embarrassment of the most distinguished among its adherents. The
circumstance noticed by M. de Remusat twenty-five years ago, is
recurring at the present day as plainly as ever. Sometimes we
find disavowals of the consequences of the principle of
Materialism, and attempts of all kinds to escape from those
consequences; sometimes we find efforts made to disguise the
principle itself under purer colors. A general and enduring
instinct in man persists in protesting against the appearances
upon which Materialism is founded. Man does not believe either
himself or the universe to be exclusively matter. The distinction
between matter and mind is a natural and spontaneous, a primitive
and permanent, belief of the human race.
And is this, then, merely an instinct and an aspiration, a proud
pretension of human nature? Is it not, on the contrary, the
innate sentiment, the intimate knowledge of that essential fact
in humanity of which observation recognizes and evidences the
existence?
{339}
The fact to which I allude is the following: As soon as a
consciousness of life is awakened in man--as soon as he feels and
perceives what is taking place within him--he has a perception of
himself as of a real, personal, and distinct being. He gives
voice to this feeling and this perception as soon as he uses the
word "I," and he does so before he has any clear knowledge in
detail of the being whose existence he so recognizes and affirms.
When, in the natural development of life, man thus makes himself
as a real and personal being, the object of his own observation,
he recognizes in himself as such real and personal being certain
facts in their nature essentially different. On the one side, he
recognizes a body inherent in his being, which forms part of his
being, and through which he communicates with the external world,
either by the impressions which he receives from that world, or
by the modes in which he acts upon that world.
{340}
On the other side, whether he regard himself as, so to say, the
theater of action, or as the very actor, he recognizes himself to
be a single being, a being permanent and abiding, ever the same
in the midst of the variety of his personal impressions or of his
actions upon the world beyond him; and this, too, in spite of the
complications and incessant transformations of his body, the
organ and the medium of those impressions and actions.
Thus it is that in man's consciousness there is a manifestation
and proof at once of the unity and of the complex nature of the
human being; that is, in accordance with the spontaneous language
of mankind, at once of the distinction and of the union of the
soul and of the body. This is the primitive and essential fact of
man in his actual life.
{341}
In proportion as the human being develops himself, as he extends
the circle of his observations upon the world and upon himself,
special facts confirm the general truth of which I have just
given a summary, and prove the essential distinction of the soul
and the body by the essential diversity of the properties of
each. Thus the body, in its organization and in its life, is
subject to fixed and pre-established laws, over which man's will
has no control or power; whereas the soul is essentially free,
and capable of determining itself and of acting from motives
foreign to the laws which govern the body. Fatality is the
condition of the human being in corporeal existence; liberty is
his privilege in his moral life. I say in his moral life, and the
expression reveals between the soul and the body another
essential and ineffaceable difference. The body is strange to
every idea of morality, abandoned to the exigencies of its
necessities and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tendency
but to satisfy them.
{342}
The soul has needs and desires of quite a different kind, and
they are often contrary to those of the body; and however often
the soul may yield to the tendencies of the body, not seldom also
does it withstand and surmount them; and this both in persons of
obscure condition, and in those who stand in the public gaze of
men. When the body is dominant in man, man tends toward
Materialism; when he listens to the aspirations of soul it is, on
the contrary, to Spiritualism that his nature rises. The
complexity of his nature manifests itself in the development of
his life as in the first instinct of his consciousness; at
whatever epoch he is the subject either of his own or of our
observation he cannot be called exclusively body, matter, without
facts giving his assertion at each step the flattest
contradiction.
Whence comes this essential and primordial fact--the fact of the
complexity and yet unity of the human being? How is this union of
soul and body accomplished? their mutual influences exercised,
how? Here, according to religion, is the mystery; here, for
philosophy, lies the problem.
{343}
Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of
this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution
of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact
itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of
soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the
human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is
only a product and an ephemeral form of matter!
I shall not refuse myself the pleasure of refuting this
hypothesis by the mouth of a contemporary philosopher, whom I
shall soon myself have to combat. "Nothing," says M. Vacherot,
"proves that the hypothesis of Materialism is true; on the
contrary, positive facts evidence its falsity. ... If the soul be
only the result of the play of the organs, how is it that the
soul is able to resist the impressions and the appetites of the
body, to direct, concentrate, and govern its faculties? If the
will be but the instinct in a different form, how explain its
empire over the instinct?
