one such as the authority of Scripture. For this very dogma,
formulated by tradition, is therefore human and contingent, and is open
to criticism like all the rest. With what then, or in the name of
what, shall dogma be criticised? Shall we, with Rationalism, take a
moral or philosophical axiom as the criterion? We should then violate
the autonomy of the religious consciousness; we should denaturalise
religion itself, by subjecting it to an external rule; and Dogmatics,
basing its fabric on an alien principle, would produce a hybrid
structure that would be rejected by believers and philosophers with
equal disdain.
The principle of criticism of Christian dogmas can only be the
principle of Christianity itself, which is anterior to all dogmas, and
which it is the aim of dogmas to manifest and to apply. Now the
principle of Christianity is not a theoretical doctrine: it is a
religious experience--the experience of Christ and His disciples
through the centuries. It is the Gospel of salvation by the faith of
the heart, the revelation of a moral relation, of a new relation, of a
filial relation, created and realised between the man who is sinful and
lost, and the Father who calls and pardons him. Such is the initial
germ from which the whole Christian development has sprung, and by
which consequently that development should and can be judged.
This generative principle of the life and of all the dogmas of the
Church being laid down, and the distinction established between the
ideal principle and its successive realisations, all of them
necessarily incomplete, the criticism of dogmas will be effected
automatically, without violence, and with fruit. It will be enough to
tell the story of the genesis and evolution of each of them. It will
then be seen what contingent and perishing elements have entered into
it in the course of history. Christianity is an organism whose soul is
immortal, but whose body is renewed unceasingly by the fact that its
materials are in constant movement, and that they are gathered from the
various environments through which it has to pass. The philosophical
notions which have served it as a temporary expression, and which are
doubly dead to-day, either because civilisation has advanced, or
because they were without vital connection with the initial Christian
experience, fall from the tree like withered leaves or lifeless
branches. As to the others, in which the sap still rises from the
mother root, they will be seen to be transformed, to grow and flower
from year to year under the same salubrious breath of criticism. Our
discipline, religiously faithful to the principle of Christian piety,
may often find itself in conflict with the administrative powers of the
Church, but never really with the Church itself.
3. _The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy_
If less burning, the problem of the relations of dogmatics to
philosophy is perhaps more difficult to solve than the problem just
discussed. It has given rise to quite as many controversies. The
danger is twofold. On the one hand, there is the pretension of
scholasticism, the attempt to absorb philosophy in theology and make it
subservient. It is still the pretension of a certain simple Protestant
orthodoxy, for which there is no philosophy outside the Christian
faith. At the other extreme is the attempt of rationalism to include
the Christian religion in general ethics and philosophy. In the first
case it is dogmatics which absorbs philosophy; in the second it is
philosophy which absorbs dogmatics. But, in both cases, the
specifically religious phenomena are lost sight of, the original
character of Christian piety is misconceived, and theology, no longer
having any special domain, succumbs and vanishes. It is the merit of
the Reformation of Luther, in the sixteenth, and of the thought of
Schleiermacher and Vinet in the nineteenth century, to have brought out
and rendered manifest, among all other psychological phenomena, the
character _sui generis_ of Christian faith and life, and thus to have
assigned to theology an object of study, eminent no doubt, but very
special and very circumscribed. A task was thus marked out for
theology widely different from that of philosophy--a task which
consists, not in explaining everything in heaven and earth, but, more
modestly and usefully, in giving an account of the religious experience
of the Christian Church. Saved at once from scholasticism and
rationalism, dogmatic theology may therefore build itself up in its own
domain by the side of the other sciences without menacing or fearing
any of them.
Its relations to philosophy will become clear if we call to mind a very
simple distinction. Philosophy to-day comprises two parts very
different in nature: a study of the thinking subject, or, as it is
sometimes called, a critique of reason, or a theory of knowledge; in
the second place, a doctrine on the essence and the necessary relations
of beings, a metaphysic, or a theory of the universe.
It is easy to see that all the positive sciences are differently
related to these two parts of philosophy. None of them, for instance,
can dispense with the first, with the criticism of our faculty of
knowing and of our means of reasoning, under penalty of mistaking the
worth of its own hypotheses, and even the regularity of its processes.
It is clear that a physicist cannot dispense with correct syllogisms or
with vigilance against illusions of the senses and other errors of
method. But, on the other hand, no savant would accept the yoke of any
metaphysic whatever which should come to him _a priori_ to dictate to
him its conclusions. Upon indications of this nature he desires to
form hypotheses and make new experiments; but, as a savant, he will
never pronounce before that supreme and decisive consultation of facts.
It is exactly the same with the relations of dogmatics to philosophy.
It will have recourse to it for all that regards the theory of
knowledge in general and the theory of religious knowledge in
particular. Like every other science it needs to ascertain the scope
of its instrument in order that it may be under no illusion as to the
worth of the work it accomplishes. But also, like every other science,
it has the right and the duty to challenge and neglect all general
metaphysic which, flowing from another principle than that of the
Christian religion, would dictate to it articles of faith or rules of
morality.
Let it not be said that every theory of knowledge soon begets a
metaphysic in its own image. We know theories which deny the very
possibility of metaphysics, and it is a question whether a truly
Christian dogmatic accommodates itself to it better than any other
theory. It may be maintained in fact that the act of faith which is
the expression of the conservating energy of the ego and the principle
of all religion is accomplished all the more freely when there is no
knowledge, properly speaking, there to hinder it. A common prejudice
requires that we should have metaphysics as a support to religion. It
is on religion, on the contrary, that metaphysics and ethics rest. Man
did not become religious when he heard that there were gods; he only
had the idea of God and believed in Him because he was religious.
Mystery was the natural cradle of piety. Faith is much less an
acquisition of knowledge than a means of salvation and a source of
strength and life. It is one thing to speculate on the universal
problem; it is another to place one's self by the heart in a living
relation of trust, of fear, or of love to the mysterious Being on whom
all other beings depend. Religion may possibly be under the necessity
of ending in a metaphysic, but a metaphysic does not necessarily end in
religion, for there are some kinds of metaphysic which either exclude
religion or render it impossible.
A theory of religion, dogmatics can have no other starting point than
religious phenomena themselves. From this concrete and experimental
principle, from this state of soul produced by the immediate feeling of
a necessary relation to God, the entire system should spring and
develop. What is not in religious experience should find no place in
religious science, and should be banished from it.
It would only be to its detriment, then, that the science of dogmas
should throw away its liberty by espousing beforehand metaphysical
theses or the final conclusions of any philosophy whatsoever. These
theses, springing from another source than religion, have no right, in
that religion, to become articles of faith. Rational truths not born
of religious feeling would be in dogmatics so many dead weights and
heterogeneous elements, which would lead to the greatest incoherence.
To build up a professedly revealed theology on a professedly natural
one is to construct a system without either unity or profound
connection. Such a dualism of principles is as intolerable to science
as to piety. Instead of dogmatics subordinating itself to metaphysics,
metaphysics ought to include dogmatics as well as the results of all
the other sciences.
It is altogether different with the criticism of our means of knowing.
In every order of science it is mere levity of mind to commence or to
conclude researches a little general without having first determined
the precise conditions of real knowledge. The absence of a
philosophical critique of this nature explains why savants, so rigorous
in their special studies, show a philosophical _naivety_ so great in
the conclusions that they draw from them, and so readily crown their
discoveries by a pseudo-metaphysic that they impose upon the multitude
with all the authority and prestige of science. More than any others,
theologians are guilty of this abuse when they wish to make their
science the sum of universal knowledge. They would be more soundly
religious were they more modest and more reserved. An excellent means
of putting ourselves on our guard against this illusion and its
deplorable consequences will be to institute, without further delay, a
rigorous criticism of religious knowledge. This task, I believe, has
never been seriously attempted in France. It is, however, as
indispensable to the right conduct of the mind as it is fitted
radically to cure us of our dogmatic pride and to inspire us with
tolerance and humility. This will be the object of the following
chapter.
CHAPTER IV
CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
He who says consciousness says science, or at least, the beginning of
science. Consciousness implies a representation. In other words, no
modification of the ego becomes conscious except by awakening in the
mind a representative image of the object that has produced it and of
the relation of that object to the ego. All our sensations and all our
feelings are accompanied by images. The religious sentiment does not
attain to the light of consciousness in any other way. It is because
it is a state or conscious movement of the soul that it becomes, it
also, a principle of knowledge.
No kind of mental life begins with clear and abstract ideas. An idea
is derived from an image, and, in order to produce the image, an
external or an internal impression is necessary. It is true that the
idea or the image has, in its turn, the mysterious power of reproducing
and renewing the sensation or the feeling from which it sprang. On
this is based the art of teaching and the power of tradition. But this
must not be allowed to produce in us the illusion that originally the
idea preceded the sensation. The development of the mental life of
children is proof of the contrary. We only know that by which we or
our kind have been in some degree affected. Our ideas are simply the
algebraic notation of our impressions and movements. That which is
outside our life is outside our view. Without the external sensations
which represent the action of the world on the ego, we should have no
knowledge of the world. Without the subjective reaction of the ego
against that action of the world, a reaction which manifests itself in
the moral, aesthetic, and religious life of the soul, we should have no
moral or religious idea, no notion of the good or the beautiful. All
our metaphysical ideas come from that source.
It remains, of course, to inquire what is the worth of ideas of this
order. It is the particularly complex and delicate question that we
here approach. There is no serious philosophy to-day that does not
start with a theory of knowledge. Religious knowledge cannot escape by
any special privilege. The criticism of it is all the more necessary,
because illusion, in this matter, is so easy, and because it clothes
itself in a sacred character. The theologian who undertakes the
scientific treatment of dogmas without first measuring the scope of the
instrument he employs, and estimating the worth of the materials he
uses, knows not what he is doing.
1. _Obsolete Theories of Knowledge_
Formerly three explanations of our knowledge prevailed in philosophy:
the hypothesis of a primitive revelation; the idealist theory; and the
sensualist theory.
