ILLUMINISM IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE
The characteristic that distinguishes English Illuminism is the
reasonable adaptation of its theories to practical circumstances; this
is best illustrated in the greatest man it has produced. Locke was for
the preservation of faith in Revelation and tried to make it agree with
reason. It was as impossible for him as for Thomas Aquinas to think
that God’s world should mean anything in contradiction with the natural
light He has granted to man. He sees in the Scriptures the revelation
of truths which would have been out of reach of man’s natural powers,
limited as they were to sense knowledge. Such a view was characteristic
of the fair-mindedness of the practical and political man, but it held
a snare in the sanction thus granted to the most unphilosophical and
unhistorical notion of Deism and natural religion. The fact is that
the most energetic champion of Subjectivism after Descartes could not
realise at all the religious position of man towards the Divinity which
is assertive of objectivism. His ethics take human felicity as the
higher aim of theoretical and practical activity, which is not original
at all, but has the merit of being quite consistent with his subjective
assertions. In his contribution to pedagogy the commonsense of the
practical man comes to temper the theoretical individualism which
inspired him and he thus keeps generally on a level above the theory
afterwards formulated by Rousseau. But nowhere does this inconsistency
of his practical application with his main system appear as clearly as
in his work on the State.
William of Orange stands to Locke as Cromwell does to Hobbes, not
that the king can be compared to the dictator, but his reign beheld
the inauguration of the political system which is the greatest gift
of England to mankind; and this practical manifestation of the
political genius of that country shows by its coincidence with its
greatest theoretical contribution to philosophy how little practice
and theory are severed in actual life, that is to say in history. Yet
Locke was enforcing the distinction with all his might to avoid the
inconsistency already noticed between the theoretical and practical
aspects of his work. As Hobbes had done before him in England, and
Grotius in Holland, he saw the basis of the State in a contract, but
he was the first (although Algernon Sydney had prepared public opinion
for such an idea) to assert that the collective will was embodied not
in any single person, but in the majority of the people. There he was
perfectly consistent with his gnoseology, the multiplicity of the data
of sense knowledge destroyed the unity of the metaphysical conception.
Only legislation, however, fell to the share of the majority; the
executive and foreign policy were to be entrusted to hereditary
monarchs. The exigencies of the new notions of liberty and equality of
man were tempered by the practical necessity of insuring the continuity
and unity of national development, which was the last assertion of
historical necessities. Hence politics went on gradually losing touch
with historical consciousness.
Yet the necessity under which Locke and the best thinkers of English
Illuminism were of tempering their theories through practical
considerations was symptomatic of the fundamental weakness of the
whole system. Theories springing from a synthetic conception of life
do not want readjusting to practical life, do not want a period of
assimilation under their theoretical form and another of elaboration
into practical systems. The best example of this is the simultaneous
production of Gentile’s most important theoretical work known to the
English-speaking scholars as the _Pure Act_ and of its practical
offspring the _Fondamenti della Filosofia del Diritto_, both of 1916,
followed at five years’ distance by their political application by the
Fascists who had, so to speak, no direct knowledge of such works; to
say nothing of his pedagogy, the application of which the author has
had the opportunity of carrying out with her own pupils. But then such
theories are conceived without abstracting one minute from practical
life, and their basis is history and society as they are in real life.
Of Fascism the same may be said; its idealism does not prevent it from
being the most thoroughly practical and realistic of movements.
The philosophy of the seventeenth century had, however, made this
consistency of theory and practice an obviously unrealisable chimera
for the men of the eighteenth century, and whilst French rationalism
brought people to think of rational theories as capable of radically
reforming society, English empiricism held that ideas may work very
well in theory and very badly in practice. Such a distinction was the
source of great difficulties. If thought and action were the terms of
an irreductible dualism it was natural to say
Meliora video; deteriora sequor.
Indeed, the moral imperative of Kant could not be reached on such
ground and in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century
moral treatises and dissertations take such a place that there is no
doubt as to the men of the period realising the difficulties of the
problem. They had separated religion from philosophy, religion from law
and politics, and as they had the _jus naturale_ they must have natural
morals. A sense of right and wrong due to the natural light granted to
man by God was to be found in Scholasticism as the natural tendency
to sociability already mentioned. It could, in fact, be traced to the
Stoic school and even farther back. But this did not make things easier
to the people who held positive religions to be useless, whilst on
the other hand they were ready to admit their value as establishments
providing for the moral care of the lower classes. In their abstention
from history, the only use of churches they could see was to curb the
egoistical tendencies of man in the classes which were denied the
enlightenment that could provide educated people with principles of
discrimination between right and wrong. They could not realise that
this function of the churches is merely a consequence of the position
of the believer towards his divinity, that such a position brings man
to realise what is to him not-self, thereby giving to the moral law the
objectivity which alone can free it from the constant alteration of
selfish motives, and bestow the stability necessary to its efficiency.
