THE DISCIPLE
THE DISCIPLE
BY
PAUL BOURGET
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Norwood Press:
Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. A MODERN PHILOSOPHER 13
II. THE GRESLON AFFAIR 43
III. SIMPLE GRIEF 65
IV. CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD 90
I. My Heredities 94
II. The Medium Of Ideas 120
III. Transplantation 144
IV. The First Crisis 179
V. The Second Crisis 230
VI. The Third Crisis 255
VII. Conclusion 289
V. TORMENT OF IDEAS 294
VI. COUNT ANDRÉ 317
_TO A YOUNG MAN_
I DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so
well acquainted, although I may not know your place of birth, your
name, your parents, your fortune or your ambitions--nothing but that
you are over eighteen and under twenty-five years of age, and that you
will search in our books for the answers to the questions which are
troubling you. And the answers which you will find depend a little upon
your moral life, a little upon your own soul, for your moral life is
the moral life of France itself--your soul is her soul. In twenty years
from now you and your brothers will hold in your hands the destiny
of this ancient country, which is our common mother--you will be the
nation itself. What will you have learned from our teachings? No man
of letters, however insignificant he may be, but should tremble at the
responsibility.
You will find in “The Disciple” the study of one of these
responsibilities. May you find here a proof that the friend who writes
these lines has the merit, if he possesses no other, of believing
profoundly in the seriousness of his art. May you also find that he
thinks of you with great concern. Yes, he has thought of you ever
since the days when you were learning to read, when we who are now
approaching our fortieth year were scribbling our first verses to the
noise of the cannon which roared over Paris. We, in our study chambers,
were not gay at that period. The oldest of us had just gone to the war,
and those of us who were obliged to remain at college already felt
the duty of our country’s rehabilitation press heavily upon us. We
often thought of you in that fatal year, 1871. O! young Frenchmen of
to-day--all of us who were intending to devote ourselves to literature,
my friends and I, repeated the beautiful verses of Theodore de Banville:
Ye in whom I hail the light.
All ye who will love me,
O young men of the coming fight,
O holy battalions!
We wished this dawn of light to be as bright as ours had been gloomy
and misty with a vapor of blood. We wished to be worthy of your love,
in leaving to you that which we valued more than we valued ourselves.
We said that our work was to make of you and for you, by our public
and private acts, by our words, by our fervor, and by our example,
a new France, a France redeemed from defeat, a France reconstructed
in its external and in its internal life. Young as we were then we
knew, because we had learned it from our masters, and this was their
best teaching--that triumphs and defeats from without interpreted the
qualities and insufficiencies within; we knew that the resurrection of
Germany at the beginning of the century had been above all a work of
soul, and we recognized that the soul of France had been terribly hurt
in 1870, and that it must be helped, healed and cured. We were not the
only ones to comprehend in the generous ingenuousness of our youth that
the moral crisis was then as it always is, the great crisis of this
country; for in 1873 the most valiant of our leaders, Alexandre Dumas,
said in the preface to “La Femme de Claude,” addressing the Frenchmen
of his age as I am addressing you, my younger brother: “Take care, you
are passing through troublous times. You have just paid death and are
not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit,
a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have
had enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage,
love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up
before you. _All these must live or you will die_”.
I cannot say of the generation to which I belong, and which kindled
the noble hope of reconstructing France, that it has succeeded, or
that it has even been sufficiently devoted to its work. But I do know
that it has labored, and labored hard. We have plodded away without
much method, alas! but with a continuous application which touches
me when I think how little the men in power have done for us, how
much we have been left to our own resources, of the indifference felt
toward us by those who directed affairs, and who never once thought
to encourage, support or direct us. Ah! the brave middle class, the
solid and valiant _bourgeoisie_ which France still possesses! What
laborious officers, what skillful and tenacious diplomatic agents, what
excellent professors, what honest artisans has this _bourgeoisie_
furnished for the past twenty years! I sometimes hear: “What vitality
there is in this country! It has survived where another would have
perished.” Yes, it lives because this young _bourgeoisie_ has
made every sacrifice in order to serve the country. It has seen the
masters of a day proscribe its most cherished beliefs in the name of
liberty, chance politicians play universal suffrage as an instrument
by which to rule and install their lying mediocrity in the highest
places. This universal suffrage has undergone the most monstrous and
the most iniquitous of tyrannies; for the force of numbers is the most
brutal of forces, possessing neither talent nor audacity. The young
_bourgeoisie_ has resigned itself to everything, has accepted
everything in order to have the right to do the necessary work. If
our soldiers come and go, if foreign powers hold us in respect,
if our higher education is being developed, if our arts and our
literature continue to assert the national genius, we owe it to the
_bourgeoisie_. It is true that this generation of young men of the
war has no victory for its activity. It could not establish a definite
form of government, or solve the formidable problems of foreign
politics and of socialism. However, young man of to-day, do not despise
it. Learn to render justice to your elders. It is through them that
France has lived!
