coarse one, since in us creative
imagination only deals with materials borrowed from without. Hence it
follows that our intelligence is but a very imperfect image of the
divine. Now, as the latter alone can be the type of veritable
intelligence, we can only attribute to ourselves a relative
intelligence, subordinated to the conditions of the creature. But does
not this amount precisely to saying that we only see things in a
subjective and human manner, and that, consequently, we do not know them
as they are in themselves? Let us go further still; let us raise
ourselves to conceptions of the perfect being, the divine being. Here,
too, all metaphysicians agree in acknowledging that we have only an
entirely relative view of the Divinity. Is there one who admits that we
can, without anthropomorphism, understand literally all the attributes
that we impute to the Deity? Has not God Himself defined Himself in
Scripture as _Deus absconditus_, and does not the doctrine of mysteries
in every great religion imply that the true essence of the Deity is
unknown to us, and that, consequently, the philosophic doctrine of the
attributes of God is a purely human conception, by which we strive to
represent to ourselves the unrepresentable, and to bring within the
grasp of our sensibility and our imagination the august and sublime
notion that confounds all created substance?
This is what we are taught by all metaphysic doctrine whatever, and not
only by that of Kant, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Descartes,
Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fénelon: all alike teach us that the senses are
but a confused and relative knowledge, that space and time are modes of
finite existence, that God can only be conceived of by analogy, and not
in His essence. Are such conceptions as these very different from those
of Kant? And if he has taken them up again under another form, if by
isolating he has exaggerated them, his is the merit of having brought
them into prominence, of reminding us of them, and forcing us to assign
them a more important place in our doctrines. Despite the warnings of
the greatest minds, and of all great minds, are we not ceaselessly
tempted to yield to the automatic instinct which makes us believe things
to be as we see them, makes us suppose the existence of a matter, solid,
coloured, sonorous, cold, or hot, such as the senses acquaint us with;
makes us believe in an absolute space and time, with which we no longer
know how to deal when we think of the true Absolute; makes us conceive
of this true Absolute or Goodness as of a species of great man, that we
strip of a body, without even reflecting whether we have really the
power of representing to ourselves anything absolutely incorporeal? It
is against this vulgar current dogmatism, which philosophy has so much
trouble in getting rid of, that not only Kant, but every metaphysician,
protests. Kant only expounded, under a rigorous and systematic form, all
the critical portion of previous metaphysics. To us it seems
impossible--with more or less reservation, and without insisting at
present too rigidly on the share of the relative and subjective in human
knowledge--impossible, we say, not to allow this share, and
consequently, in a certain measure, not to give in our adherence to
transcendental criticism and idealism. There is, however, as we have
seen above, something which escapes from this relativity of all human
knowledge: it is the very fact of knowing. This fact has in itself
something absolute. I know not whence it comes, I cannot explain it; I
marvel that a being should be met with in whom at one time or other what
we call knowledge has appeared; but this fact cannot exist without being
known by the knower. All knowledge supposes, then, a subject that knows
itself--that is to say, who is internally present to himself. Here
knowledge comes from within, not from without. Whatever is objective can
only _appear_ to me, and is consequently a _phenomenon_. I only see its
outside, and it is only in relation to myself that I can grasp even that
outside. But the conscious _ego_ sees itself from within. Shall we say
that it appears to itself? I am willing to say so, but as it appears to
itself that appearance is a reality, for the form that I give it is my
own form. In order that it should become _me_, _I_ must be _me_. Every
other object has to be given in the first instance before it is
perceived; in order that I should see a house, a house must be there. It
is not so with the _ego_. For if at the moment it is given me it is not
already me, how is it to become so? How shall I know it as such? And if
it be already me, it is already perceived as such. Hence it follows that
the external thing may be represented without being, as happens in
sleep, while I cannot think without thinking myself, or think myself
without existing. All subjectivism, all relativism, all criticism,
therefore, are baffled in presence of the _ego_.
It is from this solid and immovable foundation laid by Descartes at the
entrance of science that we may set out to extend the sphere of our
knowledge. Everything, it is said, is relative. What matter if that
relative be connected by precise and fixed relations with the unknown,
if that which is given be a strictly faithful projection of that which
is thought? For instance, we do not know the souls of other men in
themselves, we have never seen a soul such as it is in itself; those
even which are dearest to us are unknown like the rest. But if we
suppose all the signs by which they manifest themselves to be sincere,
is it not to know them truly and in the only way intelligible to us, to
hear their voices, and understand their words, and interpret their
actions? No doubt nothing external to ourselves can be known internally
by us; but if the exterior be the expression of the interior, is not the
one the equivalent of the other? And to ask more would amount to asking
to be more than man. Science teaches us that all appearances have a
fixed and precise relation to reality. The visible apparent sky is
strictly what it ought to be to express the real sky. The deeper our
knowledge of things goes, the more we see the perfect conformity of the
apparent to the real, the more faithfully do phenomena translate
noumena. Are we not, therefore, justified in supposing that these
relative noumena, which are still no more than appearances, could be
translated in their turn, if only we had the key to them, into other
noumena of which they are the form and image? I may say the same about
the anthropomorphic representations of Deity. I admit that the Absolute
is in its essence above all human representations. But these
representations, when we disengage them as much as possible from all
sensible elements, are none the less the true expression of that
incomprehensible essence in so far as it appears to a human
consciousness. If not God in Himself, it is God in relation to me; and
it is with only this last that we have to do so long as we are but men.
We do not, therefore, consider it impossible to assign to the critical
element its part in metaphysic without denying the objective reality of
knowledge. We think that the famous old distinction between being and
phenomena, the intelligible and the sensible, still endures, despite the
"Kritik" of Kant; or rather, this very "Kritik" itself is, in our eyes,
only a hyperbolical but striking manner of expressing this great truth.