independently and almost simultaneously! The first instance I remember
was the prediction of a planet exterior to Uranus by Leverrier and Adams.
One hardly knows to whom the principle of the conservation of energy
ought to be attributed, although it may reasonably be considered as the
greatest discovery science has ever made. The mechanical theory of
heat was set forth by Rankine and by Clausius during the same month of
February, 1850; and there are eminent men who attribute this great step
to Thomson.[23] The kinetical theory of gases, after being started by
John Bernoulli and long buried in oblivion, was reinvented and applied to
the explanation not merely of the laws of Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro,
but also of diffusion and viscosity, by at least three modern physicists
separately. It is well known that the doctrine of natural selection was
presented by Wallace and by Darwin at the same meeting of the British
Association; and Darwin in his “Historical Sketch” prefixed to the
later editions of his book shows that both were anticipated by obscure
forerunners. The method of spectrum analysis was claimed for Swan as well
as for Kirchhoff, and there were others who perhaps had still better
claims. The authorship of the Periodical Law of the Chemical Elements is
disputed between a Russian, a German, and an Englishman; although there
is no room for doubt that the principal merit belongs to the first. These
are nearly all the greatest discoveries of our times. It is the same with
the inventions. It may not be surprising that the telegraph should have
been independently made by several inventors, because it was an easy
corollary from scientific facts well made out before. But it was not so
with the telephone and other inventions. Ether, the first anæsthetic,
was introduced independently by three different New England physicians.
Now ether had been a common article for a century. It had been in one of
the pharmacopœias three centuries before. It is quite incredible that
its anæsthetic property should not have been known; it was known. It had
probably passed from mouth to ear as a secret from the days of Basil
Valentine; but for long it had been a secret of the Punchinello kind. In
New England, for many years, boys had used it for amusement. Why then had
it not been put to its serious use? No reason can be given, except that
the motive to do so was not strong enough. The motives to doing so could
only have been desire for gain and philanthropy. About 1846, the date
of the introduction, philanthropy was undoubtedly in an unusually active
condition. That sensibility, or sentimentalism, which had been introduced
in the previous century, had undergone a ripening process, in consequence
of which, though now less intense than it had previously been, it was
more likely to influence unreflecting people than it had ever been. All
three of the ether-claimants had probably been influenced by the desire
for gain; but nevertheless they were certainly not insensible to the
agapic influences.
I doubt if any of the great discoveries ought, properly, to be considered
as altogether individual achievements; and I think many will share this
doubt. Yet, if not, what an argument for the continuity of mind, and for
agapasticism is here! I do not wish to be very strenuous. If thinkers
will only be persuaded to lay aside their prejudices and apply themselves
to studying the evidences of this doctrine, I shall be fully content to
await the final decision.
CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] How can a writer have any respect for science, as such, who is
capable of confounding with the scientific propositions of political
economy, which have nothing to say concerning what is “beneficent,” such
brummagem generalisations as this?
[21] I am happy to find that Dr. Carus, too, ranks Weismann among the
opponents of Darwin, notwithstanding his flying that flag.
[22] See _Draper’s History of Intellectual Development_, chap. x.
[23] Thomson, himself, in his article _Heat_ in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, never once mentions the name of Clausius.
RENAN.
A DISCOURSE GIVEN AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, LONDON, OCTOBER, 9, 1892.
“Be calm and resigned,” said Renan to his weeping wife. “We undergo
the laws of that nature of which we are manifestations. We perish, we
disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes on for
ever.”
It is hard to-day to respond to these last words of the dying
philosopher. Heaven and earth remain, but they seem cold and grey when
the great heart in which they were united has ceased to beat, and when
our sweet English singer has gone silent. By the passing away of the two
highest-mounted minds in Europe this society is especially bereaved. The
earliest welcome given to the genius of young Tennyson came from the pen
of William Johnston Fox, the first Minister of this Chapel; here has his
spiritual pilgrimage been followed, and its songs here sung as hymns.
