that error abounds in history, that it is full of false
assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated,
legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that,
the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains
there, that certain historical events are authenticated and
attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two,
because connected with the subject which engages me.
{242}
It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of
nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some
epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those
nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man;
had become manifest to him by different acts or under different
forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence
upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a
succession of revelations--revelations characterized at one time
by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a
thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of
the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and
after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism
may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may
contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular
books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken
the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the
religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to
Christianity.
{243}
We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once
the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the
relations of the Creator with his creatures.
If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to
admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history,
into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its
peculiar scientific object--the study of the human soul--I am far
from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the
Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and
called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error.
While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not
perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the
intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not
see what was implied in that man besides--that is, revelation as
well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of
kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their
results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had
deduced from psychology.
{244}
In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the
domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves
to it too exclusively.
From this twofold error sprang another still more serious.
Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism--a transformation as
unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man
and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete!
---------------------------------------
{245}
Third Meditation.
Rationalism.
A man of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one who will never be
suspected of any undue bias for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve,
avowing to me recently the high esteem with which M. Alexandre
Vinet inspired him, borrowed an expression of Pascal's: "The
heart has its reasons, which the reason does not comprehend."
[Footnote 41]
[Footnote 41: Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is
a slight difference. Pascal said, "Le cœur a des raisons que
la raison ne connaît point:" "The heart has reasons that the
reason knows not at all." Pensées de Pascal, edition of M.
Faugère, 1844, vol. ii, p. 172.]
I only admit half of what is implied in this conciliatory phrase;
and these are my reasons.
{246}
True religious faith, or, to call things by their real names,
Christian faith, is founded upon instincts and upon sentiment at
the same time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason do not
accept the sentiments of the heart, on which side is the fault?
Is the fault with the heart, that it feels them, or is it with
the reason, that it does not comprehend them?
My reply to this question is easy. I reject the distinction made.
I admit no such persons as are respectively styled the heart, the
reason. Here is only an attempt at a psychological anatomy; no
true enunciation of a real fact. Man, the human being, is
essentially one, and single: he has the faculty of
self-observation and self-study, but in exercising it he does not
destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his mere reason, it is
himself, and his whole self, that makes himself the object of his
observation and of his study, and that cannot but recognize
himself and accept himself in his entirety. He has no right to
say, with an air of scientific disdain, "My reason comprehends
not the reasons of my heart."
{247}
He must perforce say: "I comprehend not myself;" he must perforce
proclaim, not the incoherency of his being, but the insufficiency
or the incompetency of what he styles his reason.
Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personifications that
mislead; the one personifies by images, the other by
abstractions. Both have need of them--the one for its creations,
the other for its studies; I am far from seeking to deny their
respective use. All that I contend for is, that we must not
misconceive the real import of these expedients of human
language; we must not, by taking them for realities, lose sight
of or destroy what are really and genuinely realities, the
entities of divine creation.
I insist the more on this error, because in the philosophy of our
time it is a common and a potent error, and the source too of
other errors, deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral
and practical point of view. Condillac and his disciples had set
apart and specially studied in man the faculty of sensation, and
they were thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out of it
alone, man himself and the whole man.
{248}
Kant and his school considered particularly in man the faculty of
the reason and judgment, and very soon reason came with them to
constitute the whole man. I am far from intending to examine in
its fundamental principles and its entirety the system of Kant,
the greatest philosophical work upon the human understanding that
any man has produced since the time of Plato. I single out this
fact, that it treats the reason as the proper, special, and
paramount object of philosophy. Warned by his profound,
scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit himself to a point of view
so narrow, although so lofty; he studied man's reason under its
different aspects, he constituted himself the critic of pure
reason, the critic of practical reason, the critic of æsthetic
reason--that is, of reason applied to the discrimination of the
beautiful; he decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as
many different faculties as he found different phases in the
intellectual and moral life of man; but the faculty that he
styled the reason remained the basis of his study and of his
system.
{249}
It became in his school, and in the schools akin to it,
pre-eminently the intellectual substance, the basis of man and of
philosophy; and the human being himself, in his personal unity,
with all his life and his free will, entirely disappeared from
their teaching.
As results of this system I will cite only two facts, very
different in their nature, both very foreign to the founder of
the system and his disciples, but which serve the better to
reveal that system's faultiness, as these facts are, although its
indirect, remote, and involuntary, nevertheless, its undeniable
consequences.
When, in 1793, the frenzied men who disposed, as masters, of the
destinies of France, abolished the Christian religion and
Christian worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to men an
object to adore. They instituted the worship of reason.
{250}
The church of Notre-Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a temple
of reason; a young woman was made to figure there as the goddess
of reason; and the orator of the National Convention, Chaumette,
cried aloud as he pointed her out to the people, "Behold living
Reason; we celebrate here to-day the sole true worship, the
worship of Liberty and of Reason."