How will she live through you is the question which at the present time
troubles all those who have retained their faith in the restoration of
France. You have not to see the Prussian cavalry galloping victoriously
among the poplars of your native land to sustain you. And of the
horrible civil war, you have only the picturesque ruins of the Cour
des Comptes, or the trees putting forth luxuriant vegetation among
the scorched stones which lend poetic attraction to the old palaces.
We have never been able to conclude that the peace of ’71 has settled
everything for all time. How I should like to know if you think as we
do! How I should like to be sure that you are not ready to renounce
the secret dream, the consolatory hope which each one of us had, even
of those of us who never spoke of it! But I am sure that you feel sad
whenever you pass the Arc de Triomphe where others have passed, even on
those beautiful summer evenings in company with the one you love. You
would leave her cheerfully to-morrow to go to the front if it should
be necessary, I am sure of it. But it is not enough to know how to
die. Have you resolved to know how to live? When you look at this Arc
de Triomphe and recall the epoch of the Grande Armée, do you regret
that you did not feel the heroic breath of the conscripts of that
time? When you recall 1830, and the glorious struggles of Romanticism,
do you experience nostalgia at not having, like those of Hernani, a
great literary standard to defend? Do you feel, when you meet one of
the masters of to-day--a Dumas, a Taine, a Leconte de Lisle--that you
are in the presence of one of the depositaries of the genius of your
race? When you read such books as must be written when it is necessary
to depict the criminal passions and their martyrdom, do you wish to
love more wisely than the authors of these books have loved? Have you,
my brother, more of the Ideal than we have--have you more faith than
we have--more hope than we? If you have, give me your hand and let me
thank you.
But suppose you have not? There are two types of young men that I see
before me, and before you also, like two forms of temptation, equally
formidable and fatal. One is cynical and usually jovial. He is about
twenty years of age, he appraises life at a discount, and his religion
consists in enjoying himself--which may be translated by success.
Let him be occupied with politics or business, with literature or
art, engaged in sport or in industry, let him be officer, diplomat or
advocate--his only God is himself; he is his only principle, his only
object. He has borrowed from the natural philosophy of the times the
great law of vital concurrence, and he applies it to the advancement
of his fortune with an ardor of positivism which makes him a civilized
barbarian; the most dangerous kind. Alphonse Daudet, who understands so
well how to describe him, has christened him the “struggle-for-lifer.”
He respects nothing but success, and in success nothing but money. He
is convinced when he reads this--for he reads what I write as he reads
everything else, if only to be in the current--that I am laughing at
the public in tracing this portrait, but that I myself am like him. For
he is so profoundly nihilistic in his manner that the Ideal appears to
him like a comedy, for example, when he judges it proper to lie to the
people to secure their votes. Is not this young man a monster? For one
is a monster who is only twenty-five years old and has for a soul a
calculating machine in the service of a machine of pleasure.
I fear him less, however, on your account than I do the other one
who possesses all the aristocracies of nerves and mind, and who is
an intellectual and refined epicurean as the former is a brutal and
scientific one. How dreadful to encounter this dainty nihilist, and
yet how he abounds! At twenty-five he has run the gamut of all ideas.
His critical mind, precociously awake, has comprehended the final
results of the most subtle philosophies of the age. Do not speak to
him of impiety or of materialism. He knows that the word “matter” has
no precise meaning, and beside he is too intelligent not to admit that
all religions have been legitimate in their time. Only, he has never
believed, and he never will believe in them, any more than he will ever
believe in anything whatever, except in the amusing play of his mind
which he has transformed into a tool of elegant perversity. The good
and the bad, beauty and deformity, vices and virtues are to him simply
objects of curiosity. The human soul so far as he is concerned is a
skillful piece of mechanism in the dissection of which he is interested
as a matter of experience. To him nothing is true, nothing is false,
nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is a subtle and refined
egotist whose whole ambition, as that remarkable analyst, Maurice
Barrès, has said in his beautiful romance of “L’Homme Libre”--that
_chef-d’œuvre_ of irony which lacks only conclusion--consists “in
adoring himself,” and to acquire new sensations. The religious life of
humanity is to him only a pretext for these sensations, as are also the
intellectual and the sentimental life. His corruption is otherwise
as profound as that of the voluptuous barbarian; it is differently
complicated, and the fine name of dilettantism with which he adorns it,
conceals its cold ferocity, its frightful barrenness. Ah! we know this
young man too well; we have all wished to be in his place, for we have
been so charmed by the paradoxes of too eloquent teachers; we all have
been like him at some time. And so I have written this book to show
you, who are not yet like him, you child of twenty years, whose soul is
in process of formation, what villainy this egoism may conceal.
