for this was, like its twin brother Materialism, born in the
cradle of Philosophy, and while the steps of Philosophy were
still those of an infant--but the birth of the spiritualistic
school of the nineteenth century. This birth was a national
reaction against the Sensualism of the eighteenth century--just
as the Christian Awakening was a reaction against the impiety of
the same epoch. Theories do not escape the influence of events:
after the ideas come the facts, to pour upon those ideas floods
of light, and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy or of
policy, in all their practical consequences.
{219}
The Sensualism--that is to say, to style it by its true name, the
Materialism--of the eighteenth century, did not pass triumphantly
through this test: it still reigned in France at the commencement
of the nineteenth century, but it was the reign of an antiquated
sovereign in decline--a sovereign of whom the public know the
defects, and whose successor is at hand.
M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of
bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and
into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the
spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a
real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific
method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession
nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed
to take up with systems--he observed, he read, he studied and
reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and
of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in
politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound
thinker.
{220}
His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment,
circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with
the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to
accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of
instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented
themselves step by step, each on its own account, without
troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth;
and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or
resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of
any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of
listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are
the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34]
characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some
special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard
them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism,
scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the
results that the inductive process discovers in the facts
themselves.
[Footnote 34: In his "Traduction des oeuvres complètes de
Reid," vol. iii, pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 273-451.]
{221}
He had been a great reader of the writings of the Scotch
philosophers, held them in high esteem, and walked in their
steps; his views were, however, loftier, and his footing firmer,
although not less prudent. He had in his short philosophical
career two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that he had a
friend in M. Maine de Biran, a profound and enthusiastic observer
of the human soul in his own soul--a subtle metaphysician, almost
a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, name the Saint Theresa of
philosophy; his other advantage was, that he had for his disciple
M. Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent interpreter of the
great philosophers of all ages. M. Cousin, in his turn, has been
fortunate in having for his disciple M. Jouffroy--a disciple, of
mind original and independent, following a master accomplished in
the art of observing intellectual and moral facts, and of
describing them and ordering them, without altering their
essential character.
{222}
Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin yields to the ambition of his
thought, or is swayed by the intellectual current of opinions in
vogue; but very soon his common sense checks, or at least sets
him on his guard--a common sense that finds lucid expression, and
is distinguished by probity of intent. Such are the founders and
the glorious chiefs of the spiritualistic school of the
nineteenth century.
Nor have they failed to find disciples and heirs worthy of such
predecessors. For some years past it has been the custom, in
certain regions of the learned world, to demand, frivolously
enough, and in a tone not free from irony, "What has become of
the spiritualistic school--what can it be about?" I will not
answer for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, "We are only of
yesterday, and we are everywhere--in your domains, your cities,
your isles, your fortresses, your communes, your councils, your
camps, your tribes, your 'decuries,' in the palace, the senate,
the forum; we only leave you your temples." [Footnote 35]
[Footnote 35: Tertullian Apologet., ch. xxxvii.]
{223}
The modern Spiritualists had no such conquests to make, and it is
fitting for philosophers to be more modest; but however short my
experience may have taught me that the human memory may in
similar cases sometimes be, I am astonished that men should so
forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and patent. What
school of philosophy ever furnished in half a century so many men
and so many works, some of eminence, all of them of distinguished
merit? I will cite only a few names: MM. de Rémusat, Damiron,
Adolphe Garnier, Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire,
Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévêque, Bouillier, Janet, some of whom
have scarcely disappeared from the stage of the world, and others
are only just arrived there--they belong all to the
spiritualistic school, to which they have all done honor by
important works on philosophy, whether speculative, historical,
political, economic, or practical.
{224}
Their doctrines, it is true, have now been for some time hotly
attacked, and the wind of the day does not blow into their sails.
They have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this respect,
that they have not directed sufficient attention to these
polemics; that they have combated in a manner too indirect, or
with too little energy; the ideas in whose name their own have
been assailed; a certain share of languor and of embarrassment is
at this moment the malady of the best minds and of the sincerest
convictions. But in spite of the blows which it receives and
returns, although with insufficient sturdiness, the
spiritualistic school, if we judge it by the names and the works
which belong to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains in
our century in possession of the domain and of the banner of
philosophy.
