No doubt, but it is an illusion. It is the illusion of a being who feels

himself as cause, but does not feel himself as effect. Try to imagine a

billiard ball which feels it moves others, but which does not feel that it

is moved. What we call decision is an idea which decides us because it

exercises more power over us than the others do; what we term deliberation

is a hesitancy between two or three ideas which at the moment have equal

force; what we name volition is an idea, and what we call will is our

understanding applied to facts. We do not want to fight; we conceive the

idea of fighting and the idea carries us away; we do not want to hang

ourselves; we have the obsessing idea of hanging ourselves and this thought

runs away with us.

HIS MORAL SYSTEM.--Spinoza wrote a system of morality. Is it not

radically impossible to write a system of morality when the author does not

believe in free-will? The admirable originality of Spinoza, even though

his idea can be contested, is precisely that morality depends on belief in

the necessity of all things--that is, the more one is convinced of this

necessity so much the more does one attain high morality--that is, the more

one believes oneself free the more one is _immoral_. The man who

believes himself free claims to run counter to the universal order, and

morality precisely is adherence to it; the man who believes himself free

seeks for an individual good just as if there could be an individual good,

just as if the best for each one were not to submit to the necessary laws

of everything, laws which constitute what is good; the man who thinks

himself free sets himself against God, believes himself God since he

believes himself to be creator of what he does, and since he believes

himself capable of deranging something in the mechanism and of introducing

a certain amount of movement. As a matter of fact, he does nothing of the

kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low

as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a

man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he is

ungodly.

On the contrary, the man who does not believe himself free believes he is

in the hands of God, and that is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning

of virtue. We are in the hands of God as the clay is in those of the

potter; the mad vase would be the one which reproached the potter for

having made it small instead of big, common instead of decorative. It is

the beginning of wisdom to believe oneself in the hands of God; to see Him,

to see Him the least indistinctly that we can, therein lies the highest

wisdom; we must see His designs, or at least His great design and associate

ourselves with it, thus becoming not only part of Him, which we always are,

but a conscient part of Him.

This is the love of God, and the love of God is virtue itself. We ought to

love God without consideration of the good He can do us and of the

penalties He can inflict upon us; for to love God from love of a beneficent

God or from fear of a punitive God is not to love God but to love oneself.

THE PASSIONS.--We have our passions as enemies and as obstacles to

our elevation to this semi-perfection. It is they which cause us to do

immoral acts. "Immoral," has that a meaning from the moment that we do

nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our

deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of

this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may

have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not

prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions,

gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order

and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence,

lives individually--that is, separated from the universe.

The passions are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume,

furnished a minute and singularly profound description of the principal

ones alone, into the details of which we regret that we cannot enter. The

_Ethics_ of Spinoza is an incomparable masterpiece.

The study of the passions is very salutary, because in studying them one

gets so detached from them that one can perceive their emptiness, their

meanness, and their puerile, nay, even bestial character. It might even be

added that the mere thought of studying them is already an act of

detachment in reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek Me, hadst thou not

already found Me," said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not make

investigations about us, hadst thou not already quitted us," the passions

might say to the philosopher.

SANCTIONS OF MORALITY.--What are the sanctions of morality? They are

necessary sanctions; just as everything is necessary and may even be said

to be mechanical. There is neither merit nor demerit and the criminal is

not culpable; only he is outside order, and everything must be in order.

"He who is maddened by the bite of a mad dog is certainly innocent; yet

anyone has the right to suffocate him. In the same way, the man who cannot

govern his passions by fear of the law is a very excusable invalid; yet he

cannot enjoy peace of mind, or the knowledge of God, or even the love of

God, and it is necessary that he perish." Through death he has re-entered

within order.

But does the sanction of beyond-the-grave exist, and is the soul immortal,

and are we to be rewarded therein in another life? The conclusion of

Spinoza on this matter is hesitating, but at the risk of misrepresenting

it, which I fear to do, it seems to me that it can be thus summed

up--_The soul makes itself immortal_, in proportion as by the

knowledge and love of God it participates more in God. In proportion it

makes itself divine; and approaching perfection, by the same progress it

also approaches immortality. It is conceivable that by error and sin it

kills itself, and by virtue renders itself imperishable. This immortality

is not or does not seem to be personal, it is literally a definite re-entry

into the bosom of God; Spinozian immortality would therefore be a

prolongation of the same effort which we make in this life to adhere to

universal order; the recompense for having adhered to it here below is to

be absorbed in it there, and in that lies true beatitude. Here below we

ought to see everything from the point of view of eternity (_sub specie

aeternitatis_), and this is a way of being eternal; elsewhere we shall

be in eternity itself.

LEIBNITZ.--Leibnitz possessed a universal mind, being historian,

naturalist, politician, diplomatist, scholar, theologian, mathematician;

here we will regard him only as philosopher. For Leibnitz the basis, the

substance of all beings is not either thought or extension as with

Descartes, but is force, productive of action. "What does not act does not

exist." Everything that exists is a force, either action or tendency to

action. And force, all force has two characteristics: it desires to do, it

wishes to think. The world is the graduated compound of all these

forces. Above all there is the supreme force, God, who is infinite force,

infinite thought; by successive descents those base and obscure forces are

reached which seem to have neither power nor thought, and yet have a

minimum of power and even of thought, so to speak, latent. God thinks and

acts infinitely; man thinks and acts powerfully, thanks to reason, which

distinguishes him from the rest of creation; the animal acts and thinks

dimly, but it does act and think, for it has a soul composed of memory and

of the results and consequences of memory, and by parenthesis

"three-fourths of our own actions are governed by memory, and most

frequently we act like animals"; plants act, and if they do not think, at

least feel (which is still thought), though more dimly than animals; and

finally in the mineral kingdom the power of action and thought slumber, but

are not non-existent since they can be transformed into plants, animals,

and men, into living matter which feels and thinks.

Therefore, as was later on to be maintained by Schopenhauer, everything is

full of souls, and of souls which are forces as well as intelligences. The

human soul is a force too, like the body. Between these two forces, which

seem to act on one another and which certainly act in concert in such

fashion that the movement desired by the soul is executed by the body or

that the soul obviously assents to a movement desired by the body, what can

be the affinity and the relation, in what consists their concurrence and

concord? Leibnitz (and there was already something of the same nature

suggested by Descartes) believes that all the forces of the world act, each

spontaneously; but that among all the actions they perform there exists an

agreement imposed by God, a concord establishing universal order, a

"preestablished harmony" causing them all to co-operate in the same

design. Well, then, between the soul, this force, and the body, this force

also, this harmony reigns as between any force whatever in nature and one

and all of the others; and that is the explanation of the union and concord

between the soul and the body. Imagine two well-constructed clocks wound up

by the same maker; they indicate the same hour, and it might appear that

this one directs the other, or that the other directs the first. All the

forces of the world are clocks which agree with each other, because they

have been regulated in advance by the divine clockmaker, and they all

indicate the eternal hour.

