The recent work of M. F. PAULHAN, _Le Nouveau Mysticisme_, places us in
the presence of a feature of modern life, if not extremely important, at
least very curious.
We assist at the formation of a new spirit. But what is it? What is its
value? A reply to this question would exact a long and minute analysis
of all social facts. M. Paulhan does not flatter himself that he has
exhausted it, and he offers us only portions, although excellent and
instructive, of the required work. He shows us in rapid review, the
dissolution of the ancient world, the intellectual and moral anarchy
which has to-day reached its highest possible point; he seeks, in the
ruins amidst which we tread, the constructive elements of a new order of
things, and makes an effort to foresee what it will be.
“The scientific mind,” writes he, “the religious spirit, pity for
suffering, the sentiment of justice, social mysticism, the attraction for
mysterious perhaps dangerous facts that we begin to have a glimpse of,
the kind of new power which the knowledge of them can give us, a general
need of universal harmony: such are the principal characters of the
spirit which is forming itself.” They are not, he himself says, all new.
It is not the presence of these elements which is significant, but rather
the singular combination in which they occur, and we could say, the
precipitate that they give in the particular chemical solution where they
find themselves thrown. In every case, the phenomenon does not affect
entirely, it seems to us, the same characters, according to whether we
observe it in the philosophic or scientific order, in the practical
order, or in that of sentiment, which literature represents. The name
of mysticism does not belong to every part of the new spirit equally;
or more exactly, the spirit which is produced could well not be truly
mysticism, but only a side phenomenon, and the very evident resurrection
of the spirit which is disappearing.
M. Paulhan, if I do not deceive myself, sometimes allows himself to be
too much influenced by a certain literature, to which I do not allow a
very great value, and of which even the sincerity may be suspected. It
represents at first, to my mind, individual conditions, and it evidently
impeaches some authors of a morbid diathesis. Many of our prophets, as
is known in the _Quartier Latin_, have or affect vices which exclude by
themselves all generating power. Then, it is very difficult, in our age,
to appreciate exactly the relations of literature to the public mind,
seeing the diversity of romantic books, and the correlation of one to
the other is perhaps not so strict, so profound as it has been in other
junctures of history. In short, the modern romance is a document the
relative value of which needs to be established by a most severe critic.
Some facts dominate the question, viewed as a whole. It is necessary to
show the work of the scientific mind, which has the result of creating
new mental habits. It is necessary to consider also that the disorder,
_the spirit of evil_, so finely analysed by M. Paulhan, corresponds
chiefly to the interpretations of ignorance, to the exaggerations of
sentiment, and to the dreams, more or less monstrous, of inventive
fantasy. It is necessary, finally, if they wish to augur of the future,
to endeavor to disengage the laws of construction, still badly defined,
of our political fabrics. The thought of M. Paulhan is good at bottom,
and the materials with which he constructs the _possible future_ are
taken from the positive conditions of our mental and social life: in the
practical order, “co-operation” is added to the social systems already
existing, although disturbed, such as the family and the nation; in the
ideal order, the conception, beyond that of humanity, of a “cosmical
whole,” and a “universe,” which, to repeat it after Comte, will be
favorable to man, in a certain sense, seeing that he causes it to exist.
We recommend the reading of this book. One’s time is never lost with
a thinker of the stamp of M. Paulhan; he has the merit this time of
disclosing to us in a few pages a vast horizon, where some points are
delineated with clearness. Logicism has caused much evil in our country.
Let us now beware of mysticism!
* * * * *
One of the most curious episodes of this new mysticism is assuredly
the Buddhist preaching, begun in France by a small group of writers.
M. AUGUSTIN CHABOSEAU, one of the representatives of this religious
tendency, publishes a work, _Essai sur la philosophie boudhique_,[50]
which it is expedient to mention. M. Chaboseau has thought it would be of
interest to sum up in a volume the results of the studies on Buddhism,
and to present it “such as science has proved it, that is to say very
different from what Christian polemists, worldly amusers, theosophic
fanatics, endeavor to disseminate.” He has had the ambition to write this
volume, and for my part, I do not refuse him my curiosity.
But that Buddhism truly contains a religious formula capable of
attracting to it the souls of our Occident, I have difficulty in
believing. This India is very far from us, and its confused philosophy
is behind us. I do not think that the nations of to-day will return to
a by-gone mode; and then, this doctrine of Sakya-Muni has something
against it, that I hesitate to say, as it might seem puerile: its god is
too fat. Its god or its sage, as you wish. Yes, that breadth of form,
that opulence of flesh, taken as a mark of goodness and power, shocks
our artistic taste. Do not forget that every religion which claims our
will ought to satisfy our æsthetic sentiment: it is one of the essential
factors of the religious sentiment, a compound sentiment where all
the emotions of a race ought to find their harmony. The opposition of
India to us, so striking in the ideal of the beautiful, still continues
in metaphysical speculation. We are too moderate, too sober, for the
debauches of imagination in which it delights. Buddhism will be to us
only a passing excrescence, and I ask myself if it lives well in the
souls where it has sincerely penetrated.
I should have much to do to speak, in the briefest manner, of all the
books or treatises, which in a direct or indirect manner relate either
to the war of Aryanism against Semitism, and principally against the
Christianism in which certain authors see the most disastrous conquest of
Semitic genius; or to the reviving of mystic traditions, strange dreams,
and monstrous desires; or to a religious restoration, of which the most
ordinary prejudice is to assure the immortality of the soul and to reopen
the beyond to man. These works are in general of slight value; they are
the multiplication of decays, and we are compelled to consider them as
social wastes, of which the abundance betrays unquestionably the bad
health of the organism, or at least a difficult crisis of its evolution.