A natural sense of right and wrong was acknowledged in order to
find in Man himself an explanation of his moral life. This original
predisposition, that was to ensure autonomy to man’s higher life
having been admitted, the psychological mentality of the time did not
hesitate to make it a matter of psychology to determine which was
the organ of this natural function of man. Whilst such researches
proceeded, Cumberland having already illustrated the Ciceronian
doctrine of the _lex naturae_ as the natural reaction of altruistic
tendencies against the selfish motives of Hobbes’s theory, the Earl
of Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, contributed the best of all these
theories. He claimed the autonomy of morals, freeing it no less from
physiological than from theological fetters. For the intrinsic value
of morals is equally destroyed whether you make good deeds dependent
of the fear of punishment and hope of reward or on the mechanism of
nature. Goodness, righteousness, and virtue are real of themselves, a
reality; they can be conceived and understood; they cannot be inferred
from anything else. Why he did not work out so original a notion is
easily understood; the philosophy of his time afforded him little
more than psychology, and his personal gifts and breeding fitted him
rather for æsthetics than for so arduous a task; hence it was perfectly
natural that his idea should have developed into a real eudemonism.
The nature of virtue is to him harmony, he thus blends the conclusions
of materialism and of the doctrine which upheld the social instinct
of man; the supremacy was to be ascribed to the egoistic motives by
the school of Hobbes, to the sense of altruism by the others. To
Shaftesbury each of these schools held half of the truth and only
the combination of both tendencies could produce in their harmony
real morality. Neither lax nor ascetic morals must result from the
harmonious combination of the two opposites. Such a theory implies the
perfection of the individual as the ultimate end of all intellectual
life; it throws light on the nobler side of Illuminism, and if it is
not theoretically sound it is the blending of all that was best in a
movement that was generous in its optimism.
The variety of the grounds which were ascribed to morality is
sufficient to betray the original flaw of such philosophy. Even Lord
Shaftesbury had been unfaithful to Locke, mainly owing to his own
strong sense of the æsthetic, but also owing to the unsuitability of
the great philosopher’s doctrine, as it was understood then, as a basis
for a theory of ethics. Thus Utilitarianism came into being. “The best
for the greatest number,” was to remain as the ideal or ideology of
Illuminism; and the best in question became more and more the material
best, and less and less the moral best. After the natural sense of
sociability which had taken the place of the will of God at the basis
of the state, after the natural sense of right and wrong which had been
elaborated as a substitute for the Decalogue, very little was left
of the _tabula rasa_ idea of man’s soul upheld by Locke. All these
natural senses were anterior to experience and when natural religion
was added to them it was understood that all these innate faculties
were constitutive of rationalness in practical life; and Nature was
gradually opposed to history as rational to irrational.
This natural religiousness had had its first English assertor in
Herbert of Cherbury. To him man’s soul is far from being _tabula rasa_;
it is a book that opens naturally and displays its hidden treasure.
And John Toland, in his efforts to retrieve free thinking from the
interference of the State, determines the limitation of the state’s
jurisdiction, to which the citizen’s _actions_ must be subject but
never his _opinions_; whilst he limited his request for tolerance for
the benefit of that class of men whose social position enabled them to
afford a sufficient culture to make a harmless use of such liberty.
Then the negativeness of any liberal government was obvious, since in
Toland’s notion of it it became like a simple set of brakes destined to
act when the machine goes wrong and to keep the serene impossibility of
an impeccable butler until order and peace are actually broken. Thus
again the radical difference between educated and uneducated which had
been fostered by the cultural movement of Humanism and Renaissance,
assumed a religious and political significance which made the new idea
of class a greater impediment to the self-making man than that of the
feudal hierarchy which had always admitted the admission to knighthood
of a valorous man whatever his condition. This cautious exclusion of
the people from the new intellectual religion was a condemnation; the
rational cult proved an artificial theory and could have no vitality.
Yet it would be a perversion of facts to present it as due to the
personal feeling of Toland or any other man. It was the consequence
both of the predominance of Rational Reality in the systems then in
honour, and of the traditional Humanism according to which there was
the same difference between a scholar and a non-scholar as there had
been once between the citizen and the non-citizen of the old pagan
world. But the main feature is the anti-historical vision of life
that made men incapable of suspecting first the social origin of the
religious notions which had flourished from pre-historic time, then the
impossibility of introducing social partitions in the life of the Mind.
