of ideas, but of beliefs, explicit or implicit. The beliefs of
the mind are the force of the soul and the moving incentives of
the will. Whatever determines us to believe we call _evidence_.
... Reason renders no account of what is evident; to condemn it
to do so is to annihilate it, for it also has need of an
evidence peculiar to itself.
{361}
Did not reasoning rest upon principles anterior to the reason,
analysis would be without end, and synthesis without
commencement. The fundamental laws of belief constitute the
intelligence itself; and as those laws all flow from the same
source, they have the same authority; they judge by the same
right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of
another. Whoever revolts against any single one of these laws,
revolts against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. Are
there weapons of legitimate use against that faculty by which
we perceive the external world? These same weapons may be
turned against the conscience, the memory, the moral sense,
against reason itself. ... Let but, in any single point, the
nature of knowledge--the nature, I say, and not the degree--be
made subordinate to our means of knowing, and all certitude is
at an end; nothing is true, nothing is false. But it is not
enough to say this; for all is true and false altogether, since
truth and falsehood no longer differ from sweet and bitter.
{362}
The void itself is then deprived of its absolute nullity: it
enters into the domain of the relative; it is something,
nothing, according to the conformation of the spectator's eye.
The useful is the sole subject that the understanding
contemplates, the sole subject for which the heart has to make
its laws. A legislation capricious and without efficacy, which
applies only shifting rules to actions, and which has none for
the intentions and for the desires. This is not mere
declamation; all these consequences have been deduced from
skeptical doctrines with an exactitude leaving nothing to be
either desired or contested. It is then a fact that public and
private morality, the order of society and the happiness of
individuals, are directly at stake in the controversy between
true philosophy and false philosophy respecting the reality of
knowledge. For when existences themselves become problems, what
force remains to the bond that unites them? We cannot divide
the entire man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as
soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding it
invades it throughout." [Footnote 78]
[Footnote 78: Fragments de M. Royer-Collard, in the works of
Reid, translation of M. Jouffroy, vol. iv, pp. 426-451.]
{363}
I retrench nothing, change nothing in these remarkable words that
express so energetically the conclusions of the common sense of
mankind. I would only render them still more complete, by
illustrating in its primitive and indestructible unity the fact
upon which they are founded. "We cannot divide man," says M.
Royer-Collard. Here is precisely the risk that philosophical
science incurs, and to which it too often succumbs. It divides
man in order to study him; and after having so studied him, when
it seeks to deduce from its laborious operation what man in his
complete and living reality is, we find the result a strange
misapprehension, because science has neglected to re-establish
the unity which it broke.
{364}
It puts together, it is true, the scattered members, but the
being itself has disappeared; and then it is that philosophers
know not how to solve the problems or to extricate themselves
from the doubts by which they are confronted. Entire, living,
one, the human being explained himself; mutilated and severed
into distinct parts, that being loses all power and falls into
obscurity.
What is sensation, what perception, judgment, reasoning, reason,
will, consciousness? They are the human being, feeling,
perceiving, judging, reasoning, willing, and observing what is
passing within him. This is no troop of actors playing, each his
part, in a complex drama; but a being single and alive, actor and
sole spectator in the drama of his proper life.
What is this one and single being doing when he feels, perceives,
judges, reasons, wills, and watches what is occurring within
himself? He is taking cognizance at once of himself, and what is
not himself.
{365}
His own existence and the existence of that which is not himself,
reveal themselves to him from the very first in those diverse
facts and acts which philosophical science discriminates, and
calls by the particular names of sensation, perception, judgment,
reason, will, consciousness. The primitive and essential fact at
the root of all, is the fact itself of the cognizance which man
takes of himself, and of what is not himself. A cognizance, at
first confused, and always incomplete, but at the same time
direct and certain. Not by way of deduction, nor as a mere
appearance, but by way of immediate intuition, and as a positive
reality, does the human being become aware of his own existence
and of that existence which is not his. This fact is lost sight
of, or at least is not characterized exactly and as it is in
itself, when it is said that man believes naturally and
inevitably in his own existence, and in that of the external
world. This is a very different thing from _belief:_ it is
_knowledge_ itself of that double reality, internal and
external, called by the name of Man and World.
{366}
Philosophers ignore, and they change the nature of this fact,
when, merely playing with verbal distinctions and reasonings,
they condemn the human mind not to issue forth from itself, when
they refuse to it the right to affirm as real, out of the mind
and in itself, that which, in the mind and for the mind, the mind
yet admits to be true.
The human being may deceive himself, and often does deceive
himself in such or such a special affirmation as to external
realities; it has of them only a knowledge incomplete, and liable
to error; but its general and permanent affirmation as to their
existence is still folly justified and legitimate; it knows them
as it knows itself, by the same proof and by the same natural
process. M. Royer-Collard expresses admirably this great fact
when he says: "The universe does not exist because we perceive
it; but we perceive it because it exists. ... It needs not our
presence; the absence of spectators would not make it languish
away; it was before us, it will still be after us; its reality is
independent of us: it is absolute."