The first was revived three quarters of a century ago by de Bonald and
Joseph de Maistre. It no longer needs to be refuted. According to
this hypothesis, our ideas came to us, not from within, from the
naturally productive force of the mind, but from without, by way of
supernatural communication. This communication from God consisted at
the outset in the gift to man of a perfect language. The exact word
brought with it the right idea. "Man," said de Bonald, "thought his
speech before speaking his thought." If errors have crept in and
reigned among men, it is because they were not able to preserve without
corruption the sacred deposit of that primitive language and
philosophy. Is it necessary to show how thoroughly this theory is
contradicted by psychology and history? It is said that in certain
countries there still exists a Botany, according to which the Great
Spirit, having created the trees of the forest, comes in the night each
Spring to stick the leaves and blossoms on the branches. The immediate
communication of right ideas and supernatural virtues to man in his
infancy implies a contradiction; it forces us to imagine in him
thoughts prior to the action of his intellect and virtues previous to
the action of his will. Lastly, it is to misconceive the nature of the
mind to make of it something passive and inert. The mind is the
thinking and willing force--that is to say, a force productive of
thoughts and volitions. If it is not this, it is nothing. We must
affirm, no doubt, that God creates this force and directs its
evolution, but it is a contradiction to say at once that He creates it
and that it is unproductive. It cannot exist without being productive.
It is of its very essence to produce. Mind is only mind in so far as
it is a force that produces thought and volition.
The aim of this hypothesis, moreover, was to found the divine authority
of an infallible tradition by making it go back to the earliest times.
These revealed ideas, by the very fact that they are the ideas of God,
have an absolute and eternal value. Man finds them guaranteed in the
religious caste, to which the deposit has been confided, and which has
preserved them intact. Thus arose the idea of an infallible authority.
So they say. But the idea of dogmatic authority never appears in early
times; it is of very late date; it is elaborated very slowly, according
to a psychological law that we have already discovered. Everywhere,
and in the traditions of all religions and Churches, it appears after
all other doctrines as the keystone which closes and binds together the
arch. It is an ultimate dogma logically derived from other dogmas, and
afterwards used as a warrant for them. Such was the dogma of Papal
Infallibility promulgated at the Vatican Council of 1870; such, in
Protestantism, was the dogma of Biblical infallibility, completed by
the theologians of the seventeenth century. To base the value of
religious notions on a supernatural authority, with a view to rendering
them indisputable, is a vicious circle; the authority, it is evident,
is the product of these notions themselves. All systems of authority
end by shutting themselves up in this circle and perishing in it.
The idealist theory of the origin of ideas is but the philosophical
form of the preceding one. It also is an endeavour to trace back our
general ideas to the divine understanding as their primary source.
Pure ideas, type-ideas, according to Plato, constitute the intelligible
Cosmos of which material phenomena are but the unreal and ephemeral
shadows. Clearly to conceive these divine ideas is to reach the
transcendent reality of things--it is to possess true knowledge. From
Platonism to the realism of scholasticism, from this to the geometry of
Spinoza and the dialectic of Hegel, the form of the theory has varied
constantly; the substance of it has remained the same. Hegel always
said: "The rational is the real," and, for him, as for Plato, absolute
knowledge resolved itself into perfect logic.
Psychology has long since dispelled the scientific illusion of
idealism. We do not wish to recall the pitiful failure of all the
attempts formerly made, and even in our own times, to deduce _a priori_
the laws of the physical world. Everywhere, in this domain, the method
of observation has superseded the deductive method. The reason of it
is simple. An idea, however lofty, can only give out what it contains,
_i.e._ other ideas. We know very well that our ideas are in our mind,
but they are only in it in the state of ideas. How do we know that the
objects which they represent exist outside ourselves? Only by logic
can we pass from the idea of a thing to the external reality of that
thing. Experience is necessary. Without it our ideas are empty forms.
One may conjure with them for ever without ever reaching anything
objective. They are shells without kernels. Pure idealism, so far
from furnishing a solid theory of knowledge, ends in scepticism, _i.e._
in the negation of knowledge.
The excesses and failures of idealist theories of knowledge have always
given rise in history to the opposite theory of sensualist nominalism,
according to which our ideas are simply transformed sensations.
Unhappily, sensualism, in laying down this axiom, never explained the
nature and still less the cause of that marvellous transformation.
"There is nothing in the understanding," said Locke, "that was not
previously in the senses." To which Leibniz rightly replied: "Except
the understanding itself;" that is to say, the force which from
sensation draws knowledge. By suppressing this ideal principle, you
remove from science all element of necessity--that is to say, all
general worth. With Hume, the sensualist theory, so far from giving an
account of knowledge, ended in pure phenomenalism, _i.e._ once more, in
scepticism. It is, in fact, with isolated sensation as with pure idea;
you may press it as much as you will, you will never get out of it
anything but what it contains--that is to say, contingencies without
any connection between each other. Materialism is still more
embarrassed to furnish any theory whatever of knowledge, for it does
not even succeed in explaining sensation. Between a mechanical
movement and a phenomenon of consciousness there is an impassable
abyss. One of the most evident marks of the inferiority of the
philosophy of French positivism is that it has not even approached this
problem of knowledge, and that it has been able to constitute itself
without any other than the popular psychology.
2. _The Kantian Theory of Knowledge_
Thinkers may to-day be divided into two classes: those who date from
before Kant, and those who have received the initiation and, so to
speak, the philosophical baptism of his critique. These two classes of
minds will always have much ado to understand each other. The first
are dogmatists or Pyrrhonists. The second no longer comprehend either
dogmatism or Pyrrhonism. For them, the point of view has been
displaced. Thanks to Kant, we judge both our knowledge and our faculty
of knowing; we give an account to ourselves of the conditions in which
it performs its functions, of the forms which determine it, and of the
limits that it cannot pass. Kant compared, without exaggeration, the
revolution which he effected in philosophy to that which the discovery
of Copernicus effected in the system of the world. In philosophy also
the sun has ceased to move round the earth, and the ancient illusion
has been vanquished and dispersed. The idea and the reality no longer
coincide; they are disjoined. The intelligible no doubt is real; but
it is not certain that all the real is intelligible. Reality appears
to us now as surpassing not only our knowledge, but our means of
knowing. The religious notion of mystery has entered into
consciousness. Man has attained to intellectual humility. Like his
body, his mind is a mean between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little, between nothing and everything. The deductive
philosophy of the unity and necessary and continuous unfolding of an
eternal substance, gives place to the philosophy of observation, which
will be found to be that of the antinomies whose permanent conflict
produces the ascensional progress of the world and of life.
To make Kantism end in scepticism shows a lack of intelligence. His
system enables us, on the contrary, to form the _scientific_ theory of
science. The truth is to be found neither in dogmatism nor in
Pyrrhonism, both of which Pascal combated with equal vigour. In modern
science there is a certitude invincible to the subtlest Pyrrhonism; but
there is also in it a sense of the limits of our knowing faculty and of
the relative character of our most solid constructions which forbids
man ever to be puffed up to the point of believing himself to be God.
To be in this mean is to be in the truth. The same critique which
establishes the validity of human knowledge lays down the limits beyond
which it cannot go. We have come to know ourselves better, and that is
the mark of all true progress in philosophy. _Know thyself_ is always
its first rule and its final fruit.
The Kantian theory of knowledge, while satisfying the mind, at the same
time sets forth the essential antinomies whose normal play constitutes
the very life of the ego and explains its multiple manifestations.
There are two elements in all knowledge: an _a posteriori_ element
which comes from experience, and an _a priori_ element which comes from
the thinking subject. The first is the _matter_ of knowledge; the
second is the _form_. Separate, these two elements are unproductive.
With the first alone we have but a reality not known; with the second
alone we have but a knowing without reality. Their union renders them
mutually fruitful by organising the data of experience into the
necessary forms of thought. The principle of causation, _e.g._, is not
in things; it is in the mind, and it is the mind which spontaneously
connects all phenomena. Science, at bottom, consists in nothing but
the causal connection of things. Where the chain breaks, positive
knowledge ends. This clear sense of ignorance on points on which we
really are ignorant is still a part of science and one of its principal
forces, for it proves that it knows itself very well, and also knows
the conditions apart from which it no longer exists. But, whether
triumphant or held in check, positive science can neither renounce its
task and method nor modify their nature. It can only seek to complete,
or rather to lengthen, the chain of phenomena. The success of this
ever-identical effort, an effort always in the same direction, is what
is called its conquests and its progress. It follows that the
irresistible tendency of science will be to extend over the whole of
the phenomena the ever-tighter network of an invincible necessity.
Determinism is its last word.
On the other hand, the ego which knows is an acting ego. Its thought
itself, properly speaking, and this display of science, are only one of
the forms of its inner activity. It wills, and it must will. If the
world acts on it by sensation, it acts incessantly on the world by its
volitions. And let it not be said that the will simply represents a
mechanical reaction of the ego, exactly equivalent to the action of the
external world upon it,--that it is a simple transformation of
energy,--for this is not true. Without here raising the question of
liberty, it is certain that I do not give back in will simply what I
have received under the form of sensation. I deliberate on the motives
which urge me to act; I choose between them; I feel myself under
obligation; I feel that I should will the good. It is impossible to
conceive of moral action without the idea of end. I conceive it,
therefore, under a different form from that of mechanical action.