{344}
This fact is an irresistible argument; it is the rock upon which
Materialism has always wrecked itself, and upon which it will
continue to do so. ... The wisdom of the ancients pronounced its
decree more than two thousand years ago. 'Do we not see,' says
Socrates, according to Plato, 'that the soul governs all the
elements of which it is pretended that it is composed? that the
soul resists them throughout the whole course of life, and
subdues them in every way, repressing some harshly and painfully,
as where the gymnastic or the medical method is resorted to;
repressing others more gently, rebuking these, warning those,
speaking to desires, to anger, to fear, as to things of a nature
alien to its own? So Homer, in the "Odyssey," represents Ulysses
as
"Smiting his breast, and chiding thus his heart:
Bear this, O heart, thou that hast worse endured." [Footnote 74]
[Footnote 74:
Στῆθος δὲ πληξὰς, κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ,
Τέτλαθι δὲ, κραδίη. καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ᾿ ἔτλης.
Odyssey, Book xx, v. 17.]
{345}
"'Do you think,' adds Socrates, 'that Homer would have so
expressed himself had, in his conception, the soul been a mere
harmony, necessarily governed by the passions of the body? Did he
not rather think that the soul ought to govern and master those
passions, and that the soul is something far more divine than any
harmony?'" [Footnote 75]
[Footnote 75: La Métaphysique et la science, by M. Vacherot,
vol. i, p. 174; Plato, Phæd, xliii.]
Materialists themselves have felt the feebleness of their
hypothesis; to support it they have invented a second hypothesis.
"No force without matter, no matter without force," [Footnote 76]
says Dr. Buchner, at the present day one of the most resolute
interpreters of the doctrine. That is to say, not being able to
explain facts by matter alone, as matter is observed and
conceived naturally by the human mind, they endow matter with
what they term _force_, a principle of movement and of
production.
[Footnote 76: Le Materialisme contemporain en Allemagne, by
M. Paul Janet, of the Institute, p. 20. 1864.]
{346}
"Matter and force are," it is now said, "inseparable; both have
existed from all eternity." Thus, imperiously urged by instinct
and by their observation of facts, they begin again by
distinguishing and naming separately matter and force; then, all
at once, they confound them, treat them as united in their
essence and from all eternity, and conclude by believing that
they have succeeded in giving an explanation of man and of the
world!
In this, what do they more than add an abstraction to an
abstraction, and an hypothesis to an hypothesis? We are here in
the presence of facts that are certain and yet perplexing; in
presence of an external world, which evidently has not always
been such as it is, which had a beginning, which is continuing to
develop itself according to certain laws, and which is tending to
certain ends; in the presence, too, of man, evidently a being at
once one and complex, identical and yet variable. The ancients
gave names and explanations to those incontestible facts, but the
names and explanations are now rejected!
{347}
Still, names and explanations are needed; man must put something
in the place of God, Creator, and Providence--in the place of
mind, and matter, and soul, and body. It is not for the first
time that man finds himself confronted by this necessity, or that
he essays to satisfy it; many abstractions, many words, have been
already employed for this purpose. _God_ was replaced by
_nature_, by _substance_, by _cause_; the _human
soul_ was transformed into _vital principle_; the vital
principle was elevated to the dignity of soul. It seems that
these words, these abstractions, have had their time and lost
their credit; and so now it is _force_ which replaces
_them_; _force_ is mind, _force_ is soul,
_force_ creates, _force_ is God. It is enough now that
they incorporate force with body; the problem no longer exists;
man and the universe are laid bare!
{348}
When Leibnitz, to combat the Idealism of Descartes, and the
Pantheism of Spinoza, developed the idea of force, he did not
foresee that that very notion would be one day made use of to
reduce to nonentities God, the human soul, all real and personal
being, all first and final cause; to reduce, in short, everything
to a medley of mechanics and dynamics incarnate in matter!
However specious it may appear to superficial minds, or to minds
prejudiced in its favor by the peculiar nature of their studies
and of their habitual labors, Materialism, like Pantheism, is
only an hypothesis--an hypothesis constructed by dint of mere
abstractions and purely verbal assertions. These not only
disregard or suppress the facts which they pretend to explain,
but are in direct contradiction with facts themselves recognized
and proved by psychological observation. It is, in effect, an
hypothesis, (I am forced here to repeat what I before affirmed of
Pantheism,) equally revolting to true science and to common
sense.