THE RADICAL OPTIMISM OF LEIBNITZ.--From all these general views on

matter, on mind and on the mind, Leibnitz arrived at a radical optimism

which is the thing for which he has since been most ridiculed, and by

which, at any rate, he has remained famous. He believes that all is good,

despite the evil of which no one can dispute the existence; and he believes

that all is the best _possible_ in the best of _possible_

worlds. In fact, God is supreme wisdom and supreme goodness; that was quite

evident to Descartes, who in the matter of evidence was not easily

satisfied. This perfect wisdom and perfect goodness could choose only what

is best.--But yet evil exists! Diminish it as much as you choose, it still

exists.--It exists by a necessity inherent in what is created. Everything

created is imperfect. God alone is perfect; what is imperfect is by its

definition evil mingled with good. Evil is only the boundary of good, where

God was compelled to stop in creating beings and things other than Himself,

and if He had created only according to absolute goodness, He could have

created only Himself. And that is the precise meaning of this phrase "the

best of possible worlds"; the world is perfect so far as that which is

created, and therefore imperfect, can be perfect; so far as what is not God

can be divine; the world is God Himself as far as He can remain Himself

whilst being anything else than Himself. THE THREE EVILS.--Let us

distinguish in order to comprehend better. There are three evils: the

metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. Metaphysical evil is this very

fact of not being perfection; it is natural enough that what emanates only

from perfection should not be perfection. Physical evil is suffering; God

cannot _will_ suffering, desire it, or cherish it; but He can permit

it as a means of good, as a condition of good; for there would be no moral

good if there were not occasion for struggle, and there would be no

occasion for struggling if physical evil did not exist; imagine a paradise;

all the inhabitants merely exist and never have cause to show the slightest

endurance, the least courage, the smallest virtue. And finally, as to

moral evil, which is sin, God can even less desire that it should exist,

but He can admit its existence, _allow it to be_, to afford men

occasion for merit or demerit. Nothing is more easy than to criticize God

whilst considering only a portion of His work and not considering it as a

whole. He must have created it to be a whole and it is as a whole that it

must be judged. And precisely because the whole cannot be comprehended by

anyone, "hold thy peace, foolish reason," as Pascal said, and judge not or

judge _a priori_, since here it is not possible to judge by

experience; and declare that the Perfect can have willed only the most

perfect that is possible.

THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE.--There still remains the

fundamental objection: to reduce God to the conditions of the possible is

to limit Him, and it is useless to say that God is justified if He has done

all the good possible. He is not; the words "possible" and "impossible"

having no meaning to Him who is omnipotent, and by definition infinite

power could effect the impossible.

Yes, Leibnitz replies, there is a metaphysical impossibility, there is an

impossibility in the infinite; this impossibility is absurdity, is

contradiction. Could God make the whole smaller than the part or any line

shorter than a straight one? Reason replies in the negative. Is God

therefore limited? He is limited by the absurd and that means He is

unlimited; for the absurd is a falling away. It is therefore credible that

the mixture of evil and good is a metaphysical necessity to which I will

not say God submits, but in which He acts naturally, and that the absence

of evil is a metaphysical contradiction, an absurdity in itself, which God

cannot commit precisely because He is perfect; and no doubt, instead of

drawing this conclusion, we should actually see it, were the totality of

things, of their relations, of their concordance, and of their harmony

known to us.

The optimism of Leibnitz was ridiculed specially in the _Candide_ of

Voltaire, ingeniously defended by Rousseau, magnificently defended by

Victor Hugo in the following verses, well worthy of Leibnitz:

"Oui peut-etre au dela de la sphere des nues,

Au sein de cet azur immobile et dormant,

Peut-etre faites-vous des choses inconnues

Ou la douleur de l'homme entre comme element."

CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General

Politics, and Religious Politics.

LOCKE.--Locke, very learned in various sciences--physics, chemistry,

medicine, often associated with politics, receiving enlightenment from

life, from frequent travels, from friendships with interesting and

illustrious men, always studying and reflecting until an advanced old age,

wrote only carefully premeditated works: his _Treatise of Government_

and _Essay on the Human Understanding_.

Locke appears to have written on the understanding only in order to refute

the "innate ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas have no

existence. The mind before it comes into contact with the external world is

a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the mind which has not first come

through the senses. What, then, are ideas? They are sensations registered

by the brain, and they are also sensations elaborated and modified by

reflection. These ideas then commingle in such a manner as to form an

enormous mass of combinations. They are commingled either in a natural or

an artificial manner. In a natural manner, that is in a way conforming to

the great primary ideas given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the idea

of end, the idea of means to an end, the idea of order, etc., and it is the

harmony of these ideas which is commonly termed reason; they become

associated by accident, by the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom,

etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, errors, and

superstitions. The passions of the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain.

The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth in us to a desire which is

called ambition, love, covetousness, gluttony; the idea of a possible pain

gives birth in us to fear and horror, and this fear and horror is called

hatred, jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At bottom we have only

two passions, the desire of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering.

THE FREEDOM OF MAN.--Is man free? Appealing to experience and

making use only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke declares in the

negative. A will always seems to him determined by another will, and this

other by another to infinity, or by a motive, a weight, a motive power

which causes a leaning to right or left. Will certainly exists--that is to

say, an exact and lively desire to perform an action, or to continue an

action, or to interrupt an action, but this will is not free, for to

represent it as free is to represent it as capable of wishing what it does

not wish. The will is an anxiety to act in such or such a fashion, and this

anxiety, on account of its character of anxiety, of strong emotion, of

tension of the soul, appears to us free, appears to us an internal force

which is self-governed and independent; we feel consciousness of will in

the effort. This tension must not be denied, but it must be recognised as

the effect of a potent desire which the obstacle excites; this tension,

therefore, is an indication of nothing except the potency of the desire and

the existence of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent that it is

irritated by the obstacle, and, so to speak, unites us against it, is a

passion dominating and filling our being; so that we are never more swayed

by passion than when we believe ourselves to be exercising our will, and in

consequence the more we desire the less are we free.

It is not essential formally and absolutely to confound will with

desire. Overpowered by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and because we

know that that would do us harm we have the will not to drink; but although

this is an important distinction it is not a fundamental one; what incites

us to drink is a passion, what prevents us is another passion, one more

general and stronger, the desire not to die, and because this passion by

meeting with and fighting another produces in all our being a powerful

tension, it is none the less a passion, even if we ought not to say that it

is a still more impassioned passion.

LOCKE'S THEORY OF POLITICS.--In politics Locke was the adversary of

Hobbes, whose theories of absolutism have already been noticed. He did not

believe that the natural state was the war of all against all. He believed

men formed societies not to escape cannibalism, but more easily to

guarantee and protect their natural rights: ownership, personal liberty,

legitimate defence. Society exists only to protect these rights, and the

reason of its existence lies in this duty to defend them. The sovereign

therefore is not the saviour of the nation, he is its law-maker and

magistrate. If he violates the rights of man, he acts so directly contrary

to his mission and his mandate that insurrection against him is

legitimate. The "wise Locke," as Voltaire always called him, was the

inventor of the Rights of Man.