Responsibility and obligation are not less the necessary forms of will
than logical necessity is the necessary form of thought. But soon
there arises in man the most tragical of conflicts. Scientific
determinism renders moral activity unintelligible, and moral activity
comes into collision with the determinism of science. If mechanical
determinism be absolutely true, my will is null; I am simply an
automaton. If my responsibility is real, if my personal energy is not
an illusion, there is in the world something besides matter, and, for
man, there are other than mechanical laws. Thus divided in myself, I
ought not to practise what I know, and I cannot do what I ought. I
remain floating between a science which is not moral and a morality
that I feel to be unscientific. My intellect destroys my will. As the
one develops the other dies. The better I know the laws of the world
the less reason I have for living and acting. My morality, at each
act, gives the lie to my science, and my science, at each affirmation,
refutes my morality. Such is the deep malady, the spiritual misery, of
the best of our contemporaries. They feel that, with them, vital
energy is in inverse proportion to the extent and penetration of
thought. It is then that they declare that pessimism, a radical
pessimism, is the truth; that existence, will, desire, are the chief
evils, and that the supreme effort of science should be to cure us of
them by delivering us from all our illusions; after which, in its turn,
it will be extinguished itself, like a flame that has consumed the food
on which it fed.
Still, the conscious subject is one. You cannot proclaim it vain
without at the same time proclaiming the vanity of its ideas as well as
of its efforts. The ruin of morality draws after it the ruin of
science. Moreover, the conflict of which we speak is different from a
theoretical contradiction whose solution may be indefinitely postponed.
The conflict is practical; it is of the vital not of the intellectual
order. It is an internal dissolution of the being itself, a struggle
between its elementary faculties, in which the mind is weakened,
droops, and dies.
The solution, therefore, if there be one, can only be a practical one,
a solution springing from the will. What is needed is to give the mind
confidence in itself. It is necessary to increase the energy of its
inner life in order that it may find the strength to believe and to
affirm in face of the universe the sovereignty of spirit. This is the
same as saying that the solution of the conflict is religion; not an
external religion, doubtless, in whose hands the thought and will of
man should abdicate--that would in no wise re-establish their inner and
living harmony--but an inward religion, an activity of spirit which
grasps in itself the supremacy of the universal spirit, and by an act
of intimate confidence, an instinctive impulse of the being ready to
perish, affirms to itself its own dignity, and makes to spring up out
of its own substance the irresistible religion of spirit. Thus the
conflict of the theoretic reason and the practical reason eternally
engenders religion in the heart of man. Let us show more clearly still
this necessary genesis of religion.
In observing, in reasoning, in generalising, I arrive at a certain
knowledge of that which surrounds me; this knowledge of external
objects forms within me the contents of what I call my knowledge of the
world. On the other hand, in acting, in living, in exercising my will,
is formed what I call my knowledge of myself. Consciousness of self,
and consciousness of the world, condition and determine each other, and
cannot exist without each other. But, at the same time, they enter
into mortal conflict. The ego desires to master the world, and the
world, in the end, devours the ego. Thought triumphs over Nature and
contemns it; Nature takes its revenge and swallows up thought in its
abyss. The consciousness of self wishes to bring over to itself the
knowledge of the world; and this absorbs and devours the consciousness
of self. The synthesis and reconciliation can only be found in the
consciousness of something superior to self and the world on which both
of them absolutely depend. This synthetic and pacificatory
consciousness is the consciousness of universal and sovereign Being; it
is the sense of the presence of God. To escape from his distress, man
has never had any but this means of salvation. The savage has recourse
to it, according to his degree of intellectual life, when, under terror
of the phenomena of Nature, and of ever-threatening death, he calls to
his aid the obscure power of his gods. The philosopher, nourished on
speculation, and arrived at the dualistic and divided consciousness of
the disciples of Kant, obeys the same instinctive impulse and the same
vital necessity when he seeks in the notion of God the conciliation of
the conflict which he feels between the ego and the world, between pure
reason and the practical reason. He needs a universal Being on whom he
feels himself to depend, and on whom he may equally make to depend the
whole universe. In uniting himself to Him, he affirms and confirms his
own life; he feels God to be active and present, in his thought under
the form of logical law, in his will under the form of moral law. He
is saved by faith in the interior God, in whom is realised the unity of
his being. It is therefore true to say that the human mind cannot
believe in itself without believing in God, and that, on the other
hand, it cannot believe in God without finding Him within itself.
That is a _salto mortale_, some superficial spirits will say,
astonished at an apparent deduction which thus makes the religious
activity of the ego spring from the depths of its own distress and
despair. To which we respond: it is, on the contrary, a _salto
vitale_, the instinctive and at the same time reflective act which
moves the mind to affirm to itself the absolute value of spirit.
Considered at this first psychological moment of its birth, the
religious faith of spirit in itself and in its sovereignty is only the
higher form, and, as it were, the prolongation of the instinct of
conservation which reigns in all Nature. The mind, crushed beneath the
weight of things, stands up and triumphs in the feeling of the eternal
dignity of spirit.
Inward religion, sacred instinct of life, divine, immortal force which
necessarily appears at the first movement of spirit, how they
misunderstand thee who only see in thee the slavery of man! On the
contrary, it is thou alone that breakest all the chains that Nature
binds on him, that savest him from death and from extinction, and that
openest out to his beneficent activity an infinite career by
associating him with the work of God: it is thou that renderest his
spontaneity creative, that renewest his forces, and that, plunging him
into the fountain whence he issued, maintainest in him an eternal youth!
This issue to the conflict of our faculties is exclusively of the
practical order; it is an act of trust, not a demonstration; an
affirmation which presupposes, not scientific proofs, but an act of
moral energy. This act must be performed, or we must die. There is no
constraint except the desire to live, but this is irresistible, if not
for each individual in particular, at least for mankind in general.
The individual may commit suicide; humanity desires to live, and its
life is a perpetual act of faith.
Nevertheless, this practical solution implies the possibility and the
hope of a theoretical one; and this in two ways: in the first place,
psychologically, because the ego of pure reason is also that of the
practical reason and feels itself to be one and the same knowing and
acting subject; then, speculatively, because in believing in the
sovereignty of spirit in ourselves and in the world we affirm that man
and the world have in spirit the principle and the aim of their being.
In God present in us, are reconciled, at least in hope, the ego and the
world. This religious faith of spirit in itself permits us to
anticipate the future solution, and to affirm that at the summit of
their complete development, and in their entire perfection, science and
the moral life will rejoin and penetrate each other. Mathematicians
tell us that two parallel lines meet in infinity. So in God are
reconciled the pure reason and the practical reason, which here seem to
us to develop themselves on parallel lines without ever being able to
meet and to unite. Let us never forget that we spring out of
nothingness, or, if you will, out of unconsciousness, and that we
slowly emerge into the light of consciousness. Man is in course of
being made spirit. If it be well considered, it will be seen that this
irreducible antithesis that fills us with despair is the very condition
of our spiritual development. The mind only disengages itself from the
bonds of its mother, Nature, by an incessant struggle. Struggle means
opposition and victory. Experience demonstrates that nothing
spiritualises, deepens, or purifies morality more than the
contradictions of science; and finally, that nothing helps science more
than a high and disinterested morality. These two sisters, enemies in
appearance, are twins, and they are seen to grow and triumph together
by the exercise they give to each other through their constant
contradictions.
* * * * *
3. _The Two Orders of Knowledge_
... The ego can only be conscious of itself and of its modifications.
That which does not touch it in any way remains unknown. Now, the
modifications of the ego may be reduced to two groups. The one comes
to it from without, representing the action of things upon it; these
are sensations. The other springs up within, representing the action
of the ego on things, its spontaneous energy, its volitions, and its
acts. Thence come the two constituent elements of every consciousness,
the distinction between object and subject, the ego and the non-ego,
thought and the object of thought. We call _objective_ every idea or
quality that it is possible to refer to the object alone, independently
of the action or disposition of the subject. We call _subjective_ all
knowledge implying identity of subject and object, all discipline
bearing on the rules of the spontaneous activity of the ego, since
without that activity the rules which should direct it would not exist.
In the first case we are conscious of a distinction and even of a
radical opposition between the object and the subject of knowledge; in
the second, we are conscious of their fundamental identity in this
sense, that the thinking and willing subject presents itself to itself
as an object of thought and study. In order that the two orders of
knowledge, engendered by this duality of origin, may be brought into
logical unity, it is necessary either that the subject should enter
into the object, that the ego should be absorbed by the non-ego, so
that the laws of the non-ego should become the laws of the ego--and
that would be materialism; or that the object should enter into the
subject so that the laws of the subject should become the law of
things--and that would be idealism. Outside these two systems, equally
violent and absolute, the two orders of knowledge are irreducible,
because in us the consciousness of the ego and the consciousness of the
world are at present in conflict. Morality is neither reconciled to
science, nor science to morality. In their _rapprochement_,
progressive to infinity, a hiatus always subsists.
One would be greatly deceived if he reduced this difference to the
ordinary opposition between the physical and the spiritual, between
external and internal phenomena. Sensation, the foundation and the
starting point of the objective order of knowledge, is just as internal
as volition. On the other hand, man is a part of what we call Nature;
and, as such, he is the theatre of a crowd of internal and external
phenomena which, so far as that is possible, should be observed,
described, explained, by the principle of causality, like all the other
phenomena of the physical order. For example, the mechanism of memory
and that of logic, the correlation between mental activities and the
physiological modifications of the cerebro-spinal system, the laws of
association of ideas, the stable forms of the human understanding, all
that psychology that is now called "scientific psychology," rightfully
enters into the domain of the sciences of Nature. It is a province
that may be explored like all the others. The psychological
observations made in it are objective not less than those of
physiology, for the reason that the phenomena that are observed, while
occurring in the ego, are nevertheless produced in it without the
voluntary intervention of the ego, and even without its express
consent. Moreover, they do not imply or provoke on the part of the ego
any moral judgment properly so called.