{349}
The hypothesis of Materialism has but a single merit; it is more
consistent than those of the other systems. But even to this
merit Materialism loses its title whenever it shrinks from
pushing its principles boldly to their consequences, whether
philosophical or practical: that is to say, whenever it shrinks
from denying man's liberty, a moral law, the necessary principles
of the human mind--whenever, in short, it shrinks from
proclaiming its ultimate results, which are, as M. Damiron puts
them, Fatalism, Egotism, Atheism. Philosophers are right in
seeking for truth and in respecting truth for itself and at every
risk; but there are some consequences which are the clearest
evidence of a vice in principle; and this vice, in Materialism,
is the blind forgetfulness of the best proved facts and the most
essential elements of human nature.
---------------------------------------
{350}
Seventh Meditation.
Skepticism.
There are two kinds of Skepticism, experimental Skepticism and
systematic Skepticism. Experimental Skepticism is the result of
the incertitude which arises in men's minds from the spectacle of
the infinite variety, discordance, and mobility of human
opinions. Systematic Skepticism, on the other hand, challenges
the power itself of the human understanding, and declares it
incapable of knowing things in their essence--reality in itself.
The one is doubt applied in practice; the other is doubt affirmed
as a principle.
{351}
In an essay on Skepticism, written in 1830, M. Jouffroy treated
experimental and practical skepticism with great contempt: this
skepticism "founds itself," says he, "only upon the apparent
contradictions of human judgment. To prove that there is a
contradiction either between the results at which each faculty of
the mind when taken separately arrives, or between the final
results attained by different faculties, as by the sense and by
the reason; to establish that there is a contradiction of a like
nature between the opinions received by different men or by
different nations, or between those opinions themselves, which,
at different epochs, have variously for a time contented
humanity; then to conclude from all this that the human
intelligence regards in turn as true things which are
contradictory, and that consequently there is for that
intelligence no truth at all: such is all the mechanism in which
this second-rate skepticism consists which has fascinated, and
still continues to fascinate, whole hosts of little minds. Long
ago this skepticism was refuted, and at all its points; long ago
the unity of human truth was demonstrated, after having been
admitted _à priori_ in all ages by their leading minds.
{352}
This kind of skepticism is a theme upon which men will long
continue to dilate; the darling subject for wits, it merits not
to arrest the attention of philosophers."
By way of amends, however, for these remarks, M. Jouffroy makes
an immense concession to the systematic skepticism which declares
the human mind incapable of knowing things as they really are in
themselves, for he admits this skepticism to be rationally
legitimate; "the foundation of all belief," says he, "is an act
of faith, blind but irresistible. In effect there is no
contradiction between faith and skepticism; for man believes by
instinct and doubts by reason. ... Skeptics fall into no
contradiction when, in the practice of life, they believe their
senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in
consequence; they obey the laws of their instinctive nature by so
believing, and they obey their rational natures by confessing
that their beliefs are illegitimate.
{353}
So we equally excuse humanity which believes, and skepticism
which doubts; but we cannot equally excuse the philosophers who
have combated skepticism by striving to demonstrate the rational
legitimacy of human belief. When men affirm that mankind
believes, and that skeptics do so with mankind, they affirm a
fact in itself incontestable; when they add that mankind believes
itself right in believing, that is to say, virtually admits that
the human intelligence sees things as they are, this is true too,
and skeptics do not deny it; but when, grappling with skepticism
itself, men pretend to show that the human intelligence really
sees things as they are, this is a pretension which I cannot
understand. What! do they not perceive that this pretension is
nothing less than the pretension of demonstrating the human
intelligence by the human intelligence, which has been, is, and
will be eternally impossible? We believe skepticism forever
invincible, because we regard skepticism as the final word of the
reason concerning the reason itself." [Footnote 77]
[Footnote 77: Mélanges philosophique, pp. 238-240.]
{354}
I do not agree with M. Jouffroy in his disdain for experimental
and practical skepticism. This is not, it is true, a system which
philosophers are called upon to refute, but a fact which ought to
occupy an important place with them, for by showing to us how
incomplete human science is, and human error how frequent, it
sets us on our guard against all presumptuous confidence in our
own ideas, and against intolerance toward the ideas of others--two
of the most dangerous infirmities to which human intelligence
and society are liable. But as for the reasoning which impels M.
Jouffroy to accept the systematic and definitive skepticism as to
the intrinsic reality of things, I repudiate it altogether. If
that were, as he says, "the final word of the reason respecting
the reason itself," it would be the negation, or to use a better
expression, the suicide, of man's reason and of the human
intelligence.