At the distance of three quarters of a century from the date of
these revolutionary orgies, in 1865, not in France but in
England, a man of earnest intentions, superior mind, and
extensive learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his
sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes a book entitled,
"Rationalism in Europe;" and the object of this book is to
establish, that all the good effected in Europe since the fall of
the Roman empire, all the progress made by states in justice, in
humanity, in liberty, and general happiness--whether in the
sphere of science or of practical industry--is due to the
influence of Rationalism, to its developments and its conquests.
{251}
Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he attaches no precise and
philosophical meaning to the word "Rationalism;" he does not
trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor the place occupied
in it by the pure, the practical, or the aesthetic reason; he
only retraces the intellectual and social history of Europe, and
all the happy results that this history commemorates, all the
salutary consequences of the activity of the human mind, of the
liberty of man's thought, of the amelioration of human
institutions and manners, he sums up all in a single name,
attributes them to a single cause, and assigns all the honor to
the progress of Rationalism!
{252}
Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his work, a single
reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: he asks himself whether, in
extolling the happy effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has
not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too much:
"Utility is perhaps the highest motive to which reason can
attain. ... It is from the moral or religious faculty alone
that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. ...
The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth for
its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of
error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political
movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of
the spirit of Rationalism into politics, has produced, and is
producing, some of the most splendid instances of
self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, the general tendency of
these influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and both in
actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible.
With a far higher level of average excellence than in former
times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of
self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or
religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice
during the last eighteen hundred years has been mainly the
history of the action of Christianity upon the world.
{253}
Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic
spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a
cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and
beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the
Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it
is by their influence alone that it can be permanently
sustained. ...
"This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant
picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of
the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecutions; the
decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments,
which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered
the character of mankind; the emancipation of suffering
nationalities; the abolition of the belief in the guilt of
error, which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the asceticism
which paralyzed the material progress of mankind, may be justly
regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilization; but
when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some
former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual
interests to what they believed to be right, and when we
realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is
impossible to deny that we have lost something in our
progress." [Footnote 42]
[Footnote 42: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii, 1866,
third edition, pp. 403-409.]
{254}
But to leave England and Mr. Lecky, and to return once more to
France. I turn to the pages of a rationalistic philosopher more
profound, and more profoundly troubled, too, in his sentiments
than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in an essay of M. Edmond Scherer,
entitled "The Crisis of Protestantism," [Footnote 43] the
following passage:
[Footnote 43: Mélanges d'histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254.
1864.]
{255}
"That which is really imperiled is not so much Protestantism;
it is Christianity, it is very religion. As for natural
religion, that exists only in books. Religions which have vital
force and influence are positive religions; that is, religions
which have a Church, and particular rites, and dogmas. What are
these dogmas? Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the
solutions of the great problems which have ever disquieted the
mind of man--the origin of the world, and of evil; the
expiation; the future of humanity. The doctrines of religion
are a sort of revealed metaphysics.
"Considered in its form, dogma is the supernatural--not merely
because religions were born at an epoch when the imagination
was greedy of miracles, and when the imagination, in her
_näiveté_, associated herself with everything; but also
because, as may be readily understood, it is impossible for a
positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation;
it is necessarily a history of the intervention of God in the
destinies of man, the account of acts by which God created and
saved the world--it is that or it is nothing. We see then at
once that in religion everything is not religious. There is in
every religion a multitude of elements, historical, physical,
and metaphysical, as to which its dogmas may come into conflict
with science. Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I
would here speak. The religious sentiment has also its critical
action; _it_ also may enter into a struggle with religion.
{256}
"As long as the authority of the priest or of the book
preserves its prestige, the believer receives his religion
ready made for him, without himself making distinctions; but as
soon as that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not entirely
reject his first belief, will at least no longer accept it
without reservations. He only retains so much of it as
enlightens or touches him, so much as commends itself to his
understanding or to his heart; so much, in a word, as gives a
satisfaction to his religious requirements.
"Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes the measure of
religious truth. It receives all in religion that addresses
itself to the soul, all that nourishes and fortifies the soul,
all that raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all
that unites the soul to God.
{257}
Religious sentiment appropriates it all, but it appropriates
nothing more. Let but a thing become indifferent, and it feels
it as an importunity, and looks upon it in the light of an
element strange, useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this
reason, doctrines purely speculative as well as facts purely
marvelous. Man requires his religion to be entirely religious;
that is to say, to be in all respects in direct relation with
piety, and, so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. The
more his faith purifies itself, the more a man eliminates from
his religion dogmas which, having no root either in the divine
nature or man's nature, appear on that very account to have no
ground to exist at all.
"At first sight this gradual emancipation of faith and this
corresponding progress of religion in the ways of Spiritualism,
seem a natural process by means of which religious opinion and
the human mind contrive to maintain themselves in a state of
constant equilibrium.
{258}
We imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that we catch a
glimpse of the religious future of humanity in a sort of
Christian Rationalism, a rational Christianity not excluding
fervor of devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man's
thought.