On the other hand, take the sciences of Nature which deal with the
objects most widely removed from man, with astronomy or geology,
_e.g._; no longer consider the bare external results; consider rather
that spiritual force which we call thought, and which has the virtue of
producing these sciences; what are they but the external revelation of
the creative and organising energy of the thinking subject, the
revelation of spirit to spirit? The work, seen from this subjective
side, serves simply to set forth the worth of the worker. You speak
then of the ordinary savant or of the intellectual genius, of the good
or bad scientific workman. The philosophy of science becomes a
necessarily subjective discipline. "Science," in fact, is simply an
abstraction. In the reality there are only minds more or less
ignorant, conscious, at each step, of their strength and of their
impotence, of their defeats and victories,--minds condemned to a
perpetual effort to struggle out of the night from which they slowly
mount. When you think of this most disinterested side of the
scientific life you ask yourself what is the basis, in the last resort,
of this confidence of mind in itself--the foundation of all the rest.
You see clearly that this activity of pure intellect demands, like all
other human activity, attention, forgetfulness of self, a heroism, in
short, going to the point of contempt of common enjoyments, and of the
sacrifice of life itself. You have then left the domain of the
sciences of Nature and have entered the realms of spirit, and there
rise around you the problems which form the object of the moral
disciplines.
Such is the intimate complexity of the two orders of knowledge that a
persevering reflection discovers them to be everywhere mingled, and it
is with difficulty that they are disentangled. All knowledge is an
aggregate (_ensemble_) of judgments; but the judgments which constitute
physical knowledge and those that constitute moral science are not of
the same nature. The first are judgments of _existence_, bearing
solely on the causality, the succession, the distribution of phenomena,
_i.e._ on the relations of objects to each other, apart from the
subject. The basis on which they rest is sensation, and, as sensation
has for necessary forms time and space, time and space will also be the
forms and limits of these judgments. Forming homogeneous quantities,
time and space give the notion of figure and of number, so that
mathematics is the foundation and the necessary framework of all the
physical sciences. They rise above this abstract science of the forms
of sensibility in the order of their complexity, and form a hierarchy
from rational mechanics to sociology, of which Comte and so many others
vainly endeavour to make a simple social mechanics. The destiny of
this universal objective science is to progress for ever without ever
being completed; for it is of the same nature as number--that is to
say, essentially indefinite and imperfect. It not only finds an
inexhaustible subject of study in the external world; it encounters a
mystery impenetrable to its methods and analyses in the very subject
that creates it, and which, in creating it, remains outside the
mechanism it sets in motion.
In fact, when the thinking subject considers itself, or considers
things in relation to itself, it brings to bear upon itself and them a
second series of judgments of an altogether different character. It
estimates them and it estimates itself according to a _norm_ which is
in itself. It declares them to be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich
or poor in life, harmonious or discordant. In other words, it is no
longer the idea of number--it is the category of _the good_ which
becomes the necessary form of these new judgments, which, for this
reason, are called judgments of _estimation_ or of dignity, and it is
clear that between these two kinds of judgments there is no common
measure. They can no more encounter each other than two balls rolled
on different planes.
Will it be said that the judgments founded on the concept of _the good_
are insignificant and worthless because neither man nor the good of man
can be the measure of things? If this remark is useful for abating
human pride and preventing childish illusions, it does not efface the
primordial distinction between good and evil inherent to the human
mind, nor would one wish to deduce from it the vanity of all morality,
and the equal worth of all the manifestations of life. The proof,
moreover, that the rule of _the good_ is above man is that it judges
and condemns him pitilessly; it is that consciousness, independently of
the painful or agreeable sensations that it receives from things,
establishes between them a fitness (_convenance_), a hierarchy, and
constitutes the harmonious unity of the universe itself in the supreme
idea of the sovereign good. If the legitimacy of the confidence which
the conscience has in its rule is to be contested, I do not see why we
should not contest that of the confidence of pure thought in itself.
Then everything crumbles to pieces, both science and conscience, in the
same abyss.
In reality, the good, the beautiful, the relations of fitness and of
harmony, are so many principles of knowledge, which progress, like
physical knowledge, by the culture of the mind. The form of the moral
judgments is universal, and identical in every man; it is this form
alone which constitutes man as a moral being; but the contents of this
form vary unceasingly in history, according to times and places.
Everywhere and always man has sought the good, but he has not always
placed it in the same things; he has formed different ideas of it, and
these ideas have become more and more noble and pure in proportion as
his life itself has been ennobled and purified. That is why there is a
history of morality, of religion, of aesthetics, as there is a history
of the natural sciences, although progress in these two classes has
been of an opposite nature and accomplished according to different
laws. However this may be, we may conclude that if mathematics, by the
concept of number, the abstract form of sensation, is the mould and
framework of the sciences of Nature, ethics, by _the categorical
imperative_, the abstract form of the activity of spirit, is the
foundation of the moral sciences, which are as diverse as the various
activities of the ego, each having special rules and criteria, no
doubt, but always falling under the common form of obligation.
Distinct and often in conflict, these two orders of knowledge are none
the less _solidaire_; they are always developed by their action the one
upon the other, and tend to a higher unity, the need for which gives
rise to attempts, renewed from age to age, at a metaphysical synthesis.
If you take the disciplines as taught in the schools to-day, you will
find that they are almost all mixed sciences such as history, social
economy, politics, philosophy, etc. So soon as the savant rises above
the simple description of phenomena, and wishes to organise his cosmos
by formulating the unity and harmony of it, he necessarily borrows this
principle of organisation and of harmony from the experience of his
subjective life. On the contrary, religion, art, morality, can only be
realised in the conditions prescribed to them by science properly so
called, and the last problem always propounded to human thought at each
stage of its development is the conciliation of the _moral idea_
acquired by the exercise of the will, and the _scientific idea_
furnished by its experience of the world.
There is no question, then, of separating the two orders of knowledge,
but of referring each of them to its true source, and preventing a
confusion which, mixing everything up, renders everything uncertain.
It is impossible in good psychology to trace to one centre the
divergent manifestations of our spiritual life, and to drive the moral
into the physical or the physical into the moral. Our spiritual life
is like an ellipse with two centres of light: on the one side, the
centre of _receptive life_, where all the sensations received are
elaborated into phenomenal knowledge; on the other, the centre of
_active life_, at which are concentrated all the revelations of the
mind's own inner energy. The line of the ellipse described by the
relation and the distance of these two centres is the approximate but
never perfect synthesis of the two kinds of data which thus arrive in
consciousness. He who does not distinguish these two centres, and
transforms the ellipse into a circumference with equal rays and an
unique centre, necessarily remains in chaos and old night.
From these general considerations is naturally deduced the specific
character of religious knowledge, its inward nature and its range.
4. _The Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge_
The first contrast that we have seen to arise between the knowledge of
Nature and religious knowledge is that the first is _objective_, and
that the second can never pass out of _subjectivity_. This does not
mean that the second is less certain, but that it is of another order,
and is produced in another way and with other characteristics.
In one sense, the knowledge of Nature is subjective, for it depends on
our mental constitution, and on the laws of our knowing faculty. But
religious and moral knowledge is subjective in a different manner and
for a deeper reason. The object of scientific knowledge is always
outside the ego, and it is in knowing it as an object outside the ego
that the objectivity of that knowledge consists. But the object of
religious or moral knowledge--God, the Good, the Beautiful--these are
not phenomena that may be grasped outside the ego and independently of
it. God only reveals Himself in and by piety; the Good, in the
consciousness of the good man; the Beautiful, in the creative activity
of the artist. This is only saying that the object of these kinds of
knowledge is immanent in the subject himself, and only reveals itself
by the personal activity of that subject. Absolutely eliminate the
religious and moral subject, or rather take from him all personal
activity, and you suppress, for him, the object of morality and
religion.
Let us take up again that striking antithesis of the two orders of
knowledge. What is at once the basis and the sign of the objectivity
of the natural sciences?
One may theoretically ask whether the world of science, the world that
_appears_ to us, is exactly the real world, existing outside of us. It
is thus that in the philosophy of Kant the famous question as to _the
thing in itself_ is stated. But it is equally certain that in the name
of that philosophy this question ought logically to be discarded. One
is astonished that the author of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ did not
immediately close that door opened to scientific scepticism. After his
critique, in fact, it is evident that that substratum which some are
forced to imagine as a support to phenomena--that the indeterminate and
indeterminable substance that they represent beneath the forms and
qualities of things,--is both a non-being and nonsense. _Das Ding an
sich ist ein Unding_. (The thing in itself is an unthing.) It is a
remnant of ancient metaphysics which ought to be eliminated from modern
philosophy. In allowing it to introduce itself into our theory of
knowledge, it overturns it as would a heterogeneous element. He that
persists in distinguishing between the thing in itself and the
phenomenal thing will never be able to give an account of the
objectivity of the sciences of Nature, and of the kind of certitude
that belongs to them.
That which appears to us from without is not doubtless all the reality
of the world; but it is a real world. By his calculations, Leverrier
came first to suspect the existence of a large planet as yet
unperceived; then he came to measure its volume, to trace its orbit,
and finally to mark its place at a given time. He said to his brother
astronomers: "Look there!" and the planet appeared at the end of their
telescopes.
How explain, moreover, without this reality of science, the power that
science gives to man over Nature? His power, is it not always exactly
in proportion to his knowledge?
In what then does this objectivity of science consist if it is not
founded on the pretended knowledge of the thing in itself? In the
necessary link that scientific thought establishes between phenomena.
This necessity does not come from experience, for it is something
ideal, which our mind adds to all experience. But, as we can only
think according to these necessary laws, we necessarily objectivise in
all scientific study. We thus affirm, of necessity, the fundamental
unity of the laws of thought and the laws of phenomena. Experience
always confirms this immediate affirmation. Now this necessity, it is
objectivity itself; it is the only noumenon that we are authorised to
seek behind phenomena in Nature, and behind the manifestations of pure
reason in spirit.
The first effect of this objective necessity is to eliminate from the
work of science the feelings and the subjective will of the ego. A
thinking and acting subject is no doubt necessary in making science;
but the characteristic of science is to see what it studies apart from
the subject, apart even from the psychical phenomena that it observes
in the ego itself. Posited outside the ego, the laws that it
promulgates appear to us therefore independent of it. This elimination
of the subject from the conclusions of science thus becomes the sign
and the measure of their objectivity. Where the elimination is
complete, as in astronomy and physics, the objectivity is entire. On
the contrary, history, _e.g._ where the elimination can never be
absolute, always tends towards objectivity, but never reaches it.