In religious politics he was equally liberal and advocated the separation

of Church and State; the State, according to him, should not have any

religion of its own, its province being only to protect equally the liberty

of all denominations. Locke was discussed minutely by Leibnitz, who,

without accepting the innate ideas of Descartes, did not accept the ideas

through sensation of Locke, and said: "There is nothing in the intelligence

which has not first been in the senses," granted ... "except the

intelligence itself." The intelligence has not innate ideas born ready

made; but it possesses forms of its own in which the ideas arrange

themselves and take shape, and this is the due province of the

intelligence. And it was these forms which later on Kant was to call the

categories of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes meant nothing else by

his innate ideas. Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperious influence

over the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER IV

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Berkeley: Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.

David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.

The Scottish School: Common Sense Philosophy.

BERKELEY.--To the "sensualist" Locke succeeded Berkeley, the

unrestrained "idealist," like him an Englishman. He began to write when

very young, continued to write until he was sixty, and died at

sixty-eight. He believed neither in matter nor in the external world. There

was the whole of his philosophy. Why did he not believe in them? Because

all thinkers are agreed that we cannot know whether we see the external

world _as it is_. Then, if we do not know it, why do we affirm that it

exists? We know nothing about it. Now we ought to build up the world only

with what we know of it, and to do otherwise is not philosophy but yielding

to imagination. What is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, and

nothing but our ideas. Very well then, let us say: there are only

ideas. But whence do these ideas come to us? To explain them as coming from

the external world which we have never seen is to explain obscurity by

denser darkness. They are spiritual, they come to us without doubt from a

spirit, from God. This is possible, it is not illogical, and Berkeley

believes it.

This doctrine regarded by the eyes of common sense may appear a mere

phantasy; but Berkeley saw in it many things of high importance and great

use. If you believe in matter, you can believe in matter only, and that is

materialism with its moral consequences, which are immoral; if you believe

in matter and in God, you are so hampered by this dualism that you do not

know how to separate nature from God, and it therefore comes to pass that

you see God in matter, which is called pantheism. In a word, between us and

God Berkeley has suppressed matter in order that we should come, as it

were, into direct contact with God. He derives much from Malebranche, and

it may be said he only pushes his theories to their extreme. Although a

bishop, he was not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of God not being

able to deceive us, and he answered that God does not deceive us, that He

gives us ideas and that it is we who deceive ourselves by attributing them

to any other origin than to Him; nor was he checked, like Malebranche, by

the authority of Scripture, which in Genesis portrays God creating

matter. He saw there, no doubt, only a symbolical sense, a simple way of

speaking according to the comprehension of the multitude.

DAVID HUME.--David Hume, a Scotsman, better known, at least in his

own times, as the historian of England than as a philosopher, nevertheless

well merits consideration in the latter category. David Hume believes in

nothing, and, in consequence, it may be said that he is not a philosopher;

he has no philosophic system. He has no philosophic system, it is true; but

he is a critic of philosophy, and therefore he philosophizes. Matter has no

existence; as we know nothing about it, we should not say it exists. But we

ourselves, we exist. All that we can know about that is that in us there is

a succession of ideas, of representations; but _we_, but _I_,

what is that? Of that we know nothing. We are present at a series of

pictures, and we may call their totality the _ego_; but we do not

grasp ourselves as a thing of unity, as an individual. We are the

spectators of an inward dramatic piece behind which we can see no

author. There is no more reason to believe in _oneself_ than in the

external world.

INNATE IDEAS.--As for innate ideas, they are simply general ideas,

which are general delusions. We believe, for instance, that every effect

has a cause, or, to express it more correctly, that everything has a cause.

What do we know about it? What do we see? That one thing follows another,

succeeds to another. What tells us that the latter proceeds from the

former, that the thing B must necessarily come, owing to the thing A

existing? We believe it because every time the thing A has been, the thing

B has come. Well, let us say that every time A has been (thus far) B has

come; and say no more. There are regular successions, but we are completely

ignorant whether there are causes for them.

THE LIBERTY AND MORALITY OF HUME.--It results from this that for

Hume there is no liberty. Very obviously; for when we believe ourselves

free, it is because we believe we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now

the word "cause" means nothing. We are a succession of phenomena very

absolutely determined. The proof is that we foresee and nearly always

accurately (and we could always foresee accurately if we completely knew

the character of the persons and the influences acting on them) what people

we know will do, which would be impossible if they did as they wished. And

I, at the very moment when I am absolutely sure I am doing such and such a

thing because I desired to, I see my friend smile as he says: "I was sure

you would do that. See, I wrote it down on this piece of paper." He

understood me as a necessity, when I felt myself to be free. And he,

reciprocally, will believe himself free in doing a thing I would have

wagered to a certainty that he would not fail to do.

What system of morality can Hume have with these principles? First of all,

he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the

immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza,

by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It

is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not

responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything

durable or constant. I have committed murder. Truly it is by chance, if it

was by an entirely isolated determination, entirely detached from the rest

of my character, and momentary; and I am only infinitesimally

responsible. But if all my actions are linked together, are conditional

upon one another, dependent on one another, if I have committed murder it

is because I am an assassin at every moment of my life or nearly so, and

then, oh! how responsible I am!

Note that this is the line taken up by judges, since they make careful

investigation of the antecedents of the accused. They find him all the more

culpable if he has always shown bad instincts.--Therefore they find him the

more responsible, the more he has been compelled by necessity.--Yes.

Hume then does not believe himself "foreclosed" in morality; he does not

believe he is forbidden by his principles to have a system of morality and

he has one. It is a morality of sentiment. We have in us the instinct of

happiness and we seek happiness; but we have also in us an instinct of

goodwill which tends to make us seek the general happiness, and reason

tells us that there is conciliation or rather concordance between these two

instincts, because it is only in the general happiness that we find our

particular happiness.

THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL: REID; STEWART.--The Scottish School (end of the

eighteenth century) was pre-eminently a school of men who attached

themselves to common sense and were excellent moralists. We must at any

rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. They were bent especially on

opposing the transcendent idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of David

Hume, also in some measure Locke's doctrine of the blank sheet. They

reconstituted the human mind and even the world (which had been so to speak

driven off in vapour by their predecessors), much as they were in the time

of Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the reality of the external

world; let us believe that there are causes and effects; let us believe

there is an _ego,_ a human person whom we directly apprehend, and who

is a cause; let us believe that we are free and that we are responsible

because we are free, etc. They were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of

states of the soul, admirable psychological moralists and they were the

ancestors of the highly remarkable pleiad of English psychologists of the

nineteenth century.

CHAPTER V

FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.

Rousseau a Freethinking Christian, but deeply Imbued

with Religious Sentiments.

Diderot a Capricious Materialist.

D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.

Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.