Be neither of these young men, my young friend! Be neither the brutal
positivist who abuses the world of sense, nor the disdainful and
precocious sophist who abuses the world of thought and feeling. Let
neither the pride of life nor that of intellect make of you a cynic
and a juggler of ideas! In such times of troubled conscience and
conflicting doctrines cling as you would to a safe support to Christ’s
words: “The tree is known by its fruit.” There is one reality which
you cannot doubt, for you possess it, you feel it, you see it every
moment, it is your own soul. Among the thoughts which assail you, are
those which render your soul less capable of loving, less capable of
desire. Be sure that these ideas are false to a degree, however subtle
they seem, adorned as they are with the finest names and sustained by
the magic of the most splendid talents. Exalt and cultivate these
two great virtues, these two energies, without which only blight and
final agony ensue--Love and Will. The sincere and modest Science of
to-day recognizes that the realm of the Unknowable extends beyond the
limit of its analysis. The venerable Littré, who was a saint, has
magnificently spoken of this ocean of mystery which beats against our
shore, which we see stretching before us, and for which we have neither
bark nor sail. Have the courage to respond to those who will tell you
that beyond this ocean is emptiness, an abyss of darkness and death;
“You do not know that.” And since you know, since you feel that there
is a soul within you, labor to keep it alive lest it die before you.
I assure you, my boy, France has need that you should think thus, and
may this book help you so to think. Do not look here for allusions to
recent events, for you will not find them. The plan was marked out and
a part of the book written before two tragedies, the one French, the
other European, occurred, to attest that the same trouble of ideas and
of sentiments agitates both high and humble destinies at the present
time. Do me the honor to believe that I have not speculated on the
dramas in which too many persons have suffered, and still suffer. The
moralist, whose business it is to seek for causes, sometimes encounters
analogies of situation which attest that they have seen correctly. They
would rather have been deceived. I, myself, for example, would wish
that there never had been in real life a person like the unfortunate
Disciple who gives name to this romance! But if there had not been, if
none existed, I should not have said what I am going to say to you, my
young countryman, you to whom I wish to be a benefactor, you by whom I
so earnestly wish to be loved--and to be worthy of your love.
PAUL BOURGET.
Paris, June 5, 1889.
THE DISCIPLE
I.
A MODERN PHILOSOPHER.
THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the
bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event
was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher
Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated
author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the
breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very
favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the
Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one
afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock,
a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was
as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was
even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the
English call the French Spencer.
This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the
Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the
Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and
the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits
those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger
districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the
tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live
here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish
to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the
Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as
regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the
washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the
domestics who make the purchases.
There is little room for competition in this square, which is
ornamented by a fountain capriciously encumbered with figures of
animals in honor of the Jardin des Plantes. Visitors to the garden
seldom enter by the gate, which is opposite the hospital; so that even
on fine spring days when crowds of people gather under the trees of the
park, which is a favorite resort of the military and of nursemaids,
the Rue Linné is as quiet as usual, and so also are the adjacent
streets. If occasionally there is an unusual flow of people into this
corner of Paris, it is when the doors of the hospital are opened to
visitors, and then a line of sad and humble figures stretches along
the sidewalks. These pilgrims of poverty come furnished with dainties
for their friends who are suffering behind the gray old walls of the
hospital, and the inhabitants of ground-floors, lodges, and shops are
not interested in them. They hardly notice these sporadic promenaders,
and their entire attention is reserved for the persons who go by every
day at the same hour. There are for shopkeepers and _concierges_,
as for sportsmen in the country, unfailing indications of the time
and of the weather, that there will be in this quarter, where resound
the savage calls of some beast in the neighboring menagerie; of an
ara that cries, and elephant that trumpets, an eagle that screams,
or a tiger that mews. When they see the free professor jogging along
with his old green leather case under his arm, nibbling at a penny
bun which he has bought on his way, these spies know that it is about
to strike eight. When the restaurant boy passes with his covered
dishes they know that it is eleven o’clock, that the retired captain
of battalion is soon to have his breakfast, and thus in succession
for every hour of the day. A change in the toilette of the women who
here display their finery, is noted and critically interpreted by
twenty babbling and not overindulgent tongues. In fine, to use a very
picturesque expression common in central France, the most trifling
movements of the frequenters of these four or five streets are at the
end of the tongues, and those of M. Adrien Sixte even more than those
of many others. This will be readily understood by a simple sketch
of the person. And beside, the details of the life led by this man
will furnish to students of human nature an authentic document upon a
rare species--that of philosopher by profession. Some examples have
been given to us by the ancients, and more recently by Colerus, in
reference to Spinoza, and by Darwin and John Stuart Mill in reference
to themselves. But Spinoza was a Hollander of the eighteenth century,
Darwin and Mill grew up among the wealthy and active English middle
class, whereas M. Sixte lived in the heart of Paris at the end of the
nineteenth century. In my youth, when studies of this kind interested
me, I knew several individuals just as entirely given up to abstract
speculations. I have, however, never met one who has made me comprehend
so well the existence of a Descartes--in his little room in the depth
of the Netherlands, or that of the thinker of the Ethics, who, as we
know, had no other distraction from his reveries than smoking a pipe
and fighting spiders.
