_Different Opinions Criticised--Apology for Locke._
I must acknowledge, that when I examined the infallible Aristotle, the
evangelical doctor, and the divine Plato, I took all these epithets for
nicknames. In all the philosophers who have spoken of the human
soul, I have found only blind men, full of babble and temerity,
striving to persuade themselves that they have an eagle eye; and others,
curious and foolish, believing them on their word, and imagining that
they see something too.
[Illustration: John Locke.]
I shall not feign to rank Descartes and Malebranche with these teachers
of error. The former assures us that the soul of man is a substance,
whose essence is to think, which is always thinking, and which, in the
mother's womb, is occupied with fine metaphysical ideas and general
axioms, which it afterwards forgets.
As for Father Malebranche, he is quite persuaded that we see all in
God--and he has found partisans: for the most extravagant fables are
those which are the best received by the weak imaginations of men.
Various philosophers then had written the romance of the soul: at
length, a wise man modestly wrote its history. Of this history I am
about to give an abridgment, according to the conception I have formed
of it. I very well know that all the world will not agree with Locke's
ideas; it is not unlikely, that against Descartes and Malebranche, Locke
was right, but that against the Sorbonne he was wrong: I speak according
to the lights of philosophy, not according to the relations of the
faith.
It is not for me to think otherwise than humanly; theologians decide
divinely, which is quite another thing: reason and faith are of contrary
natures. In a word, here follows a short abstract of Locke, which I
would censure, if I were a theologian, but which I adopt for a moment,
simply as a hypothesis--a conjecture of philosophy. Humanly speaking,
the question is: What is the soul?
1. The word "soul" is one of those which everyone pronounces without
understanding it; we understand only those things of which we have an
idea; we have no idea of soul--spirit; therefore we do not understand
it.
2. We have then been pleased to give the name of soul to the faculty of
feeling and thinking, as we have given that of life to the faculty of
living, and that of will to the faculty of willing.
Reasoners have come and said: Man is composed of matter and spirit:
matter is extended and divisible; spirit is neither extended nor
divisible; therefore, say they, it is of another nature. This is a
joining together of beings which are not made for each other, and which
God unites in spite of their nature. We see little of the body, we see
nothing of the soul; it has no parts, therefore it is eternal; it has
ideas pure and spiritual, therefore it does not receive them from
matter; nor does it receive them from itself, therefore God gives them
to it, and it brings with it at its birth the ideas of God, infinity,
and all general ideas.
Still humanly speaking, I answer these gentlemen that they are very
knowing. They tell us, first, that there is a soul, and then what that
soul must be. They pronounce the word "matter," and then plainly decide
what it is. And I say to them: You have no knowledge either of spirit or
of matter. By spirit you can imagine only the faculty of thinking; by
matter you can understand only a certain assemblage of qualities,
colors, extents, and solidities, which it has pleased you to call
matter; and you have assigned limits to matter and to the soul, even
before you are sure of the existence of either the one or the other.
As for matter, you gravely teach that it has only extent and solidity;
and I tell you modestly, that it is capable of a thousand properties
about which neither you nor I know anything. You say that the soul is
indivisible, eternal; and here you assume that which is in question. You
are much like the regent of a college, who, having never in his life
seen a clock, should all at once have an English repeater put into his
hands. This man, a good peripatetic, is struck by the exactness with
which the hands mark the time, and still more astonished that a button,
pressed by the finger, should sound precisely the hour marked by the
hand. My philosopher will not fail to prove that there is in this
machine a soul which governs it and directs its springs. He learnedly
demonstrates his opinion by the simile of the angels who keep the
celestial spheres in motion; and in the class he forms fine theses,
maintained on the souls of watches. One of his scholars opens the watch,
and nothing is found but springs; yet the system of the soul of watches
is still maintained, and is considered as demonstrated. I am that
scholar, opening the watch called man; but instead of boldly defining
what we do not understand, I endeavor to examine by degrees what we wish
to know.
Let us take an infant at the moment of its birth, and follow, step by
step, the progress of its understanding. You do me the honor of
informing me that God took the trouble of creating a soul, to go and
take up its abode in this body when about six weeks old; that this soul,
on its arrival, is provided with metaphysical ideas--having consequently
a very clear knowledge of spirit, of abstract ideas, of infinity--being,
in short, a very knowing person. But unfortunately it quits the uterus
in the uttermost ignorance: for eighteen months it knows nothing but its
nurse's teat; and when at the age of twenty years an attempt is made to
bring back to this soul's recollection all the scientific ideas which it
had when it entered its body, it is often too dull of apprehension to
conceive any one of them. There are whole nations which have never had
so much as one of these ideas. What, in truth, were the souls of
Descartes and Malebranche thinking of, when they imagined such reveries?
Let us then follow the idea of the child, without stopping at the
imaginings of the philosophers.
The day that his mother was brought to bed of him and his soul, there
were born in the house a dog, a cat, and a canary bird. At the end of
eighteen months I make the dog an excellent hunter; in a year the
canary bird whistles an air; in six weeks the cat is master of its
profession; and the child, at the end of four years, does nothing. I, a
gross person, witnessing this prodigious difference, and never having
seen a child, think at first that the cat, the dog, and the canary are
very intelligent creatures, and that the infant is an automaton.
However, by little and little, I perceive that this child has ideas and
memory, that he has the same passions as these animals; and then I
acknowledge that he is, like them, a rational creature. He communicates
to me different ideas by some words which he has learned, in like manner
as my dog, by diversified cries, makes known to me exactly his different
wants. I perceive at the age of six or seven years the child combines in
his little brain almost as many ideas as my hound in his; and at length,
as he grows older, he acquires an infinite variety of knowledge. Then
what am I to think of him? Shall I believe that he is of a nature
altogether different? Undoubtedly not; for you see on one hand an idiot,
and on the other a Newton; yet you assert that they are of one and the
same nature--that there is no difference but that of greater and less.
