question: Are we free to obtain knowledge, as he did with the thesis:
Knowledge when obtained is freedom. For one feels that whatever the
blessedness of knowledge, if understanding is denied us we are not
blessed. And has not Spinoza himself said that the path to knowledge is
a difficult one? And he adds “surely it must be difficult, since it
is so rarely found. For if salvation were easily attained and could be
found without great labor, how could it be neglected by nearly every
one?”
Had Spinoza maintained that not only knowledge but the pursuit of
knowledge was blessed, then indeed salvation must lie at every man’s
door. For is not life itself one long education? And if it bring
its share of disillusionment, may we not repeat the words of a
distinguished German scientist of our own day, “All disillusionment is
enlightenment”? And this I think is the burden of Spinoza’s teaching:
“Let the pain of life teach you to understand and you will not hate
life, but in the joy of understanding, love it.”
* * * * *
You will learn to love life! But Spinoza has a loftier word for it:
You will learn to love God. A clearing up of this expression may
well end our account of the religion of Spinoza. You must recall our
saying that for Spinoza and his fellow rationalists, all truths were
deducible from the single one “God is,” as all theorems of geometry
are proved from its axioms. If the truths respecting triangles follow
from the nature of a triangle and are not merely the result of physical
measurement, so too, the truths about the world follow from the nature
of God and are not merely brute facts that we have to accept because
we are continually bumping against them. To understand a particular
experience is to recognize God as its cause. But we have seen that such
understanding is the greatest happiness that can come to man, for it
is his assurance of power, of freedom from pain. Now Spinoza defines
love as “pleasure accompanied with the idea of an external cause.” If
understanding is pleasure, and if it is at the same time recognition of
God as a cause, it fulfils the condition of being love, and of course,
love of God. It is this love of God that is at once knowledge, freedom,
virtue and blessedness. “For blessedness,” our philosopher has written,
“blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we
rejoice in it _because_ we restrain our desires, but on the contrary
because we rejoice in it we are able to restrain our desires.”
“I know,” he writes, “that the belief of the multitude is different.
Most men seem to think that they are free just in so far as they are
permitted to gratify desire, and that they give up their independence
just in so far as they are obliged to live according to the precept of
the divine law.
“Piety, then, and religion and all things without restriction that are
referred to as greatness of soul, they regard as burdens; and they
hope after death to receive the reward of their bondage, that is, of
piety and religion. And not by this hope alone, but also and chiefly by
fear--the fear of being punished after death with dire torments--are
they induced to live according to the precept of the divine law so far
as their poverty and feebleness of soul permit. If men had not this
hope and fear, but if on the contrary they thought that minds perished
with the body, and that for the wretched, worn out with the burden of
piety, there was no continuance of existence, they would return to
their inclinations, and decide to regulate everything according to
their lusts and to be governed by chance rather than by themselves.
This seems to me no less absurd than it would if some one because he
does not believe he can nourish his body with good food to eternity
should choose to stuff himself with what is poisonous and deadly; or
because he sees that his mind is not eternal or immortal should choose
on that account to be mad and to live without reason.”
And Spinoza closes his doctrine of life with a calm hymn to science.
“I have completed all that I intended to show regarding the power of
the mind over the emotions, and the freedom of the mind. From what I
have said it is evident how much stronger and better the wise man is
than the ignorant man, who is held by mere desire. For the ignorant
man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes and never
attaining to true satisfaction of the soul, lives as it were without
consciousness of himself, of God, and of things, and just as soon as he
ceases to be acted upon, ceases to be. While on the contrary the wise
man is little disturbed in mind, but conscious by a certain eternal
necessity of himself, of God, and of things, he never ceases to be,
but is always possessed of true satisfaction of soul. If indeed, the
path that I have shown to lead to this appear difficult, yet it may be
found, and all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
III
A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA
An Illustration
I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte
progressed with his first reading of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,”
he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured
pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise,
were it not for the quality of the tears:--not those of vexation and
baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude.
For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza.
At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth
century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than
irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the
reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by
inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its
parts there was no freedom. Gloomy, then, was the implication few but
Spinoza himself could escape, that man in such a machine had lost all
the familiar marks of a moral being. It was from the heavy chains of
such bondage that Kant seemed to free the poor Spinozist by holding
out to him the hope of a deeper-lying freedom, while not denying his
apparent subjection to the universal and necessary laws of physical
nature. It was by this promise of freedom that Fichte was moved to the
enthusiasm, the gratitude, the tears of which I have spoken.