It was fourteen years after the war when M. Sixte came to live in the
Rue Guy de la Brosse, where every denizen knows him to-day. He was at
that time a man thirty-four years of age, in whom all physiognomy of
youth had been destroyed by the absorption of his mind in ideas, so
that his smoothly-shaven face indicated neither age nor profession.
Some physicians, some priests, and some actors offer to our regard, for
different reasons, faces at once cold, smooth, intent and inexpressive.
A forehead high and tapering, a mouth prominent and obstinate, with
thin lips, a bilious complexion, eyes affected by too much reading and
hidden behind dark spectacles, a slim, big boned body, always clothed
in a shaggy cloth overcoat in winter, and in some thin material in
summer. His shoes tied with strings, his hair long and prematurely
gray and very fine, under one of those hats called _gibus_,
which fold up mechanically--such was the appearance presented by this
savant, whose every action was as scrupulously regulated as those of
an ecclesiastic. He occupied an apartment at a rent of seven hundred
francs on the fourth floor, which consisted of a bedroom, a study, a
dining-room about as large as the cabin of a wherry, a kitchen and
a servant’s room, the whole commanding a very extensive view. The
philosopher could see from his windows the Jardin des Plantes with the
hills of Père-la-Chaise in the distance; beyond, to the left, a kind
of hollow which marked the course of the Seine. The Orléans station
and the dome of La Salpêtrière rose directly in front; and, to the
right, the mass of cedars looked black against the green or bare trees
of the labyrinth. The smoke of factories wreathed upward on a clear
or gray sky from every corner of the wide landscape, from which arose
a sound like the roar of a distant ocean, broken by the whistlings of
steam engines. In choosing this Thebais, M. Sixte had no doubt yielded
to a general though inexplicable law of meditative nature. Are not
nearly all cloisters built in places which permit an extended view?
Perhaps these unlimited and confused prospects favor concentration
of the mind, which might otherwise be distracted by details too near
and circumstantial? Perhaps recluses find the pleasure of contrast
between their dreamy inaction and the breadth of the field in which the
activity of other men is developed? Whatever may be the solution of
this little problem so closely related to another which is too little
studied, namely, the animal sensibility of intellectual men--it is
certain that the melancholy landscape had, for fifteen years, been the
companion with whom the quiet worker had most frequently conversed.
His house was kept by one of those servants who are the ideals of
all old bachelors, who never suspect that the perfection of certain
services implies a corresponding regularity of existence on the part
of the master. On his arrival, the philosopher had simply asked the
_concierge_ to find some one to keep his rooms in order, and
to recommend a restaurant from which he could order his meals. By
this request he risked obtaining a service decidedly bad and a very
uncertain sort of nourishment. It resulted, however, in unexpectedly
introducing into the home of Adrien Sixte precisely the person who
realized his most chimerical wishes, if an extractor of quintessences,
as Rabelais calls this sort of dreamer, still preserves the leisure to
form wishes.
This _concierge_--according to the use and custom of all such
functionaries in small apartment houses--increased the revenue of his
lodgings by working at a trade. He was a shoemaker, “in new and old,”
as a placard read which was pasted on a window toward the street.
Among his customers, old man Carbonnet--this was his name--counted a
priest who lived in the Rue Cuvier. This aged priest had a servant,
Mlle. Mariette Trapenard, a woman nearly forty years old, who had been
accustomed for some years to rule in her master’s house while still
remaining a true peasant woman, with no ambition to play the lady,
faithful in her work, but unwilling to enter at any price a house where
she would be subject to feminine authority. The old priest died quite
suddenly the week preceding the installation of the philosopher in the
Rue Guy de la Brosse. Old Carbonnet, in whose register the newcomer had
simply signed himself _rentier_, had no trouble in recognizing the
class to which this M. Sixte belonged, first from the number of books
which composed his library, and also through the account of a servant
belonging to a professor of the College of France, who lived on the
first floor.
In these phalansteries of the Parisian bourgeois everything becomes
an event. The maid told her mistress the name of her future neighbor;
the mistress told her husband; she spoke of M. Sixte at table in such
a way that the maid comprehended enough to surmise that the new lodger
was “in books like monsieur.” Carbonnet would not have been worthy
of drawing the cord in a Parisian lodging-house, if his wife and he
had not immediately felt the necessity of bringing M. Adrien Sixte
and Mlle. Trapenard together. They felt this the more because Mme.