VOLTAIRE; ROUSSEAU.--The French philosophy of the eighteenth

century, fairly feeble it must be avowed, seemed as if dominated by the

English philosophy, excepting Berkeley, but especially by Locke and David

Hume, more particularly Locke, who was the intellectual deity of those

Frenchmen of that epoch who were interested in philosophy.

Whenever Voltaire dealt with philosophy, he was only the echo of Locke

whose depths he failed to fathom, and to whom he has done some injury, for

reading Locke only through Voltaire has led to the belief that Locke was

superficial.

Rousseau was both the disciple and adversary of Hobbes, as often occurs,

and dealt out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes in an inverted form,

making the state of nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting the

government of all by all in the place of government by one, invariably

reaching the same point with a simple difference of form; for if Hobbes

argued for despotism exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued for the

despotism of all over each. In _Emile_, he was incontestably inspired

by the ideas of Locke on education in some degree, but in my opinion less

than has been asserted. On nearly all sides it has been asserted that

Rousseau exercised great influence over Kant. I know that Kant felt

infinite admiration for Rousseau, but of the influence of Rousseau upon

Kant I have never been able to discover a trace.

DIDEROT; HELVETIUS; D'HOLBACH.--It was particularly on David Hume

that Diderot depended. The difference, which is great, is that David Hume

in his scepticism remained a grave, reserved man, well-bred and discreet,

and was only a sceptic, whilst Diderot was violent in denial and a man of

paradoxes and jests, both impertinent and cynical.

It is almost ridiculous in a summary history of philosophy to name as

sub-Diderots, if one may so express it, Helvetius and D'Holbach, who were

merely wits believing themselves philosophers, and who were not always

wits.

CONDILLAC.--Condillac belongs to another category. He was a very

serious philosopher and a vigorous thinker. An exaggerated disciple of

Locke, while the latter admitted sensation _and_ reflection as the

origin of ideas, Condillac admitted only pure sensation and transformed

sensation--that is to say, sensation transforming itself. The definition of

man that he deduces from these principles is very celebrated and it is

interesting: "The _ego_ of each man is only the collection of the

sensations that he feels and of those his memory recalls; it is the

consciousness of what he is combined with the recollection of what he has

been." To Condillac, the idea is a sensation which has fixed itself and

which has been renewed and vivified by others; desire is a sensation which

wishes to be repeated and seeks what opportunity offers for its renewal,

and the will itself is only the most potent of desires. Condillac was

voluntarily and systematically limited, but his system is well knit and

presented in admirably clear and precise language.

CHAPTER VI

KANT

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.

KNOWLEDGE.--Kant, born at Koenigsberg in 1724, was professor there

all his life and died there in 1804. Nothing happened to him except the

possession of genius. He had commenced with the theological philosophy in

use in his country, that of Wolf, which on broad lines was that of

Leibnitz. But he early read David Hume, and the train of thought of the

sceptical Scotsman at least gave him the idea of submitting all philosophic

ideas to a severe and close criticism.

He first of all asked himself what the true value is of our knowledge and

what knowledge is. We believe generally that it is the things which give us

the knowledge that we have of them. But, rather, is it not we who impose on

things the forms of our mind and is not the knowledge that we believe we

have of things only the knowledge which we take of the laws of our mind by

applying it to things? This is what is most probable. We perceive the

things by moulds, so to speak, which are in ourselves and which give them

their shapes and they would be shapeless and chaotic were it

otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the matter and the

form of our knowledge: the matter of the knowledge is the things

themselves. The form of our knowledge is ourselves: "Our experimental

knowledge is a compound of what we receive from impressions and of what our

individual faculty of knowing draws from itself on the occasion of these

impressions."

SENSIBILITY; UNDERSTANDING; REASON.--Those who believe that all we

think proceeds from the senses are therefore wrong; so too are those wrong

who believe that all we think proceeds from ourselves. To say, Matter is an

appearance, and to say, Ideas are appearances, are equally false doctrines.

Now we know by sensibility, by understanding, and by reason. By sensibility

we receive the impression of phenomena; by the understanding we impose on

these impressions their forms, and link them up together; by reason we give

ourselves general ideas of things--universal ones, going beyond or

believing they go beyond the data, even when linked up and systematized.

Let us analyse sensibility, understanding, and reason. Sensibility already

has the forms it imposes on things. These forms are time and space. Time

and space are not given us by matter like colour, smell, taste, or sound;

they are not perceived by the senses; they are therefore the forms of our

sensibility: we can feel only according to time and space, by lodging what

we feel in space and time; these are the conditions of sensibility.

Phenomena are thus perceived by us under the laws of space and of time.

What do they become in us? They are seized by the understanding, which also

has its forms, its powers of classification, of arrangement, and of

connection. Its forms or powers, or, putting it more exactly, its active

forms are, for example, the conception of quantity being always equal:

through all phenomena the quantity of substance remains always the same;

the conception of causality: everything has a cause and every cause has an

effect and it is ever thus. Those are the conditions of our understanding,

those without which we do not understand and the forms which within us we

impose on all things in order to understand them.

It is thus that we know the world; which is tantamount to stating that the

world exists, so far as we are concerned, only so long as we think

so. Reason would go further: it would seize the most general, the

universal, beyond experience, beyond the limited and restricted

systematizations established by the understanding; to know, for instance,

the first cause of all causes, the last and collective end, so to speak, of

all purposes; to know "why is there something?" and "in view of what end is

there something?" in fact, to answer all the questions of infinity and

eternity. Be sure that it cannot. How could it? It only operates, can only

operate, on the data of experience and the systematizations of the

understanding, which classify experience but do not go beyond it. Only

operating upon that, having nothing except that as matter, how could it

itself go beyond experience? It cannot. It is only (a highly important

fact, and one which must on no account be forgotten)--it is only a sign,

merely a witness. It is the sign that the human spirit has need of the

absolute; it is itself that need; without that it would not exist; it is

the witness of our invincible insistence on knowing and of our tendency to

estimate that we know nothing if we only know something; it is itself that

insistence and that tendency: without that it would not exist. Let us pause

there for the moment. Man knows of nature only those impressions which he

receives from it, co-ordinated by the forms of sensibility, and further the

ideas of it which he preserves co-ordinated by the forms of his

understanding. This is very little. It is all, if we consider only pure

reason.

PRACTICAL REASON.--_But_ there is perhaps another reason, or

another aspect of reason--to wit, practical reason. What is practical

reason? Something in us tells us: you should act, and you should act in

such a way; you should act rightly; this is not right, so do not do it;

that is right, do it. As a fact this is uncontestable. What is the

explanation? From what data of experience, from what systematization of

the understanding has our mind borrowed this? Where has it got it? Does

nature yield obedience to a "you ought"? Not at all. It exists, and it

develops and it goes its way, according to our way of seeing it in time and

space, and that is all. Does the understanding furnish the idea of "you

ought"? By no means; it gives us ideas of quantity, of quality, of cause

and effect, etc., and that is all; there is no "you ought" in all

that. Therefore this "you ought" is purely human; it is the only principle

which comes exactly from ourselves only. It might therefore well be the

very foundation of us.--It may be an illusion.--No doubt, but it is highly

remarkable that it exists, though nothing gives it birth or is of a nature

to give it birth. An illusion is a weakness of the senses or an error of

logic and is thus explained; but an illusion in itself and by itself and

only proceeding from itself is most singular and not to be explained as an

illusion. Hence it remains that it is a reality, a reality of our nature,

and given the coercive force of its voice and act, it is the most real

reality there is in us.

THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.--Thus, at least, thought Kant, and he

said: There is a practical reason which does not go beyond experience and

does not seek to go beyond it; but which does not depend on it, is

absolutely separated from it, and is its own (human) experience by

itself. This practical reason says to us: you ought to do good. The crowd

call it conscience; I call it in a general way practical reason, and I call

it the categorical imperative when I take it in its principle, without

taking into account the applications which I foresee. Why this name? To

distinguish it clearly; for we feel ourselves commanded by other things

than it, but not in the same way. We feel ourselves commanded by prudence,

for instance, which tells us: do not run down that staircase _if_ you

do not wish to break your neck; we feel ourselves commanded by the

conventions which say: be polite _if_ you do not wish men to leave you

severely alone, etc. But conscience does not say _if_ to us: it says

bluntly "you ought" without consideration of what may or may not happen,

and it is even part of its character to scorn all consideration of

consequences. It would tell us: run down that staircase to save that child

even at the risk of breaking your neck. Because of that I call all the

other commandments made to us hypothetical imperatives and that of

conscience, alone, the categorical or absolute imperative. Here is a

definite result.

MORALITY, THE LAW OF MAN.--Yet reflect: if the foregoing be true,

morality is the very law of man, his especial law, as the law of the tree

is to spread in roots and branches. Well. But for man to be able to obey

his law he must be free, must be able to do what he wishes. That is

certain. Then it must be believed that we are free, for were we not, we

could not obey our law; and the moral law would be absurd. The moral law is

the _sign_ that we are free. Compared to this, all the other proofs of

freedom are worthless or weak. We are free because we must be so in order

to do the good which our law commands us to do.

Let us examine further. I do what is right in order to obey the law; but,

when I have done it, I have the idea that it would be unjust that I should

be punished for it, or that I should not be rewarded for it, that it would

be unjust were there not concordance between right and happiness. As it

happens, virtue is seldom rewarded in this world and often is even

punished; it draws misfortune or evil on him who practises it. Would not

that be the sign that there are two worlds of which we see only one? Would

not that be the sign that virtue unrewarded here will be rewarded elsewhere

_in order that there should not be injustice?_ It is highly probable

that this is so.

But for that it is necessary that the soul be immortal. It is so, since it

is necessary that it should be. The moral law is accomplished and

consummated in rewards or penalties beyond the grave, which pre-suppose the

immortality of the soul. All the other proofs of the immortality of the

soul are worthless or feeble beside this one which demonstrates that were

there no immortality of the soul there would be no morality.

GOD.--And, finally, if justice is one day to be done, this supposes

a Judge. It is neither ourselves who in another life will do justice to

ourselves nor yet some force of circumstances which will do it to us. It is

necessary to have an intelligence conceiving justice and a will to realise

it. God is this intelligence and this will.

All the other proofs of God are weak or worthless beside this one. The

existence of God has been deduced from the idea of God: if we have the idea

of God, it is necessary that He should exist. A weak proof, for we can have

an idea which does not correspond with an object. The existence of God has

been deduced from the idea of causality; for all that is, a cause is

necessary, this cause is God. A weak proof, for things being as they are,

there is necessity for ... cause; but a cause and a _single_ cause,

why? There could be a series of causes to infinity and thus the cause of

the world could be the world itself. The existence of God has been deduced

from the idea of design well carried out. The composition, the ordering of

this world is admired; this world is well made; it is like a clock. The

clock supposes a clock-maker; the fine composition of the world supposes an

intelligence which conceived a work to be made and which made it. Perhaps;

but this consideration only leads to the idea of a manipulation of matter,

of a demiurge, as the Greeks said, of an architect, but not to the idea of

a _Creator;_ it may even lead only to the idea of several architects

and the Greeks perfectly possessed the idea of a fine artistic order

existing in the world when they believed in a great number of deities. This

proof also is therefore weak, although Kant always treats it with respect.

The sole convincing proof is the existence of the moral law in the heart of

man. For the moral law to be accomplished, for it not to be merely a tyrant

over man, for it to be realised in all its fullness, weighing on man here

but rewarding him infinitely elsewhere, which means there is justice in all

that, it is necessary that somewhere there should be an absolute realizer

of justice. God must exist for the world to be moral.

Why is it necessary for the world to be moral? Because an immoral world

with even a single moral being in it would be a very strange thing.

Thus, whilst the majority of philosophers deduced human liberty from God,

and the spirituality of the soul from human liberty, the immortality of the

soul from human spirituality, and morality from human immortality, Kant

starts from morality as from the incontestable fact, and from morality

deduces liberty, and from liberty spirituality, and God from the

immortality of the soul with the consequent realization of justice.

He has effected an extraordinarily powerful reversal of the argument

generally employed.

THE INFLUENCE OF KANT.--The influence of Kant has been incomparable

or, if you will, comparable only to those of Plato, Zeno, and

Epicurus. Half at least of the European philosophy of the nineteenth

century has proceeded from him and is closely connected with him. Even in

our own day, pragmatism, as it is called--that is, the doctrine which lays

down that morality is the measure of truth and that an idea is true only if

it be morally useful--is perhaps an alteration of Kantism, a Kantian

heresy, but entirely penetrated with and, as it were, excited by the spirit

of Kant.

CHAPTER VII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY

The great reconstructors of the world, analogous to the

first philosophers of antiquity.

Great general systems: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.

FICHTE.--Fichte, embarrassed by what remained of experience in the

ideas of Kant, by the part, restricted though it was, which Kant left to

things in the external world, completely suppressed the external world,

like Berkeley, and affirmed the existence of the human _ego_

alone. Kant said that the world furnished us with the matter of the idea

and that we furnished the form. According to Fichte, form and matter alike

came from us. What then is sensation? It is nothing except the pause of the

_ego_ encountering what is not self, the impact of the _ego_

against what limits it.--But then the external world does exist, for how

could our mind be encountered by nothing and there be an impact of our mind

against nothing?--But this non-self that encounters self is precisely a

product of self, a product of the imagination which creates an object,

which projects outside us an appearance before which we pause as before

something real which should be outside us.

This theory is very difficult to understand, but indicates a very fine

effort of the mind.