Its merits will present themselves still more clearly if we
examine closely the results of its labors.
{225}
The first and the most important result, in a point of view
purely philosophical, is, that the Spiritualists of our days have
given to their researches and to their ideas a character really
scientific: they have introduced into the study of man and of the
intellectual world, the method practiced with so much success in
the study of man and of the material world--that is to say, they
have taken the observation of facts as the point of departure and
the constant guide of their investigations. Are there in man and
in the intellectual world, as there are in man and in the
material world, facts capable of being observed, seized,
described, classified, generalized? This is the question which
the spiritualistic school proposed and discussed at the outset. I
have no hesitation in saying, that it resolved it in the
affirmative, and that, thanks to this school, psychology has
assumed its rank among the positive sciences, just as physiology
did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, psychology has its
special object, its determined domain, in which it proceeds
absolutely according to the same method observed by the physical
sciences in their domain.
{226}
That this method, the observation of facts, of their value and
their laws, is in psychology more difficult to be followed than
in the physical sciences, is certain; but this certainly does not
deprive psychology either of its domain or of its scientific
character. It is a science by the same right and upon the same
conditions as all the others are so. The labors of the
spiritualistic school, and particularly those of M. Jouffroy,
have given it a solid foundation: and this has been formally
recognized by several even among the adversaries of this school,
among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot. [Footnote 36]
[Footnote 36: I read in the Métaphysique et la Science of M.
Vacherot:
"_The Metaphysician:_
"In his denial of psychology, I stop at once the author of
the 'positive philosophy,' and I demand of him by what right
he thus banishes from the domain of the experimental sciences
a science of observation.
"_The man of learning:_
"It constitutes in effect 'hiatus' in this philosophy, and a
hiatus which all the sound minds of the positive school are
beginning to admit. M. Littré, for example, may make his
reservations of opinion as to the manner in which our
psychologists understand psychology, and as to the method
which they apply to it; but he has too much sense not to
admit that the intelligence--all that constitutes man's
identity, the moral man--is the object of a peculiar study,
of which many previous works have shown the possibility, and
many practical results prove the high and vital interest."--
Vacherot, la Métaphysique et la Science, vol. iii, p. 181.]
{227}
It is in the name of science and by the processes of science that
the Spiritualists of the nineteenth have combated the Sensualists
of the eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, absolutely
crushed Materialism, that child and legitimate heir of
Sensualism; but while dethroning the parent, they have compelled
the child sometimes to avow himself boldly, sometimes to
transform himself, and to assume other features and other arms
than those of his cradle. I will only cite the lecture of M.
Cousin on the "Sensualistic Philosophy in the Eighteenth
Century," and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on the "Existence
of the Soul," [Footnote 37] written on the occasion of the work
of M. Broussais: "De l'Irrritation et de la Folie."
[Footnote 37: This essay, first inserted in 1828 in the Revue
Française, has been reprinted in the "Ecrits et discours
divers" of the Duke de Broglie, collected and published in
1863.]
{228}
Whoever, after having read them, would still persist in
maintaining the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in
refusing to see the consequences to which Sensualism leads, would
prove, in my opinion, that he has not understood either the
question put, or the doctrine combated and refuted. We have here
a result acquired for the science of the intellectual world, and
we owe the result to the polemics of the spiritualistic school.
That school has obtained another result more important still, and
which belongs no longer to the polemics of simple negation, but
to positive doctrine; it has set in the broad light of day the
real and fundamental principle of morals, the distinction as to
the essentials of moral good and evil, as well as the law of
obligation, that "categorical imperative," the sole refuge which
Kant found against Skepticism.