Carbonnet, who was old and almost disabled, had already too much to do
to take care of three households, to undertake this one. The taste for
intrigue which flourishes in lodging-houses like fuchsias, geraniums,
and basils induced this couple to assure the savant that the cooking at
the eating-houses was wretched, that there was not a single housekeeper
whom they could recommend in the whole neighborhood, and that the
servant of the late M. l’Abbé Vayssier was a “pearl” of discretion,
order, economy, and culinary skill. Finally, the philosopher consented
to see this model housekeeper. The visible honesty of the woman pleased
him and also the reflection that this arrangement would simplify his
existence, by relieving him from the odious task of giving a certain
number of positive orders. Mlle. Trapenard entered the service of this
master for fifty francs a month, which was soon increased to sixty.
The savant gave her fifty francs in New-Year gifts beside. He never
examined his accounts, but settled them every Sunday morning without
question. It was Mlle. Trapenard who did the business with all the
tradesmen without any interference on the part of M. Sixte.
In a word she reigned absolute mistress, a situation, as may be
imagined, which excited the universal envy of the little world
incessantly going up and down the common staircase so zealously
scrubbed every Monday.
“I say, Mam’zelle Mariette, you have drawn the lucky number,” said
Carbonnet as the housekeeper stopped a minute to chat with her
benefactor, who was now much older.
He wore spectacles on his square nose, and it was with some difficulty
that he adjusted the blows of his hammer to the heads of the nails
which he drove into the boot-heels closely pressed between his legs.
For some years he had taken care of a cock named Ferdinand--why, no
one knew. This creature wandered about among the bits of leather,
exciting the admiration of all visitors by his eagerness to peck at
the buttons of the boots. In his moments of fright this pet cock
would take refuge with his master, plunge one of his feet into the
pocket of the cobbler’s vest and hide his head under the arm of the
old _concierge_: “Come, Ferdinand, say good-day to Mam’zelle
Mariette,” resumed Carbonnet. And the cock gently pecked the woman’s
hand, while his master continued:
“I always say, ‘Never despair at one bad year, two good ones are bound
to come immediately after.’”
“There we agree,” responded Mariette, “for monsieur is a good man,
though as to religion he is a regular pagan; he has not been to mass
these fifteen years.”
“There are plenty who do go,” replied Carbonnet, “who are sad dogs, and
lead anything but a quiet life between four and midnight--without your
knowing anything about it.”
This fragment of conversation perhaps shows the type of opinion which
Mariette held in regard to her master; but this opinion would be
unintelligible if we did not recall here the works of the philosopher,
and the trend of his thought.
Born in 1839 at Nancy, where his father kept a little watchmaker’s
shop, and remarkable for the precocity of his intellect, Adrien Sixte
left among his comrades the remembrance of a child thin and taciturn,
endowed with a strength of moral resistance which always discouraged
familiarity. At first he was very brilliant in his studies, then
mediocre, until in the class in philosophy which then bore the name
of Logic, he distinguished himself by his exceptional aptitude. His
professor, struck by his metaphysical talent, wished him to prepare
for the normal school examination. Adrien refused and declared beside
to his father that, taking one trade with another, he preferred manual
labor. “I will be a watchmaker like you,” was his sole answer to the
objurgations of his father, who, like the innumerable artisans, or
French merchants whose children attend college, cherished the dream
that his son might be a civil officer.
M. and Mme. Sixte could not reproach this son, who did not smoke,
never went to the _café_, was never seen with a girl, in fine,
who was their pride, and to whose wishes they resigned themselves with
a broken heart. They renounced a career for him, but they would not
consent to putting him to an apprenticeship, hence, the young man lived
at home with no other occupation than to study as suited his fancy.