Yet outside ourselves is there anything? There is pure spirit, God. What

is God? For Fichte He is moral order (a very evident recollection of

Kant). Morality is God and God is morality. We are in God, and it is the

whole of religion, when we do our duty without any regard to the

consequences of our actions; we are outside God, and it is atheism, when we

act in view of what results our actions may have. And thus morality and

religion run into one another, and religion is only morality in its

plenitude and complete morality is the whole of religion. "The holy, the

beautiful, and the good are the immediate apparition [if it could be] in us

of the essence of God."

SCHELLING.--Schelling desired to correct what, according to him, was

too radical in the idealism of Fichte. He restored the external world; for

him the _non-ego_ and the _ego_ both exist and the two are

_nature_, nature which is the object in the world regarded by man, the

subject when it regards man, subject and object according to the case; in

itself and in its totality neither subject nor object, but absolute,

unlimited, indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man)

there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect,

and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a

debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can

be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how

the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the

finite has no existence, and relatively to perfection, the imperfect is

nothing.

It appears however that it is thus, and that the world is an emanation of

God in which He degrades Himself and a degradation of God such that it

opposes itself to Him as nothing to everything. It is a fall. The fall of

man in the Scriptures may give an idea, however distant, of that.

HEGEL.--Hegel, a contemporary of Schelling, and often in

contradiction to him, is the philosopher of "_becoming_" and of the

idea which always "becomes" something. The essence of all is the idea, but

the idea in progress; the idea makes itself a thing according to a rational

law which is inherent in it, and the thing makes itself an idea in the

sense that the idea contemplating the thing it has become thinks it and

fills itself with it in order to become yet another thing, always following

the rational law; and this very evolution, all this evolution, all this

becoming, is that absolute for which we are always searching behind things,

at the root of things, and which is _in_ the things themselves.

The rationally active is everything; and activity and reality are synonyms,

and all reality is active, and what is not active is not real, and what is

not active has no existence.

Let not this activity be regarded as always advancing forward; the becoming

is not a river which flows; activity is activity and retro-activity. The

cause is cause of the effect, but also the effect is cause of its cause.

In fact the cause would not be cause if it had no effect; it is therefore,

thanks to its effect, because of its effect, that the cause is cause; and

therefore the effect is the cause of the cause as much as the cause is

cause of the effect.

A government is the effect of the character of a people, and the character

of a people is the effect also of its government; my son proceeds from me,

but he reacts on me, and because I am his father I have the character which

I gave him, more pronounced than before, etc.

Hence, all effect is cause as all cause is effect, which everybody has

recognized, but in addition all effect is cause of its cause and in

consequence, to speak in common language, all effect is cause forward and

backward, and the line of causes and effects is not a straight line but a

circle.

THE DEISM OF HEGEL.--God disappears from all that. No, Hegel is very

formally a deist, but he sees God in the total of things and not outside

things, yet distinct. In what way distinct? In this, that God is the

totality of things considered not in themselves but in the spirit that

animates them and the force that urges them, and because the soul is of

necessity in the body, united to the body, that is no reason why it should

not be distinct from it. And having taken up this position, Hegel is a

deist and even accepts proofs of the existence of God which are regarded by

some as hackneyed. He accepts them, only holding them not exactly as

proofs, but as reasons for belief, and as highly faithful descriptions of

the necessary elevation of the soul to God. For example, the ancient

philosophers proved the existence of God by the contemplation of the

marvels of the universe: "That is not a 'proof,'" said Hegel, "that is not

a proof, but it is a great reason for belief; for it is an exposition, a

very exact although incomplete account rendered of the fact that by

contemplation of the world the human mind rises to God." Now this fact is

of singular importance: it indicates that it is impossible to think

strongly without thinking of God. "When the passage [although

insufficiently logical] from the finite to the infinite does not take

place, it may be said that there is no thought." Now this is a reason for

belief.'

After the same fashion, the philosophers have said "from the moment that we

imagine God, the reason is that He is." Kant ridiculed this proof. Granted,

it is not an invincible proof, but this fact alone that we cannot imagine

God without affirming His existence indicates a tendency of our mind which

is to relate finite thought to infinite thought and not to admit an

imperfect thought which should not have its source in a perfect thought;

and that is rather an invincible belief than a proof, but that this belief

is invincible and necessary in itself is an extremely commanding proof,

although a relative one.

HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.--The philosophy of the human mind and

political philosophy according to Hegel are these. Primitive man is mind,

reason, conscience, but he is so only potentially, as the philosophers

express it; that is to say, he is so only in that he is capable of becoming

so. Really, practically, he is only instincts: he is egoist like the

animals [it should be said like the greater part of the animals], and

follows his egoistical appetites. Society, in whatever manner it has

managed to constitute itself, transforms him and his "becoming" commences.

From the sexual instinct it makes marriage, from capture it forms regulated

proprietorship, out of defence against violence it makes legal punishment,

etc. Hence-forth, and all his evolution tends to that, man proceeds to

substitute in himself the general will for the particular will; he tends to

disindividualize himself. The general will, founded upon general utility,

is that the man be married, father, head of a family, good husband, good

father, good relative, good citizen. All that man ought to be in

consideration of the general will which he has put in the place of his own,

and which he has made his own will. That is the first advance.

It is realized (always imperfectly) in the smallest societies, in the

cities, in the little Greek republics, for example.

Here is the second advance. By war, by conquest, by annexations, by more

gentle means when possible, the stronger cities subdue the weaker, and the

great State is created. The great State has a more important part than the

city; it continues to substitute the general will for the particular wills;

but, _in addition,_ it is an idea, a great civilizing idea,

benevolent, elevating, aggrandizing, to which private interests must and

should be sacrificed. Such were the Romans who considered themselves, not

without reason, as the legislators and civilizers of the world.

THE IDEAL FORM OF STATE.--Putting aside for a while the continuation

of this subject, what political form should the great State take to conform

to its destiny? Assuredly the monarchical form; for the republican form is

always too individualist. To Hegel, the Greeks and even the Romans seem to

have conceded too much to individual liberty or to the interests of class,

of caste; they possessed an imperfect idea of the rights and functions of

the State. The ideal form of the State is monarchy. It is necessary for the

State to be contracted, gathered up, and personified in a prince who can be

personally loved, who can be reverenced, which is precisely what is

needed. These great States are only really great if they possess strong

cohesion; it is therefore necessary that they should be nationalities, as

it is called--that is, that they should be inwardly very united and highly

homogeneous by community of race, religion, customs, language, etc. The

idea to be realized by a State can only be accomplished if there be a

sufficient community of ideas in the people constituting it. However the

great State will be able to, and even ought to, conquer and annex the small

ones in order to become stronger and more capable, being stronger, of

realizing its idea. Only this should be done merely when it is certain or

clearly apparent that it represents an idea as against a people which does

not, or that it presents a better, greater, and nobler idea than that

represented by the people it attacks.

WAR.--But, as each people will always find its own idea finer than

that of another, how is this to be recognized?--By victory itself. It is

victory which proves that a people ... was stronger than another!--Not

only stronger materially but representing a greater, more practical, more

fruitful idea than the other; for it is precisely the idea which supports a

people and renders it strong. Thus, victory is the sign of the moral

superiority of a people, and in consequence force indicates where right is

and is indistinguishable from right itself, and we must not say as may

already perhaps have been said: "Might excels right," but "Might is right"

or "Right is might."