{367}
Systematic skepticism is not, like Materialism and Pantheism, an
hypothesis invented, although unsuccessfully invented, in order
to solve the grand problem of soul and body, of finite and
infinite; its error is not less considerable, although of a
different character. It consists in a defective examination of
the primitive fact of the human mind, and in the misapprehension
of the nature and the import of that fact. This fact is by no
means, as M. Jouffroy affirms, "a faith blind and irresistible,"
disavowed by rational science; it is really the natural
knowledge, and the earliest knowledge acquired by the human being
when it enters into activity; a knowledge, confused and
incomplete, either of itself or of what is not itself; but still
a knowledge direct and certain of the existence of itself, and of
the existence of what is not itself. "Man believes by instinct
and doubts by reason," adds M. Jouffroy; "skeptics obey the law
of their instinctive nature when they believe, like the mass of
mankind, in their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and
when they act in consequence; so also they obey their rational
nature when they confess that their beliefs are illegitimate."
{368}
This is strangely to _ignore_--I permit myself the use of
this, here, incorrect expression--at once the reality of facts,
and the value of words. What M. Jouffroy terms _instinct_,
is the intuitive consciousness of internal reality and of
external reality, and this consciousness the human being acquires
directly by the complete and indivisible exercise of all his
faculties; what he terms _reason_ is the result of the
isolated operation of one of the faculties of the human being,
who virtually forgets, when he decomposes himself for his own
study, what he really is. Skepticism is not the "final word of
the reason respecting the reason;" it is the suicide of the
reason by a negation falsely termed scientific, of natural
evidence, and of the common sense of mankind.
---------------------------------------
{369}
Eighth Meditation.
Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity.
The different systems, of each of which I have endeavored to show
the essential and characteristic vice, do not remain confined to
learned regions, or to the classes to which, from profession or
from taste, man and the world are a special object of study. The
breath of science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, unseen
itself, places even where ignorance reigns. How often in remote
cities and even rural districts, among a population alien to
every kind of study, have I met with and discovered the traces of
Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pantheism, Materialism,
Skepticism; and yet these had been imported, imperceptibly and in
manner that the sense could not detect, like a noxious miasma,
into places where their very names were unknown; and yet they
bore everywhere their natural fruits!
{370}
There is a contagion in the intellectual as well as in the moral
order; and the facility, the rapidity, the universality of
communication, which contribute so much to the force and the
grandeur of modern civilization, are as much at the disposal of
evil as of good, of error as of truth.
The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social
regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it
there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present
themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate
feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being
aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At
epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect
reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with
favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost
exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with
which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and
Materialism seem very readily to prevail.
{371}
After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the
disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind
them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it
even their refuge. These different social facts, and the
influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy,
manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and
they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or
taciturn.
Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very
general--impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious
perplexity.
I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which
are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although
contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current
rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single
way.
{372}
Others there are where different currents cross and combat one
another, and impel society at the same moment toward different
objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very
predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of
independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth
century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies
various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the
different principles and elements of our society, good or the
reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may
again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and
its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I
have made, either as to that important movement or as to the
confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time,
believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian
demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of
recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious
perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of
feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind.
{373}
In our days impiety is spreading, and assuming serious
development, more especially among the operative classes, and in
that young generation that issues from the middle classes, and is
destined to follow the liberal professions. Not that the
infection is universal even there; on the contrary, those classes
show also the most different tendencies; among them, too, the
progress of the Christian awakening has made itself felt, and
religious belief is treated with more respect. There, however, it
is that the evil of impiety has its focus and its center of
expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under gross and cynical
forms, sometimes with a pretension to thought and learning; now
by the brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by the arrogant
yet embarrassed expression of its opinions.
{374}
Last year I received an invitation to attend the great congress
of students assembled at Liège; an invitation which, although I
expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a real and a sincere
interest, I declined. When I learned what the ideas were that had
been there loudly expressed--when I read that the question had
there been put as one between God and man, and that the idolatry
of man had been proclaimed in the place of the adoration of
God,--I experienced two sentiments the most contradictory, a
lively satisfaction that I had held myself aloof from such a
scene, and a profound regret, at the same time, that I had not
been present to protest against such an invasion of Pantheism and
of Atheism into young souls, upon whom my thoughts only rest with
sentiments of affectionate hopefulness. I have grown old, I have
had to undergo painful disappointments, but in spite of all, my
first impulse has ever been to believe in the prompt efficacy of
truth when it knocks unhesitatingly at the door of the mind; nor
is it without reluctance that I bring myself to wait for time and
experience to unvail what is error.