He employed ten years in perfecting himself in the study of English
and German philosophy, in the natural sciences and especially in the
physiology of the brain and in the mathematical sciences; finally,
he gave himself, as one of the great thinkers of our epoch has said
of himself, that “violent inflammation of the brain,” that kind of
apoplexy of positive knowledge which was the process of education of
Carlyle and of Mill, of Taine and Renan, and of nearly all the masters
of modern philosophy. In 1868, the son of the watchmaker of Nancy, then
twenty-five years of age, published a large volume of five hundred
pages entitled: “Psychology of God,” which he did not send to more
than fifteen persons, but which had the unexpected fortune of causing
a scandalous echo. This book, written in the solitude of the most
honest thought, presented the double character of a critical analysis,
keen to severity, and an ardor in negation exalted to fanaticism. Less
poetic than M. Taine, incapable of writing the magnificent preface to
the “Intelligence,” and the essay upon universal phenomena; less dry
than M. Ribot, who already preluded by his “English Psychologists” the
beautiful series of his studies, the “Psychology of God,” combined the
eloquence of one with the penetration of the other, and it had the
chance, unsought, of directly attacking the most exciting problem of
metaphysics. A pamphlet by a well-known bishop, an unworthy allusion
of a cardinal in a discourse to the senate, a crushing article by the
most brilliant critical spiritualist in a celebrated review, sufficed
to point out the work to the curiosity of the youth over whom passed
a revolutionary wind, the herald of future overthrow. The thesis of
the author consisted in demonstrating the necessary production of
“the hypothesis--God,” by the action of some psychologic laws, which
are themselves connected with some cerebral modifications of an
entirely physical order, and this thesis was established, supported,
and developed with an acrimony of atheism which recalled the fury of
Lucretius against the beliefs of his time. It happened then to the
hermit of Nancy, that his work, which was conceived and written as if
in the solitude of a cell, was at once in the midst of the noise of the
battle of contemporaneous ideas. For years there had not been seen such
power of general ideas wedded to such amplitude of erudition, nor so
rich an abundance of points of view united to so audacious a nihilism.
But while the name of the author was becoming celebrated in Paris, his
parents were bowed to the earth by his success. Some articles in the
Catholic journals filled Mme. Sixte with despair. The old watchmaker
trembled lest he should lose his customers among the aristocracy of
Nancy.
All the miseries of the province crushed the philosopher, who was about
to leave his home, when the German invasion and the fearful national
shipwreck turned the attention of his countrymen away from him. His
parents died in the spring of 1871. In the summer of the same year, he
lost an aunt, and so in the autumn of 1872 having settled his affairs,
he came to establish himself in Paris. His resources, thanks to the
inheritance of his parents and of his aunt, consisted in eight thousand
francs income invested in a life-interest. He had resolved never to
marry, never to go into society, never to be ambitious of honor, of
place nor of reputation. The whole formula of his life was contained in
the words: _To think_!
In order to better define this man of a quality so rare that this
sketch after nature will risk appearing untruthful to the reader who
is unfamiliar with the biographies of the great manipulators of ideas,
it is necessary to give a rapid glance at some of the days of this
powerful thinker.
Summer and winter, M. Sixte sat down to his work at six o’clock in the
morning, refreshed by a single cup of black coffee. At ten o’clock he
took his breakfast, a summary operation which permitted him to be at
the gate of the Jardin des Plantes at half-past ten. He walked in the
garden until noon, sometimes extending his stroll toward the quays and
by the way of Notre Dame.
One of his favorite pleasures consisted in long séances in front of
the cages of the monkeys and the lodges of the elephants. The children
and servants who saw him laugh, long and silently, at the ferocities
and cynicisms of the baboons and ouistitis, never suspected the
misanthropic thoughts which this spectacle brought to the mind of the
savant who compared in himself the human to the simian comedy, as he
compared our habitual folly with the wisdom of the noble animal that,
before us, was king of the earth.
Toward noon M. Sixte returned to his home and worked again until four
o’clock. From four to six he received three times a week, visitors who
were nearly always students, masters occupied with the same studies
as himself, or foreigners attracted by a reputation which to-day is
European. Three other days he went out to make some indispensable
visits. At six o’clock he dined and then went out again, this time
going the length of the closed garden to the Orléans station. At eight
o’clock he returned, regulated his correspondence or read. At ten
o’clock the lights were extinguished in his house.
This monastic existence had its weekly rest on Monday, the philosopher
having observed that Sunday emptied an obstructing tide of pleasure
seekers into the country. On these days, he went out very early in the
morning, boarded a suburban train, and did not return until evening.
Not once in fifteen years had he departed from this absolute
regularity. Not once had he accepted an invitation to dine nor taken a
stall in a theater. He never read a newspaper, relying on his publisher
for marked copies pertaining to his own works.
His indifference to politics was so complete that he had never drawn
his elector’s card. It is proper to add, in order to fix the principal
features of this singular being, that he had broken off all connection
with his family, and that this rupture was founded, like the smallest
act of his life, upon a theory. He had written in the preface to his
second book, “Anatomy of the Will,” this significant sentence: “The
social attachments should be reduced to their minimum for the man who
wishes to know and speak the truth in the domain of the psychologic
sciences.”
From a similar motive this man, who was so gentle that he had not
given three commands to his servant in fifteen years, systematically
forbade himself all charity. On this point he agreed with Spinoza who
has written in the fourth book of the Ethics: “Pity, for a wise man who
lives according to reason, is bad and useless.” This Saint Lais, as he
might have been called as justly as the venerable Emile Littré, hated
in Christianity the excessive fondness for humanity. He gave these two
reasons for it: first that the hypothesis of a Heavenly Father and of
eternal happiness had developed to excess the distaste for the real
and had diminished the power to accept the laws of nature; second, in
establishing the social order upon love, that is, upon sensibility,
this religion had opened the way to all the caprices of the most
personal doctrines.
He did not suspect that his faithful servant had sewed consecrated
medals into all his vests, and his indifference with regard to the
external world was so complete that he went without meat on Fridays and
on other days prescribed by the Church, without perceiving this effort
on the part of the old maid to assure the salvation of a master of whom
she sometimes said, repeating unconsciously a celebrated saying:
“The good God would not be the good God, if he had the heart to damn
him.”
These years of continuous labor in this hermitage of the Rue Guy de
la Brosse had produced, beside the “Anatomy of the Will,” a “Theory
of the Passions,” in three volumes, whose publication would have been
still more scandalous than that of the “Psychology of God,” if the
extreme liberty of the press for ten years had not accustomed readers
to audacities of description which the mild, technical ferocity of a
savant could not equal.
In these two books is found, precisely stated, the doctrine of M. Sixte
which it is necessary to take up again here, in some of its general
features, for the intelligent understanding of the drama to which this
short biography serves as prologue. With the critical school sprung
from Kant, the author of these three treatises admits that the mind
is powerless to know causes and substances, and that it ought only to
co-ordinate phenomena.
With the English psychologists, he admits that one group among these
phenomena, those which are classed under the name of soul, may be the
object of scientific knowledge, on condition of their being studied
after a scientific method.
Up to this point, as we all see, there is nothing in these theories
which distinguishes them from those which Messrs. Taine, Ribot and
their disciples have developed in their principal works.
The two original characteristics of M. Sixte’s inquiries are found
elsewhere. The first resides in a negative analysis of what Herbert
Spencer calls the Unknowable. We know that the great English thinker
admits that all reality rests upon a First Cause which it is impossible
to penetrate; consequently it is necessary to use the formula of
Fichte, to comprehend this First Cause (_arrière-fonds_) as
incomprehensible; but as the beginning of the “First Principles”
strongly attests this Unknowable is real to Mr. Spencer. It exists
since we derive our existence from it. From this there is only a step
to apprehend that this First Cause of all reality involves a mind and a
soul since one finds their source in it. Many excellent minds foresee
a probable reconciliation between science and religion on this ground
of the Unknowable. For M. Sixte this is a last form of metaphysical
illusion which he is rabid to destroy with an energy of argument that
has not been seen to this degree since Kant.
His second title of honor as psychologist consists in an exposé, quite
novel and very ingenious, of the animal origin of human sensibility.
Thanks to an exhaustive reading and a minute knowledge of the natural
sciences, he has been able to attempt for the genesis of human thought
the work which Darwin attempted for the genesis of the forms of life.
Applying the law of evolution to all the facts which constitute the
human heart, he has claimed to show that, our most refined sensations,
our most subtile moral delicacies as well as our most shameful
failures, are the latest development, the supreme metamorphosis of very
simple instincts, which are themselves transformations of the primitive
cellule; so that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical,
and the former is the consciousness, either painful or pleasurable, of
the latter.
This conclusion presented under the title of hypothesis because of
its metaphysical character, is the result of a marvelous series of
analyses, among which it is proper to cite two hundred pages on love,
which are so audacious as to be almost ludicrous from the pen of so
chaste a man. But has not Spinoza himself given us a theory of jealousy
which has not been equalled in brutality by any modern novelist? And
does not Schopenhauer rival Chamfort in the spirit of his tirades
against women?
It is almost unnecessary to add that the most complete positivism
pervades these books from one end to the other. We owe to M. Sixte
some sentences which express with extreme energy this conviction that
everything in the mind is there of necessity, even the illusion, that
we are free. “Every act is only an addition. To say he is free, is to
say that there is in the total more than there is in the sum of all
the parts. That is as absurd in psychology as it is in arithmetic.”
And again: “If we could know correctly the relative position of all
the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could, from the
present, calculate with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers
the day, the hour, the minute when England, for example, will evacuate
India, or Europe will have burned her last piece of coal, or such a
criminal, still unborn, will assassinate his father, or such a poem,
not yet conceived will be written. The future is contained in the
present as all the properties of the triangle are contained in its
definition.” Mohammedan fatalism itself is not expressed with more
absolute precision.
“With speculations of this order, only the most frightful aridity of
imagination would seem to comport. Thus that which M. Sixte so often
said of himself: I take life on its poetic side,” appeared to those
who heard it the most absurd of paradoxes. And yet nothing is truer
with regard to the special nature of the minds of philosophers. What
essentially distinguishes the born philosopher from other men is that
ideas instead of being formulas of the mind more or less exact, are to
him real and living things. Sensibility, with him, models itself upon
the thought instead of establishing a divorce more or less complete,
between the heart and the brain, as with the rest of us.