Of religion they only saw its practical organisation in the different
churches; of the need from which the pre-Christian forms of religion
had sprung they had not the slightest suspicion.
The rough and obscure notion they had of the Middle Ages was too often
identified with religion and they had no possibility of realising
the part played by the Church to keep the objectivity of a religious
creed as a counterpoise to the anarchy-breeding self-assertion of
man. Christianity had revealed the profound humanity, that is to say
spirituality, of the world, and Man, feeling himself to be the main
agent of God in the world, realised his subjective importance. Only God
had remained above him—only the notion of God’s presence could enforce
objective law. It is not the Decalogue and the Church’s precepts which
are meant here. It is the recognition, essential to religion, of a
reality existing besides his own self that compels man to realise such
objectivity of law. St. Paul laid an emphatic stress on the fact. But
the _caritas sibi_ is that which raises the subject, raises us and
enlarges our capacity until we are capable of taking in the object,
all that we are not, the world in short; what modern philosophy calls
the not-self. When man does realise this objectivity, this distinction
of the world from him, his attitude is that of respect not only
towards God but towards the world. Thus we have the religiousness,
that Fascism is striving to enforce until it will pervade the whole
of life, practical and theoretical life, since it does not part them.
This notion of religiousness, however, is ultra-modern, and could not
have been conceived in pre-Kantian days, in pre-Hegelian, pre-Gentilian
days. It is not mediæval by any means, and Illuminism is one of the
stages through which Mind has had to pass, to realise a subject capable
of taking in the object without going back to Pagan objectivism.
For this objective world must at all cost be such through subjective
objectivity. If it is to remain a Christian world in its very
objectivity it must remain a human world, the world of man, the world
of the subject whose religious recognition of his not-self is a supreme
self-assertion.
* * * * *
Before the end of the century Reason fell from her enthroned glory,
and sentiment was glorified as the purest activity of man’s soul. So
that the century of light ended by raising the less rational motives
of man’s life to semi-divine honours. This reaction was due to the
unilateral dogmatism assumed by philosophy in France owing to the
political circumstances of the country.
With a democratic sense that is partly due to the democratic origin of
the French monarchy, which to be absolute, had to rest on the support
of the people, the thinkers of France did not dream of keeping their
conclusions to themselves. What they considered true should be public.
Perhaps, in their feeling that it is the duty of the man of science
to communicate to the people the result of his studies, they hid the
most beautiful motive of the whole century—one that is not brought
out by the historians of philosophy—the imperative exigency of Truth
that impels divulgation. It is frequently remarked that they were the
real champions of Illuminism inasmuch as they claimed the right of the
people to be enlightened; the idea of Truth which prompted such a claim
is the loftiest part of their contribution to philosophy.
The French mathematical mentality, after having exported Descartes,
had imported Newton, and as Hobbes and, before him, Bacon, had come to
France to find the yeast they needed to develop their own theories, so
now men like Voltaire and Rousseau made their leaven out of Locke’s
and Hume’s doctrines and studied the political institutions of
England. In France, from Montaigne, from Pascal, men had learned the
cautious prudence, and the self-dedication to the object of faith that
are nearly antithetic and usually never appear together Montaigne’s
influence is due to the fact that he reflects the state of mind of
all the western world, tired of religious struggles and the emphatic
expressions of dogmatism on all sides; it was due also to his charming
style and the purity of his French mind. So French is he, so much a man
of the West, that his charm is felt alike by French and Anglo-Saxon
minds. One cannot resist him. In his analytic scepticism he is so
logically methodic, that his style is like the colour of a piece of
antique bronze, inviting the onlooker to touch it whilst its lines,
its lights and shadows reveal the powerful mind of the sculptor.
Montaigne through his very respect for the Church helped to ruin the
religious spirit of his countrymen, and the genius of Pascal could not
have made up for it, even if its mysticism and its repugnance for the
_Moi haissable_ had not been tinged as they were by the self-assertive
spirit of his time. Both mysticism and scepticism take their practical
form in Pierre Bayle.
Few men ever enjoyed the gift of sympathy with which he was endowed
because few men are so superlatively sincere. He does not renounce
religion, he is indeed quite a religious man, but his religion
is negative on account of his mysticism as a believer and of his
scepticism as a scientist. To him the Thomist and Lockian point of
view of the super-rationality of the Revelation is an illusion.
In perfect sincerity he could say _credo quia absurdum_, and like
Tertullian proclaim definitely the divorce of science from religion, of
rationality from irrationality.