It is altogether otherwise with religious knowledge. With it we enter
at once into the subjective order--that is to say, into an order of
psychological facts, of determinations and internal dispositions of the
subject itself, the succession of which constitutes his personal life.
To eliminate the ego would not here be possible; for this would be both
to eliminate the materials and to dry up the living spring of
knowledge. An ancient illusion pretended that we know God, as we know
the phenomena of Nature, and that the religious life springs from that
objective knowledge as by a sort of practical application. The very
opposite is true. God is not a phenomenon that we may observe apart
from ourselves, or a truth demonstrable by logical reasoning. He who
does not feel Him inside his heart will never find Him outside. The
object of religious knowledge only reveals itself in the subject, by
the religious phenomena themselves. It is with the religious
consciousness as with the moral consciousness. In this the subject
feels obliged, and this obligation itself constitutes the revelation of
the moral object which obliges us. There is no good known outside
that. The same in religion: we never become conscious of our piety
without--at the same time that we feel religiously moved--perceiving,
more or less obscurely, in that very emotion the object and the cause
of religion, _i.e._ God.
Observe the natural and spontaneous movement of piety: a soul feels
itself to be trusting, that it is established in peace and light; is it
strong, humble, resigned, obedient? It immediately attributes its
strength, its faith, its humility, its obedience, to the action of the
Divine Spirit within itself. Anne Doubourg, dying at the stake, prayed
thus: "O God, Do not abandon me lest I should fall off from Thee." The
prophet of Israel said: "Turn me, O Lord, and I shall be turned." And
the father in the Gospels cried: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine
unbelief." To feel thus in our personal and empirical activity the
action and the presence of the Spirit of God within our own spirit, is
the mystery, but it is also the source, of religion.
It will be seen how much religious knowledge and the science of Nature
differ by their very origin. The one is the theory of the receptive
and logical life of the ego; the other is the theory of its active and
spontaneous life. As both the receptive and the active life are one,
however, the two orders of knowledge are neither isolated nor
independent. But they must never be confounded. Their results will
always remain heterogeneous; they are not of the same order, and cannot
supply the place of each other. If you were to admit, _e.g._, that
philosophers may succeed (as they have often been believed to do) in
establishing a veritable objective science of God, and if they were
thus to know God in Himself and apart from the religious ego, that
scientific knowledge of God, even if it were possible, would not be
religious knowledge; for to know God religiously is to know Him in His
relation to us--that is to say, in our consciousness, in so far as He
is present in it and determines it towards piety. This is the sense in
which it is permissible to maintain that religion is as independent of
metaphysics as it is of cosmology. It is the same with the knowledge
of the world. To know the world as an astronomer or a physicist is not
to know it religiously. To know it religiously is, while taking it as
it is, and in no wise contradicting the scientific laws according to
which it is governed, to determine its value in relation to the life of
spirit; it is to estimate it according as it is a means, a hindrance,
or a menace, to the progress of that life. In the same way, to know
ourselves religiously is not to construct scientific psychology; but
that psychology being once constructed, and properly constructed, it is
to realise ourselves in our relation both to God and to the world,
forcing ourselves to surmount the contradictions from which we suffer,
in order that we may attain to unity and peace of mind. Thus, not only
can religious knowledge never cast off its subjective character; it is
in reality nothing but that very subjectivity of piety considered in
its action and in its legitimate development.
The inner nature of these two orders of knowledge having been defined,
it becomes evident that each of them is valid in its own domain, and
that they cannot legitimately encroach upon each other. To try to
establish by religious faith the reality of any phenomenon whatsoever,
of which experimental science or intellectual criticism are the sole
judges; or to wish to formulate by means of objective science a moral
judgment which springs from the subjective consciousness--these are two
equivalent encroachments and abuses. Experimental science has the
right to forbid the religious consciousness to do violence to it; but
the religious consciousness has an equal right to restrict science to
its true limits. We must prevent confusion if we would put an end to
the conflicts between them. To enclose God in any phenomenal form is,
properly speaking, superstition or _idolatry_; to confine or dissipate
the soul in external phenomenism, and to deny the seriousness and value
of its religious and moral activity, is _infidelity_, properly so
called.
Truths of the religious and moral order are known by a subjective act
of what Pascal calls _the heart_. Science can know nothing about them,
for they are not in its order. In the same way the phenomena of Nature
are only known and measured by observation and calculation. Neither
the heart nor religious faith can decide with respect to them. Each
order has its certitude. We must not say that in the one the certitude
is greater than in the other. Science is not more sure of its object
than moral or religious faith is of its own; but it is sure in a
different way. Scientific certitude has at its basis intellectual
evidence. Religious certitude has for its foundation the feeling of
subjective life, or moral evidence. The first gives satisfaction to
the intellect; the second gives to the whole soul the sense of order
re-established, of health regained, of force and peace. It is the
happy feeling of deliverance, the inward assurance of "salvation."
It is not surprising, lastly, that these two kinds of knowledge or of
certitude should spring up and propagate themselves by different means.
Objective science transmits itself by objective demonstration. The
subjective life of the savant has nothing to do with it. To convince
us of the reality of his discoveries, an astronomer does not need to be
a good man. On the contrary, a fundamentally immoral man will always
be a detestable professor of ethics. Religion is only propagated by
religious men. It may also be added that, in religious knowledge, the
intellectual demonstration or the idea has no value except in so far as
it serves as the expression and the vehicle of the personal life of the
subject. This is the secret and the mystery of eloquence. The _si vis
me flere, dolendum_, is true in all the moral disciplines, as much and
more than in aesthetics. One gains nothing by attempting to demonstrate
objectively the existence of God. That demonstration is ineffective
towards those who have no piety; for those who have, it is superfluous.
The true religious propaganda is effected by inward contagion. _Ex
vivo vivus nascitur_. Accuracy in theology is much less important in
religion than warmth of piety. Pitiful arguments have in all ages been
followed by admirable conversions. Those who are scandalised at this
have not yet penetrated into the essence of religious faith.
For want of this clear and frank separation between our two orders of
knowledge, one sees, on the one hand, philosophers pretending to
transform ethics and philosophy into objective science, and, on the
other, savants naively giving forth their objective science as a
metaphysic and as a solution of the enigma of life. Two illusions, in
whose train everything is mixed up and founded. Objective ethics are
everything you could wish--except ethics. You might as well speak of a
round square. When an objective science transforms itself into
metaphysics, it ceases to be science and becomes subjective philosophy.
This goes without saying.
And yet, in distinguishing the two orders we must not isolate them, nor
above all must we lose sight of their solidarity, their close
connection, and correspondence. The subject is one, and has a clear
consciousness of his unity; that is why he always tends towards a
synthesis. Phenomenal science cannot complete itself without borrowing
from the subjective consciousness of the ego the ideas of unity, of
plan, and of harmony. On the other hand, the moral and religious
consciousness, in order to express itself, needs to borrow from
phenomenal science the data which it uses, and, consequently, it should
always avoid contradicting them. Thus we tend towards the synthetic
harmony of a continuous effort and of an indefectible faith; but we
discard none the less resolutely the philosophy of logical unity. We
obstinately refuse to admit that the subjective order can ever be
deduced, by way of consequence and application, from the objective
order of knowledge: that is the error of materialistic Pantheism; and,
_vice versa_, that the objective order of phenomenal science can or
ought to be deduced from the religious or moral order: that is the
opposite error of all the dogmatisms. The mental cannot be simply
reduced to the physical, or the physical entirely to the mental. We
must respect the fruitful antinomies of life from which the necessary
progress springs. The tendency towards harmony is there, not the
harmony itself. This is the reward promised, the aim proposed, to
effort. Our philosophy ought to regard the spiritual life in its
becoming--that is to say, in its growth and in its conflicts, without
wishing, like all idealist and materialist speculations, to make of the
actual and transient moment the eternal metaphysical reality.
5. _Teleology_
Subjective in essence and origin, religious knowledge is _teleological_
in its procedure, and this second characteristic springs from the first.
Teleology is the form of all organic life and of all conscious
activity. Now, what is moral knowledge but the theory of the conscious
life of spirit?
Without the principle of causation, phenomena, in science, would not be
connected; without the idea of end, or principle of direction,
biological and psychical facts could not be organised--that is to say,
hierarchised.
Mechanism and teleology: these then are the two new terms for the
antithesis formed by the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge.
But it is a prejudice to believe that the one form of explanation
excludes the other or renders it superfluous. We have examples to the
contrary not only in the machines constructed by man, but also in all
living organisms, in which, according to Claude Bernard, the _directive
idea_ of life is realised in an absolute determinism.
The mechanical explanation of phenomena and the determinism of science
only become exclusive of teleology when they are transformed into
metaphysical materialism--that is to say, when it is affirmed, _a
priori_, and by a subjective act, that there is nothing in the universe
but matter and the movements of matter. But then, it is clear that
materialism, which believes itself to be scientific, becomes a
philosophy, and like all other philosophies it falls under the
jurisdiction not only of the objective science of the world, but of the
consciousness of the ego.
The ideas of cause and end spring from one and the same source. The
idea of cause awakens in us because the ego, as soon as it knows
itself, has the clear sense of being the author of its acts; it has
this sense by that of the very effort that it has made. But, at the
same time, it knows that it made that effort with a view to an end
which attracted it. Cause and end, therefore, are the two aspects of
the same conscious act. The one is the backward glance of the
consciousness; the other is its forward look. As we only know the
world by reflecting it in the mirror of our consciousness, it follows
that the two categories of cause and end impose themselves on our
understanding with an equal necessity.
There is another consequence of this psychological observation. The
consciousness of the ego is one; neither the idea of cause nor the idea
of end, by itself, would suffice to explain the whole universe to me.