* * * * *
But let us return to the works of philosophy properly so-called. What
are we to think of that of M. F. RAUH? I deceive myself much if his
_Essai sur le fondement métaphysique der la morale_ is considered of
much service in his own circles. M. Rauh, who belongs to the philosophic
youth, the youth of the age, can be well assured that the partisans of
scientific morality will not upbraid him for “the admiration of high
metaphysical thoughts” with which he does himself honor, but he can fear
lest the metaphysicians accuse him of further compromising metaphysics by
the denser obscurities he casts on it. One is stupefied to find again in
a modern book a phraseology so made up of abstract words, of substantives
with capitals, and logical shadows which affect the posture of realities.
Much study, much work, without advancing one step, and still worse, in
order to throw us again into the _culs-de-sac_ from whence we have had
so much difficulty to disengage ourselves. All the profit one can derive
from this dialectic is to contemplate at the end the vague shadow of its
own body that is perceived on the wall.
The metaphysicians of a certain school are not only reluctant to have
to accept that morality is a natural formation, a social product, an
historical fact; they wish further that the existence even of moral
society should depend on the intelligence that they have of it, or of
the explanation that they give of it. They affirm boldly, and these are
the words even of M. Rauh, that “the fate of morality is united to that
of metaphysics”—their metaphysics. This is a pretension as exorbitant as
would be that of a naturalist who should refer the reality of the animal
world to the idea he formed of zoölogical types, or that of a chemist
who should subject the value of the positive results of science to a
particular hypothesis as to the constitution of bodies.
* * * * *
There are certain difficulties of language to criticise in the work of
M. ISIDORE MAUS, barrister in the Court of Appeals at Brussels, _De la
justice pénale, étude philosophique sur le droit de punir_. A curious
spectator, he tells us, of the battle waged between the new school of
anthropology and the ancient penal jurisprudence, he seeks to divine the
issue of it. It will probably end, according to him, in the formation of
a medium penal jurisprudence, which will accept limited responsibilities,
and which, while protecting society, will do its best “to give to
punishment all the advantages it can.”
It would be exaggerated no doubt, I willingly grant it, to take away from
repression every mark of moral reparation, all weight of “reformative
power”; but I am always shocked to hear partial responsibilities spoken
of. From the social point of view, the responsibility remains perfect;
it is united, indeed, to the very act of having caused injury, beyond
all appreciation. From the point of view of the individual, the word
responsibility has the grave inconvenience of implying that the quantity
of liberty or free-will attributable to the delinquent is measured.
It would be less compromising and more exact, to value simply the
quality, the worth of the delinquent, according to the totality of
his affective, intellectual, voluntary, and pathological character,
according to the nature and the conditions of the act of which he is
accused, etc. We should thus escape contradictions of words which easily
become contradictions of fact; we should no more stumble at this latent
difficulty of free-will, in medium cases—for _serious cases_ are never
difficult. Words exercise a tyranny which jurists would do well to
distrust.
Is not this, moreover, just about what M. Maus means by his favorite
formula—that justice ought “to individualise as much as possible”? It is
a pity only that he does not present his conclusions with the requisite
clearness. His exposition is not distinct and frank. He has mental
habitudes, subtilities of reasoning, which are of value at the Palais,
but which it is suitable to rid oneself of when writing a book: his would
gain much by being entirely remodeled, made clear and disentangled.
* * * * *
M. E. DE LAVELEYE offers to the public a fourth edition, revised and
considerably augmented, of his great work, _De la propriété et de ses
formes primitives_. We have not to recall the numerous facts which this
work contains and the knowledge of which has become sufficiently general;
nor to commend M. de Laveleye, who no longer expects fresh praises for
it. I have only to express the regret that he should have retained the
theory of property expounded in the last chapter of his book, or rather
the metaphysical conception of right with which he connects it. It seems
as if he wished to excuse himself from reducing property to the simple
value of a fact, modifiable in its forms, by indicating as a fixed point
an “order” which shall be the best, which shall be _known_ and _wished_
of God, _sought_ and _realised_ by man.
M. de Laveleye knows it as well as any one. Right is only a rule, an
expression of the relations of men among themselves, in a determined
geographical and historical medium. Its changes depend, in part on
external conditions, in part on the characters of man himself, the
state and variable equilibrium of his passions and of his mentality.
If certain forms of right establish themselves proportionally, in the
course of the life of nations, the fact is explained by the constancy
and the universality of certain conditions, either physical or mental;
the repetition of social arrangements, which produces ultimately a
more stable structure and constitutes a sort of axis of development,
is somewhat analogous, if we may be permitted this comparison, to the
repetition of the essential elements in all architecture, or of the
primitive forms in all the products of the ceramic art. What is the
good of enveloping with mystery the ideal we create ourselves, and of
rendering obscure a notion that we can positively explain? But let
us leave here this little quarrel, for it does not touch the solid
groundwork of the book.
Still to signalise are: _Premiers principes métaphysiques de la
science de la nature_, translated from Kant by M. M. CH. ANDLER and
ED. CHAVANNES, who have written an interesting introduction _On the
philosophy of nature in Kant_; and _L’Année philosophique, Iʳᵉ année_
1890, published under the direction of F. PILLON, former manager of
_La Critique philosophique_. There will be found in this last volume
two profound studies, one by M. Renouvier on the phenomenist method,
the other by M. Pillon on the criticism of the infinite, an excellent
article by M. L. Dauriac on philosophy and particularly on the æsthetics
of Guyau, finally a bibliography of French works which appeared in 1890.
I wish good success to this publication; it will become valuable, and
it will be still more so, in my opinion, if M. Pillon, will not recoil
before the fatigue, no doubt sufficiently great, of adding to the
Bibliography a critical sketch of the review articles published in the
course of the year.