His next move was to divorce morality from religion. Men could be
excellent in Pagan times and they can be wicked in Christian times, yet
Christianity is superior to Paganism; obviously religious opinions are
independent of the morality of men.
He then passed to politics. His idea of religion was far too high to
allow him to consider it as an auxiliary of the state’s police as
English theorists had often done, and since it had nothing to do with
morals the Church could have nothing to do with man as a citizen. This
evidently made not only for tolerance, but for indifference on the part
of the state in all religious matters.
Expelled from science, morality, and politics, religion was thus
as good as expelled from life by a mystic simply because he had
the sincerity and coherency to be practically consistent with the
theoretical ground of the philosophy of the time.
Voltaire overshadows the century as Louis XIV had done the preceding
one. His greatness does not depend on his contribution to philosophy,
but on his immense efficiency as a propagandist of the conclusions
reached by philosophy. Like all the great and best men of Illuminism he
was absorbed in the moral and religious problem and had most obviously
assimilated the best English theories. Less sincere than Bayle, he took
up his sceptical conclusions, without, however, sharing his mysticism,
and in the prose of the greatest French writer of the century, he
set to work to popularise the destructive criticisms of all dogmas.
Voltaire may have been convinced that dogmas were harmful, but as he
did not bring forward anything to put in their stead his influence
was negative. What it would have been without the constant recall to
present experience of English empiricism cannot be gauged; as it was,
present experience was rather an incentive to dissolve and destroy the
whole social order than to build; and towards past experiences there
could be no recall whatsoever, or rather there was only one and an
original one, but it could not be heard.
To Voltaire history offered no direct lesson. His belief in the
supremacy of reason could only bring him to despise the incoherency of
historical facts through which very often the rationality of history
displays itself. His clearness of sight limited his outlook to the
present, and this focussing of life was an abstraction which prevented
him from realising the historical forces at play in the political and
social circumstances of his country. His religiousness is strongly
tinged with utilitarianism, as he held, like many Englishmen had
done, that the purpose of Churches was to act as moral check to the
lower class. All these fathers of Liberalism and Radicalism are more
aristocrats than democrats. Their worship of culture and reason makes
for political tyranny and a social system of caste as distinct as
that of the Indians. Hence it evoked a reaction, and this found its
spokesman in Jean Jacques Rousseau. People were tired of dry reason and
its negativeness, they felt parched and longed for affirmative works;
he came out, a man of genius, devoid of the mathematical and classical
grounding of the others; entirely led by feelings and, alternately, by
the most generous and lowest impulses he was a democrat.
Until Rousseau appeared the writers on political matters had been
either followers of the _jus naturalism_ or of the constitutionalist
schools.
In Rousseau two streams mingle their waters, for he is an artist as
well as the most original thinker France had after Bayle. As an artist
he is the spokesman of his generation, and it is as such that his
contemporaries took to him as they did in spite of his disreputable
personal life. As a thinker, although the statement may sound very
daring, he ought to share with Berkeley and Hume the honour of being
considered as one who made the way for Kant. His were mere intuitions;
they could not be more as he had no scientific or philosophic training.
But as Professor Saitta has pointed out, his reaction against
rationalism transcends very much what was grasped by most of his
readers and even sometimes by recent critics. His passionate claim for
the important part played by sentiment in the life of man and by all
irrational forces, original though it is, is the impulsive reaction
of an artist, whereas by the time he wrote, Italy had already had for
some quarter of a century the works of a man who had claimed, with
a speculative genius far superior to his, the acknowledgment of all
the different activities of mind. And Giambattista Vico had been a
jurist and an historian as well as a philosopher. So that his notion
of Man was capable of taking in, not only his rational activity, or
his sense relation to the exterior world, or his sentimental life,
or his religious position, as rationalism, empiricism, sensism and
mysticism had respectively done; but the whole range of man’s spiritual
manifestations. Therefore, is it that Rousseau’s greatest intuitions
are those that could not affect Italy in a speculative way. The man who
was to pick them up was a German whose genius had all the robustness
of his country at that stage, coming as it was to the fore after having
fed on the intellectual production of Italy, France and England.
What affected Italian thought most was the weakest part of Rousseau.
The idea to which he owed his immediate fame is that nature made man
happy and good, but that society had made him bad and unhappy. He was
thereby contradicting rationalism and empiricism, he was flinging
his glove in the face of all Illuminism. And he could do it not on
philosophical ground, but merely calling upon life to justify his
assertion. That age of light was an age of corruption and misery. The
lack of religion had brought in its trail the lack of seriousness; the
abstract subjectivism of a century had made of each man a self-centred
world. Liberty was, so to speak, constantly cried for out of tune since
it could not be accompanied by the assertion of law. For all that the
Jus-naturalists and Constitutionalists had admitted the liberty of men
to make a contract and give themselves the form of government which
suited them best; they had denied the citizens the liberty of declaring
such contract lapsed when it had ceased to satisfy them. As this was
due to their training in a philosophy that considered the world as
a machine, Rousseau had no reason to follow them nor to see in the
state a mechanism subject to laws as inalterable as those of nature.
