really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits
which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high
its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three
martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according
to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they
respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that
they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter
that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a
void in quest of what they call "Being!"
{314}
Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably,
still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to
Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and
the passionate longing for universal unity--feelings noble both,
but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction.
"I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real
Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it
shall have rejected all the rest--in a word, a Good that gives
the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal
and supreme happiness. ... Man is essentially a being that
thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the
highest degree of human felicity. ... My sources of enjoyment
consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64]
[Footnote 64: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M.
Emile Saisset, vol. i, pp. 15, 16.]
{315}
What obliviousness of man's nature and of man's life! Man is not
merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and
acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same
time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of
knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for
his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not
from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his
liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment.
Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest
degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human
knowledge." Man is more exacting than the philosopher, and it
requires infinitely more to satisfy the most modest human soul
than to satisfy the proudest mind. Infinitely more in respect of
happiness, infinitely less in respect of science! Not that I
would make their intellectual ambition a reproach to
philosophers, even when it leads them astray.
{316}
It is an honor to the human mind that it aspires higher than it
can attain, that it torments itself in the struggle to carry its
science into that invisible world, which it instinctively feels
by anticipation, just as it does into that visible world that it
sees. God granted to man this privilege; he implanted in his soul
the ardent desire to know him and to possess him fully. But at
the same time, God granted to men in general certain instincts
and spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy this desire
without the necessity of any profound study. What would have
become of the human race if, in order to believe in God, to hope
in him, and to pray to him, man had been obliged to wait until
philosophers had resolved the problems which still weigh upon
_their_ genius? As God, in creating man free, took care that
the maintenance of the general order in this world should not be
completely abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he provide
for the spiritual nourishment of mankind, without denying to the
great ambitious ones of the earth either the prospect of a
satisfaction more complete, or the right to search for it.
{317}
Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's
mixed nature--an indication of a destiny in store for him
superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas
of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but
a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to
himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of
thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and
upon earth than philosophy--than even the philosophy 'of the
absolute'--can explain. ... To comprehend God, it needs to be
God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I
borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of
Hegel. [Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 366, 341.
1864.]
Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee,
Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes."
{318}
Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to
enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient
than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of
comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by
receiving no being as God but man.
The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That
truth is one--that is to say, that all truths, whatever their
object, are in harmony with one another--the very word truth
implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists
passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They
identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding
all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and
abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and
the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an
impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the
void.
{319}
By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was
the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to
construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and
yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so
rigorously philosophical?
Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is
considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical
world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems,
invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the
Pantheists by similar means proceeded--nay, are proceeding--to
explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite.
The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of
the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact
study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange
not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences
themselves--I may at once call it by its proper name, the
scientific method--was formerly, and remains still, strange to
the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to
Spinoza.
{320}
Whether Plotinus plunges into an _ecstacy_ to arrive at and
comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of
contemplation; or Spinoza, defining _substance_, makes it
the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and
of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of _idea_ in order to
arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his
term _substance_--it is the same defect that appears in the
labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their
development, but in the very point from which they start; for
observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the
affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction,
logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set
aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing
themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.
{321}
They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step
facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their
inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient
principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts,
themselves evident, indestructible.
Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes
three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves
may lead to questions and controversies.
1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality.
He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and
distinct from every other being.
2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the
freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations
which precede them, man has an intimate and assured
consciousness.
3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good
and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be
thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and
of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts
evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the
experience of the human race.
{322}
Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, sometimes formally denies,
these facts, which psychology attests and proves. There is,
however, a notable difference in this point in the three great
representatives of Pantheism. Thanks to the Platonic school, from
which he sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different questions of
man's liberty and of the reality of good and of evil, soars in an
elevated region where the truth now shines in splendor, now
obscures itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which the
philosopher himself is entangled as soon as he attempts to
explain the one and infinite Being and that Being's relations
with nature and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and plainer.
He formally denies all individuality, all human liberty.
Substance, "_the being_" is single and universal.
{323}
All act of man, as every fact of nature, is produced by fated
laws and causes: "Free will is a chimera, flattering to our pride
and in reality founded upon our ignorance. All that I can say to
those who believe that they can, by virtue of any free decision
of the soul, speak or be silent--or, to use a single word,
act--is that they dream with their eyes open." [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. E.
Saisset, vol. i, Introduction, p. clii.]
... "Nothing," adds he, "is bad in itself. Good and evil indicate
nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are
nothing but manners of thinking. Not only has every man the right
to seek his good, his pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise. ...
The measure of each man's right is his power. ... He who does not
yet know reason, or who, having not as yet contracted the habit
of virtue, lives according to the laws only of his appetites, is
as much in his right as he who regulates his life according to
the laws of reason.
{324}
In other words, just as the sage has an absolute right to do all
that his reason dictates to him, or to live according to the laws
of his reason, in the same manner has the ignorant man and the
madman a right to everything that his appetite impels him to
take; in other words, the right to live according to the laws of
appetite. ... And he is no more obliged to live according to the
laws of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under the laws
that govern the nature of a lion. ... Hence we conclude that a
compact has only a value proportioned to its utility; where the
utility disappears the compact disappears too with it, and loses
all its authority. There is, then, folly in pretending to bind a
man forever to his word; unless, at least, man so contrive that
the breach of the compact shall entail for him that violates it
more danger than profit." [Footnote 67]
[Footnote 67: Œuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx.]
{325}
Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from
its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of
his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical,
æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of
the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what
place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most
intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His
philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between
historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the
absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal
history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety,
and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at
the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in
politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment
conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and
yet revolutionary." [Footnote 68]
[Footnote 68: Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis
Kant jusqu'a Hegel, by S. Willm: a work crowned by the
Institute: vol. iv, p. 337.]
{326}
"It is impossible," says M. Edmond Scherer, "to read Hegel
without asking ourselves if he, be serious. He falls incessantly
into a style of images and personifications; and one would
suppose one's self, in perusing his writings, to be present at
the formation of a mythology, at the development of a world like
that of the ancient Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and
marched on, passing through all kinds of adventures." [Footnote
69]
[Footnote 69: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 298, 838.]
M. Edmond Scherer's is a mind hard to please, which is ever
struck and offended by incoherence of objects, futility of
artificial combinations, and vain play upon words, even where he
recognizes or admires the genius. The philosophical "rout" is not
embarrassed for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the
object toward which the dominant idea, once adopted, gives the
impulse. In spite of its complexities and of its craving for the
reconciliation of religion and of politics, the Pantheism of
Hegel has borne its natural fruits.
{327}
A school has resulted from it, which, in accordance with its
proper and independent manifestations, a learned and moderate
judge, M. Willm, characterizes in these words: "The new German
philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Rüge are
the principal chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact
with the _Humanism_ of M. Pierre Leroux, the
_Positivism_ of M. Auguste Comte, and the _Atheism_ of
M. Proudhon. It tends to substitute for the ancient worship the
worship of humanity, and to found a new worship dispensing with
God, and with morality properly so called. ... There is no such
thing as _theology_ but only _anthropology_; for the
mind of humanity is the divine mind realized. There is no longer
any other piety than devotedness to the objects of humanity; no
longer any other prayer than the contemplation of the human mind.
... Man accomplishes every reasonable object if he accomplishes
his own peculiar object, and he cannot do better than employ all
his faculties to realize his own objects. _Man's will be
done:_ such is the principle of the new law." [Footnote 70]
[Footnote 70: Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis
Kant jusqu'a Hegel: by S. Willm: vol. iv, pp. 624, 626.]
{328}
Such is the inevitable result at which Pantheism, even that kind
termed idealistic Pantheism, ultimately arrives, whatever the
elevation of mind and the morality of intent in its first
authors. This is no scientific doctrine, founded upon the
observation of facts and their laws; it is an hypothesis framed
by dint of violent abstractions, verbal commutations and
reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk with itself. Under
the breath of Pantheism all beings--real and personal
beings--vanish, and are replaced by an abstraction becoming in
its turn the Being _par excellence;_ the sole being,
although without personality and without volition, swallowing up
all things in a bottomless abyss, which absorbs that being, too,
after it has already absorbed everything that it has sought so to
explain.
{329}
Was there ever, in the conceptions of mythology, or in the
mystical dreams of the human imagination, anything so artificial,
anything so vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very
beginning, as well as throughout its entire course, loses sight
of the best attested facts respecting man and the world; and,
shocking equally science and common sense, departs as much from
the method of philosophy as from the spontaneous instincts of
mankind?
---------------------------------------
{330}
Sixth Meditation.
Materialism.
Materialistic Pantheism is more consistent and more intelligible.
I must at once restore to it its genuine name; it has no right to
that of Pantheism: it sees God neither in the universe nor in
man; the eternal world and ephemeral individuals are, in its
eyes, only combinations and different forms of matter. It is
Materialism in its principle, and Atheism in its consequences.
Two things strike me in the actual state of men's minds; the
progress that Materialism is making, and its constant timidity in
that very progress.
{331}
The progress of Materialism is evident; progress in the learned
world and in the unlearned world, in the name of the scientific
studies and of popular tendencies. A contemporary spiritualistic
philosopher, as distinguished by intellectual probity as by the
independence and the moderation of his opinions, of whom the Duke
de Broglie, on learning his death, exclaimed, "We have lost a
sage"--M. Damiron I mean--published eight years ago his
"Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophie au 18
siècle;" he had read it in successive parts to the _Académie
des Sciences Morales et Politiques_. He said in his preface,
"Men are disposed a second time to have Sensualism; they insist
upon something that they may oppose to and substitute for pure
and simple Spiritualism: be it so; but then let them at least
well understand what it is that they are asking for.
{332}
It is not merely Locke, the moderate chief of the school, nor is
it d'Alembert, nor Saint-Lambert, nor even Helvetius; these keep
themselves relatively within bounds: it is Diderot who has so
little moderation, it is d'Holbach, it is Naigeon, it is Lalande,
and de la Mettrie; it is a whole order of minds, not very
eminent, but very decided and very consistent and logical in
their materialism; materialists in all and for all, from the soul
up to God--not forgetting, be it remembered, liberty, duty, a
future life, etc. ... These men, with their heads in the air and
their masks in their hand, with a confidence in themselves and a
faith almost confounding itself with religion, profess openly as
truth, fatalism, egotism, and atheism. This is what men want, and
what, if they wish to be logical, men must want, when, closely or
remotely, they adhere to a philosophy that reduces everything to
sensation, and that which is the object of sensation. Let there
then be no illusion upon this subject; all the principles of
morals and of religion are at stake. Sensualism _is_ what it
is, and _can_ be nothing else. It was made a complete system
in the eighteenth century; nothing remains in it that can be
either made or remade; and if men recur to it in our days, the
mechanism and the form may be altered--for these are
variable--but not the essential substance, for that is _not_
so.
{333}
There are not two manners of being consequent any more in this
system than in any other; however the attempt may be made, men
can never by any reproduction render it what it is not, and what
its nature prevents it from ever being; so we must take it or we
must leave it alone; we cannot change its principles." [Footnote
71]
[Footnote 71: Memoires pour servir à l'histoire de la
philosophie au 18 siècle, by Ph. Damiron, member of the
Institute; vol. i, p. xiv. 1858.]
What M. Damiron eight years ago felt would occur, has been
accomplished rapidly. Sensualism, in its true nature as
Materialism, has resumed its activity and returned to the stage;
now tacitly admitted by sober, studious men, now loudly professed
and loudly proclaimed by the "enfants terribles" of the school;
professed and proclaimed not only with all its principles, but
with all its consequences.
{334}
A profound sentiment of hesitation and embarrassment clings,
nevertheless, to the doctrine of Materialism. The most
distinguished of its adepts struggle to give explanations that
look like disavowals, and many repudiate the charge of being
Materialists as if it were an insult. "I have never," says M. de
Remusat, "observed without astonishment the testy sensibility of
philosophers upon this point. Who is there that has not witnessed
the indignation manifested by the followers of the philosophy of
sensation when they hear retraced to them the positive
consequences of this doctrine? It seems just as if their rightful
claims were being disavowed, or as if they were being denounced;
as if the Inquisition were still at hand, with its tortures and
its auto-da-fès; or as if their refuters were sending them to
martyrdom. A general timidity reigns throughout their school;
they seem to think freedom of opinions never sufficiently
assured, and society never tolerant enough, for their philosophy
to declare and avow itself for such as it is.
{335}
Whether from shame or from fear, Materialism asks to be tenderly
handled, suspects that every one who defines her has the designs
of a persecutor, makes protestations of her good intentions, and
is alarmed at her very faith. She defends herself from the
imputation of believing only in the senses, even while making
sensation the one universal fact. It might be said that she
blushes at matter just as persons infirm of faith blush at the
name of Jesus. Perhaps this may be an indirect proof of the
distrust which their cause inspires in Materialists, and an
involuntary avowal that the human mind belongs not to them."
[Footnote 72]
[Footnote 72: Essais de philosophie, by Charles de Remusat:
vol. ii, p. 179.]
Whence arise, what signify, these two contradictory facts: on the
one side, the perseverance and the facility with which, in our
days, Materialism reproduces and propagates itself; on the other
side, the uneasiness and the timidity which it inspires in many
of those even who admit it?
{336}
Materialism is the doctrine of appearances. "Specious doctrine,"
says M. Vacherot, "to those whose conception of things depends
solely upon their ability to picture them to themselves."
[Footnote 73]
[Footnote 73: La métaphysique et la science, vol. i, p. 171.]
It is by their material appearances that, at the outset, the
external world and man himself manifest themselves to the human
mind. It is only by reflection and by a process of observation
within itself that it penetrates beyond mere appearances, and
discovers what appearances alone would never enable it to see. To
minds at once active and superficial, inquisitive, impatient to
acquire science, although not very nice as to the kind,
Materialism is a commodious and apparently clear solution of
certain difficult and obscure questions which fasten irresistibly
upon the human understanding.
{337}
Besides all this, these questions, and the different solutions of
which they are susceptible, have their epochs of ardor or
languor, of favor or discredit. In our days, the fruitful
activity and the brilliant progress of the sciences of the
material world, come in aid of the doctrine of Materialism. This
progress is, however, far from being as exclusive of other
progress as is often said. Although less popular than a few years
ago, Spiritualism has not ceased to be an active and influential
doctrine in the elevated region of philosophy, and the Christian
awakening persists and develops itself energetically in the face
of the adversaries of Christianity. The times in which we live
are entitled to more justice than men accord to them;
intellectual labors are now very extensive and very varied; the
most different tendencies coexist, and pursue their independent
career. Even in this, Materialism is again the doctrine of
appearances; it is neither so strong nor so near its triumph as
it has the air of being.
{338}