If I have mentioned these matters, it is not because our present
reflections are to dwell upon the philosophy of Fichte, nor yet upon
the historic contrast between Spinoza and Kant. It is rather because
the seriousness with which Fichte faced the issue between these two
thinkers is shared by the men of all times and of all countries
who have given themselves to the pleasures and to the burdens of
reflection. The issue was not first raised by the seventeenth century,
and was not laid with the eighteenth. That it remains one of the
most interesting to which we of the twentieth century can turn our
attention is just the point which I wish to bring out in the form of
an example--an example taken, not indeed from the technical philosophy
of our day, but from a writer holding a distinguished place among its
novelists. Those of you who have enjoyed the more mundane writings
of M. Paul Bourget,--his “Cosmopolis,” his “Coeur de Femme,” his
“Complications Sentimentales,”--are perhaps not prepared to meet in him
the philosopher and moralist that shows through his less widely known,
but sometimes more admired work, “Le Disciple.” You will allow me,
then, to present so much as is indispensable of the story of Bourget’s
“Disciple.”
* * * * *
Let me begin by giving some idea of the way in which the plot of the
tale may have worked itself out in the author’s mind. If a mass of
rock were to fall from a cliff, and at its foot to crush before your
eyes a human being--and not a mere vague humanity, but, let us say,
a young girl just entering upon the promise of life--you would, of
course, feel the full horror of the catastrophe. More than that, you
would not be a descendant of the myth-makers, as we all of us are,
were you not to cast about for some soul in the order of things on
whom to blame the calamity as though it were a crime. Such shadowy
beings from out of the past as the Fates, the “purblind doomsters,” are
creatures of this human instinct to transform physical nature into a
moral being. But it is no longer easy to take these inventions of our
fancy as seriously as did our forefathers. Galileo and Newton have come
between us and the myth-makers. They have enabled us, and at the same
time have constrained us, to envisage the event I have just depicted
as essentially a conflict between gravitational and elastic forces,
not one between the human soul and the soul of Fate. The thing moves
us more, no doubt, than it would had the heavy mass rolled quietly
on to the bottom of the valley, because the young girl as a possible
object of sympathy and love is nearer to ourselves than is a mere
topographical contour; but our emotions, be they what they may, are not
of themselves enough to transform a physical fact into a moral event, a
catastrophe into a crime.
Robert Greslou, the Disciple of our story, is not indeed made to kill
such a young girl, but in a singularly detestable fashion to render
it inevitable that she should kill herself. The author has taken care
that we should have no feeling but loathing for this creature of his
brain. We cannot even extend to him that pity and half-forgiveness that
the instinctive man commonly feels for the aberrations of passion. To
Robert the whole episode was a carefully planned piece of psychological
research,--a vivisection of the emotional life. The author, in his
anxiety that we should not be tempted to excuse, but should confine
ourselves to understanding, has created a monster. “Non, monsieur,”
says André de Jussat, the brother of Charlotte, to Robert who has
offered him all the satisfaction left in his power, “Non, monsieur,
people do not fight men like you, they execute them.”
Now, Bourget’s interest in the situation thus created I conceive to be
this: May we not gain sufficient insight into the causes of this young
man’s conduct to make it appear as inevitable as the fall of the rock
from the cliff? And if we do this, must we not view the catastrophe in
which a human being happens to play a part as no less void of moral
aspects than that in which a falling mass is concerned? There we could
not blame the stone; here, if the case is made out, we should not blame
the man. In neither situation is it meaningful to blame the facts and
laws of nature.
It is for the right so to regard his own conduct that the Disciple
pleads with his old master, Adrien Sixte. At the end of his
autobiography he makes a tragic appeal to the man whose writings had
formed his mind. “I felt assured,” he writes, “that I should be able
to tell you my story as you develop your problems of psychology in the
books I have so constantly read, and having finished, I find nothing
to offer you but the despairing cry, De profundis! Write to me, cher
maître, guide me. Strengthen me in the doctrine which was, which still
_is_, my own,--in that conviction of universal necessity which holds
that even our most detestable, our most damning acts, even this cold
enterprise of seduction, even my weakness when it came to keeping my
side of the compact of death, are the outcome of laws that govern this
immense universe. Tell me that I am not a monster, that there is no
such thing as a monster, that you will still be there when I come out
of this supreme crisis to welcome me as your disciple, as your friend.”
* * * * *
What, then, is the philosophy of this Adrien Sixte that, having brought
a human being to such a pass, it could still be appealed to to bring
him through?
Adrien Sixte had made two contributions to philosophy. The first was
a negative analysis of what Herbert Spencer calls the Unknowable.
“Many excellent minds,” the author assures us, “catch a glimpse of
the probable reconciliation of science and religion on this ground of
the Unknowable. For M. Sixte it is a last illusion which he is hot to
destroy with an energy of argument that has not been equalled since
Kant.”