But for their magnitude Tennyson and Renan might have been considered
together. They were children of the same spiritual epoch; the son of the
Catholic Church, and the English Rector’s son, were fellow-pilgrims on
the painful road of scepticism; they encountered the same phantoms, were
attended by the same mighty shades, and found no altar but such as their
own genius could raise and their glowing hearts kindle in the wilderness
of doubt and denial. Alike they distrusted democracy, and dreamed of the
ideal monarch,—as of Arthur, “flower of kings,” whom ancient legends of
Britain and Brittany said would some day return to lead up the Golden
Year. Renan loved to tell the story of how Tennyson, roaming in Brittany,
stopped at an inn in Lannier, birthplace of Renan’s mother. In the
morning the poet demanded his account, but the hostess said, “There is
nothing to pay, Monsieur. It is you who have sung of our King Arthur.”
But the people have a greatness of their own. They enshrine Tennyson
in Westminster Abbey, Renan in the Pantheon. The career of Renan is a
triumph of republican France. Under the Empire he was deprived of his
professorship, and of his office in the Imperial Library, for writing the
“Life of Jesus.” But the Republic made him President of the College of
France, gave him every honor, in life as in death. The national homage to
that ex-priest, that outspoken rationalist, who flattered not the masses
nor fawned on power, is a high water-mark of civilisation. For it marks
the rise of a steady tide of liberty, and not the mere leap of waves
under some tempest of momentary emotion. The great fact is that this
unique heretic, thinker, and scholar, has been able, without compromising
his independence, without help of any sect or school, to live his life,
think his thought, and round out his life-work with completeness, on the
scene of a thousand martyrdoms.
In Renan’s “Feuilles Détachées,” which appeared last spring but is not
yet translated, there are outbursts of gratitude to his time, which,
he says, has been good to him, and pardoned many faults. He had just
finished, he says, his “History of the People of Israel”—“the serious
work of my life.”
“The bridge which it remained to me to build between Judaism
and Christianism is built.... In the ‘Life of Jesus’ I tried
to exhibit the majestic growth of the Galilean tree from the
stock of its roots to the summit, where sing the birds of
heaven. In the volume just finished I have sought to make
known the subsoil in which shot the roots of Jesus. Thus my
principal duty is accomplished. At the Academy the work on the
Rabbins also nears conclusion, and the _Corpus Inscriptionum
Semiticorum_ is in excellent hands. So that now, having paid
all my debts, I am free enough to amuse myself a little,
and without scruples to indulge myself with the pleasure of
gathering these leaves, often light enough.”
So radiant was the author, at sixty-nine, having achieved the main
schemes of a life which, at forty, was threatened with ruin by
intolerance. Of course it was but a small part of what he would fain have
accomplished. Last year (September 11) there was a festival, in the
Island of Bréhat, where Renan was the chief speaker. In the course of his
address he said:
“Every year I used to come hither with my mother to visit
my aunt Périne, who loved me much, for she thought me like
my father. Here on your rocks, and in your paths, I formed
plans and dreamed dreams, of which I have realised a third
or a quarter. That is much; I consider myself fortunate; I
hold myself among the privileged ones of life. I have been
more sad than now, for I feared I might die young (misfortune
notably not arrived) and never produce what was in my mind.
Oh certainly, could I live a long time yet, I would know what
to do. I have schemes of work for three or four lives. I
would write a history of the French Revolution, showing it an
attack of fever, grand, strange, horrible, and sublime; the
foundation, let us hope of something better. I would compose
a history of Athens, almost day by day; also a history of
science and freethought, telling by what steps man has come
to know something of how the world is made; I would write a
history of Brittany in six volumes. I would study Chinese,
and review critically all the problems of Chinese history and
literature. Of all that I would make nothing. There is a crowd
of things I wish to know and shall never know. But why reproach
nature for refusing me? Let us recognise what she has given
us. I have traversed the world at an interesting moment in its
development, and, after all, have seen enough. After my time
humanity will do surprising things: I can rest content during
eternity.”