A Christian preacher has admirably shown the nature of this divorce
when he uttered this strange and profound sentence: “We _know_
well that we shall die, but we do not _believe_ it.”
The philosopher, when he is one by passion and by constitution, does
not conceive this duality, this life divided between contradictory
sensations and reflections.
This universal necessity, this indefinite and constant metamorphosis of
phenomena, this colossal work of nature ceaselessly making and unmaking
itself, with no point of departure, no point of arrival, by the play
of the primitive cells alone, this parallel work of the human mind
reproducing under the form of thoughts and volitions the movement of
physiological life, was not for M. Sixte a simple object of speculation.
He plunged into the contemplation of these ideas with a kind of
vertigo, he felt them with all his being, so that this simple man
seated at his table, waited upon by his old housekeeper, in a study
whose shelves were laden with books, this man of poor appearance, with
his feet in a carriage boot (_chancelière_) to keep them warm, and
his body wrapped in a shabby great-coat, participated in imagination in
the labor of the universe.
He lived the life of every creature. He slept with the mineral,
vegetated with the plant, moved with the rudimentary beasts, confounded
himself with the superior organisms, and at last expanded into the
fullness of a mind capable of reflecting the vast universe.
These are the delights of general ideas, analogous to those of opium,
which render these dreamers indifferent to the small accidents of the
external world, and also, why shall we not say it? almost absolute
strangers to the ordinary affections of life.
We become attached to that which we feel to be very real; now to these
singular minds, it is abstraction which is reality, and the daily
reality is only a shadow, only a gross and degraded impression of the
invisible laws. Perhaps M. Sixte had loved his mother, but surely this
was the limit of his sentimental existence.
If he was gentle and indulgent to all, it was from the same instinct
which made him take hold of a chair gently, when he wished to move it
out of his way; but he had never felt the need of a warm and loving
tenderness, of family, of devotion, of love, nor even of friendship. He
sometimes conversed with some savants with whom he was associated, but
always professionally on chemistry with one, on the higher mathematics
with another, and on the diseases of the nervous system with a third.
Whether these men were married, occupied in rearing families, anxious
to make a career for themselves or not, was of no interest to him in
his relations with them; but however strange such a conclusion must
appear after such a sketch, he was happy.
Given such a man, such a home and such a life, let us imagine the
effect produced in this study in the Rue Guy de la Brosse by two events
which occurred one after the other in the same afternoon: first, a
summons addressed to M. Adrien Sixte, to appear at the office of M.
Valette, Judge of Instruction, for the purpose of being questioned,
“upon certain facts and circumstances of which he would be informed;”
second, a card bearing the name of Mme. Greslon and asking M. Sixte to
receive her the next day toward four o’clock, “to talk with him about
the crime of which her son was falsely accused.”
I have said that the philosopher never read a newspaper. If by chance
he had opened one a fortnight before he would have found allusions to
this history of the young Greslon which more recent trials have caused
to be forgotten. For want of this information the summons and the note
of the mother had no definite meaning for him. However, by the relation
between them he concluded that they were probably connected, and he
thought they concerned a certain Robert Greslon, whom he had known the
preceding year, in quite simple circumstances. But these circumstances
contrasted too strongly with the idea of a criminal process, to guide
the conjectures of the savant, and he remained a long time looking at
the summons turn by turn with the card, a prey to that almost painful
anxiety which the least event of an unexpected nature does inflict on
men of fixed habits.
Robert Greslon? M. Sixte had read this name for the first time two
years before, at the bottom of a note accompanying a manuscript.
This manuscript bore the title: “Contribution to the Study of the
Multiplication of Self,” and the note modestly expressed the wish
that the celebrated writer would glance at the first essay of a very
young man. The author had added to his signature: “Veteran pupil of
philosophy at the Clermont-Ferrand Lyceum.”
This work of almost sixty pages revealed an intellect so prematurely
subtle, an acquaintance so exact with the most recent theories of
contemporaneous psychology, and finally such ingenuity of analysis,
that M. Sixte had believed it a duty to respond by a long letter.
A note of thanks had come back immediately, in which the young man
announced that, being obliged to go to Paris for the oral examination
of the normal school he would have the honor to present himself, to the
master.
The latter had then seen enter his study one afternoon, a young man of
about twenty years with fine black eyes, lively and changeable, which
lighted up a countenance which was almost too pale. This was the only
detail of physiognomy which remained in the memory of the philosopher.
Like all other speculative persons, he received only a floating
impression of the visible world and he retained but a remembrance as
vague as this impression. His memory of ideas was, however, surprising,
and he recalled to the smallest detail his conversation with Robert
Greslon.