Therefore he realised the real essence of liberty as inalienable. It
could be transferred, not alienated. Strong in this sense of liberty
Man must fight all the unnatural edifice of society which, according to
him, is the cause of all immorality through the inequalities of men it
begets.
Once men accepted the notion of Rousseau—that Nature had made man
good and society had made him bad—it became not only permissible but
morally right to destroy the order of things which had been evolved by
society and to invest man, every single man, with the consciousness of
his sovereignty. Of the two tendencies which have been compared to two
streams, one was the naturalistic individualism rooted in the thoughts
of his contemporaries and which he expressed merely as an artist,
as the greatest artist of the time; the other was the idealistic
universalism which was personal to him as a thinker, but that was bound
to remain a source of fleeting intuitions on account of his incapacity
to raise it to speculative consciousness. He roused a powerful echo
where men like Voltaire and the Encyclopædists failed to command
attention; and even his art of writing could not have provided him with
so great a fascination if most of the ideas and feelings he expressed
had not been a living reality throbbing in the hearts of his readers,
even of the lowest classes. It was the lowest side of his doctrines
that spread amongst the people, the part which appealed to envy and
hatred, two very powerful levers indeed, but of which Rousseau might
not have chosen to make use had he been able to choose. His insistence
on the distinction between the will of all and the general will tells
eloquently of the intuition he had of transcendental self and of the
ethic essence of the state; but all this comes to nought on account of
his lacking a theoretical ground for such a notion, and he is obliged
to fall back on the intellectual stock of his time; in spite of his
genius, in spite of all sentimental intuition of a universal will, he
is thrown back on a will which is merely the sum, the numerical sum,
of the single wills. Thus it is that he gave us the system which
enthrones quantity while it aims at quality.
His first principle that men are made all alike by Nature, happy and
good, is, as most of the philosophy against which he was the first
to react with the power of genius, perfectly anti-historical and,
therefore, abstract. When it had received at the hands of Kant and
Hegel a systematic and speculative treatment this principle was bound
to have as necessary consequences Socialism and Communism. If the
nature of man, thus hypothetically accepted, is as abstract and as
unreal as an algebraical axiom, it was bound to lead to political and
economic hypothesis just as abstract and as unreal. Since history
shows us in the class struggles and individual competitions the main
spring of progress, the condition _sine qua non_ of all social life,
it is impossible even to dream of the elimination of such class and
individual differences. Life would cease to be dynamic, cease to be
a moving process, it would be static, everything being brought to a
standstill, which is death.
To look at real life, to turn away from atomistic individualism towards
a subjectivism capable of comprehending all the objective world in
order to realise finally what should be the Christian world which must
be _Liberty and Law_, another century and a half was needed. Now we
can look back to Rousseau and detect in him the obscure foreshadowing
of the school of thought which was to redeem in the face of reason the
irrational activities of Mind, not as the handmaids of reason but in
their full autonomy and necessity. Mind is no longer pure reason, and
philosophy does not exclude but imply religion and art, the two moments
of law and liberty, although such distinction of activities does not
destroy the vital unity of man’s conscience. Mankind is no longer the
arithmetical sum of X beings reduced to the same type and value, it
transcends the individual and can be realised as well in the smaller
cell of society which is the family as in the greater cell which is the
country. Consequently, for the abstract man of Rousseau a Man can be
now substituted who never is Man as Man, but Man in his full reality
as son, as brother, as husband, as father, as worker, as citizen, as
believer, as artist.
To make this possible, however, a long process was required, the first
stage being Rousseau and the application of his theories even in their
negativity. For to reach Fascism, which really puts men on the same
level, it was necessary to break through class distinctions as they
existed then, that is to say as static partitions meant to stay as they
were. It was necessary so that power should slip from the hands of
people, who considered it as their natural birthright, into the hands
of those who are actually fit to hold it. Again such a revolution was
necessary so that a day should come in which neither the aristocracy
nor the proletariat could think of eliminating politically each other.
And, as the philosophy of Italy proclaims, ethical reality is neither
of the subject in itself, nor of the object, but of their actual
relation; so Fascism does not allow class elimination but protects
class competition as the best means of raising the spiritual and
economical standard of the nation.