"I demand nothing better as far as I am concerned; but I cannot
refrain from asking, not without anxiety, whether Christian
Rationalism is really a religion. What remains in the crucible
after the operation just detailed? Is the residue really the
essence of the positive dogmas, or is it but a _caput
mortuum?_ When Christianity is rendered translucent to man's
mind, conformable to man's reason and man's moral appreciation
of things, does it still possess any great virtue? Does it not
very much resemble Deism, and is it not equally lean and
sterile? Does not the potent influence of religious belief
reside in its dogmatic formulas and marvelous legends just as
much as in anything more essentially religious that it
possesses?
{259}
Is there not even somewhat of superstition in genuine piety,
and is it possible for piety to dispense with that popular
system of metaphysics, that attractive mythology, which men
strive to eliminate from it? Do not the elements which you
pretend to abstract from religion constitute the alloy, without
which the precious metal becomes unsuitable for the rough
usages of life? In short, when criticism shall have succeeded
in overthrowing the supernatural as useless, and dogmas as
irrational; when the religious sentiment on the one side, and a
scrupulous reason on the other, shall have penetrated man's
belief, assimilated and transformed it; when no other authority
shall remain standing, save that of the personal conscience of
each individual; when, in a word, man having torn every vail
and penetrated every mystery, shall behold that God face to
face to whom he aspires, will it not be discovered that that
God is, after all, nothing else than man himself, the
conscience and the reason of humanity personified? Will not
religion, in the very attempt to become more religious, have
ceased to exist?"
{260}
Such, according to the views of its most eminent representatives,
are the potent influences and the final results of Rationalism.
After having confusedly attributed to it all the progress of
man's thought and of man's civilization, Mr. Lecky expresses the
apprehension that he has lowered the nature of man, by depriving
him (these are his very words) "of our noblest quality, of the
divine spark, the principle in us of everything that is heroic,"
the complete and pure devotedness of Christian faith. M. Scherer
asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive
revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing,
and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational
criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself;
and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself
with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has
its reasons, which the reason comprehends not."
{261}
Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, at the same time,
throws such light upon the subject of my meditations as this
involuntary, this invincible anxiety observable in men of lofty
sentiments and profound convictions, when confronting the chasms
in their system, and dealing with the incoherences of their own
convictions. However profound, however different my own
conviction may be, I have no desire to engage, either with them
or against them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. I have
been engaged all my life in frequent and ardent polemics. Those
could not be well avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely
to combat human opinions, but to grapple with human affairs; and
called upon to resolve, upon the instant, practical and urgent
questions. But while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of
precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience has taught me
their inconveniences and their perils.
{262}
The combatants on each side are prone to make use of weapons of
too offensive a nature; men involve themselves for party
interests and party honor, and push their conclusions with
obstinate pertinacity beyond the strictness of truth, sometimes
even beyond their own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of
philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any similar rock; but
avoiding all personal polemics, all controversy of detail, I will
express upon the essence of Rationalism, although only in a
general manner, my sincere and intimate convictions.
There are in Rationalism two fundamental errors. First, it
mutilates man while it studies him; it holds as of no account
several of the constituent elements and essential facts of human
nature, of which it ignores the meaning and the import. Secondly,
Rationalism extends the pretensions of human science beyond its
rights, and beyond its legitimate limits.
{263}
The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are certainly not
sufficient reasons for scientific conviction, nor conclusive
proofs in support of any particular system whatever. The
instinctive belief of the human race in one or more supernatural
forces is no demonstration of the reality of the supernatural;
and the aspirings of man's soul for a life beyond this
terrestrial one does not rationally prove the soul's immortality.
Error may occur in human instincts or sentiments just as much as
in human ideas. But when these instincts and these sentiments are
universal, permanent, indestructible, encountered in all ages and
in all countries--when they resist and survive all attacks, all
doubts of reason or science--they are, beyond all question,
considerable facts, and facts which the human understanding
cannot but recognize and respect. If these instincts and
sentiments do not solve the problems which trouble man's
understanding, at least they demand imperiously some solution; if
they throw no light upon his road to science, they oblige him to
see that that road has its mysteries.
{264}
Rationalism mutilates humanity when it ignores such facts,
regarding them as vain illusions because it cannot explain them;
and when, after this mutilation, it assigns the entire empire to
a single portion of the human nature, to a single faculty, called
by it reason, as if reason constituted the entire man,
Rationalism does in the intellectual world what it would be doing
in the physical world did it deny the reality of night because it
only sees the day clearly.
Rationalism is the more wrong in thus discarding facts which it
does not explain, that in its proper domain similar facts occur,
and that its science of reason arrives also finally at mysteries.
I mentioned it before, as a truth acquired to philosophy, that
there exist in the human mind certain universal and necessary
principles, neither furnished to the mind by impressions derived
from the external world, nor created by the mind itself; and that
those principles are inherent in the nature of the mind, and come
to it from another source than that of sensation, or any
discovery of man's own thought.
{265}
We have here a psychological fact which, after the profound
studies of the spiritualistic school from the time of Plato down
to M. Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To what does this
fact tend, and what is its logical consequence? What but God,
creation, revelation, and the relations of God with man? Will
Rationalism give any better explanation of these divine laws of
the human mind than it has given of the instincts and of the
sentiments of the human heart? or will it ignore the one result
as it has ignored the other?