It is easy to see at a glance that the objective science of phenomena
is not and never can be completed. The chain into which it introduces
each particular phenomenon as a new link is indefinitely lengthened by
scientific progress, in time and space, but without the power to hang
on anywhere. Outside space and time, the principle of causation only
engenders insoluble antinomies. Besides, to explain one phenomenon by
another is to explain it by a cause which itself needs explanation.
The mechanical reason of things is therefore never a sufficient reason.
It is an indefinite series of insufficient particular reasons. The
network of science, however fine and firm it be, does not cover, and
cannot cover all reality. The Cosmos that science builds is like the
globe; it floats in immensity. "Where, O Lord, goes the earth through
the heavens?"
To this question teleology alone responds. But every teleological
affirmation respecting the universe is a religious affirmation.
Science, studying only accomplished facts, never establishes anything
but phenomena and their antecedent or concomitant conditions. Once the
phenomenon is integrated in the causal series, the task of science is
accomplished. To ask it to go further is to ask it to go beyond its
limits and to denaturalise itself. You can only put teleology into the
universe by affirming the sovereignty of spirit. To say that there is
reason, that there is thought, in things--that they move towards an end
or realise an order, a harmony, a good: this is to say that matter is
subordinate to spirit. Now, to affirm this sovereignty of spirit is to
commit that act of initial religious faith of which I spoke at the
beginning; it is to feel in one's self and in the world something
besides matter, the mysterious energy of spirit. This act of
faith--legitimate because inevitable--belongs to the subjective order
of religious life, not to the objective order of science. Teleology
and the theory of final causes have been compromised because their
specific character has been mistaken; they have sometimes been
assimilated to, and sometimes substituted for, mechanical causes in the
explanation of phenomena. For an unknown scientific explanation has
been substituted an appeal to a supernatural intention or volition of
God. The savants rightly protested against this. God, who is the
final reason of everything, is the scientific explanation of nothing.
The object of science is to search for second causes; where these do
not appear there is no science. It is faith which replaces it. To say
that God created the world, or that the world tends toward the
sovereign good, is not to advance positive science a single step. On
the other hand, to explain the phenomena of rain, or thunder, or the
fall of bodies, is to dissipate some mythological conceptions; but it
is not to suppress the religious affirmation of spirit that the
mechanism of the universe has an end, and that the laws of gravitation
and the material forces serve some purpose of which they are ignorant,
and which is of more value than themselves.
Between the discoveries of science and the postulates of the religious
and moral life there is always necessarily formed a synthesis which is
destroyed at each step, but which rises again higher and larger than
before. Mechanism itself, in order to be intelligible, calls for
teleology. The text of the material world awaits the interpretation
that spirit gives of it. By its discoveries positive science
establishes the text. Without this rigorous establishment of the text,
the exegesis of consciousness remains a phantasy. But, without that
exegesis, the text itself signifies nothing; it is almost as if it did
not exist.
There is another reason, a practical reason, which makes of teleology
the very essence of the religious consciousness. We must never lose
sight of the fact that what we seek in and by religion is the key to
the enigma of life. The enigma of the universe only torments us, at
the religious point of view, because we believe that in this is the
secret of that. We are embarked in the vessel, and we see clearly
enough that our destiny depends upon its own. That is why religious
faith, perfectly indifferent to the architecture and to the ways and
means of the construction of the vessel, regards above all the
direction in which the sails are set, and seeks to discover the route
which is being followed. Has it a compass? And is there some one at
the helm?
In other words, the religious instinct is the pressing need that spirit
has to guarantee itself against the perpetual menaces of Nature. Faith
judges everything from the point of view of the sovereign good, and the
sovereign good, for spirit, can only be the final and complete
expansion of the life of the spirit. Therefore, in every religious
notion there will never, at bottom, be anything but a teleological
judgment. It is not the essence of things--it is their reciprocal
value and their hierarchy which interest religious faith. In the
religious notion of God it is not the metaphysical nature--it is the
will of God in regard to men--which is of most concern; and in the
religious notion of the world it is not the mechanical cause of
phenomena--it is to know which way the world is going, and whether it
has any other end to serve than as the theatre and the organ of spirit.
What does faith itself desire to say when it defines God as the Eternal
and Almighty Spirit, except that man needs to affirm that his own
individual spirit does not depend on any but a spiritual power like
himself? It is true that to determine this final cause of the world is
also to determine its first cause. It is the same thing in other
terms; and indeed it is to make metaphysics in the etymological sense
of the word. The important point is to know that this decisive step
beyond the chain of visible phenomena, whether it be taken by the
philosopher or the theologian, is always an act of subjective life, an
affirmation of spirit, an act of faith, and not a demonstration of
science.
6. _Symbolism_
Thirdly, and lastly, religious knowledge is _symbolical_. All the
notions it forms and organises, from the first metaphor created by
religious feeling to the most abstract theological speculation, are
necessarily inadequate to their object. They are never equivalent, as
in the case of the exact sciences.
The reason is easy to discover. The object of religion is
transcendent; it is not a phenomenon. Now, in order to express that
object, our imagination has nothing at its disposal but phenomenal
images, and our understanding, logical categories, which do not go
beyond space and time. Religious knowledge is therefore obliged to
express the invisible by the visible, the eternal by the temporary,
spiritual realities by sensible images. It can only speak in parables.
The theory of religious knowledge requires for its completion a theory
of symbols and symbolism.
What is a symbol? To express the invisible and spiritual by the
sensible and material--such is its principal characteristic and its
essential function. It is a living organism, in which we must
distinguish between appearance and substance. It is a soul in a body.
The body is the manifestation of the soul, although it is not like it;
it makes the soul active and present. The most perfect example of
symbolism, in this respect, is found in language and writing--two
incarnations of thought. Neither the characters formed by my pen, nor
the sound made by the air in my larynx, have a positive resemblance to
my thought. But these letters and sounds become signs to those who
have the key to them. They express the intangible thought; they make
it present and living in the minds of those who read or hear.
This is still truer of the creations of art. They also are mere
symbols. Art might be defined as the effort to enshrine the ideal in
the real, and by a material form to express the inexpressible. This is
clearly taught by the word _poesy_, which means creation. The works of
great artists really live; for they have a soul, a rich and intense
life, which the material form at once conceals and reveals. From
architecture to music there is not an art that is not symbolical.
Ethics, religion, all the disciplines relating to the subjective life
of spirit, have only this means of expression. It is their peculiarity
to become exterior and objective, and to dominate the external things
that science studies. Symbols, much better than science, attest the
victory and the royalty of spirit. If science reveals Nature, symbols
make of Nature, of its transformations and its laws, the glorified
image of the inner life of spirit.
Born in the artist's soul, of the subjective activity of his ego, the
symbol addresses itself much less to the pure intellect than to the
inner life and to the emotions of those who contemplate it. It awakes
and sets in motion the subjective activity of the ego; it has produced
its whole effect when it has produced in us the emotions, the
transport, the enthusiasm, the faith, that the poet himself experienced
in engendering it. Such is the source and the explanation of "the
magic of art," of eloquence, of religious inspiration. All the
creators of living symbols pour their soul into our soul, their life
into our life. They subjugate and ravish us. By symbols, much better
than by scientific notions, the community and fraternity of spirits is
realised, and the fusion of souls into a collective consciousness
effected; a consciousness which includes all individual minds and tunes
them into harmony; the consciousness of a nation, of a church, of
humanity. It is not science that rules the world--it is symbols.
Inferior to the exact ideas of science in logical clearness, symbolic
forms are superior to them in power and reach. Science is forcibly
arrested at the surface of things, at the appearances continually
arising in the universe. In it is found neither the principle of
energy, nor, consequently, the secret of life, or the key to our
destiny. You seek the meaning and the end of your action; you ask for
some sufficient reason for living; do you not feel that it is
contradictory to address yourself to the science of phenomena, seeing
that, from the strictly scientific point of view, phenomena have not in
themselves their own _raison d'etre_? That which you seek is beyond
phenomena, and it is symbols alone that can, not make you comprehend
it, but reveal it to you.
Since Nature may become and does become, in art and in religion, the
constant symbol of the inner life of spirit and of its normal
development,--since it is susceptible of this perpetual and glorious
transfiguration by spirit,--it is impossible not to admit the inner
correspondence of the laws of Nature and the laws of conscious life,
and to believe in their deep unity. It is, in fact, secret and
powerful analogies which rule and inspire symbolical creations. Art
and religion are more than conventions; they are revelations of that
which is hidden at once in spirit and in Nature, of the principle of
Being itself, of the absolute energy which is manifested, parallelly,
in the unfolding of the physical universe and of the moral universe.
All things cover some mystery; phenomena are simply veils. That is
why, by their very destination, they become symbols.
The idea of symbol and the idea of mystery are correlative. Who says
symbol says at the same time occultation and revelation. In becoming
present and even sensible, the living verity still remains veiled. The
same image that reveals it to the heart remains for the intellect an
impassable barrier. One may say of it what the poet says of the sense
of the infinite, for, at bottom, it is the same thing. "We are
restless because we see it but can never comprehend it."
This inquietude is soothed by a clear knowledge of the cause from which
it springs. Symbols are the only language suited to religion. We need
to know that which we adore; for no one adores that of which he has no
perception; but it is not less necessary that we should not comprehend
it, for one does not adore that which he comprehends too clearly,
because to comprehend is to dominate. Such is the twofold and
contradictory condition of piety, to which symbols seem to be made
expressly in order to respond. Piety has never had any other language.
In considerations of this kind might be found the explanation of the
bond which in the beginning unites religion and art. But we must
confine ourselves to our special topic, and proceed to inquire what it
is that constitutes the life and power of religious symbols.