The better to assure myself of the verisimilitude of my probable
opinion, I examine the dog and the child both waking and sleeping--I
have them each bled immediately; then their ideas seem to escape with
their blood. In this state I call them--they do not answer; and if I
draw from them a few more ounces, my two machines, which before had
ideas in great plenty and passions of every kind, have no longer any
feeling. I next examine my two animals while they sleep; I perceive that
the dog, after eating too much, has dreams; he hunts and cries after the
game; my youngster, in the same state, talks to his mistress and makes
love in his dreams. If both have eaten moderately, I observe that
neither of them dream; in short, I see that the faculties of feeling,
perceiving, and expressing their ideas unfold themselves gradually, and
also become weaker by degrees. I discover many more affinities between
them than between any man of strong mind and one absolutely imbecile.
What opinion then shall I entertain of their nature? That which every
people at first imagined, before Egyptian policy asserted the
spirituality, the immortality, of the soul. I shall even suspect that
Archimedes and a mole are but different varieties of the same
species--as an oak and a grain of mustard are formed by the same
principles, though the one is a large tree and the other the seed of a
small plant. I shall believe that God has given portions of intelligence
to portions of matter organized for thinking; I shall believe that
matter has sensations in proportion to the fineness of its senses, that
it is they which proportion them to the measure of our ideas; I shall
believe that the oyster in its shell has fewer sensations and senses,
because its soul being attached to its shell, five senses would not at
all be useful to it. There are many animals with only two senses; we
have five--which are very few. It is to be believed that in other
worlds there are other animals enjoying twenty or thirty senses, and
that other species, yet more perfect, have senses to infinity.
Such, it appears to me, is the most natural way of reasoning on the
matter--that is, of guessing and inspecting with certainty. A long time
elapsed before men were ingenious enough to imagine an unknown being,
which is ourselves, which does all in us, which is not altogether
ourselves, and which lives after us. Nor was so bold an idea adopted all
at once. At first this word "soul" signifies life, and was common to us
and the other animals; then our pride made us a soul apart, and caused
us to imagine a substantial form for other creatures. This human pride
asks: What then is that power of perceiving and feeling, which in man is
called soul, and in the brute instinct? I will satisfy this demand when
the natural philosophers shall have informed me what is sound, light,
space, body, time. I will say, in the spirit of the wise Locke:
Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of physical science fails
us. I observe the effects of nature; but I freely own that of first
principles I have no more conception than you have. All I do know is
that I ought not to attribute to several causes--especially to unknown
causes--that which I can attribute to a known cause; now I can attribute
to my body the faculty of thinking and feeling; therefore I ought not to
seek this faculty of thinking and feeling in another substance, called
soul or spirit, of which I cannot have the smallest idea. You exclaim
against this proposition. Do you then think it irreligious to dare to
say that the body can think? But what would you say, Locke would answer,
if you yourselves were found guilty of irreligion in thus daring to set
bounds to the power of God? What man upon earth can affirm, without
absurd impiety, that it is impossible for God to give to matter
sensation and thought? Weak and presumptuous that you are! you boldly
advance that matter does not think, because you do not conceive how
matter of any kind should think.
Ye great philosophers, who decide on the power of God, and say that God
can of a stone make an angel--do you not see that, according to
yourselves, God would in that case only give to a stone the power of
thinking? for if the matter of the stone did not remain, there would no
longer be a stone; there would be a stone annihilated and an angel
created. Whichever way you turn you are forced to acknowledge two
things--your ignorance and the boundless power of the Creator; your
ignorance, to which thinking matter is repugnant; and the Creator's
power, to which certes it is not impossible.
You, who know that matter does not perish, will dispute whether God has
the power to preserve in that matter the noblest quality with which He
has endowed it. Extent subsists perfectly without body, through Him,
since there are philosophers who believe in a void; accidents subsist
very well without substance with Christians who believe in
transubstantiation. God, you say, cannot do that which implies
contradiction. To be sure of this, it is necessary to know more of the
matter than you do know; it is all in vain; you will never know more
than this--that you are a body, and that you think. Many persons who
have learned at school to doubt of nothing, who take their syllogisms
for oracles and their superstitions for religion, consider Locke as
impious and dangerous. These superstitious people are in society what
cowards are in an army; they are possessed by and communicate panic
terror. We must have the compassion to dissipate their fears; they must
be made sensible that the opinions of philosophers will never do harm to
religion. We know for certain that light comes from the sun, and that
the planets revolve round that luminary; yet we do not read with any the
less edification in the Bible that light was made before the sun, and
that the sun stood still over the village of Gibeon. It is demonstrated
that the rainbow is necessarily formed by the rain; yet we do not the
least reverence the sacred text which says that God set His bow in the
clouds, after the Deluge, as a sign that there should never be another
inundation.
What though the mystery of the Trinity and that of the eucharist are
contradictory to known demonstrations? They are not the less venerated
by Catholic philosophers, who know that the things of reason and those
of faith are different in their nature. The notion of the antipodes was
condemned by the popes and the councils; yet the popes discovered the
antipodes and carried thither that very Christian religion, the
destruction of which had been thought to be sure, in case there could be
found a man who, as it was then expressed, should have, as relative to
our own position, his head downwards and his feet upwards, and who, as
the very unphilosophical St. Augustine says, should have fallen from
heaven.
And now, let me once repeat that, while I write with freedom, I warrant
no opinion--I am responsible for nothing. Perhaps there are, among these
dreams, some reasonings, and even some reveries, to which I should give
the preference; but there is not one that I would not unhesitatingly
sacrifice to religion and to my country.