For example [Hegel might have said], France was "apparently" within her

rights in endeavouring to conquer Europe from 1792 to 1815; for she

represented an idea, the revolutionary idea, which she might consider, and

which many besides the French did consider, an advance and a civilizing

idea; but she was beaten, _which proves_ that the idea was false; and

before this demonstration by events is it not true that the republican or

Caesarian idea is inferior to that of traditional monarchy? Hegel would

certainly have reasoned thus on this point.

Therefore war is eternal and must be so. It is history itself, being the

condition of history; it is even the evolution of humanity, being the

condition of that evolution; there-fore, it is divine. Only it is purifying

itself; formerly men only fought, or practically always, from ambition; now

wars are waged for principles, to effect the triumph of an idea which has a

future, and which contains the future, over one that is out of date and

decayed. The future will see a succession of the triumphs of might which,

by definition, will be triumphs of right and which will be triumphs of

increasingly fine ideas over ideas that are barbarous and justly condemned

to perish.

Hegel has exercised great influence on the ideas of the German people both

in internal and external politics.

ART, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION.--The ideas of Hegel on art, science, and

religion are the following: Under the shelter of the State which is

necessary for their peaceful development in security and liberty, science,

literature, art, and religion pursue aims not superior to but other than

those of the State. They seek, without detaching the individual from the

society, to unite him to the whole world. Science makes him know all it

can of nature and its laws; literature, by studying man in himself and in

his relations with the world, imbues him with the sentiment of the possible

concordance of the individual with the universe; the arts make him love

creation by unravelling and bringing into the light and into relief all

that is beautiful in it relatively to man, and all that in consequence

should render it lovely, respected, and dear to him; religion, finally,

seeks to be a bond between all men and a bond between all men and God; it

sketches the plan of universal brotherhood which is ideally the last state

of humanity, a state which no doubt it will never attain, but which it is

essential it should imagine and believe to be possible, without which it

always would be drawn towards animality more and much more than it is.

The Hegelian philosophy has exercised an immense influence throughout

Europe not only on philosophic studies, but on history, art, and

literature. It may be regarded as the last "universal system" and as the

most daring that has been attempted by the human mind.

SCHOPENHAUER.--Schopenhauer was the philosopher of the

will. Persuaded, like Leibnitz, that man is an epitome and a picture of the

world, and that the world resembles us (which is hypothetical), he takes up

the thought of Leibnitz, changing and transforming it thus: All the

universe is not thought, but all the universe is will; thought is only an

accident of the will which appears in the superior animals; but the will,

which is the foundation of man, is the foundation of all; the universe is a

compound of wills that act. All beings are wills which possess organs

conformed to their purpose. It is _the will to be_ which gave claws to

the lion, tusks to the boar, and intelligence to man, because he was the

most unarmed of animals, just as to one who becomes blind it gives

extraordinarily sensitive and powerful sense of hearing, smell, and

touch. Plants strive towards light by their tops and towards moisture by

their roots; the seed turns itself in the earth to send forth its stalk

upwards and its rootlet downward. In minerals there are "constant

tendencies" which are nothing but obscure wills; what we currently term

weight, fluidity, impenetrability, electricity, chemical affinities, are

nothing but natural wills or inconscient wills. Because of this, the

diverse wills opposing and clashing with one another, the world is a war of

all against all and of _everything_ literally against _everything_; and

the world is a scene of carnage.

The truth is that will is an evil and is the evil. What is needed for

happiness is to kill the will, to destroy the wish to be.--But this would

be the end of existence?--And in fact to be no more or not to be at all is

the true happiness and it would be necessary to blow up the whole world in

an explosion for it to escape unhappiness. At least, as Buddhism desired

and, in some degree, though less, Christianity also, it is necessary to

make an approach to death by a kind of reduction to the absolute minimum of

will, by detachment and renunciation pushed as far as can be.

NIETZSCHE.--A very respectful but highly independent and untractable

pupil of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche "turns Schopenhauer inside out" as it

were, saying: Yes, assuredly the will to be is everything; but precisely

because of that it is essential not to oppose but to follow it and to

follow it as far as it will lead us. But is it not true that it will lead

to suffering? Be sure of that, but in suffering there is an intoxication of

pain which is quite comprehensible; for it is the intoxication of the will

in action; and this intoxication is an enjoyment too and in any case a good

thing; for it is the end to which we are urged by our nature composed of

will and of hunger for existence. Now wisdom, like happiness, is to follow

our nature. The happiness and wisdom of man is to obey his will for power,

as the wisdom and happiness of water is to flow towards the sea.

From these ideas is derived a morality of violence which can be

legitimately regarded as immoral and which, in any case, is neither

Buddhist nor Christian, but which is susceptible of several

interpretations, all the more so because Nietzsche, who was a poet, never

fails, whilst always artistically very fine, to fall into plenty of

contradictions.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:

Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.

TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.--The great philosophic invention of the

English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide

knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal

species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and

the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining

invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has

transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into

higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet

more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name

_transformism_), discrimination and separation of species, the

strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants

in their image which constitute a species; evolution (hence the name

_evolutionism_) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types

to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but

that in the world.

LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER.--The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth

century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set

it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of

general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no

immorality. On the contrary, the progressive transformation of the human

species is an ascent towards morality; from egoism is born altruism because

the species, seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness,

perceives a greater happiness in altruism; seeking its best law and its

best condition of happiness, perceives that a greater happiness lies in

order, regular life, social life, etc.; so that humanity raises itself to a

higher and yet higher morality by the mere fact of adapting itself better

to the conditions of the life of humanity. Morality develops

physiologically as the germ becomes the stem and the bud becomes the

flower.

As for religion it is the domain of the unknowable. That is not to assert

that it is nothing. On the contrary it is something formidable and

immense. It is the feeling that something, apart from all that we know,

surpasses us and that we shall never know it. Now this feeling at the same

time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul

and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over

universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul

of it.

CHAPTER IX

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.

The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.

The Kantist School: Renouvier.

Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.

LAROMIGUIERE: ROYER-COLLARD.--Emerging from the school of Condillac,

France saw Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened Condillac, less

trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was

little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard

introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald

Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth

with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and

magisterial formulae.

MAINE DE BIRAN.--Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself

to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been

interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of _ego_. In full

reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to

the _ego_; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of

sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon,

elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for

Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the

primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the

will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very

closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of

sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is

almost passive, with a commencement of activity which consists in

classifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly

speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet

again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the

ingenious and profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de Biran has placed

himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of

the most original.

VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.--Victor Cousin, who appears to have

been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and

the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is

characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in

seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a

borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the

systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny."

Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy,

correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make

metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove God by the human soul and the

relations of God with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him

God is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all

religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this

tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career,

which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a

statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian,

and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to

make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very

well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the unassailable temerities of the

one and in sympathetic relations with the other. What has remained of this

eclecticism is an excellent thing, the great regard for the _history_

of philosophy, which had never been held in honour in France and which,

since Cousin, has never ceased to be so.

The principal disciples of Cousin were Jouffroy, Damiron, Emile Saisset,

and the great moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of the important

political part he played.

LAMENNAIS.--Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, _Essay

on Indifference in the Matter of Religion_, then, when he had severed

himself from Rome, by his _Words of a Believer_ and other works of

revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher,

properly speaking, in his _Sketch of a Philosophy_. To him, God is

neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being

from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created

the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself,

He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely

voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is

in the image of God, but the whole world. The three Persons of God, that

is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are

found--diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found--in every

being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the

form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society,

under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every

being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it

cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity

without the loss of one.

AUGUSTE COMTE.--Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all

sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his

great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a

positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to

metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not

exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the

commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object;

philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the

universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation

of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part

of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the

_credo_ or rather the _non credo_ of a fairly large number of

minds.

The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte was this: what can be done is to

make a classification of sciences and a philosophy of history. The

classification of sciences according to Comte, proceeding from the most

simple to the most complex--that is, from mathematics to astronomy,

physics, chemistry, biology to end at sociology, is generally considered by

the learned as interesting but arbitrary. The philosophy of history,

according to Comte, is this: humanity passes through three states:

theological, metaphysical, positive. The theological state (antiquity)

consists in man explaining everything by continual miracles; the

metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by

ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by

abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul,

faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains

and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit

himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one

another, links he will content himself with observing and subsequently with

controlling by experiment. Also there is always something of the succeeding

state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation,

and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding

state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind,

theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always

thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before

science is progress.

Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life--as if to prove

his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example--founded a sort of

religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be

worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection

(and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but

Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it

bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new

religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last

conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste

Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.

RENOUVIER.--After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored

the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely

systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from

him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which

measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.

TAINE.--Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of

Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed,

experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as

with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need

of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact

eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact

observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious

gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double

nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the

baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and

actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the

continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and

guarantee of morality.

RENAN.--Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always

preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a

Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth

and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus

formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above

all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them

with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this

difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams,"

but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this

precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart

and reconstituted God, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity

and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was

only the idea of Providence--that is, of the particular and circumstantial

intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and

against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God

does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which

seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and

circumstantial intervention by God in human affairs, it is certainly grace

according to all appearances.

He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with

them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all

French philosophy no one calls Plato to mind more than he does.

He possessed a charming mind, a very lofty character, and was a marvellous

writer.

TO-DAY.--The living French philosophers whom we shall content

ourselves with naming because they are living and receive contemporary

criticism rather than that of history, are MM. Fouillee, Theodule Ribot,

Liard, Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson.

THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY.--It is impossible to forecast in what

direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to

trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance

such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it

will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend

remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization

around it, and even for those who believe in a philosophy of history there

is not, as it appears to me, a philosophy of the history of philosophy. The

only thing that can be affirmed is that philosophy will always exist in

response to a need of the human mind, and that it will always be both an

effort to gather scientific discoveries into some great general ideas and

an effort to go beyond science and to seek as it can the meaning of the

universal enigma; so that neither philosophy, properly speaking, nor even

metaphysics will ever disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is valuable

only as the instrument of knowledge. However eager humanity may be and

become for branches of knowledge, it will be always passionately and

indefatigably anxious about complete knowledge.

INDEX OF NAMES

A

Aelard

Aenesidemus

Agrippa

Agrippa, Cornelius

Ailly, Peter d'

Albertus Magnus

Alexander the Great

Anaxagoras

Anaximander

Anselm, St.

Antisthenes

Apollodorus

Arcesilaus

Arete

Aristippus

Aristo

Aristobulus

Aristophanes

Aristotle

Arius

Arnauld

Atticus

Augustine, St.

Averroes

Avicenna

B

Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Roger

Beaconsfield

Bergson

Berkeley

Bonaventura, St.

Bossuet

Bruno, Giordano

Brutus

Buridan

C

Calvin

Campanella

Cardan

Carneades

Cato

Champeaux, William of

Charles the Bald

Christina of Sweden

Chrysippus

Cicero

Cleanthes

Clement, St., of Alexandria

Comte, Auguste

Cnodillac

Corneille

Cousin, Victor

Crantor

Crates

D

Damiron

Darwin

Democritus

Descartes

Diderot

Diogenes

Durand de Saint-Pourcain

Durckheim

E

Empedocles

Epictetus

Epicurus

Euhemerus

F

Fenelon

Fichte

Fontenelle

Fouillee

Franklin

G

Gassendi

Gerbert

Gerson

Gorgias

H

Harvey

Havet, Ernest

Hegel

Hegesias

Helvetius

Heraclitus

Herillus

Hermarchus

Hobbes, Thomas

Holbach, d'

Horace

Hugo, Victor

Hugo de Saint-Victor

Hume, David

I

Iamblichus

Izoulet

J

James I

Jesus Christ

Joan of Navarre

Jouffroy

Justinian

K

Kant

L

La Bruyere

Lamarck

Lamennais

Laromiguiere

Leibnitz

Leo X

Leucippus

Liard

Locke

Louis XIV

Lucian

Lucretius

Lulle, Raymond

M

Maine de Biran

Malebranche

Manes

Marcus Aurelius

Menippus

Metrodorus

Moderatus

Moliere

Montaigne

Moses

N

Nemesius

Nero

Nicomachus

Nietzsche

O

Ockham, William of

Origen

P

Paracelsus

Parmenides

Pascal

Paul, St.

Pericles

Philips the Fair

Philo

Pico della Mirandola

Plato

Pliny the Younger

Plotinus

Plutarch

Poincare, Henri

Polemo

Polystratus

Pomponazzo

Porphyry

Prodicus

Protagoras

Pyrrho

Pythagoras

R

Reid, Thomas

Renan

Renouvier

Reuchlin

Ribot, Theodule

Richard de Saint-Victor

Roscelin

Rousseau, J. J.

Royer-Collard

S

Saisset, Emile

Schelling

Schopenhauer

Scotus Erigena

Seneca

Servetus, Michael

Sextus Empiricus

Shakespeare

Simon, Jules

Socrates

Spencer, Herbert

Speusippus

Spinoza

Stewart, Dugald

T

Taine, Hippolyte

Thales

Theodosius

Theophrastus

Thomas Aquinas, St.

Thrasea

Timon

V

Vanini

Vauvenargues

Vico

Villon

Vincent of Beauvais

Voltaire

W

William of Auvergne

Wolf

X

Xenocrates

Xenophanes

Xenophon

Z

Zeno (of Citium)

Zeno (of Elea)

Zoroaster

End of Project Gutenberg's Initiation into Philosophy, by Emile Faguet