{375}
Of the two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded to, the
impiety which is gross and cynical, which springs from immorality
and which produces immorality, is undoubtedly the more fatal to
the human soul, to its dignity and its future lot; but systematic
impiety--impiety that establishes itself into doctrine--is the
more dangerous for human societies; for, enamored of itself, it
takes its pride in self-glorification and self-propagation. The
ambitious ones of impiety obtain more credit than those, the
chief characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness.
Recklessness in religion is in our days a more widely spread evil
than impiety. I do not here speak of that indifferentism with
respect to religious subjects that the Abbé de la Mennais so
eloquently attacked; that sentiment may be profound, and it may
be frivolous; it may spring from Materialism, from Skepticism,
from a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross forgetfulness
of the paramount questions which exercise the human mind.
{376}
The recklessness now so common gives no thought at all to these
subjects, does not picture to itself that there is any ground for
so doing; where this tendency prevails, man's thought confines
itself to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business and the
interests of this life alone occupy him, alone content him; there
is, as it were, a sleep of all those instincts and requirements
of the human soul which go beyond this low region, and if not a
complete abdication, at least a sluggish torpor of the heavenly
part of our nature.
Let not the friends of a religious life and of the Christian
faith deceive themselves; it is here that they have the greatest
obstacles to encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to remove.
Aggression provokes resistance; a struggle leads to the
marshaling of the different hostile forces; nor does the learning
of the believer dread to enter the arena with the learning of the
incredulous.
{377}
But recklessness in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no
being lives, an immense barren desert in which no vegetation
pushes. It is, if not the most revolting, at least the most
formidable evil of the day. It is against this evil that
Christians are bound, more especially, to direct their energies,
for there are a world and an entire population here to be
conquered.
Nor will _points d'appui_ or means of action fail them in
this great work. For if religious recklessness is in our days
deplorably common, neither is perplexity as to religious matters
a stranger among us. It springs from sentiments and out of
interests very different in their natures, sometimes merely on
the surface, sometimes in the depths of the soul. There is a kind
of perplexity founded upon the dictates of common sense, and
entitled to every respect, but to which I do not accord,
nevertheless, the epithet of religious; this perplexity is
generated by the instinct or the experience of the utility of
religion for the maintenance of order in society, not merely in
the great public society, but also in the smaller domestic
societies, that is, in the state as well as in families.
{378}
A man of distinguished mental capacity and of an honorable
character, "elève" of the "Ecole politechnique," and "ingénieur
en chef" in one of our great departments, was one day speaking to
me with sorrow of the attacks leveled at Christianity. "It is
not," he said, "on my own account that I regret these attacks;
you know I am a 'Voltairean;' but I ask for regularity and peace
in my own household; I felicitate myself that my wife is a
Christian, and I mean my daughters to be brought up like
Christian women. These demolishers know not what they are doing;
it is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our houses, our
homes and their inmates, that their blows are telling!"
{379}
There is a perplexity more serious and more profound--a
perplexity really religious--one suggested not merely by the
necessity of social order, but by that of moral security, of
harmony, of confidence, and of intimate hopefulness in the
presence of the problems and of the chances that weigh upon man.
This perplexity takes place not merely in the minds of thinking
men--of men who render to themselves an account of their internal
troubles, and who avow them undisguisedly; it causes agitation
and spreads desolation among multitudes of single-minded, modest,
and silent men, who suffer from the antichristian _malaria_
spread around them. What framer of statistics shall count their
number? what philosopher minister successfully to their disease?
I go further still. I listen to contemporary philosophers
themselves, and I find in the cases of some of the more eminent
an intellectual perplexity, showing itself clearly through
opinions the most systematic, and the furthest removed from the
Christian religion. I shall name but two--M. Vacherot and M.
Edmond Scherer.
{380}
I have no intention of entering here into a special examination
of their ideas; I seek only to show the state of their minds and
of their souls, as it results from the tenor of their works.
I have read, and read over again, with scrupulous attention, the
two principal philosophical treatises of M. Vacherot, _La
Métaphysique et la Science ou Principes de Philosophie
Positive,_ [Footnote 79] and the _Essais de Philosophie
Critique_. [Footnote 80]
[Footnote 79: Second edition, three vols. 12mo., 1863.]
[Footnote 80: One vol. 8vo., 1864.]
M. Vacherot does not desire to be, nor is he really, in his
conscience and in his own eyes, an advocate either of
Materialism, or Positivism, or Pantheism, or Atheism, or
Skepticism.