It would be an illusion to believe that a religious symbol represents
God in Himself, and that its value, therefore, depends on the
exactitude with which it represents Him. The true content of the
symbol is entirely subjective: it is the conscious relation of the
subject to God, or rather, it is the way he feels himself affected by
God. Thus when the Psalmist exclaims: "The Lord is my rock"; or "God
is a devouring fire"; when the Christ teaches us to say, "Our
Father,"--these are not scientific, and in this case metaphysical,
definitions of God. What these images simply translate is the relation
of absolute confidence, of awe, of filial love, which, by His
mysterious action, the Spirit of God creates in revealing Himself in
the spirit of man. From these divers feelings spring spontaneously the
strong and simple images which translate them, and which, if these
subjective experiences are eliminated, have no content and no truth.
From this point of view we may see in what religious inspiration
psychologically consists. Neither its aim nor its effect is to
communicate to men exact, objective, ready-made ideas on that which by
its nature is unknowable under the scientific mode; but it consists in
an enrichment and exaltation of the inner life of its subject; it sets
in motion his inward religious activity, since it is in that that God
reveals Himself; it excites new feelings, constituting new concrete
relations of God to man, and by the fact of this creative activity it
spontaneously engenders new images and new symbols, of which the real
content is precisely this revelation of the God-spirit in the inner
life of the spirit of man.
The greatest initiators in the religious order have been the greatest
creators of symbols. Prophecy, in the Biblical sense of the word, has
never given divine revelation except in the form of images. And whence
spring these images but from the exaltation of the religious life of
the prophet which spontaneously expresses itself without? Every other
conception of inspiration is anti-psychological.
To the question, Whence come the life and power of symbols? we reply:
From the primitive organic unity of the sentiment of piety, and of the
image which translates it first to consciousness. It is the organic
unity of soul and body. The greater the creative force that engenders
the symbol, the stronger is this unity. It constitutes its truth
because it constitutes its life. For a symbol, to be living it
suffices that it should be sincere, that the feeling should not be
separate from the image, nor the image from the feeling. To this cry
of confidence in God, "The Lord is my rock," there is no objection, so
long as this confidence is really felt, although a rock is a very poor
image of God. It follows that the value of a symbol must not be
measured by the nature of the image employed, but by the moral value,
in the scale of feeling, of the relation in which it places us to God.
It is the moral value of this relation which alone makes the intrinsic
value of a religion, and which permits us to assign to it its true
place in the development of humanity.
The time comes, however, when the image detaches itself from the
feeling that produced it, and when it fixes itself as such in the
memory. In considering it in itself, reflection transforms the image
into an idea more or less abstract, and takes this idea for a
representation of the object of religion. But then arises the original
discrepancy that we noted at the outset between the object of religion,
which is transcendent, and the nature of the phenomenal image by which
we attempt to represent it. Hence there is a latent contradiction in
every symbolic idea. To get rid of this contradiction the
understanding is obliged to eliminate from these ideas the sensible
element which remains in them and renders them inadequate to their
object.
By progressive generalisation and abstraction, reasoning attenuates the
primitive metaphor; it wears it down as on a grindstone. But, when the
metaphorical element has disappeared, the notion itself vanishes in so
far as it is a positive notion. There are mysterious lamps which only
burn under an alabaster globe. You may thin away the solid envelope to
make it more transparent. But mind you do not break it; for the flame
inside will then go out and leave you in the dark.
So with all our general ideas of the object of religion. When every
metaphorical element is eliminated from them, they become simply
negative, contradictory, and lose all real content. Such are our pure
ideas of the infinite and the absolute. If you would give them a
positive character, you must put into them some element of positive
experience. This is what is done when it is said that God is the
ultimate energy of things, that He is the creative cause of everything,
that He is Justice, that He is Spirit, a Judge, a Father.
Born of the primitive symbols of religion, all our religious ideas will
therefore necessarily keep their symbolical character to the end. As
is the seed, so is the plant. Dogmatics itself will never be for the
religious soul anything but a higher symbolism--that is to say, a form
which, without the inward presence of active and living faith, would be
worthless. If dogmas may sustain and produce faith, it is still more
true that, at the outset, it is faith which produces dogmas and
afterwards revives them.
Many good men withstand these conclusions from a rigorous analysis of
religious knowledge and of its psychological genesis. Supposing you
are right, they say, and that the mental constitution of our spiritual
nature confines religious thought to symbolic forms, cannot a
supernatural revelation enable us to pass beyond these limits and bring
to us religious ideas adequate to their object, and consequently of a
pure and absolute truth? This seems to us a very strange desire--that
a revelation of God should be effected apart from the conditions of
knowledge--that is to say, apart from the forms under which alone it
can be accessible to us. Do they not see that the very idea of
revelation soon becomes contradictory? If God wished to make us a gift
that we could receive, must He not have suited the form of it to that
of our mind? Must He not have availed Himself of our ideas and of our
language in order to explain to us the nature of His benefits? Now, it
is certain that our ideas, as soon as they are transported outside
space and time, contradict and destroy themselves, and that we are
reduced to the necessity of conceiving and expressing things invisible
and eternal by images actual and terrestrial. If God, in speaking to
us of His mysteries, used other than these human means, we should not
understand Him at all, so that the revelation would no longer be a
revelation. And is it not for this reason that when God has desired to
reveal Himself to men He has never employed any but men as His organs,
and that He whom we name His Son never spoke except in images and
parables of the things of the kingdom of God?
No one in fact was fonder and more intelligently fond of this
symbolical form than the Christ; He never wished to employ any other.
This preference did not arise, as is supposed, merely from the fact
that He found it a happy means of popularity to adapt Himself to all
minds. He also knew that no language was more natural or more
conformed to the moral exigencies of piety. He saw in it an
institution ordained by God Himself. And it is the truth. The Parable
addresses itself, not to the pure understanding, but to the active
faculty of the ego, to "the heart." It appeals to our subjective life;
it awakens the religious need before satisfying it. The soul which
hears it meditates, and experiences the living content that it
contains. On the contrary, the soul that is inert and dead finds
nothing in the symbol and receives nothing from it even theoretically,
so that it is literally true that the symbolic form, a shining
revelation unto some, remains a dull and empty letter for others. It
is from this point of view alone that it is possible to understand that
other saying of Jesus, so paradoxical to common sense, so rich and just
to the eyes of experience and of faith: "To him that hath shall be
given; from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he hath."
The gift of God comes only to the felt need and the active desire of
man.
7. _Conclusion_
The conclusion from all that has now been said is that religious
knowledge is subject to the law of transformation which regulates all
the manifestations of human life and thought.
As there is disproportion and disparity between the object of religion
and its means of expression, it will always be possible and necessary
to distinguish, in all its creations, between the form and the
substance, the body and the soul. Religious symbolism will therefore
always be very variable _de facto_, but subject, _de jure_, to new
interpretations.
This variability, however, is not unlimited. It is necessarily
confined within limits which, while not easy to define theoretically,
are none the less precise and fixed; for the great religious creations
are organisms, and every organism carries in itself, determined by its
own nature, the exact capacity of its metamorphoses.
In every living organism, in fact, there is a principle of stability
and a principle of movement. The identity of a human being persists
through all the modifications, internal and external, which he
undergoes. So with the language of a people; and so with every
historical religion. Its fundamental and regulative principle is the
relation it establishes between the soul and God. The form or external
realisation of this principle depends, no doubt, on the race, the
geographical environment, the historical period. It will vary
therefore with these circumstances. But the religious type or organic
principle remaining the same, this religion will appear the same
throughout the incessant movement of its dogmas, rites, and symbols.
This is the very condition of its life. Forms which cannot bend,
symbols whose fresh and living interpretation is exhausted, a rigid
body that no longer assimilates or eliminates any external element,
represent a state of sterility and death, to be followed by a speedy
dissolution.
Pious men are right in clinging obstinately to the stability of their
principle of piety, but they ought to cling as tenaciously to the
renewal of forms and ideas in their religion; for this is the only
proof that their treasure has kept its value, and their religious
principle its organising virtue. The life of a religion is measured by
this power of adaptation and renovation. If Christianity is the
universal and eternal religion, it is because its virtuality in this
respect is infinite.
* * * * *
Before I close, let me try to prevent two misunderstandings. In saying
that in dogmas we must distinguish the religious substance and the
intellectual form, I do not mean that we either can or ought to isolate
them from each other, or that we can ever hope to have them separately.
Piety is only conscious for us and discernible by others when incarnate
in its expression or intellectual image. A religion without doctrine,
a piety without thought, a feeling without expression, these are things
essentially contradictory. It is as vain to wish to seize pure piety,
as in philosophy it is to seek to define "the thing in itself." When
we speak of the inward religious fact, then, of pious experience, we do
not speak of a bare experience; we speak of a psychological phenomenon,
of a precise and, consequently, formulated experience.
In the second place, for religious science, it is not a question of
isolated experience, of the experience of a single individual. The
material would be too precarious, and the field of observation too
limited. The question refers to the individual life in its continuity,
and to the life of the religious society considered in its historical
development.
A social and universal as much and even more than it is an individual
fact, it is in the social life of the species, in organised religious
societies, in their institutions, their common worship, their liturgy,
their rules of faith and discipline, that religion objectively realises
its fundamental principle, manifests its inner soul, and develops all
its power. It is only as a social manifestation that it can become an
object of scientific study, and that it has need of explanation.
Moreover, a religious life which remains hidden in the individual
consciousness, which does not communicate itself, which does not create
any spiritual solidarity, any fraternity of soul, is as if it were not;
it is a mere film of feeling, an ephemeral poetic flower, which has no
more effect on the individual himself than it has on the human race.
From these considerations springs a method. The dogmatic treatment of
religious knowledge will have for its subject the tradition of the
religious society as it is fixed, conserved, and developed in its
historic monuments. It will consider that tradition from the symbolic
point of view, as the objective revelation of the inner life of the
Church, and of its piety. The tradition will then appear not as
something dead and immutable, but as a power continuing in ourselves.