“M. Sixte’s second title to honor as a psychologist consists in a
quite new and ingenious development of the animal origin of human
sensibility.... He undertook for the genesis of types of thought the
work that Darwin essayed for the forms of life. Applying the laws of
evolution to all the facts that make up the human heart, he thought to
show that our most exquisite sensibilities, our most delicate moral
discriminations, as well as our most shameful degradations, are the
final development, the ultimate metamorphosis of very simple instincts,
themselves transformations of the properties of the primitive cell: in
such wise that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical, and
that the former is only the consciousness, now painful, now ecstatic,
of the latter.”
We owe to M. Sixte some phrases that translate with extreme energy this
conviction that all is necessitated in the soul--even the illusion that
the soul is free.
“Every act,” he writes, “is but an addition. To say that it is free, is
to say that there is in a sum more than there is in the elements added.
This is as absurd in psychology as in arithmetic.”
And elsewhere he put it thus: “If we knew truly the relative position
of all the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could at
this moment with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers, tell
the day, the hour, the minute at which, say, England will evacuate
India, when Europe will have burned its last lump of coal, when such a
criminal, still to be born, will assassinate his father, when such a
poem, yet to be conceived, will be composed. The future is contained in
the present as all the properties of a triangle are contained in its
definition.”
The provenance of this type of thought is obvious enough to the
experienced reader. Our author has in an ingenious way translated his
Spinoza into the language of contemporary science. Let us merely catch
up a note or two that will render our Spinozist’s attitude toward
common morality, and his understanding of the master’s doctrine of
emancipation through science.
In the first sense we find that Adrien Sixte has somewhere written,
“All conscious beings must be looked upon by the scientist as
experiments set up by nature. Among these experiments some are useful
to society, and one hears of virtue; others are destructive, and one
hears of vice and of crime.” And he adds, a little by way of flourish,
“These last are nevertheless the most significant, and we should lack
an essential datum for the science of mind if Nero, say, or such and
such a tyrant of the fifteenth century had not existed.” Or again he
has said, “To consider one’s destiny as a corollary of this living
geometry which is nature, and therefore as an inevitable consequence of
the eternal axiom whose indefinite development is prolonged through all
time and all space, this is the unique way to emancipation.”
* * * * *
To show that human conduct is so necessitated as to be without moral
aspects: “this is the unique way to emancipation.” It was just for
the master’s aid over the last rough steps of the path to this
emancipation that we left our Disciple crying, “De profundis.” Can
the aid be given? Can it not? This is the singularly philosophical
catastrophe of this singularly reflective novel.
For us the issue depends upon an analysis of what our philosopher would
regard as determinants of human conduct. That it is not meaningless to
seek explanations of human acts all admit, for all alike are engaged
in the search for them, and much that is of importance to daily life
depends upon one’s ability correctly to explain and so to predict
the conduct of one’s fellows. The only question is whether the laws
by which we explain and predict could conceivably be increased in
precision until they completely determined conduct. To judge this we
must consider of what nature these laws are, _i.e._, in the present
context, with what illustrations of such laws our author furnishes us.
We are familiar with the idea that the explanation of a fact consists
in pointing out its likeness to others. We are not surprised, then,
to find our young analyst, following the guide of a master who, we
have heard, regarded “our most exquisite sensibilities” as “the
development of very simple instincts,” looking upon his relations with
a singularly pure young woman as not without likeness to the battle of
life throughout the animal kingdom. “It is the law of the world,” he
reasons, “that all existence is a conquest carried on and maintained
by the stronger at the expense of the weaker. This is as true of the
moral universe as of the physical. There are souls of prey as there are
wolves, tiger-cats, and hawks,” and he kept repeating to himself, “I
am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious access of what the
mystics call _the pride of life_.
But if the animal instincts are the most widely related of those that
display themselves in human conduct, more special instincts must be
appealed to to account for what is special in the act. Well, in its
proper place we find that the family of Robert Greslou had its roots
in war-trodden Lorraine. Of no very remote peasant origin, son of a
conquered race, he catches himself at certain moments reacting with
instinctive hate toward an individual whom he hardly knows and who has
done him no personal injury, yet whose every aspect shows him to have
sprung from the conquerors, in whose most courteous gesture there lurks
a polished insolence of aristocracy.
When, then, a human pity for his prospective victim comes upon this
“soul of prey,” it is such a hate that neutralizes it. “Why,” he cries,
“in so many of my imaginings does Charlotte appear by the side of her
brother André? What secret fibre of hatred had this man by his mere
existence touched in my heart, that simply to imagine him with his
sister dried up the fountain of my pity and left nothing in me but the
will to win?”
In answer we are expected to recall the moment when Robert Greslou,
introduced into the family of the Marquis de Jussat as tutor to the
younger son, finds himself for the first time in the presence of the
Comte André, heir and dominating spirit of the house. “I felt then,”
our young analyst records, “in its full force, in the depths of that
instinct of life into which it is so hard for thought to descend, the
revelation of that sense of race which modern science attributes to all
nature, and which consequently must be found in man.... Why should not
this hostility be an heredity like the rest? The horse that has never
approached a lion trembles with fear when his stall is made up with
straw on which such a beast of prey has lain. Then fear is inherited,
and is not fear a form of hate? Why should not hate be inherited too?
And in a thousand cases envy is probably nothing but that--was nothing
more than that in my case, certainly,--the echo in us of hatreds long
ago acquired by those whose sons we are, and which continue in us the
battle of hearts begun hundreds of years ago.”
No less carefully does our author work out another group of
influences: those that fall within the experience of the individual.
Influences of family, of school, of books read, of friends, of
adventures of sex, of religious education, all culminating in the
forming of a character whose foundations have already been laid in its
heredities, in this case a type for which the French have invented
the expressive term, a _cérébral_. The rest one can readily imagine,
the delicate suggestions of daily life, the influences, slight in
themselves, that play upon the attuned character and to which it
resounds with acts of this kind or that, an instrument touched by the
fingers of Fate.
* * * * *
Such, then, is our author’s understanding of what it means so to
explain a human act that it shall appear to follow inevitably from
recognized laws of nature. If it do so follow, we ask again: Can it in
the end be regarded as either good or bad?
It is not to our author that we may turn for an answer. M. Bourget is
an artist, and owes his allegiance to the interests of the heart, not
to the curiosities of the intellect. For him it is sufficient to have
shown that to have lived out a Spinozistic philosophy would in extreme
cases lead to very ugly results. He is addressing himself, as he tells
us in his preface, to the youth of France, and it may not be without
interest to note the place he gives to the type of philosophy we have
just been considering among the influences dangerous to the young
France of his day.
“There are two types of young men,” he says, “that I see before me
at the present moment, which are before you too, as two forms of
temptation equally redoubtable and dangerous. The one is cynical and by
preference jovial. He has, since his twentieth year, discounted life,
and his religion is contained in the single word, _to enjoy_,--which
is translated by this other, _to succeed_. Whether he go into
politics or business, literature or art, sport or industry, whether
he be an officer, diplomat, or lawyer, he has only himself for god,
for beginning and for end. This young man is a monster, is he not?
For it is to be a monster, to have lived but twenty-five years and
to have by way of a soul a calculating machine at the service of a
pleasure-machine. Yet I fear him less for you than I do a certain other
type. This one has all the aristocratic traits of nervous organization,
all those of mentality. He is an intellectual and refined epicure,
as the first was a brutal and scientific epicure. This delicate
nihilist, how unpleasant he is to encounter, and how he abounds in
the land! At twenty-five years he has made the tour of all ideas. His
critical spirit, precociously awakened, has grasped the last results
of the most subtle philosophy of this age. Do not speak to him of
impiety or materialism. He knows that the word _matter_ has no very
precise sense. He is, on the other hand, too intelligent not to admit
that all religions may have been legitimate in their time, only he
has never believed and never will believe any one of them any more
than he will ever believe in anything in particular, if not in the
amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into an instrument
of elegant perversity. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, vice and
virtue appear to him objects of simple curiosity. The human soul is
for him a clever mechanism which it amuses him to take apart by way
of experiment. To him nothing is true, nothing is false; nothing is
moral, nothing is immoral. He is an egoist, subtle and refined, whose
one occupation lies in adorning his Self, in dressing it out with new
sensations. The religious life of humanity is for him only a pretext
for such sensations, as is the intellectual life, as is the life of
feeling. His corruption is vastly more profound than that of the
barbarian of pleasure, is vastly more complicated, and the pretty name
of dilettantism with which he covers it hides its cold ferocity, its
appalling hardness. Ah, we know him too well, this young man; we have
all just missed being such as he is, we whom the paradoxes of too
eloquent masters have too much charmed. We have all _been_ this man
for a day, for an hour, and if I have written this book, it is to show
you, you who are not yet like him, child of twenty whose soul is yet in
process of making, what base things such egoism may hide in its depths.”
For Bourget, then, to have justified this picture of the youthful
Spinozist, is enough. But for us, who for the moment have become
philosophers, who have given ourselves up to the curiosities of the
mind, it is not enough to have convinced ourselves that certain
teachings are ugly and unpleasant to contemplate; we must know whether
they are true or false. While much that is unlovely is also untrue,
who but the poet can feel sure in his heart that only the beautiful is
true? Well, then, if we were to face the issue that seems to be drawn
between that universal necessity which science hopes to establish
throughout the domain of nature, and that freedom which ethics regards
as indispensable to the existence of moral beings,--if we are to face
this issue squarely, on which side should we range ourselves?