{381}
He analyzes and he refutes successively these different systems,
as conceived and expounded by their most distinguished
representatives; he defends himself, and with warmth, from the
charge of adhering to them: "a man," he says, "is not an Atheist,
a Materialist, a Pantheist, an Idealist, because he does not
believe in God, soul, mind, matter, world--in all these
metaphysical words taken in a given acceptation. The true
_Atheist_, if such a one exists, is he whose mind is grossly
empirical, and wanting in the sense of what is intelligible,
ideal, and divine. The true _Pantheist_ is he who identifies
truth and reality, God and the world, whether, like Spinoza and
Goethe, he deifies the world, or like the Stoics, he materializes
God. The true _Materialist_ is he who degrades man to the
beast, either by denying him his superior and really human
faculties, or by deriving these from animal faculties. The true
_Idealist_, like Berkeley, is he who rejects all external
reality as an illusion, whatever the conception of that reality;
whether it be as a thing made up of forces and of laws, or as
consisting of extended matter. ... All these words require to be
defined and explained, or they necessarily occasion mysteries,
contradictions, and absurdities. In their vague complexities they
do not express ideas of sufficient simplicity, nor do they answer
to ideas sufficiently precise for science to adopt them
unreservedly and without distinction. ...
{382}
A chosen few exist whose sympathy is dear to me; I remain
profoundly attached to all the truths which they, with reason,
regard as constituting the strength, life, and honor of
philosophy. I remain, like them, a Spiritualist, an Idealist, a
Theist, although with other methods, another language, and also,
beyond a doubt, with notable reservations." [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: La Métaphysique et la science; in the
Introduction and the Preface, vol. i., pp. xvi, xxxiv.]
Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than of a Materialist and a
Pantheist; he believes firmly in absolute truth, in scientific
metaphysics, and in the universal and essential principles which
form their bases. "Metaphysics," he says, "have nothing to dread
from analysis; it is a test from which they can only issue with
honor. The truths _à priori_ upon which the science rests,
will inspire no more doubt so soon as it comes to be well
understood that those truths are founded upon the ordinary
principles of demonstration, like all the truths _à priori_
of the other sciences.
{383}
Metaphysics have, and will ever have for their object, the Being
infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. Now the ideas of
being, infinite, necessary, absolute, universal, are so involved
in the notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative,
individual, that it is impossible for the human mind to separate
them. Accordingly, in order to be entitled to deny Metaphysics,
and the truths which are peculiar to them, we must first mutilate
the human mind, and reduce it to the pure faculties of sensation
and imagination which are common to it with animals. From the
moment when the reason, the thought, the faculty peculiar to the
human intelligence, enters the field, it brings necessarily with
it the object of sensation and of imagination, under the
categories of quantity, quality, being, relation, unity.
{384}
Then it is that appear to the mind the distinction, and afterward
the logical connection, of the two terms corresponding to each
category, of the finite and the infinite, of the contingent and
the necessary, of the individual and the universal, of the
relative and the absolute, of appearance and being. The thought
enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of it or not, upon
the peculiar ground of Metaphysics. Nothing but a gross and, so
to say, an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the
conceptions and the truths of this science, and the denial is a
denegation of the higher faculties of the intelligence."
[Footnote 82]
[Footnote 82: La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i,
p. xlviii.]
It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism,
Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their
consequences. But after all these declarations and these
disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has
to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his
criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn,
undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of
Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once
apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths
from which he proposed to escape.
{385}
"What do you understand by God?" says he; "the perfect Being? He
is the God of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz;
he is the God of all the theologians with whom _Divinity_
and _Perfection_ are synonyms. That God is our God too. But
if, of this God, immutable in his perfection, elevated beyond
time, space, the movement of universal life, you make anything
else than an ideal of the thought, I confess I no longer
comprehend him. ... These ideas, all equally reducible to the
idea of the _Perfect_, as understood by Plato, Descartes,
Malebranche, Fénélon, Leibnitz, can have no _objective
reality_, and only exist in the ideal order of pure thought;
absolutely in the same manner as the figures of geometry do,
which lose all the vigorousness and all the exactitude of their
definition elsewhere than in the domain of the understanding. ...
{386}
Perfection exists, can only exist, in the thought. It is of the
essence of perfection to be purely ideal; and the remark applies
as truly to the Perfect Being of Descartes and of Leibnitz as to
the 'intelligible world' of Plato and of Malebranche. A 'perfect
God,' or a 'real God?' Theology must make its choice. A perfect
God is only an ideal God." [Footnote 83]
[Footnote 83: La Métaphysique et la science; vol. i, pp. xii,
1, vol. iii, p. 247.]
That is to say, that for Metaphysics to admit God, the
_Being_ God must vanish, and remain only a conception, a
notion, an idea. It may be that to a philosopher or two this may
seem still Theism; to the human soul, and to the human race, it
is Atheism, and nothing else.
God thus made to vanish, what becomes in its turn of the world?
{387}