To grasp this soul in its fruitful continuity and in the perpetual
renewal of the external organism; to comprehend them in their living
unity; to tell the story of the genesis of dogmas and their endless
metamorphoses as a constant and necessary incarnation of the principle
that is manifested in them; to follow this uninterrupted chain in
history, and prolong it into our own life,--such is the method, at once
critical and positive, conservative and progressive, firm in piety and
always deferential to science, which critical symbolism enables us to
apply to all religious creations.
The error of that form of religious knowledge called _Orthodoxy_ is
that of forgetting the historically and psychologically conditioned
character of all doctrines, and of desiring to raise into the absolute
that which is born in time, and which must necessarily modify itself in
order to live in time. Impotent to arrest the current of ideas and the
movement of minds, it can only establish its rule by political
measures, by regulations enacted and applied like civil laws--decisions
of popes, bishops, or synods, trials for heresy, dogmatic tribunals.
Orthodoxy has lost the sense of the symbolical character of Confessions
of Faith, which, however, it still names symbols. Its misfortune and
its failing is to be anti-historical.
The error of _Rationalism_, at once the brother and the enemy of
orthodoxy, is of the same nature, but it is produced in an opposite
sense. It does not lose sight of the imperfect and precarious
character of traditional dogmas and symbols; it exaggerates it; but it
loses sight of their specifically religious contents. Orthodoxy is
mistaken as to the nature of the body of religion; rationalism as to
the nature of its soul. Beneath the old traditional ideas it seeks for
other ideas, moral or rational ideas, freer from sensible elements, and
less contradictory, which it mistakes for the essence of religion. It
replaces dogmas by other dogmas which it believes to be more simple,
and which it regards as absolute truth. But in giving to religion a
rational or doctrinal content, it empties it of its real content, of
specific religious experience; it kills faith, which no longer having
an object of its own, no longer has a _raison d'etre_. It has less
liking than orthodoxy for symbolism and for religious creations; it is
radically impossible for it to comprehend, and consequently to
interpret, them. The chief vice and the misfortune of rationalism is
to be anti-religious.
The theory of _Critical Symbolism_, whose broad outlines we have
traced, will bring us out of this old antithesis. It shows to us the
kind of truth and the legitimacy possessed by symbolical ideas, without
ignoring the psychological and historical determinism which rules their
form and their appearance. It must not be imagined that, from this
point of view, everything becomes fluid and inconstant in
religion--that nothing in it can be fixed or permanent. In the
progress of his life, man is destined to realise his spiritual nature,
to attain to what St. Paul calls "the stature of Christ," in which the
religious and moral ideal is realised. This moral stature is a
reality, the highest of all realities. We tend towards it without
ceasing, and the value of each moment of our inner life is measured by
the progress that it marks towards that supreme end. For this inner
life there is a norm which imposes itself on the consciousness with an
imperative necessity, and, consequently, there may be religious symbols
which are normal and normative in relation to others. These are the
symbols which represent with perfect simplicity and fitness either this
ideal end of the Christian life or some of the necessary moments
through which the soul passes on the way to it. There are symbols, in
a word, such as that of the Heavenly Father, the Kingdom of God, the
New Birth, the Effusion of the Holy Spirit, so intimately bound up with
our religious life, with its origin, its progress, or its end, which
one cannot conceive as disappearing, so long as the spiritual life of
humanity exists. All the exclusively religious words of Christ which
bear directly on the consciousness are of this number. And it is of
them that He was able to say without being contradicted by the ages:
"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away."
On the other hand, it is no less impossible to ignore the distinction
we have made in symbol between substance and form. Now, this
distinction opens the door to criticism. The most conservative of
Christians confess that men may adhere to a doctrine without having
appropriated its religious content; that they may be orthodox without
being pious. They therefore make it the duty of every member of the
Church to assimilate the contents of the symbol. But how can the duty
of personal assimilation be imposed without the right arising to
critically interpret the transmitted forms? Is it not a psychological
necessity for each believer to bring his inner religious consciousness
into harmony with his general culture? What if these syntheses and
conciliations are necessarily unstable and precarious because of the
constant development of life and knowledge? When a man is walking his
equilibrium is destroyed and re-established at each step. It is the
very condition of walking.
Symbolism, which thus makes peace in the individual, may also effect it
in religious societies. In Catholicism the unity of the Church is only
maintained by a central infallible authority and by political means.
That authority creates peace by imposing silence. Dogmas only subsist
because no one concerns himself with them. Can Protestant communities
maintain their unity by the same method? The Catholic method ruins
Protestant communities, inevitably, by causing schisms frequent in
proportion as their life and thought become intense. The theory of
symbolism offers them a more honourable issue. It permits them to
combine veneration for traditional symbols with perfect independence of
spirit by leaving to believers, on their own responsibility, the right
to assimilate them and adapt them to their experiences. They will
attach themselves to tradition with all the more sincerity and zeal as
each one is able to find in it that of which his religious faith has
need. It will be a help and not a yoke. Men will love it; they will
defend it as the link between the generations, as a family heritage, as
the place where souls of every race and age, and stage of scientific
culture, meet and mingle and commune.
APPENDIX
REPLY TO CRITICISMS
Before laying down the pen, I ought perhaps to reply to one or two
objections.
The first reproach that has been addressed to me is contained in the
words, "Naturalistic Evolutionism." A conception more or less
materialistic of the universe is thus attributed to me, according to
which, like Herbert Spencer, I should explain all things by the single
law of evolution, and end sooner or later by reducing the laws of the
moral world to the laws of the physical world, since I make of the
first a simple transformation of the second. Need I say that this is
the very opposite of my thought? It is true that I like to use the
word evolution, and to consider all phenomena in their natural
succession. But this is not a metaphysical doctrine; it is a process
of study, a method which consists in these two essential rules: to
observe each fact as it presents itself; and to observe it in its
order, _i.e._ in the conditions in which it presents itself, because a
fact only possesses its truth and value in that order and succession.
On our planet, moral life emerges slowly and painfully out of organic
life. Must we therefore conclude that there is no more in the one than
in the other, and that they are of equal value? Certainly not. Both
these series of phenomena must be placed in their relations and
connections; but the method which makes them known to me gives me no
more right to confound them than to separate them, to ignore their
differences than to forget their analogies. It shows me, on the
contrary, that there is advance, _real_ progress from the one to the
other; that the first in date has its end in the second; that there is
a sort of living and continuous creation, each stage and degree of
which reveals new riches and new glories. This is so thoroughly the
oasis of my religious philosophy that there would be more ground or, at
all events, more excuse for accusing me of denying the reality of the
world than the continuous action of the Divine Creator.
It is true that the one reproach has not saved me from the other. Both
have been addressed to me by persons who have not taken the trouble to
reconcile them. The accusation of Pantheism, contradictory as it may
seem, has been added to that of Naturalistic Evolutionism. I have been
made to appear the blind and docile disciple of an idealism more or
less Hegelian, which would annihilate the reality of second causes in
order to contemplate in the universe the flux and transformation of a
first cause or substance, of which one might either say that it is
everything or that it is nothing. But here, again, they lose sight of
the character of the method that I follow. It leads me to discover in
my consciousness the mysterious and real co-existence of a particular
cause, which is myself, and of a universal cause, which is God. That,
I repeat, is a mystery impenetrable to analysis, but undeniable by any
man who examines himself and enters into the ultimate basis of his
life. It is the mystery out of which religion springs by an invincible
necessity. Now, as this mystery is posited by me at the very outset of
my researches, and maintained to the end, how can they legitimately
reproach me with sacrificing either of the two terms which constitute
it to the other--the first effect of which would be to dissipate and
make impossible my theory of the psychological origin of religion? "In
me," said Charles Secretan, "lives some one greater than me"--a
mysterious guest whose universal and eternal action I feel beneath the
variable phenomena of my empirical activity, to Whom, when I am good,
confiding, humble, brave, I always attribute my goodness, my faith, my
courage, my humility, as to Him I attribute my whole life.
I cannot comprehend the co-existence of the finite and the infinite;
but this duality is everywhere. I observe that in the physical as in
the moral world there is, in each phenomenon, a latent force, a sort of
potential energy, which raises it and urges it beyond itself. Nature
is perpetually becoming, that is to say, in perpetual travail. It is
not true that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the future
must simply repeat the past. Creation is not yet completed. "My
Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus. "It doth not yet appear what we
shall be." But the little that I perceive of the Divine work
demonstrates to me that it is progressive, that it raises and enriches
life at every step, and that this progress accounts exactly for the
essential antinomies amid which my reason loses itself and my heart
adores. To wish to reduce everything to unity is to turn the kingdom
of life into the domain of death. For my part, I have long since
renounced what is justly called "the philosophy of identity," that
abstract dialectic which, throwing all things back to their point of
logical departure, renders perfectly incomprehensible and superfluous
the ephemeral development which they have in our consciousness and in
history. The painful contradictions observed by Pascal in our moral
life, and the insoluble antinomies in our thought unveiled by Kant,
always seem to me to go nearer to the bottom of things than the
ontological deductions of Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel.
* * * * *
In this book I have hardly noted any but facts that have been verified
in myself and by myself. It is true that I suppose that every
reflective reader is capable of finding them and tracing them out in
his own personal experience. Those who are able and wishful to re-read
my book in themselves, and thus verify my analyses, may perhaps draw
some profit from it. Those who read me otherwise will not only lose
their time and pains--they will misunderstand at every step the meaning
of my phrases and the direction of my ideas. Beneath my reasonings or
my images they will put other ideas and other intentions than mine, and
they may afterwards, with an apparent good conscience, deduce from them
the most terrible consequences.... Philosophical language lends itself
to all and permits all; and the mischief of it is that it would be
useless to desire to prevent these quarrels. New explanations only
give rise to new misunderstandings, and simply serve to perpetuate a
dispute without interest and without fruit. We can only repeat the
saying of the ancient sages of Arabia: _Magna est veritas et
praevalebit_.
THE END