229
Neither the interest well defined of each individual, nor the
interest of the greater numbers, nor any sentimental sympathy,
nor any system of positive written law, can, for the future, be
considered as the basis of morals. An attempt is made in the
present day to establish another thesis, and to represent
morality as absolutely independent of religion. Grave error,
which discards from morality, if not its principle, at least its
source and its object, its author and its future; an error,
however, very different from those errors which dispense even
with the principle of morals, and assign as the rule for the
conduct of men, motives having in themselves nothing moral,
nothing absolute. The fact that man's conscience and man's reason
recognize the distinction of moral good and evil, and at the same
time the duty of practicing that good as the law of human
actions, is a fact which we may now regard as acquired to
philosophy.
{230}
The treatise "Du Bien," in the work of M. Cousin upon "Le Vrai,
le Beau, et le Bien," the preface of M. Jouffroy to the "Outlines
of Moral Philosophy," by Dugald Stewart, and the "Essia sur la
Morale," in the "Mélanges Philosophiques," which M. Jouffroy
published in 1833, the book of M. Jules Simon upon "Le Devoir,"
these are all solid and brilliant works, by which the
spiritualistic school has victoriously established the truth to
which I have referred.
And in establishing it, it has paid a remarkable act of homage to
another fact, and rendered an immense service by enforcing a
truth, with which are intimately connected man's rights in this
world, as well as his prospects beyond this world: I mean the
fact of man's liberty. This is no question of pure theory and
scientific curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution has
for man, in time present and time future, the most important
practical consequences. Upon what grounds would the claim of man
to liberty in the social state rest, what would become of his
hopes and fears of a future eternity, if man were not a being
morally free and responsible for the decisions which determine
his acts?
{231}
The civil liberty of man during his life on earth, and his
future destiny after his life on earth, closely depend upon the
fact of his free volition and upon the responsibility which
accompanies it. Without free volition man falls in this world,
without rights, under the yoke of whatever force may take
possession of him, or use him as its instrument; what remains for
man, then, but to tremble at the destiny which awaits him beyond
this world by virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign
Master? To the spiritualistic school belongs the honor of having
firmly established and rendered plain the psychological fact of
the freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has it allowed
itself to be troubled and blinded by the ontological questions
which that fact suggests, or by the difficulty attending the
solution of these questions. Consequently, it has accepted upon
this point the limits of man's science, and at the same time
maintained the rights of man's nature. It has laid in man's
liberty and man's responsibility the legitimate foundation of
political liberty, as well as that of the personal morality of
man and of man's future.
{232}
Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century
is at once scientific, moral, liberal. Eminent merits, rare
combination in any time, and still more so in our time!
With these great merits, and in spite of them, two omissions are
still remarkably striking.
The spiritualistic school, our contemporary, has halted abruptly
before the sovereign problems which weigh upon the human soul,
and which, in the first series of these "Meditations," I styled
natural problems; [Footnote 38] it has in no respect furthered
their solution according to reason, or accepted their solution
according to Christianity; its "Theodicy" has remained far in
arrear of its Psychology.
[Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
Religion.]
Halted it has, also, before any practical solution of these same
problems; nor has it eliminated either any faith or any law which
suffices for man's soul or man's conduct in life--in short, any
religion.
{233}
M. Jules Simon, in his work entitled "La Religion Naturelle," MM.
Saisset and De Rémusat, in their "Essais de Philosophie
Religieuse," have striven, irrespectively of all positive
revelation, to give to man's soul and to man's conduct that
satisfaction and that religious rule which both require. I doubt
their counting much upon the success of their attempts; I doubt
their believing that their natural religion, or their religious
philosophy, are sufficient substitutes for Christianity. Far
other things than such drops of science are required to appease
the thirst of humanity for religion.
Whence, in the spiritualistic school, this double hiatus--this
twofold weakness, whence?
In my opinion, the causes are themselves twofold. The
spiritualistic school has been at once too timid and too proud.
It has not seen in the psychological facts which it was observing
and describing, all that they contain and reveal upon the subject
of the great natural problems of man and of the world; it has
neglected the cosmological facts and the historical facts which
concur to throw light upon those problems; its psychology has
remained isolated and incomplete.
