There comes at length a time when a greater or smaller number of
perceptions, received in our mechanism, seem to present themselves to
our will. We think that we are forming ideas. It is as if, when we
turn the tap of a fountain, we were to think that we cause the water
which streams out. We create ideas, poor creatures that we are! It
is evident that we had no share in the former, yet we would regard
ourselves as the authors of the latter. If we reflect well on this
vain boast of forming ideas, we shall see that it is insolent and
absurd.
Let us remember that there is nothing in external objects with the
least analogy, the least relation, to a feeling, an idea, a thought.
Let an eye or an ear be made by the best artisan in the world; the
eye will see nothing, the ear will hear nothing. It is the same with
our living body. The universal principle of action does everything in
us. He has not made us an exception to the rest of nature.
Two experiences which are constantly repeated during the course of
our life, and of which I have spoken elsewhere, will convince every
thoughtful man that our ideas, our wills, and our actions do not
belong to us.
The first is that no one knows, or can know, what idea he will have
at any minute, what desire he will have, what word he will speak,
what movement his body will perform.
The second is that during sleep it is clear that we have not the
least share in what takes place in our dreams. We grant that we are
then mere automata, on which an invisible power acts with a force
that is as real and powerful as it is incomprehensible. This power
fills the mind with ideas, inspires desires, passions, reflections.
It sets in motion all the organs of the body. It has happened at
times that a mother has smothered, in a restless dream, the new-born
child that lay by her side; that a man has killed his friend. How
many musicians have composed music during sleep? How many young
preachers have composed sermons during their sleep?
If our life were equally divided between waking and sleeping, instead
of our usually spending a third of our short career in sleep, and if
we always dreamed during sleep, it would then be evident that half of
our life did not depend on us. In any case, assuming that we spend
eight out of the twenty-four hours in sleep, it is plain that a third
of our existence is beyond our control. Add to this infancy, add all
the time that is occupied in purely animal functions, and see how
much is left. You will admit with surprise that at least half our
life does not belong to us at all. Then reflect how inconsistent it
would be if one half depended on us and the other half did not.
Conclude, therefore, that the universal principle of action does
everything in us.
Here the Jansenist interrupts me and says: “You are a plagiarist; you
have taken your doctrine from the famous book, _The Action of God
on Created Things, or Physical Premotion_, by our great patriarch
Boursier.” I have said somewhere of Boursier that he had dipped
his pen in the inkpot of the Deity. No, my friend; I have never
received anything from the Jansenists or the Molinists except a
strong aversion for sects, and some indifference to their opinions.
Boursier, taking God as his model, knows precisely what was the
nature of Adam’s dream when God took a rib from his side wherewith
to make woman; he knows the nature of his concupiscence, habitual
grace, and actual grace. He knows, with St. Augustine, that men and
women would have engendered children dispassionately in the earthly
paradise, just as one sows a field, without any feeling of carnal
pleasure. He is convinced that Adam sinned only by distraction in the
earthly paradise. I know nothing about these things, and am content
to admire those who have so splendid and profound a knowledge.
X