{355}
In his discourse which he pronounced in 1813, on resuming his
functions at the "Faculté des Lettres," M. Royer-Collard summed
up his conclusions upon this fundamental question--conclusions
very different, more different essentially than even apparently
they are, from those arrived at by M. Jouffroy. Whereas M.
Jouffroy believes systematic skepticism forever invincible,
"because he regards it as the final word of the reason concerning
the reason," M. Royer-Collard, on the contrary, ends his
discourse with these words: "We cannot divide man; we cannot
assign a part only to skepticism; as soon as skepticism once
penetrates into the understanding, in [it?] invades it
throughout." I would confirm this conclusion of M. Royer-Collard,
by carrying still further the reasoning which led him to it.
{356}
"The most general result," says he, "presented by the history of
modern philosophy--its most striking characteristic when
contrasted with ancient philosophy--is its skepticism with
respect to the existence of the external world; that world in
which mankind has so long believed, which begins to reveal itself
in us with our existence itself, and in the bosom of which we are
forced to perceive ourselves as mere fragments of its immensity.
... I am not here to reason in favor of the received opinion;
that opinion needs neither proofs nor defenders; it is rooted
deeply enough in our most intimate nature to brave all attack. It
is not the world that risks anything at the hands of the
philosophers; it is rather the honor of philosophy which suffers
some discredit; it is rather philosophy that relieves the vulgar
from a part of the respect which philosophy yet demands at its
hands, when it gives birth to paradoxes bearing, seemingly, the
very impress of folly.
{357}
Moreover, whether the material world really exist or not, is not
a matter in controversy; this question would resolve itself into
one still more general--whether all those facilities of ours, of
which the authority is indivisible, are organs of truth or organs
of falsehood; and upon this point we shall ever be driven to
accept the testimony of those very organs. The sole question
which belongs to philosophical analysis, consists in examining if
it be certain that our faculties attest to us the existence of an
external world, and if the human race believes in this existence;
for if it believes in it, this universal belief becomes a fact in
our intellectual constitution; and whether this fact be a
primitive one, or a deduction from any anterior fact--whether it
be the immediate teaching of nature or an acquisition by
reasoning--it is entitled to its place unmutilated in the
synthetic table of science. Has it disappeared? Then the man of
philosophy is not the man of nature; science is false, and
consequently, the analysis without fidelity; and one may rest
assured that philosophers have inserted in the understanding some
principle, or some fact, which was not there before; or that they
have not collected with care all the principles and facts which
are actually there."
{358}
Having thus formalized the question, M. Royer-Collard follows it
up with an inquiry as exact as it is profound, of the
psychological fact of the perception of the external world which
accompanies the fact of sensation: this inquiry leads him to this
conclusion:
"Sensation has no object; sensation is merely relative to the
sentient being; if not perceived, sensation does not exist. But
the perception, which affirms an external existence, supposes
two things--the mind which perceives, and the object which is
perceived; the being that thinks, and the being that is the
subject-matter of thought. Just as the sensation is relative to
the mind, so is the act of the perception relative to it also,
and just so does it suppose the mind; the object, on the
contrary, supposes neither the mind nor the mind's perception.
{359}
The object does not exist because we perceive it; but we
perceive it because it exists--because we are endowed with the
faculty of perception. In a city inhabited no longer, there
remain no sensation, no idea, no judgment; the houses remain,
and even the streets, and with them nature, with all nature's
laws, which are not suspended in their course. To the universe,
the energetic presence of its Creator suffices; it does not
require our presence; the absence of spectators would not make
it languish; it existed before us, it will exist after us; its
reality is independent of us and of our thoughts--it is
absolute. The authority which persuades us of this is no less
than that of the consciousness itself; it is the authority of
the primitive laws of thought, and to man's mind those laws are
absolute laws of truth. The same draught may convey the
impression of sweetness and of bitterness, because sensation is
relative to the variable state of sensibility, and sensibility
itself is relative to organization; but the laws of the mind
are an immutable standard.
{360}
The imperfection of knowledge does not render it uncertain, and
although it admits of degrees, it does not admit of
contradiction. Our limited faculties do not, it is true,
perceive all that there is in things; but still, what they do
perceive, is in effect there just as they perceive it. ...
If a man call upon me to prove this by reasoning, I shall, in
my turn, demand of him, too, that he first prove to me by
reasoning that reasoning is more convincing than perception;
that he at least prove that the memory, without which there is
no such thing as reasoning, is a faculty more to be relied upon
than those faculties whose testimony they reject.