The happiness of this venerable author, conscious that his life is
closing, his work ended,—a happiness not derived from any hope of future
reward, or even existence,—is a salient testimony of our time. In one of
these recent addresses Renan says: “Let us die calmly, in the communion
of humanity, the religion of the future.” The dying Voltaire was fed with
a wafer, even while he ridiculed it. Renan partakes the communion of
humanity, the religion of the future. It may appear cold comfort to the
superstitious, for they comprehend not that to such a man the communion
of humanity implies an eternal life.
In one sense Renan lived not quite threescore years and ten; in another
he lived ages on ages. By his mastery of Eastern and Oriental languages
and literatures, by his studies of ancient and modern systems, he had
familiarly dwelt among primitive tribes, with them set up their sacred
dolmens, knelt at their altars, travelled with their migrations in India,
Persia, Egypt, Syria, shared their pilgrimages from lower to higher
beliefs, listened to their prophets, visited the home of Mary and
Joseph, walked with the disciples, conversed with Jesus, witnessed the
crucifixion, journeyed through the middle ages, reached the Renaissance,
passed through Protestantism, gathered every spiritual flower of the
nineteenth century. Such long experience of the past, such knowledge
of the attractions of humanity,—predicting its fulfilments,—carry the
thinker equally far into the future. Knowing the angles of convergence in
time’s rising pyramid, he can calculate the apex, and look down from it.
He is able to rejoice in realisations of ideals now mere tendencies. His
immortality is present. Such to Renan meant that communion of humanity,
into which he entered by patient studies, and by the devotion of his life
to the spiritual essence of the world. And this vision sustained him in
his last hour.
And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in any belief
in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory destiny in
nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of man. In his last work
he reminds youth that their efforts at new abstractions and theologies
are idle: the new notions will follow the old into extinction. “Dear
children,” he says—
“Dear children, it is useless to give yourself so much
headache to reach only a change of error. Let us die calm,
in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future.
The existence of the world is assured for a long time. The
future of science is guaranteed, for in the great scientific
book everything adds itself and nothing is lost. Error is not
deep; no error lasts long. Be tranquil. Before a thousand
years, let us hope, the earth will find means to supply its
exhausted coal, and, in some degree, its diminished virtue. The
resources of humanity are infinite. Eternal works accomplish
themselves without loss to the fountain of living forces, ever
rising again to the surface. Science, above all, will continue
to astonish us by its revelations, substituting the infinite
of time and space for a poor creationism that can no longer
satisfy the imagination of a child. Religion also is true to
the infinite. When God shall be complete, he will be just. I am
convinced that virtue will find itself one day clearly to have
been the better part. The merit is in affirming duty against
the apparent evidences. [As for the future] denying not,
affirming not, let us hope. Let us keep a place at our funerals
for the music and the incense.”
It will be seen that Renan’s deity is the brother of man’s divinity.
God is as dependent on man as man on God. Natural evil is God’s
incompleteness: when man is complete God will be complete: there will be
no more injustice.
But I must warn you that while this is the way in which Renan impresses
me, he is not a man to be caught or held in any one theory. He is the
many-sided man of our time. When I heard his lectures in his college, two
years ago,—his French was so clear and expressive that even a limping
listener could follow him tolerably,—he impressed me as a sort of Buddha.
Buddha is supposed by some to have got his large form by sitting so long
in contemplation, by others his size is regarded as a protest against
the meagreness of ill-fed ascetics. The unfurrowed serenity of Buddha’s
face, his infantine smile, were those of Renan, also the remembered music
of his voice. This association has been extended to Renan’s spiritual
nature by a letter of his to a friend, in his “Feuilles Détachées.” He
is fascinated by the legends of Buddha and Krishna which describe them
as multiplying themselves. When Buddha was born into this world, ten
thousand women entreated to be his nurses, and Buddha multiplied himself
into ten thousand babies. Each woman believed that she alone had nursed
the true Buddha. In the legend of the god Krishna, he first appeared to
some shepherdesses who were dancing. The beautiful god multiplied himself
into as many forms as there were maidens, so that each believed, that she
alone had danced with Krishna, and through life kept her heart sacred to
him. Writing of these legends, Renan says:
“The ideal loses nothing by dividing itself: it is entire
in each of its parts. We live that part of Krishna which we
assimilate according to our genius. The ideal is for all
partakers, like morsels modified to each taste. Each creates
his divine dancer. One refinement I would introduce into
the legend of Krishna, should I ever make it into a drama,
or, better, a philosophic ballet: at the time when the
shepherdesses believed they were singly dancing with Krishna,
he should find that they were in reality dancing with different
Krishnas. Each had made her Krishna to her fancy, and when
they came to describe to each other their heavenly lover, they
should find their visions in nowise alike; and nevertheless to
each it was always Krishna.”
The legend which thus charmed Renan has many correspondences in religious
history; in Christianity, for instance, where we to-day find a hundred
and fifty sects, each believing that it alone has the true Christ for
partner. But it applies to all great personalities, and to all spiritual
influences. The finest spirits frame no systems, found no schools. They
are akin to the sun and rain which nourish and paint innumerable and
diverse growths. It was so with Emerson. Dean Stanley said that he heard
many different preachers in America, but their sermons were generally
by Emerson. It was preëminently the case with Renan. The Catholic, the
Protestant, the idealist, the sceptic, the man of the world, the mystic,
the conservative, the radical, provided they are unsophisticated like
the shepherdesses, not champions of some sect or party, find that Renan
has spoken better for them than they can for themselves; he knows their
secret heart, is their partner by unbounded sympathies. Yet it is always
the same Renan, full and entire in each and all of his manifestations.
Some time ago, when his friend Littré, the Positivist, was buried by his
family with Catholic rites, the aspersoir passed round the grave, and
came to Renan, who, like the rest, sprinkled holy water on the coffin.
There were cries of “Shame” among the freethinkers present; but really it
was the act of a man less sectarian than themselves. The same tenderness
that could not wound the family parting for ever from their beloved, is
visible in the gentleness with which he treats old beliefs, when it is
a question of affection or sentiment, not of dogma and authority. They
have died out of his mind utterly; he sees the creeds already in their
graves; he no longer fears them, but is glad to soothe those who cling
to their lifeless forms by speaking kindly of their virtues in the past.
His “Life of Jesus” is, in large part, a wreath of immortelles laid on
the tomb of a faith to him utterly dead,—that is, faith in a supernatural
Christ. He once told me of a little island on the coast of his native
Brittany, from which some medieval saint was supposed to have driven
monstrous serpents, or worms. To that island the peasants still repair
to get a little of the soil to use as a—vermifuge. To similarly small
size had shrunk, in Renan’s view, the greatest dogmas and superstitions
of Christendom. Others might still compliment them with fear and wrath,
but Renan was tender to them because of their smallness. He was endlessly
good-natured with his ignorant opponents, from whom he often received
warning letters. Of one who wrote him simply the words, _Remember, there
is a Hell_, he said that this monitor did not terrify him as much as he
may have supposed. He (Renan) would be rather glad to know for certain
that there was beyond the grave even a hell. And if he should go there
he felt certain that he would be able to address to the deity such
subtle arguments to prove that he ought not to remain there, but to be
transferred to paradise; (only he feared his exhorter’s paradise would be
very dull,) that he would presently be released.
One purpose of the “Life of Jesus” has been mentioned, but that work had
also another and a higher aim. With a love like that of Mary Magdalene,
in whose rapt vision Jesus rose from the tomb, to be transformed into
a supernatural Christ, Renan sought to raise out of the grave of that
supernatural Christ the human Jesus. He had travelled through Palestine,
visited every spot associated with the great teacher, and drew the most
realistic portraiture he could of the parents, home, friends, disciples,
and daily life of Jesus. The outcry against that book was a confession
by theology of its utter loss of the human personality of Jesus. There
had been a time when the religious heart loved to dwell on the sweet
humanities of Jesus. In the seventeenth century the poet, Thomas Dekker,
wrote:
“The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.”
And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his
friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson,
South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed the
humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider Jesus as a
man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he lay dead and buried
under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away the stone, raised him
to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested him with beauty,
and said once more to the Pharisee, the sceptic, the scoffer—_Behold
the man!_ For writing that book,—just after Strauss had shown the
Christ of Christendom a mythological figure,—the churches should have
clasped Renan’s knees. But for it they heaped him with abuse, declared
that Jewish bankers had bribed him to write it, drove him from his
professorship of Hebrew, reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced
him as “The European Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his
own country, where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he
lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold
on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away the
supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the sign of
his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive
as that of many who have written in the generation that has elapsed
since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on whom Oxford
has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading Renan’s “Life of
Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions. He accepts the four
Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief which even the learned
theologians have abandoned. Some newspaper has said that Renan borrowed
from Strauss; on the contrary, the fault of the book is that it did not
borrow from Strauss, and from English authors, who had proved that the
Gospels are all of the second century. That would have relieved him of
the necessity of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus
never heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he
intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception.
No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of his own century.
In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” on its negative side,
is behind the advance of research and criticism. But those are small
details compared with the spirit and general purpose of the work. In
this moment, when we are celebrating the discovery of a western world,
we may well pay homage to the scholar who rediscovered and exhumed an
eastern world, long buried under débris of mythology and rubbish of
superstitions. This Renan has done in his series of works on the “Origins
of Christianity,” beginning with the “Life of Jesus,” dealing with the
“Apostles,” with “St. Paul,” with “Antichrist,” and other studies,
leading up to his “History of the People of Israel.”
In all these works there is not a line that is not interesting, alike
to learned and unlearned. As some one has said, Renan could make Hebrew
roots blossom with roses and lilies. But that super-fine art of his was
carrying the cause of intellectual and religious emancipation. For these
works concerned the constitution of Europe. This Great Britain, with all
its physical freedom, is religiously a mere dependency of Judea. Here
men were formerly burnt, until lately imprisoned, and even now denied
equal advantages, not in accordance with what Englishmen think, but
with the opinions of some ancient Jews. The voice of the Jews was the
voice of God. But Judea, like the Grand Llama, could rule only while
veiled. Renan unveiled it. He did it all the more effectually because
in the literary and philosophic spirit. All the ages of Judea, from the
first tribal groups to the movement of John the Baptist and Jesus, are
assigned their exact place as successive chapters of human history, the
natural origin of their mythology is explained, Jehovah takes his seat
beside Jupiter and Brahma, Jesus is revered with Buddha and Zoroaster;
and all this is done, not by mere opinion, but by impregnable facts,
unwearied researches, inflexible veracity. It was also done lovingly.
A superstition can survive combat, but not explanation. Renan did much
to remove Christianity from the field of militant camps to the quiet
province of literary investigation. In the Republic of Letters there is
no arbitrary authority. The combat is left to salvation armies,—“theirs
not to reason why.”
There is a large Renan literature. More than three hundred works
represent the efforts of theology to get the resuscitated human Jesus
back into his grave again. Renan’s accessible life-work is represented
by about twenty-five volumes, of which some are philosophic diversions
written amid the heavy labours of his College, and while collecting
and preserving for scholars the whole body of Semitic inscriptions.
For more than twenty years Renan has been training the young scholars
of France—those who are to fashion France in the future, and influence
mankind. Those acquainted with his larger works can realise his immense
service in elevating the standard of criticism, and establishing the
method of exact research and exact thought. But there are other works of
Renan, notably his _Philosophic Dramas_, not yet translated, from which
may be better gathered the great variety of his ability, the poetic play
of his genius, and the charm of his personality, which some of us have
personally felt, and which so won all hearts that even the priesthood
have not raised discordant notes in the homage and emotion with which
his nation has laid him in an honored grave.
Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a wreath
of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America, and for the
sake of this free English Society. For your victory is ours also: your
triumph is that of every independent mind on earth.