{234}
It has, at the same time, failed to see the limits of psychology
and of human science in general; not having succeeded in
advancing the torch of science into the regions where access to
it is denied, it has refused to accept the light descending upon
man by another way than that of science.
Like Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Reid, and Kant, M. Cousin, now
the most eminent representative of the spiritualistic school,
establishes, by virtue of psychological observation, these two
great facts: first, that there exist universal and necessary
principles manifesting themselves in the human mind, and reigning
there without being capable of being subverted, which are called
into action by sensations coming from the external world;
secondly, that these sensations, so coming from the external
world, do not in any way supply the human mind with these
universal and necessary principles, and that they can explain
neither their presence nor their origin.
{235}
Such, for instance, are the principles, that everything which
begins to appear has a cause--that every quality belongs to a
substance! [Footnote 39] Sensualism is not in a position to
account in any way for these two principles, or to find them
among those facts that form all its psychology.
[Footnote 39: Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, pp. 19-66. 1857.]
I am not called upon to develop or to discuss this idea, which,
for my part, I fully admit; enough that I mention it as a
fundamental doctrine of the spiritualistic school.
The philosophers, who have admitted the existence of these
universal and necessary principles, have assigned them different
names, and have enumerated and classified them differently; but
whether they style them "ideas," or "innate ideas," or "laws," or
"forms," or "categories of the understanding"--whether they
enlarge or limit their number--they agree as to their nature, and
declare them inherent in the human mind itself, which applies
them, so to say, as its own peculiar property in its appreciation
of the external world; so far is the mind from borrowing them
from that world!
{236}
These universal and necessary principles once admitted and
characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and
characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no
further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining
its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others,
like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological
value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming
that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the
human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that
they regulate the realities of the external world, as they
regulate our intellectual activity.
{237}
Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz,
Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God
himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside
over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as
the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles
reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and
think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he
placed man himself in the middle of the world.
To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why does the spiritualistic
school so stop short, why does it not advance to the very end of
the path upon which it has entered? It admits God as the being in
whom these necessary principles reside, and from whom man has
received them; what does this mean but that it recognizes in God
the author and instructor of man? And to recognize in God the
author and the instructor of man, what is this but to recognize
the fact of the creation, and the fact of the primitive
revelation inherent in the fact of the creation?
{238}
These two truths are involved in the fact that the necessary
principles exist in the mind of man, and that man derives them,
not from his relations with the external world, but from himself,
and from the source whence he himself emanates--from God, his
Creator. God has created man armed at all points, as well in the
order of the intellect as of matter, complete in his soul as in
his body: that is to say, God has given to him at his creation
the necessary principles of his intellectual life, just as he has
given him the necessary mechanism of his physical organization.
Scientific psychology thus mounts up to that supreme point where
it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its part,
inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing and proclaiming the
existence of that light to which it so attains.
What was the import, what the form, of that primitive revelation?
Has the revelation itself been renewed at any epoch subsequent to
the creation? If so, by what instruments and with what incidents
has it been renewed? These are questions to which I shall recur,
but which for the moment I do not approach; I wish here only to
establish the fact of the divine revelation in the sphere and in
the terms of scientific psychology.
{239}
Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclusion. I repeat here
what I said in the first series of these Meditations, when
speaking of the dogma of the creation:
"The only serious opponents of the dogma of the creation are
those who maintain that the universe, the earth, and man upon
the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively,
in the state in which they now are. No one, however, can hold
this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many
ages man has existed on the earth is a question that has been
largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry
in no way affects the dogma of the creation itself; it is a
certain and recognized fact that man has not always existed on
the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone
different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man,
therefore, had a beginning: man has come upon the earth."
[Footnote 40]
[Footnote 40: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
Religion, page 18.]
{240}
He did not come there by spontaneous generation--that is to say,
by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter.
Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this
hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to
admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth
of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another
delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member
of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where
M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his
luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the
progressive transformation of species does not explain better the
existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth.
{241}
This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts;
even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same
problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose
successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the
existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the
primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man
himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology.
God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which
each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors.