The second cause of contemporary pessimism is the rapid progress of

positive science, and the revelations it is making in regard to the

natural world. The movement has been so precipitate, new ideas have

been produced with such rapidity, that the intelligence has found it

difficult to adapt itself to them; we are going too fast, we find it

as difficult to get our breath as the rider of a runaway horse, or an

aeronaut swept away at a dizzy speed by the wind. Knowledge causes

thus, at the present epoch, a sense of discomfort which is due to a

disturbance of the inner equilibrium; consciousness of the world,

so joyous in its beginnings at the time of the Renaissance, making

its first appearance in the midst of Rabelais’ uproarious fun, has

come to be almost melancholy. We have not yet become domesticated in

the infinities of the new world which has been revealed to us, and

we feel a little lost; therein lies the secret of the melancholy of

the present epoch, which was melodramatic and rapid in the pages of

Chateaubriand and the youngest children of the century; and has come to

be serious and reflective in the pages of Leopardi and of Schopenhauer

and of the pessimists of the present day. In India the Brahmans are

distinguished by a black point between their eyes; our men of science,

our philosophers and artists, carry this black point on their foreheads.

[Sidenote: Exaggerated development of thought.]

The third cause of pessimism, which results from the two preceding,

is the suffering caused by the exaggerated development of thought at

the present day, and the disproportionate place that it occupies at

present in human life. We are suffering from a sort of hypertrophy of

the intelligence. Those who work with their brains, who meditate upon

life and death, who philosophize, ultimately experience this suffering;

and the same is true of artists, who pass their life in endeavouring

to realize a more or less inaccessible ideal. One is drawn all ways

at once by the sciences and arts; one wishes to devote one’s self

simultaneously to all of them, and one is obliged to choose. One’s

whole vitality sets in toward one’s brain; one has to check it, to beat

it back, to resign one’s self to vegetating instead of to living! One

does not resign one’s self—one prefers to abandon one’s self to the

inner fire that consumes one. One’s thoughts gradually become feebler,

the nervous system becomes irritable, becomes feminine; but the will

remains virile, is always on the stretch, unsatisfied, and the result

is an eternal struggle, an endless dissatisfaction with one’s self;

one must choose, must have muscles or nerves; be a man or a woman;

and the thinker and artist are neither the one nor the other. If by a

simple immense effort we could but express the world of sentiment and

thought we carry within us, with what joy, what pleasure we should

do it; even if the brain should be torn asunder in the process! But

we must give it out by small fragments, squeeze it out drop by drop,

submit to all the interruptions of life, and little by little the

organism becomes exhausted in the struggle between mind and body, and

the intelligence flickers like a light in a rising wind, until the

spirit is vanquished and the light goes out.

[Sidenote: Dissolving effect of subjective analysis on the emotions.]

Modern thought is not only more clear-sighted in matters of the

external world, but also in matters of the internal world. John

Stuart Mill maintained that introspection and the progress of

psychological analysis possess a certain dissolving force that, along

with disillusionment, induces sadness. We come to be too well aware

of the source of our feelings and the details of our character; what

an antagonism between being gifted enough in matters of philosophy or

poetry to create a world to one’s own mind, to embellish and illuminate

the real world, and, nevertheless, being too analytic and introspective

to profit by the pleasing illusion! We build airy palaces of cards

and are the first to blow them down. We are without pity for our own

hearts, and sometimes wonder whether we should not have been better off

without them; we are too transparent to our own eyes, we see the hidden

springs of our own activity, we have no sincere faith in objective

reality, nor faith enough in the rationality of our own joys to enable

them to attain their maximum.

[Sidenote: Heightened sensibility.]

At the same time that the intelligence is becoming more penetrating and

reflective with the progress of knowledge, sensibility of every kind

is becoming more delicate; even sympathy, according to the pessimist,

is coming to be an instrument of torture by annexing the suffering of

others in addition to our own. The echo and reverberation in us of the

sufferings of other people, growing with the growing sociality, seem

to be greater than the echo and reverberation in us of human joys.

Social needs themselves, which have been so magnified at the present

day, are so far from being satisfied that pessimists are asking whether

they ever can be satisfied and whether humanity is not destined to

become simply more numerous in the struggle for existence, and more

wretched and more conscious of its wretchedness.

[Sidenote: Depression of vitality.]

And, finally, a last cause of pessimism is the enfeeblement of the

will, which accompanies an exaltation of the intelligence and the

sensibility. Pessimism is in some sort a metaphysical suggestion

engendered by physical and moral powerlessness. Consciousness of

lack of power produces a disesteem, not only for one’s self, but for

everything; a disesteem which, in certain speculative minds, must

inevitably crystallize into _a priori_ formulæ. It has been said that

suffering embitters one; and the same is true in an even greater degree

of a sense of powerlessness. Recent psychological observations confirm

this conclusion.[139] Among the insane, and among hypnotic subjects,

periods of satisfaction and optimism, which are periods of benevolence

and amenity, coincide with a heightened muscular power, whereas periods

of discontent and malevolence coincide with a state of depression of

the will which is accompanied by a lowering of the muscular powers,

sometimes by one-half. One may say, with M. Féré, that people in good

health, at the maximum of their muscular vitality, are incessantly

disposed to estimate the world in terms of their own vigour, whereas

the degenerate, the physically or mentally enfeebled, are incessantly

disposed to estimate the world and its possibilities in terms of their

own slackness and incompetency. Add that, being themselves unequal

to the struggle with the universe, it seems to them, by a natural

illusion, that the universe is unequal to their ideals and demands upon

it; they fancy that it is they that tip the scale, whereas the fact is

precisely the opposite.

[139] M. Ch. Féré, _Revue philosophique_, July, 1886.

[Sidenote: Relation between powerlessness and pessimism.]

In all the experiments in hypnotism a sense of powerlessness engenders

dissatisfaction; the patient who finds himself unable to obtain

possession of a desired object endeavours to explain his inability by

seeking in the object itself some quality which renders it repulsive.

We are inevitably inclined to objectify the limitations of our own

power instead of recognizing them for what they are. Once started in

this path, hypnotic patients would certainly, if they were competent,

go the length of constructing a metaphysical system to justify their

state of mind.[140]

[140] A woman somnambulist was induced to believe that she

could not lift her worsted neckerchief off the back of a chair;

her shoulders were cold and she wanted it; she put out her

hand, and finding herself unable to overcome the subjective

obstacle, she translated it into the outer world and declared

that the neckerchief was unclean, or of an offensive colour,

etc., and ultimately became violently terrified. Another

subject, also a woman, was persuaded that she could not pull

open a drawer; she touched the button and then let go of it

shivering, and exclaiming that it was cold. “No wonder,” she

added, as a rational justification of her repulsion, “it is of

iron!” She was given an iron compass; she endeavoured to handle

it, but soon dropped it. “You see,” she said, “it is as cold as

the handle, I cannot hold it.” Thus the objective explanation

of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of

logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar

phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological

and metaphysical system.

[Sidenote: Sense of powerlessness destined to increase.]

Pessimism thus probably originates, for the individual, in a sense of

lack of power. Sometimes this sense possesses indisputably a certain

element of universality; a consciousness of the limits of human power,

as of human intelligence, must as inevitably increase by the very

progress of our knowledge and capacity. Pessimism is not, therefore,

pure madness, nor pure vanity; or, if it is madness, the madness is

natural, and is induced sometimes by nature itself. At certain periods

nature seems to go insane, to revel in folly, although the power of

logic, which is identical in the last resort with the overruling

principle of things, always has the last word in the universe, as it

ought to have also in the human mind.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up: in this century of transition, of religious and moral and

social transformation, of reflection and dissolving analysis, causes

of suffering are abundant and ultimately assume the guise of motives

of despair. Every new step in intelligence and sensibility brings new

modes of suffering within our reach. The desire of knowledge, in

especial, which is the most dangerous of all human desires, because the

object of it is really infinite, becomes every day more insatiable and

enslaves not only isolated individuals, but entire nations; it is the

desire of knowledge that is the disease of the century, a disease which

is growing, and becoming for the philosopher the disease of humanity.

The seat of the disease is in the head; it is the brain of mankind that

is attacked. We are far from the naïveté of primitive people, who, when

they are asked for the seat of thought, point to the stomach or the

bosom! We are well aware that we think with our heads, for it is in our

heads that we suffer from a preoccupation with the unknown, with the

ideal, with an incessant endeavour to overtake the progress of a winged

and devouring thought. On the mountains of Tartary one sometimes sees

a strange animal pass through the morning mist at a breathless speed;

its eyes are those of a frightened antelope, and while it gallops with

a foot that trembles as it strikes the soil, two great wings stretch

out from the sides of its head and seem on the point of lifting it from

the ground each time that they pulsate. It sweeps down the valleys, and

its path is marked by traces of blood, and suddenly it falls, and the

two great wings rise from the body, and an eagle, which was feeding

leisurely upon its brain, takes its way off into the sky.

[Sidenote: Is pessimism the last word of philosophy?]

II. Is pessimism curable? A sense of evil constitutes a legitimate

element in the metaphysical or religious sentiment; but is that a

sufficient reason for recognizing it not simply as a part, but as the

whole of metaphysics and of religion? Such is the problem.

[Sidenote: Pessimism only part of the truth.]

Von Hartmann has endeavoured to discover in all religion a basis of

pessimism. To do so is to judge all humanity too narrowly, according to

one’s observation of it at the present day. To maintain that religion

is founded on a radical pessimism is like affirming that medicine is

based not on a theory of the curability, but of the incurability of

disease. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, like Spinoza’s optimism, contains,

no doubt, a certain indestructible element of truth, but immensely

overstated and magnified. If science cannot regard the world as

divine, neither can it regard the world as diabolical. There is no

more ground for cursing the objective universe than for adoring it.

And the subjective causes of unhappiness, which we have analyzed,

are provisional simply. Human knowledge, which at present is so

considerable in its dimensions that it actually embarrasses the brain,

may well come to be so organized (as, indeed, in some cases, it is even

now) that it will produce a sense of well-being and of largeness of

life only. There is need, however, for a wholly new science, that of

intellectual hygiene, of intellectual therapeutics, a science which,

once created, might prevent or cure the mental depression which seems

to result from exaggerated nervous excitation, such as pessimism seems

to be incidental to, and such as Greece was unacquainted with.

[Sidenote: Resignation.]

For the rest, the desire of knowledge, which is, as we have seen,

among the most profound of the desires of the century, may become the

source of, perhaps, the most trustworthy and most infallible cure for

a great number of human ills. Some of us, certainly, who are of the

physically and mentally disinherited, may cry: “I have suffered in all

my joys.” _Nescio quid amari_ was present for us in the first draught

of pleasure, in the first smile, in the first kiss, and yet the present

life is not without its sweetness when we do not rebel against it,

when it is rationally accepted. What makes up for the bitterness of

knowledge is the definiteness and clearness that it lends to the world.

As science becomes more perfect it may some day inspire the soul with

something of the serenity that is everywhere incidental to unfaltering

clear light. Therein lies the secret of Spinoza’s intellectual calm.

If his objective optimism is indefensible, his subjective optimism is

not without an aspect of truth in the consciousness of inner peace that

belongs to breadth of intelligence and harmony of thought.

[Sidenote: Analysis destroys irrational joys only.]

So far as introspection is concerned, and the dissolving force it

exercises upon our joys, introspection is destructive, really, of none

but irrational joys, and by way of compensation, it is destructive also

of irrational griefs. Truth resists analysis; it is our business to

seek in truth not only for the beautiful, but for the good. Take it

all in all, there is as much solid and enduring truth in enlightened

love of family, of country, of humanity, as in the most unquestionable

scientific fact, or in certain physical laws, like that of gravitation.

The great remedy for excessive analysis, such as Amiel, for example,

suffered from, is a little to forget one’s self, to widen one’s

horizon, and, above all, to do something. Action, by its very nature,

is a realized synthesis, a decision which necessitates the solution of

a certain number of problems, or the recognition that their solution is

not indispensable. Action is something too trenchant and provisional,

no doubt, but men must remember that they live in the provisional and

not the eternal, and that of their life, after all, what is least

provisional is action, motion, the vibration of an atom, the undulation

which traverses the great whole. Whoever lives immersed in the conduct

of life has no time for self-pity or self-dissection. Other forms of

oblivion are involuntary and sometimes lie beyond one’s power, but one

may always forget one’s self. The cure for all the sufferings of the

modern brain lies in an enlargement of the heart.

[Sidenote: The problem of distribution of wealth.]

It has been urged, it is true, that we suffer increasingly from a

growing sympathy and pity for each other. The problem of individual

happiness, owing to the increasing sense of the solidarity of mankind,

is more than ever dependent to-day upon the happiness of society at

large. Not only our immediate and personal griefs, but the griefs of

other people, of society, of humanity, present and to come, influence

us. So be it. To discuss the future would be endless. We have not

Macbeth’s privilege of being brought face to face with the file of

future generations, and cannot read in advance the destiny of our

descendants in their faces. The mirror of human life shows us nothing

but an image of ourselves, and in this image we are inclined, like the

poets, to emphasize the lines of pain. The labour problem, which at

present distresses us, is infinitely complex; but we believe that the

optimists have even more right to regard it with tranquillity than the

pessimists have to declare it insoluble; in especial when one considers

that it has assumed a threatening aspect only during something like

the last half century.

[Sidenote: How the economic half of the problem will be dealt with.]

The labour problem involves two distinct questions, one of them

relating to a conflict of interests, the other to a conflict of

intentions. We believe that the strictly economic problem will one

day be solved by a simultaneous increase in the difficulty of the

industrial situation and in the knowledge of how to deal with it, which

will lead the well-to-do classes to perceive that by endeavouring to

save everything they are running the risk of losing everything, and

will lead the lower classes to perceive that by endeavouring to obtain

too much they are running the risk of gaining nothing and of seeing

society’s coveted wealth melt away before their eyes, and that dividing

capital is like dividing a germ, and results in sterilization. The

remedy for socialism lies in science—even though the first effect of

a wider dissemination of knowledge would be to increase the strength

of socialism. Out of the very intensity of the crisis the solution

will come. The moment different interests are completely conscious of

their real points of antagonism, they are close upon a compromise. War

is never the result of anything but an incomplete knowledge of the

comparative powers and respective interests of the opposing parties;

people fight when they can no longer calculate, and the march of armies

and pitched battles may themselves be regarded as a sort of higher

arithmetic.

[Sidenote: The human half will settle itself.]

When it has once come to be understood that there is no fundamental

conflict of interest between the classes, the sense of antagonism

between them will gradually diminish. The most reassuring promise of a

complete solution of the industrial problem lies in human sociality.

All asperity of temper in the matter will be smoothed away by the

incontestable growth of sympathy and altruism.

[Sidenote: Love and admiration the panacea for pessimism.]

If sympathy, love, labour in common, recreation in common, sometimes

seem to augment the pains of life, they more than proportionately

augment the joys. Moreover, as is well known, to share trouble is to

lessen it; sympathy is itself a pleasure; poets know it, dramatic poets

in especial; even when pity is accompanied by a lively realization

of another’s pain it nevertheless induces love, and to that extent

still preserves a certain charm. That creature suffers, therefore

I love it; and there are infinite joys in love; it, multiplies the

value of life in one’s own eyes, by giving it a value in the eyes of

other people, a social value, which is in the best sense a religious

value. Man, Wordsworth says, lives in admiration, hope, and love,

but he who possesses admiration and love will always possess an

abundance of hope. He who loves and admires will possess the lightness

of heart that carries one through the day without fatigue. Love and

admiration are the great remedies of despair. Love, and you will wish

to live. Whatever may be the value of life from the point of view of

sensibility—knowledge and action, and principally action in behalf of

another, will always constitute reasons for living. And it is mainly

one’s reasons for living that justify one’s tenacity of life.

[Sidenote: Pessimism an optical illusion.]

Pessimism sees only the sensitive side of life; but life presents also

an active and an intellectual side; over and above the agreeable there

exist the great, the beautiful, and the generous. Even from the mere

point of view of pleasure and pain, pessimism is based on calculations

which are as open to discussion as Bentham’s hedonistic arithmetic. We

have seen elsewhere[141] that happiness and unhappiness are _ex post

facto_ mental constructions that are based upon a multitude of optical

illusions. Even the disillusionment of pessimism is itself a sort of an

illusion.

[141] _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_, p.

89.

Leopardi hit upon an ingenious empirical argument in favour of

pessimism in his dialogue between an almanac seller and a passer-by:

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars! Who wants new

almanacs?

_Passer-by._ Almanacs for the new year?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, sir.

_Passer-by._ Do you think this year will be a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, to be sure, sir.

_Passer-by._ As happy as last year?

_Almanac Seller._ Much more so.

_Passer-by._ As the year before?

_Almanac Seller._ Still more so, sir.

_Passer-by._ Why, should you not like the new year to resemble one of

the past two years?

_Almanac Seller._ No, sir, I should not.

_Passer-by._ How many years have gone by since you began to sell

almanacs?

_Almanac Seller._ About twenty years, sir.

_Passer-by._ Which of the twenty should you wish the new year to be

like?

_Almanac Seller._ I do not know.

_Passer-by._ Do you not remember any particular year which you thought

a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Indeed, I do not, sir.

_Passer-by._ And yet life is a fine thing, is it not?

_Almanac Seller._ So they say.

_Passer-by._ Should you not like to live those twenty years, and even

all your past life from your birth, over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Ah, dear sir, would to God that I could!

_Passer-by._ But if you had to live over again the life you have

already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings?

_Almanac Seller._ I should not like that.

_Passer-by._ Then what other life would you like to live? Mine, or that

of the prince, or whose? Do you not think that I, or the prince, or

anyone else would reply exactly as you have done, and that no one would

wish to repeat the same life over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, I believe that....

_Passer-by._ And it is clear that each person is of opinion that the

evil he has experienced exceeds the good; ... but with the new year

fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the

happy life will begin....

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars![142]

[142] Dialogue cited by M. Caro in _Pessimisme_.

[Sidenote: Persistent novelty in the universe.]

Many of us no doubt would reply to the poet as the almanac seller

did—we should not wish to begin our life over again—but it is not

to be concluded from that that our past life, taken as a whole, has

been unhappy rather than happy. It is to be concluded simply that it

has lost its novelty, and with its novelty a great part of its charm.

Man, in effect, is not a purely sensitive being. His pleasures are,

so to speak, not blind. He not only enjoys, he knows that he enjoys,

and knows what he enjoys, and each of his sensations constitutes an

addition to his treasures of knowledge. Having once begun to amass

this treasure, he desires incessantly to augment it, though he cares

little enough futilely to handle and to contemplate the wealth already

acquired. Our past life, therefore, is to some extent tarnished and

deflowered. The number of hours that were so rich, so full that we

could not exhaust them at the time and desire to repeat them, is not

great; and, barring such hours, the principal charm of the rest of our

past existence lay in estimating its details, in comparing them with

each other, in exercising upon them our intelligence and our activity,

and in lightly passing them by; they were not worth lingering over;

they resembled the tracts of country that the traveller does not feel

tempted to turn and look back upon. If novelty possesses for mankind

a certain charm, if a repetition of identically similar circumstances

rarely affords as great pleasure the second time as the first, the

fact is owing in part to the very laws of desire, but in part to the

superiority of the human mind; the desired object should always offer

something new to the intelligence. Every desire contains an element of

philosophic and æsthetic curiosity that the past cannot satisfy; the

flower of novelty cannot be gathered twice from the same branch.

[Sidenote: And genuine novelty.]

But Leopardi might reply, What is the charm of novelty but an

illusion? For everything on earth is really old: the future is but

a repetition of the past and ought logically to be as repugnant as

the past. Abstract formulæ, and precipitate inductions like that,

offer no resistance either to reason or to experience. Whatever

pessimistic poets may say to the contrary, nothing is a repetition

of anything else, either in human life or in the universe. There is

always something new under the sun, if it be no more than the budding

leaves on a tree or the changing colour on a cloud. No two sunsets are

the same. Fairy-stories tell of a marvellous picture book, the pages

of which one may turn forever without weariness, for the instant the

picture has been looked upon and the page turned, its place is taken

by a new picture. The universe is such a book; when one wishes to turn

back to a familiar page it is no longer the same nor are we ourselves

the same, and if we consider the matter narrowly, the world should

always possess for us its first freshness.

[Sidenote: Perception of difference the mark of high intelligence.]

The distinctive sign of a really superior, really human intellect is

to be interested in everything in the universe, and in the difference

between things. When we look straight before us without, properly

speaking, seeing anything, we perceive resemblances only; when we

look with attention, with affectionate love of detail, we perceive an

infinity of differences; an intellectual activity, always awake, finds

everywhere objects of interest. To love anything is to find in it,

incessantly, elements of novelty.

[Sidenote: The world inexhaustibly interesting.]

When pessimists maintain that the charm of the future is an illusion,

it may be retorted that the illusion is theirs, that they do not

look at the world closely enough to see it as it is, and do not love

it because they do not know it. If one could view the Alps from the

surface of a passing aërolite, the Rigi, the Faulhorn, Mont Blanc,

Monte Rosa would all look alike, would all appear to be indifferent

points on the earth’s rind; but what shall be said of the naïve

traveller who confounds them, and professes to have seen the whole

of the Alps when he has climbed the Rigi? Life, also, is a perpetual

ascent, of which it is difficult to say one has seen the whole because

one has climbed the first peak. From childhood to old age, the horizon

grows larger and changes and is always new. Nature seems to repeat

itself only to a superficial gaze. Each of its works is original,

like those of genius. Æsthetically or intellectually considered,

discouragement is voluntary or involuntary blindness. If poets have

wished to forget past experiences which were too painful, even in

memory, no true scholar or man of science has ever expressed the desire

to forget what he knew, to make a blank space in his intelligence, to

reject the knowledge so slowly acquired—unless, indeed, it were for

the refined pleasure of learning it all over again and of owing nothing

to the labour of previous generations. Beneath every human desire,

we repeat, there exists this thirst for truth, which is one of the

essential elements of the religious sentiment, and all other desires

may be satiated or fatigued, but this one still subsists; one may be

weary of life without being weary of knowledge; even those who have

been most bitterly wounded by the conditions of life may still accept

them for the light that the intelligence brings them at the price

of pain, as a soldier, whose eyes have been injured by some chance

splinter, nevertheless strains them beneath his eyelids to follow the

course of the fight about him.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect, the analysis that pessimism is based upon is, in many

respects, superficial. Even the word pessimism is inexact, for the

doctrine ascribes no progress from bad to worse, from pejus to

pessimum; it maintains simply that the world is bad and must be

recognized as such, and that this recognition is the consequence and

the condition of progress, of intellectual power and of knowledge.

[Sidenote: Suicide as a resource.]

The practical rules for the conduct of life that pessimism prescribes

from its principles are still more open to discussion. Granted the

wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new

religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable. This

novelty, which is older than Sâkya-Muni itself, is one of the most

ancient of Oriental ideas; it to-day proves attractive to a number of

Occidental peoples, as it has several times proved attractive to them

in former days, for traces of it may be found among the Neo-Platonists

and the Christian mystics. The conception is that of Nirvâna. To

sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune

away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognize that to be rid

of them is a deliverance; to practice a sort of complete psychical

circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing

you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the

mystics would say of God); to create an inner vacuum, and feel dizzy

in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plentitude

supreme—Πλὴρωμα—these have always constituted temptations to

mankind; mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been

tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over. The

pantheistic or monistic notion of Nirvâna eludes criticism precisely

because it is void of all precise content. Physiologically speaking,

Nirvâna corresponds to the period of repose and quietude which always

follows a period of tension and of effort. One cannot stop and take

breath in the eternal forward march that constitutes the phenomenal

life of humanity; it is good sometimes to feel lassitude, it is good a

little to understand the comparative cheapness and vanity of everything

one has hitherto attained, but good only on condition that such an

understanding of our past constitutes a spur to fresh effort in the

future. To rest content with lassitude—to believe that the deepest

existence is the meanest, the coldest, the most inert—is equivalent to

a confession of defeat in the struggle for existence. Nirvâna leads, in

fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the

logical absurdity that the vanquished in the struggle for existence are

the victors over the trials and miseries of life.

[Sidenote: Trial of Nirvâna.]

It would be interesting to perform a practical experiment in Nirvâna.

One of my acquaintances pushed the experiment as far as a European of

scientific tendencies could. He practised asceticism to the point of

rejecting all variety in his diet, he gave up meat (as Mr. Spencer

also did for some time), wine, every kind of ragout, every form of

condiment, and reduced to its lowest possible terms the desire that

is most fundamental in every living being—the desire of food, the

excitation of the famished animal in the presence of appetizing dishes,

the moment of heightened expectation before dinner which constitutes

for so many people the event of the day. For the protracted meals

that are customary, he substituted a certain number of cups of pure

milk. Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his

appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he sought to find

a recompense in the pleasures of abstract meditation, and of æsthetic

contemplation. He entered into a state which was not that of dreamland,

but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details. What

gives relief and outline to the life of each day, what makes each day

an epoch for us in our existence, is the succession of our desires

and our pleasures. One has no idea what a blank would be produced in

one’s existence by the simple omission of some hundreds of meals. By

a similar process of elimination, employed in regard to pleasures

and desires generally, he secured for his life a certain savourless,

colourless, ethereal charm. The whole universe recoiled by degrees

into the distance, for the universe was composed of things that he

no longer came into forcible contact with, that he no longer handled

vigorously, and that, therefore, came less violently into contact with

him, and left him, therefore, more indifferent to them. He entered the

cloud in which the gods sometimes envelop themselves, and no longer

felt the firm earth beneath his feet, but he soon found that, if he no

longer stood upon firm earth, he was not on that account the nearer

heaven; what struck him most was the enfeeblement of his thoughts

precisely at the time when, owing to his complete detachment from all

material cares, he was inclined to believe himself most intellectually

competent. The instant that thought ceased to rest upon a foundation

of solid reality it became incapable of abstraction; the life of

thought as of our whole being is contrast, and it gathers power by

dealing from time to time with objects which seem least readily to lend

themselves to its purposes. An endeavour to purify and to sublimate

thought robs it of its precision; meditation gives place to dream, and

dream gives place to the ecstasy in which mystics lose all sense of

the distinction between ἕν καὶ πᾶν, but in which a mind accustomed

to self-possession cannot long remain without a sense of vapidity.

Then a feeling of revolt supervenes, and one begins to understand

that abstract thought needs, if it is to achieve its highest point of

lucidity and concentration, to be spurred on by desire. Such at least

was the experience of the friend mentioned above, and I suggest his

experiment for imitation to those who speak of Nirvâna from hearsay

only, and have never practised absolute renunciation. The only danger

to fear is lest renunciation produce a certain brutalization, lest one

lose one’s self-control and be overcome by a sort of vertigo before

having measured the depth of the abyss, and having perceived that it is

bottomless. The safest paths in the mountains are those that have been

trodden out by asses and mules. “Follow the asses,” is the advice of

the guides. The advice is often good in real life; the good sense of

the multitude opens the way which must be followed, whether one will or

not, and philosophers may well at times “follow the asses.”

[Sidenote: Sanctity and egoism.]

Absorption in infinite substance, renunciation of the desire to live,

and inert sanctity will always constitute the ultimate form and

expression of human illusion. If all is vanity, nothing, after all, is

more vain than to be completely conscious that all is vanity; if action

is vain, repose is still more vain; life is vain, death is vainer.

Even sanctity is not the equal of charity, the equal, that is to say,

of what binds the individual to other individuals, and by that fact

renders him once more the slave of desire and of pleasure—if not of

his own desires and pleasures, at least of those of other people. One

must always serve someone, must always be in bonds to something, even

if only to the flesh. One must drag a chain, if one is to draw others

after one. Nobody forms a sufficient end and aim for his own activity;

nobody can emancipate himself by living ‘in and in,’ by forming

an ideal circle like the coiled serpent, by reflecting eternally,

according to the Hindu precept, on his navel; nothing is more like

servitude than liberty that is confined within the bounds of self. The

perfect sanctity of the mystics, Buddhists, and pessimists is a subtler

egoism simply; and the sole genuine virtue in the world is generosity,

which does not fear to set its foot in the dust, in the service of

another.

[Sidenote: Pessimism not destined to prevail.]

We do not therefore believe, with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann,

that pessimism will be the religion of the future. Life will not be

persuaded to seek death, nor movement to prefer immobility. We have

said elsewhere that what renders existence possible renders it also

desirable; if the sum of the pains of human life were greater than the

sum of the pleasures, the species would become extinct by a gradual

decrease in the vitality of each succeeding generation. Occidental

nations, or rather the active people in the world, to whom the future

belongs, will never become converts to pessimism. Whoever acts, feels,

has power, and to be strong is to be happy. Even in the Orient, when

their pessimism, the great religions, is addressed to the multitude, it

is very superficial; commonplace maxims on the ills of existence, and

on the necessity for resignation, result as a matter of fact in a _far

niente_ which is appropriate to the manners of the Orient. And, when

it is addressed to thinkers, pessimism is only provisional—it points

to its own remedy in Nirvâna; but Nirvâna as a panacea and salvation

by negation, or by violent self-destruction, will not long captivate

modern common sense. It is ridiculous to attribute to man the power

to destroy the sacred germ from which life, with all its illusions,

has sprung, and will always spring, in spite of ascetics and partisans

of individual suicide, and even, if Von Hartmann will, of “cosmic

suicide.” It is perhaps less difficult to create than to annihilate, to

make God than to destroy Him.

CHAPTER V.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE

DOGMA—_Concluded_.

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective

idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence

resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of

idealism considered from point of view of the religious

sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms:

Possibility of universal progress on the hypothesis of

radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation

between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral

idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment:

Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.

II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:

Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity

of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin

of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception

of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.

III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary

systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of

monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and

as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists

in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the

rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without

the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical

and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the

world and of humanity it may be founded on scientific

monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these

expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that

is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the

immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for

the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence,

of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is

eternity _a parte post_ a ground of discouragement or

of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other

worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of

beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of

gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a

universal society.

IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of

immortality from the point of view of monism—Two

possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or

untemporal existence and continuation of life in some

superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its

function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the

systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal

life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction

made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers

between individuality and personality—Eternal life

problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of

the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional

immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional

immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that

of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of

the present life and its evolution into some superior

form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution

permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours

and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its

relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural

selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections

drawn from science—Protestations of affection against

the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III.

Modern opposition between the conception of _function_

and the conception of simple substance, in which

ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of

immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern

philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a

continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity,

but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between

complexity and instability—Three stages of social

evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective

character of individual consciousness—Conception of

progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and

natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the

compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its

dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical

universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their

possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary

psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration

of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification

of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of

love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of

every conception relative to existence, of consciousness,

and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV.

Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the

present state of evolution, do not believe in the

immortality of the individual—Antique and modern

stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy

and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of

philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness,

to the point of to some extent approving one’s own

annihilation.

[Sidenote: The problem of the immanence of being.]

Naturalism consists in believing that nature, together with the beings

which compose it, make up the sum total of existence. But even from

this point of view there still remains the problem, what existence

essentially is, and what special mode of existence is most typical.

Is nature material, or mental, or both? The problem of the essence of

being is one that cannot be escaped.

[Sidenote: The double-aspect theory.]

The theory that seems to-day to be dominant is the “double-aspect”

theory—the theory of two inseparable correlatives subjective and

objective, of consciousness and of motion. We have, as M. Taine[143]

would say, two texts of the eternal book instead of one. The question

is, which of the two texts is original and sacred? Sometimes that which

is furnished by introspection alone, sometimes that which objective

science endeavours to decipher, are respectively held to be primitive.

Thence arise two opposed tendencies, not alone in psychological but

in metaphysical speculation; the one toward idealism, the other

toward materialism; the one toward what lies within, the other toward

what lies without. But these two aspects may and should be conceived

as possessing a certain unity; there is an inevitable tendency in

the human mind to follow out two converging lines to their point

of intersection. There are, therefore, three forms of naturalism:

idealism, materialism, monism. These three constitute the three genuine

systems of thought from which theism, atheism, and pantheism are

respectively derived.

[143] M. Ribot holds the same doctrine.

_I. Idealism._

[Sidenote: Idealism defined.]

If the words thought and idea be interpreted as Descartes and Spinoza

understand them, as designating the entire life of the mind, the sum

total of the possible content of consciousness, idealism may be defined

as the system which resolves all reality into thought, into psychical

existence, insomuch that to be is to think or to be thought; to feel or

to be felt; to will or to be willed; to be the object or subject of a

conscious effort.

[Sidenote: Idealism and the religious instinct.]

It is evident that idealism is one of the systems which is capable of

affording a certain satisfaction to the religious sentiment, because

the religious sentiment is allied to the instinct for metaphysics, and

the instinct for metaphysics finds itself at home among all things

of the spirit, of thought, of the moral world. The foundation of

theism, as we have said, is _moralism_; the belief, that is to say,

that the true power in nature is mental and moral. God is simply a

representation of this power, conceived as transcendent. Pantheism

itself, after having divinized and materialized the universe and

resolved all things, so to speak, into God, tends to become idealistic,

to resolve God into the thought which has conceived Him, to deny Him

all existence over and above that which He possesses in thought,

and for thought, and by virtue of thought. According to the Hindu

comparison, the human mind is like the spider that can build its

mansion out of materials drawn from its own body, and then reabsorb

them.

[Sidenote: Subjective idealism criticised.]

But how shall the mind itself, the central fund of thought that is

the origin and end of all things, be conceived? Is it individual or

impersonal? English subjective or egoistic idealism, as Mr. Huxley

defines it in his “Life of Hume,” replies, that in spite of all

demonstration to the contrary, the collection of perceptions which

constitute our consciousness may be simply a phantasmagoria which,

engendered and co-ordinated by the ego, unrolls its successive

scenes upon a background of nonentity. Mr. Spencer retorts that,

if the universe is thus simply a projection of our subjective

sensations, evolution is a dream; but evolution may be formulated in

idealistic quite as well as realistic terms: and a coherent dream

is as good as reality. Subjective idealism is therefore difficult

to refute logically; but in spite of that fact it will never have

many followers. For this apparent simplification of the world is in

reality a complication. For subjective idealism involves the ridiculous

hypothesis of a chance agreement between the impressions of any given

individual and of all other individuals: a difficulty much harder to

explain away than the preliminary one of the simple reflection in us

of an external world. Mental phenomena are always more complex than

material phenomena.

The reduction of the external world to subjective terms, the

explanation of the optical illusion of objectivity, demands a much

greater display of vain ingenuity than any theory of simple perception.

More than that, the least effort with the resistance that it encounters

is a refutation of egoistic, or as the English again say, solipsistic

idealism. In the fact of resistance, subjective sensation and the

perception of an objective reality coincide. Even if the manner in

which our sensations of resistance are combined in tridimensional space

may be conceived as subjective, it is difficult to admit that the

materials out of which the structure is made are, as it were, suspended

in mid-air. To explain the fact of resistance requires us absolutely

to pass beyond the limits of consciousness, for even in the cases in

which the sensation of resistance seems to be due to hallucination,

the cause of hallucination is always found to be some instance of

actual resistance, of friction or stress inside the body. The mistake

of a madman, who sees an unfamiliar form take shape and rise before

his eyes, is not that of considering the power as existing outside

of himself, but of locating it at the extremities of his nerves of

touch; whereas it is really in his brain, at the point where the nerves

intersect with the cerebral centres. He is right in his sense of the

presence of an enemy, but wrong in the direction in which he looks for

it.

[Sidenote: Truth in subjective idealism.]

We are obliged, therefore, to admit the hypothesis of a multitude

of microcosms, of mine, of yours, of everybody’s, and of a single

macrocosm the same for everybody. What is true is that between the

great world and every little world there is an incessant communication,

by means of which everything that passes in the one is echoed in the

other. We live in the universe, and the universe lives in us. The

statement is not metaphorical, but literal. If we could look into the

consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful

image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities,

etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of

every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we

could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some

poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the

whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its

laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. If the

traces left by experience on the nervous system could be read, like the

writing in a book, the earth might disappear, and its image and history

be handed down in certain chosen human brains.

[Sidenote: Realism destined to prevail.]

Active and practical humanity will always believe in realism to the

extent of insisting that the world possesses an existence which is

independent of any individual thought. We shall dwell no further

on subjective idealism, which is more important as a metaphysical

curiosity than for any comfort it gives to the religious sentiment.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism.]

Of objective idealism the same cannot be said. In objective idealism,

too, all material existence is regarded as a mode of mental existence;

being is identified either with the ideal law which presides over the

development of the universe, or with the genuine foundation of our

consciousness, our sensations, our desires. The world, as Emerson has

said, is a precipitate of the soul.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This hypothesis is certainly one of those that may best serve as a

substitute for theism, if theism should ever disappear. But idealism,

thus understood, is open to the following objection: Is it of any

special use to objectify the soul, if the existence of evil, which

Plato identified with matter, is thereby left unchanged? It is in

vain to translate evolution into psychic terms; no difficulty can be

avoided by so doing. The mysterious imperfections of the exterior world

are transported bodily into the mind; evil is spiritualized simply.

Identifying things with the intellectual law which presides over their

evolution in nowise excuses us from explaining why that law is in so

many respects bad, and why the intelligence that directs the universe

is so often self-contradictory and feeble.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism relatively capable of satisfying the

moral instincts.]

In spite of this objection, which will, perhaps, never receive a

sufficient reply, it is certain that, so far as our moral and social

instincts are concerned, idealism offers us greater ground for hope

than either of the remaining systems of thought. In spite of evil and

pain, the desire of progress and of salvation, which is the basis of

all religious speculation, may rely upon thought as its last resource.

But thought, if the doctrine of objective idealism is to be made

acceptable, must be understood as including not only intelligence,

but also sentiment, desire, and volition, and, in effect, the purely

intellectual idealism of a former time is at the present day being

succeeded by an idealism that regards the will as the fundamental

element in the universe.[144] Universal sensibility is an incident of

universal power of will, whereas intelligence, properly so called,

at least in so far as the function of intelligence is regarded as

representation, is more superficial than sensibility or volition.[145]

These three inseparable forms of psychic life[146] constitute the great

forces to which moral and religious sentiment must always turn for

support.

[144] See Schelling, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wundt, Secrétan, MM.

Ravaison, A. Fouillée, Lachelier, and, to a certain extent, M.

Renouvier.

[145] See Schopenhauer, Horwicz, and M. Fouillée.

[146] See Wundt’s _Psychologie physiologique_.

[Sidenote: Hypothesis of moral progress immanent in the world.]

Idealism, thus understood, constitutes one of the most tempting of the

solutions of the problem of evil. Optimism being, as we have seen,

indefensible, and pessimism being a caricature, the most plausible

religious and metaphysical hypothesis at the present day is the

conception of a “possible progress owing to the radical spontaneity

of all existing things.”[147] The will, according to this hypothesis,

with its tendency to indefinite self-expansion, is _par excellence_

the primitive power, the central element in man and in the universe.

Freedom of the will in man means the consciousness of this progressive

power, which is immanent in all things, and this consciousness may

be made the foundation of a moral being. This conception of freedom,

which is reconcilable with determinism, becomes an additional motive

among the other motives that govern man’s life, and tends to be

realized by the very fact that it is conceived and desired. Through

the intermediation of this conception, reality possesses a progressive

freedom, that is to say, a power of constant union with the whole, and

of moral enfranchisement. “In the beginning there obtains a universal

antagonism among the forces of the universe, a brutal fatality, an

infinite reign of shock and counter-shock, between blind and blindly

driven beings; then there arises a progressive organization that makes

the evolution of consciousness, and therefore of volition, possible;

there arises a gradual union and fraternity among the particulars that

constitute the universe. Ill-will, whether it originate in mechanical

necessity or in intellectual ignorance, is transitory; good-will is

permanent, radical, normal, and fundamental. To cultivate good-will

in one’s self is to enfranchise one’s self from the individual and

the transitory in favour of the universal and the permanent; it is to

become truly free, and by that very fact to become truly loving.”[148]

[147] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d

edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[148] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d

edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[Sidenote: Reconciliation between freedom and determinism.]

Between progressive freedom thus conceived, and the determinism in

the midst of which it progresses, there is no opposition; freedom and

determinism constitute two aspects of one and the same process of

evolution. Determinism essentially consists in a series of actions and

reactions existing between other beings and ourselves; but these very

actions and reactions constitute the manifestation of the development

of our, and their, inner activities. And the source of activity in the

universe is none other than an overflowing power, which is hostile to

limitation, to impediment of every kind; is, in a word, none other than

a self-realizing volition. Freedom, thus understood, may, therefore,

be considered in the last resort as the origin of determinism and as

one with it.[149] Necessity is, so to speak, the outer surface of

freedom—the point of contact between two or more free agents. Freedom

is inconceivable apart from a resulting determinism, for to be free is

to possess power, is to act and to react, is to determine and to be

determined. Determinism, on the other hand, that is to say, reciprocal

action, is inconceivable apart from freedom, from internal action, from

a spontaneous outbreak of power that tends to be free. So that one may

say, without contradiction, that determinism envelops the world, and

that free-will constitutes it.

[149] A. Fouillée, _op. cit._

[Sidenote: Ideal liberty the aim of the universe.]

If the shock of wills in the world is unusually brutal, the reason

is that they are as yet but half conscious of their powers; as

consciousness develops, contest will give way to concurrence. To

avoid violent concussion with obstacles in the way, the free agent

has less need of acquaintance with them than of acquaintance with

itself. As there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to

volition, there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to the ideal

that every volition aims at. It is probable that life is always and

everywhere accompanied by consciousness in some slight degree; and

wherever consciousness exists, desire may exist. Nature’s device, as

a contemporaneous poet has said, is “I aspire.” The human ideal is,

perhaps, no more than the conscious formulation of this aspiration

which is common to the whole universe. If so, it follows that ideal

freedom is the limit of evolution, and that volition, which aims at

ideal freedom, is the principle of it.[150]

[150] “The category of Real Existence does not seem

reconcilable with the notion of liberty; the latter in its

perfection must be conceived under the category of the Ideal,

and in its imperfection under that of Becoming.”—A. Fouillée,

_La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, conclusion.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

It has been objected to this idealist theory of evolution that

progress implies an aim and the observance of certain principles

in its attainment, while evolution does not.[151] But the precise

object of the doctrine in question is to supply evolution with a name

and appropriate principles, and to extend the notion of progress to

the universe as a whole. It has also been objected to this somewhat

panthelistic hypothesis (θέλος), that if everything is free, nothing

is free.[152] This objection is not exact, for it would imply, in

economics, for instance, that to increase everybody’s well-being would

increase the well-being of nobody, or that if everybody equally

should be impoverished, everybody would equally be enriched. To

universalize a conception is one thing, to suppress it is another.

The world cannot at the present day be conceived as distinct from the

human race: the two are vitally and intimately related. Endow mankind

with an unbiassed freedom of will, and Epicurus would be right in

holding that indeterminism is the basis of all things.[153] Similarly,

suppose mankind endowed with “a radical goodness of will, which is

very distinct from freedom of the will, but nevertheless constitutes a

sort of moral freedom in process of formation,”[154] and the germ of

such goodness of will should be found in a more or less unconscious

form throughout the entire universe. Before the human mind can really

produce anything whatever, the whole universe must be like it in

labour. Partisans of the theory of goodness of will as the basis of

human morality are therefore logical in regarding it as more or less

present in some degraded form throughout the whole of nature, even

in beings in which intelligence has not yet made its appearance; and

goodness of will in such cases is to be considered as accompanied

by the obscure beginnings of responsibility, of implicit merit or

demerit—one must return in effect to a sort of re-reading of the Hindu

theory, according to which the several degrees that exist in nature

represent so many stages in morality.

[151] M. Franck, _Essais de critique philosophique_.

[152] M. Franck, _op. cit._

[153] The author argued the point at length, in 1873, in his

book on Epicurus. See also his _Morale anglaise_, 2 partie, pp.

385-386, 2d edition.

[154] A. Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition.

[Sidenote: Moral idealism and the religious sentiment.]

_Hypotheses fingo_ is the mother of metaphysics. Moral idealism of

the kind we have just epitomized from the pages of a contemporary

author is decidedly no more than a hypothesis, and a hypothesis open

to discussion; but it is assuredly the form of idealism that is

least incompatible with the theory of evolution, and with the facts

of natural history and of human history.[155] Moreover, it affords

unusual scope for the religious sentiment, freed from its mysticism

and transcendence. If the unknown activity which lies at the basis

of the natural world has produced in the human race a consciousness

of goodness, and a deliberate desire for it, there is reason to hope

and to believe that the last word of ethics and metaphysics is not a

negative.

[155] This form of idealism is equally compatible with the

prevailing monistic doctrines, and is in some cases, as notably

in that of M. Fouillée, confounded with them. See below.

[Sidenote: Religion interpreted in the light of this hypothesis.]

We have a number of times cited Schleiermacher’s definition of

religion: the sense of our absolute dependence in regard to the

universe and its principle. When the religious sentiment becomes

transformed into a moral idealism its correct formula tends to be the

inverse of the preceding: a sense of the dependence of the universe

upon the determination that goodness shall prevail, of which we are

conscious in ourselves and which we conceive to be or to be capable of

becoming the directing principle of universal evolution. The notion

of the moral and social ideal of freedom is, therefore, according to

this doctrine, not a mere superficial accident in the universe, but

a revelation and growing consciousness of the most fundamental laws

of the universe, of the true essence of things, which is the same in

all beings in different degrees and in diverse combinations. Nature

represents an eternal ascent toward a more and more clearly conceived

ideal, which dominates its progress from beginning to end. As one

climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise

silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems

as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which

uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one

feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian

legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their

strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas,

and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. Ancient peoples

generally regarded the mountains as a transition between earth and sky;

it was from the mountains that the soul, profiting by the impulse lent

it by the last touch of earth, took its freest flight: the mountains

constituted a pathway toward the open heavens. And that may be an

element of profundity in these naïve ideas which ascribe to nature

aspirations which are more properly human. Do there not exist in nature

great unfinished sketches, hints and lines leading upward? Nature has

done all that unconsciously, has blindly piled block on block of stone

slowly toward the stars. It is man’s privilege to read a meaning into

her work, to make use of her efforts, to employ past centuries as the

materials out of which to build the future; by scaling the heights of

nature man will reach the sky.

_II. Materialism._

Properly to estimate idealism it must be contrasted with its opposite,

materialism.

[Sidenote: Materialism difficult to define.]

We shall say but a few words on the subject of pure materialism,

because of all systems of thought materialism is the farthest removed

from those which give rise to religious and to metaphysical theories.

Absolute materialism is somewhat difficult to define, because matter

is one of the vaguest of words. To aim at representing the ultimate

elements of matter as wholly independent of thought, of consciousness,

of life, is evidently chimerical; such an effort leads straight to

the pure indeterminism of matter as conceived by Plato, Aristotle,

and Hegel; to an indefinite dyad, to a theory of virtuality and of

the identity of non-being. Also materialists are obliged to regard

as determinate and material the primitive force of which the world

constitutes simply a development. If, for example, according to the

most recent theories, all matter should prove to be reducible to

hydrogen, materialism would regard hydrogen as constituting a sort of

material or substantial unity in the world. Variety would exist only

in the forms displayed by the primitive element, hydrogen, or, if you

prefer, pre-hydrogen.

[Sidenote: Materialism criticised.]

It must be confessed that this conception is somewhat naïve and

nominalistic; the word material or chemical can never express more

than the outside, than the exterior properties of the primordial

element. The hydrogen atom itself is probably in a high degree

composite, is itself probably a world of little worlds, held in

place by gravitation. The very conception of an indivisible atom is

philosophically infantine. Thomson and Helmholtz have shown that our

atoms are little vortices of energy, and have succeeded in producing

experimentally analogous vortices formed of vapour; for instance, of

the vapour chlor-hydrate of ammonia. Each vortex is composed always of

the same particles; no one particle can be separated from the others;

each vortex possesses, therefore, a stable individuality. When the

attempt is made to cut the vortices, they fly the blade or bend about

it, and prove to be indivisible. They are capable of contraction, of

dilation, of partial interpenetration and distortion, but never of

dissolution. And certain men of science have thence inferred that we

possess thus a material proof of the existence of atoms. And so indeed

we do, providing an atom be understood to be something as complex, as

little primordial, and as relatively enormous as a nebula. Atoms are

indivisible as a nebula is indivisible by a knife blade, and the atom

of hydrogen is about as simple as the solar system. To explain the

universe by hydrogen is like explaining it by the sun and the planets.

The rise of the actual world out of hydrogen can be conceived only

on condition of ascribing to the alleged atoms of hydrogen something

more than physicists and chemists know them to possess. Materialism,

therefore, must enlarge its principle if it is to prove productive:

enlarge, as Diderot would say, your atheism and your materialism.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some theory to account for life.]

But the instant materialism is “enlarged,” the universal element must

at once be regarded as alive and is not what is called brute matter.

Every generation of physicists, as Mr. Spencer says, discovers in so

called brute matter forces the existence of which the best informed

physicist would some years previous have disbelieved. When we perceive

solid bodies, sensitive in spite of their inertia to the action of

forces, the number of which is infinite; when the spectroscope proves

to us that terrestrial molecules move in harmony with molecules in the

stars; when we find ourselves obliged to infer that the innumerable

vibrations traverse space in all directions, the conception which is

forced upon us is not that of a universe of dead matter but rather

that of a universe everywhere alive; alive in the general sense of the

word, if not in the restricted.[156] The notion of life is perhaps

more human and more subjective, but after all more complete and

concrete than the notion of movement and of force; for we cannot hope

to discover the truth at any great distance from the subjective, since

subjectivity is the necessary form in which truth appears to us.

[156] Mr. Spencer himself has a little forgotten this fact in a

number of his own somewhat too mechanical constructions.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some sort of mind-stuff theory.]

The second emendation to which materialism must submit, if it is to

satisfy the metaphysical instincts of mankind, is to include in the

primordial element not only life but some germ of mind. But primitive

matter conceived as a force capable of living and ultimately of

thinking is not what is scientifically and vulgarly regarded as matter,

far less as hydrogen. The pure materialist, thumping the rotundity of

the earth with his fist, and relying grossly on his sense of touch,

cries: “Matter is everything,” but matter is analyzable into force, and

force is simply a primitive form of life. Materialism therefore issues

into a sort of animism; in the presence of the circling world, the

materialist is obliged to say it is alive. Nor can he stop there; the

world is force, is action, is life—and something more; for in and by

me the world thinks. _E pur si pensa!_

[Sidenote: Passes readily into idealism.]

Behold us landed once more in idealism. And, indeed, as Lange and M.

Taine have well shown, materialism easily passes to idealism; pure

materialism results in an abstract mechanism, which is analyzable

into the laws of logic and of thought. And the basis of this

mechanism—atoms and motion—consists in enfeebled subtilized and

rarefied tactual and visual sensations, taken ultimately as the

expression of the final reality. The alleged foundation of objective

reality is simply a residuum of our most essential sensations.

Materialism is advocated in the name of positive science; but it, not

less than idealism, belongs really to the poetry of metaphysics; its

poetry is recorded simply in terms of atoms and motion, instead of in

terms of the elements of consciousness. Materialistic symbols are more

matter of fact, more neighbour to the visible reality, possess a wider

compass and generality, but they are none the less symbols simply.

Materialism is in some sort a tissue of metaphor in which scientific

terms lose their scientific signification, and gain a metaphysical

signification in its stead, transferred, as they are, to a domain that

lies beyond the range of experience. The man of science who speculates

thus upon the nature of things is, unknown to himself, a modern

Lucretius.

[Sidenote: Materialism and the notion of infinity.]

And finally, materialism, properly so called, has been invaded by

a notion which has been at all times peculiarly adapted to satisfy

the metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind; the notion of

infinity, whether in the direction of greatness or the opposite. Men of

science go to the trouble of estimating the number of molecules in a

drop of water; they tell us that the thousandth part of a millimeter of

water contains 228,000,000 molecules; they say that a pinhead contains

the fourth power of 20,000,000 atoms, and that, if the atoms could be

counted a billion every second, it would take 253,678 years to complete

the task. But all such calculations are simply arithmetical _jeux

d’esprit_. These figures, which are so great in appearance, really

amount to nothing, and a grain of sand, no doubt, contains literally an

infinite number of particles.

[Sidenote: Final breakdown of materialism.]

The argument against the notion of infinity, based on the logical

impossibility of an infinite number, is not decisive;[157] it rests

upon a begging of the question, namely, that everything in the

universe is innumerable—that is to say, is capable of being precisely

included within the limits of an intelligence like our own. Logic, on

the contrary, insists that in homogeneous matter, like space, time,

and quantity, there is no limit to the possibility of division and

multiplication, and that, consequently, they may proceed beyond any

given number. If so called “purely scientific” materialism does not

admit that nature is coextensive with man’s conception of what is

possible—if it denies the parallelism between thought and nature—it

by that very fact denies also the rationality of nature, which is

precisely the principle upon which every philosophy that pretends to

be purely scientific ultimately relies. Whoever rejects the notion

of infinity is obliged, in the last resort, to suppose a species of

contradiction between the activity of the human mind, which is unable

to stop at any given point, and nature, which stops, for no reason in

particular, at a determinate point in time and space. The conception

of infinity may be said to be forced upon materialism, and that very

notion contains one of the antinomies against which intelligence, by

the very fact of its employment, is ultimately brought to a standstill;

it is precisely in the act of counting that intelligence achieves

the conception of the innumerable; it is by exhausting every given

quantity that it achieves the conception of the inexhaustible; it is

by reaching ever beyond the limits of the known that it comes in touch

with the unknowable; and all these conceptions mark the point where

we feel our intelligence becoming feeble and beyond which our sight

grows dim. Back of matter, which thought takes cognizance of, and back

of thought, which takes cognizance of itself, lies infinity, which

envelops both of them, and which seems the most fundamental aspect

of matter itself. It was not without reason that the ancients called

matter, abstractly considered, as independent of its diverse forms,

the infinite ἄπειρον. Materialism thus leaves us, as other systems

do, in the presence of that ultimate mystery which all religions have

symbolized in their myths, and which metaphysics will always be obliged

to recognize, and poetry to express, by the instrumentality of images.

[157] See Renouvier’s arguments and Lotze’s and Fouillée’s

replies to them in the _Revue philosophique_.

[Sidenote: Apologue.]

By the seaside stood a great, upright mountain that pierced the sky

like an arrow-head, and the waves beat upon its base. In the morning,

when the first light of the sun touched the ancient rocks, they

shivered, and a voice rose from the gray stones and mingled with the

sound made by the blue sea; and mountain and wave conversed together.

The sea said: “The heavens have been mirrored in my shifting waves

a million years, and in all that time have held as high aloof from

me and stood as motionless.” And the mountain said: “I have climbed

toward the heavens a million years, and they are still as high above

me as ever.” One day a ray of sun fell smiling upon the brow of the

mountain, and the mountain questioned it on the distant heavens from

which it came. The ray was about to reply, but was reflected suddenly

from the mountain to the sea, and from a scintillating wave back to

the heavens from which it came. And the ray is still _en route_ across

the infinite, toward the nebulæ of Maïa, in the Pleiades, which were

so long invisible, or toward some point farther still, and has not yet

replied.

_III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds._

[Sidenote: Monism.]

The word infinite, ἄπειρον, which the ancients applied to matter, the

moderns have applied to mind. The reason, no doubt, is that matter and

mind are two aspects of one and the same thing. The synthesis of these

two aspects is attempted by monism.

[Sidenote: Monism to-day prevalent.]

I. It is not our purpose here to pass judgment upon the theoretical

pretensions of monism as a system of metaphysics. We observe simply

that the trend of modern thought is toward this system. Materialism is

simply a mechanical monism, the fundamental law of which is conceived

as capable of being completely formulated in mathematical terms.

Idealism is simply a monism the essential law of which is conceived as

mental, as pertaining to the intelligence or to the will. This latter

form of monism numbers many adherents in Germany and in England. In

France it has been advocated by M. Taine, and we have just seen that

it is maintained at the present moment under a somewhat different form

by M. Fouillée, who regards it as a reconciliation of naturalism and

idealism, and no doubt also as a possible reconciliation between what

is essential in pantheism and in theism.[158] In our judgment the

balance must be more evenly trimmed than the philosophers above cited

have done, between the material and mental aspects of existence,

between objective science and subjective, conscious knowledge. Monism,

therefore, essentially consists simply in a hypothesis that combines

the least questionable facts dealt with by science, those which are

inseparable from the elementary facts of consciousness. The fundamental

unity imported by the term monism is not to be confounded with

Spinoza’s unity of substance, nor with the absolute unity advocated

by the Alexandrians, nor with Spencer’s unknowable force, nor with

anything in the nature of a final cause, such as is spoken of, for

example, by Aristotle. Neither do we affirm the existence of any

unity of figure and form in the universe. We are content to admit,

by a hypothesis at once scientific and metaphysical, the fundamental

homogeneity of all things, the fundamental identity of nature. Monism,

in our judgment, should be neither transcendent nor mystical, but

immanent and naturalistic. The world is one continuous Becoming; there

are not two kinds of existence nor two lines of development, the

history of which is the history of the universe.

[158] See the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: The fundamental conception of philosophy is that of life.]

Instead of endeavouring to resolve matter into mind or mind into

matter, we recognize them both as united in this synthesis, which

science itself (and science is a stranger to anything in the nature of

moral or religious prejudice) is obliged to recognize: the synthesis

known as _life_. Science tends every day still further to extend the

domain of life, and there exists no fixed point of demarcation between

the organic and the inorganic world. We do not know whether the

foundation of life is _will_, or _idea_, or _thought_, or _sensation_,

although in sensation we no doubt approach the central point; it seems

to us probable simply that consciousness, which constitutes for us

everything, should count for something in every mode of being, and

that there is, so to speak, no being in the universe which is entirely

abstracted from self. But, leaving these hypotheses to one side, what

we can affirm with certainty is that life, by the very fact of its

development, tends to engender consciousness; and that progress in life

ultimately comes to be one with progress in consciousness, in which

what is movement in one aspect is sensation in another. Considered

from within everything, even the intellectual forms of time and space,

is resolvable by the psychologist into sensation and desire;[159] and,

considered from without, everything is resolvable by the physicist into

emotion; to feel and to move seem to be the two formulæ that express

the entire inner and outer universe, the concave and convex aspects of

things; but to feel that one’s self moves is the formula that expresses

self-conscious life which is still so infrequent in the great totality

of things, but which is becoming increasingly more common. The very

meaning of progress in life consists in what is expressed by the

gradual fusion of these two. Life means, in fact, development toward

sensation and thought.

[159] See the author’s study on _L’idée de temps_ (_Revue

philosophique_, April, 1885).

[Sidenote: Life and activity.]

Side by side with the tendency which life thus displays to take

possession of itself by consciousness, it seeks to widen the sphere

of its operation by a more and more profound activity. Life is

productivity. At the lowest stage of consciousness life leads only

to the inner development of the solitary cell; at the highest stage

of consciousness, life manifests itself in intelligent and moral

productivity. Expansion, far from being opposed to the nature of

life, is in harmony with its nature, is the very condition of life,

properly so called, just as in generation the need to engender another

individual results in that individual’s existence being, as it were,

a condition of our own. The fact is that life does not consist in

nutrition only, it consists in production, and pure egoism involves not

an expansion of self but a diminution and mutilation of self. Also the

individual, by the mere fact of growth, tends to become both social and

moral.[160] It is this fact of the fundamental sociality of mankind

which is the basis of the moral instinct, and of what is most profound

and durable in the religious and metaphysical instinct. Metaphysical

speculation, like moral action, thus springs from the very source

of life. To live is to become a conscious, a moral, and ultimately

a philosophical being. Life is activity in one or other of its more

or less equivalent forms: moral activity, and what may be called

metaphysical activity, that is to say, activity of thought, binds up

the individual with the universe.

[160] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, p. 447, _et

seq._

[Sidenote: No final cause in nature.]

Up to this point we have made no mention of anything in the nature of

a final cause. Morality, in our judgment, is as independent as the

so-called religious instinct of anything in the nature of a primordial

end and aim. Morality in the beginning is simply a more or less blind,

unconscious, or, at best, subconscious power. As this power becomes

endowed with self-consciousness, it directs itself toward more and more

rational objects: _duty_ is self-conscious and organized morality.

Just as humanity moves blindly forward without in the first instance

possessing any notion of its destination, so also moves nature.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Monism and the problem of destiny.]

All this being true, what is the destiny of mankind in the world? Does

monism allow a place for the hopes on which the moral and metaphysical

sentiments have always relied in their effort to save thought and

good-will from the charge of vanity?

[Sidenote: Natural selection and the possible evolution of gods.]

If evolution may be conceived as possessing from the beginning a

certain aim and as being on the whole providential,—a metaphysical

hypothesis which unhappily is guiltless of the smallest trace of

scientific induction,—it may also be conceived as resulting in beings

capable of proposing to themselves a certain aim, and of dragging

nature after them toward it. Natural selection would thus finally be

converted into moral and, in some sort, divine selection. Such an

hypothesis is, no doubt, as yet a rash one, but is at least in the

direction of the trend of scientific thought, and it is not formally

in contradiction with present knowledge. Evolution, in effect, can and

will produce species and types superior to humanity as we know it; it

is not probable that we embody the highest achievement possible in

life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but that evolution may

be able to bring forth, nay, has not already brought forth, what the

ancients called gods?

[Sidenote: Possibility of arresting process of dissolution.]

Such speculation offers a permanent support for what is best in the

religious sentiment for sociality, not only with all living and knowing

beings, but with the creatures of thought and superior power with which

we people the universe. Provided such beings are in no sense anti-real,

provided they might somewhere exist, if not in the present at least in

the future, the religious sentiment may attach itself to them without

check from the scientific sentiment. And in so doing it becomes one

with the metaphysical and poetic impulse. The believer is transmuted

into a philosopher or a poet, but into a poet whose poetry is his

life, and who dreams of a universal society of real or possible beings

who shall be animated to a goodness of will analogous to his own. The

statement that Feuerbach proposed, of what is essential in moral and

religious sentiment (the reaction of human desire on the universe),

may then be interpreted in a higher sense as referring to a desire and

a hope both that, first, the sociality with which we feel ourselves

personally to be animated may, as biology would lead us to believe,

be discovered in all beings that exist at the summit of universal

evolution; and second, that these beings thus placed at the front by

evolution, will one day succeed in securing what they have gained, in

preventing dissolution, and that they may thereby permanently establish

in the universe the love of social or rather universal well-being.

[Sidenote: The highest possible conception in the realms of morals.]

Thus understood, the religious sentiment may still be regarded as

ultra-scientific, but no longer as anti-scientific. It is, no doubt,

taking much for granted to suppose that beings who have arrived at a

high degree of evolution may determine from that point on the direction

that the evolutionary process is to take, but, after all, since we are

unable to affirm with certitude that such is not or may not become the

fact, the moral and social sentiment urges us to act in such manner

as to turn as far as in us lies the process of evolution in that

direction. If, as we have said, morality is a species of productivity,

every moral being must turn his eyes toward the future, must hope that

his work will not die, must watch over the safety of that portion of

himself that he has delivered to someone else—of his love—by which

not only he has devoted himself to others, but has made others in a

sense his own; has acquired rights over them, has conquered them, so to

speak, by subjecting himself to them. By labouring for humanity and for

the universe with which humanity is bound up, I acquire certain rights

over the universe. There arises between us a relation of reciprocal

dependence. The highest conception of morals and metaphysics is that

of a sort of sacred league between the higher beings of the earth, and

even of the universe, for the advancement of what is good.

* * * * *

II. What scientific facts may be urged in bar of such hopes as to the

destiny of the universe and of humanity?

[Sidenote: Immanence of dissolution.]

The most discouraging aspect of the theory of evolution is that

of dissolution, which seems to be inevitably incident to it. From

Heracleitus to Mr. Spencer, philosophers have regarded these two ideas

as inseparable. But does evolution necessarily result in dissolution?

Our experience, both of the life of individuals and of worlds,

seems, so far as the past is concerned, to make for a reply in the

affirmative. Our whole acquaintance has been with worlds which have

gone or are going to shipwreck. When the corpse of a sailor is thrown

into the sea, his friends take notice of the exact point of latitude

and longitude at which his body disappeared in the ocean. Two figures

on a bit of paper are all that exists of what was a human life. An

analogous destiny may be supposed to be in reserve for the terrestrial

globe and for humanity as a whole. They may some day sink out of sight

in space and dissolve beneath the moving waves of ether; and at that

period, if some neighbouring and friendly star observe us, it may

take the latitude and longitude in infinite space of the point in the

celestial abyss where we disappeared—the angle made by the last rays

that left the earth; and the measure of this angle, made by two extinct

rays, may be the sole trace to remain of the whole sum of human effort

in the world of thought.

[Sidenote: Has been observed in the past only.]

Nevertheless, the duty of science being equally in its denials and

in its affirmations to keep within the limits of certainty, it is

important not to model our conception of the future too absolutely upon

our knowledge of the past.

[Sidenote: The future may differ from the past.]

Up to the present time there has been no individual, nor group of

individuals, nor world which has attained complete self-consciousness,

complete consciousness of its life and of the laws of its life. We are

unable, therefore, either to affirm or to demonstrate that dissolution

is essentially and eternally incident to evolution by the very law

of being: the law of laws is to us simply _x_. If thought is ever to

understand the law of laws, it will be by realizing the law in its

own person. And such a height of development is conceivable; if it

is impossible to prove its existence, it is still more impossible to

prove its non-existence. It may be that if complete self-consciousness,

if complete consciousness is ever achieved, it will produce a

corresponding power great enough to arrest the process of dissolution.

Beings who are capable, in their infinite complication of movements

in the world, of distinguishing those which make for evolution as

against those which make for dissolution, might be capable of defeating

the latter and of securing the unimpeded operation of the former. If

a bird is to cross the sea it needs a certain breadth of wing; its

destiny depends on some inches, more or less, of feathers. Seabirds

that desert the shore before their wings have attained the proper

strength are one after another engulfed in the waves, but when their

wings are full grown they can cross the ocean. A world also needs, so

to speak, a certain breadth of wing to secure its flight in infinite

space—its fate depends on some small increments, more or less, in the

development of consciousness; beings may one day be produced capable of

traversing eternity without danger of being engulfed, and evolution may

be established once for all in security against a recoil; for the first

time in the onward movement of the universe a definitive result may be

achieved. According to the profound symbolism of the Greek religion,

time is the father of worlds. The power of evolution which the moderns

regard as ruling over all things is the ancient Saturn who devours

his offspring. Which of his children shall deceive him and vanquish

him—what Jupiter shall some day prove strong enough to chain up the

divine and terrible power that engendered him? The problem for him when

he shall arise—for this god of light and intelligence—will be to

check the eternal and blind impulse of destruction without at the same

time arresting the impulse of productivity. Nothing, after all, can

justify one in affirming scientifically that such a problem is forever

insoluble.

[Sidenote: The inexhaustible resources of nature.]

The great resource of nature is number, the possible combinations of

which are infinite and constitute the secret of the eternal mechanism

of the universe. Fortuitous combination and selection, which have

produced so many marvels in the past, may give rise to still greater

marvels in the future. It is on that fact that Heracleitus, Empedocles,

Democritus, and later the men like Laplace, Lamarck, and Darwin based

their conception of the part played by chance in the universe, and of

the point of union between luck and destiny. There is in the history

of the world—as in the history of a people, a belief, or a science—a

certain number of partings of the way, where the least impulse toward

one side or toward the other suffices to destroy or to preserve the

accumulated effort of centuries. We must happily have passed an

infinity of such cross-roads to have attained our present point of

development. And at each new point of the kind we encounter once more

the same danger and run the same risk of losing everything that we have

gained. The number of times that a fortunate soldier has evaded death

will not make the next shot fired at him deviate a millimetre from its

appointed path, but if our successes in the past are no guarantee of

success in the future, our failures in the past do not constitute a

definitive proof of failure in the future.

[Sidenote: Even chances that the future may not resemble the past.]

The gravest objection that can be urged against hopefulness, an

objection which has hitherto not been sufficiently considered,

and which M. Renan has omitted to deal with in his something too

optimistic “Dialogues”—is that of the eternity _a parte post_, is the

semi-abortion, the partial miscarriage of a universe which, throughout

an infinite past, has proved itself incapable of a better world than

this.[161] Still, if that fact constitutes a reason for looking with

less confidence toward the future, it cannot be regarded as a ground

for despair. An infinite past has proved to be more or less sterile,

but an infinite future may prove to be otherwise. Even taking for

granted the total miscarriage hitherto of the labours of humanity and

of the infinity of extra-terrestrial beings who no doubt coöperate with

us, there remains, so far as the future is concerned, mathematically

one chance out of every two of success; and that is enough to debar

pessimism forever of an ultimate triumph. If the mere chances of the

dice, by which, according to Plato, the universe is governed, have as

yet produced nothing but crumbling worlds and caducous civilization, a

calculation of probabilities demonstrates that even after an infinite

number of throws the result of the present cast or of the next cast

cannot be foreseen. The future is not entirely determined by the past

_which is known to us_. Future and past are reciprocally related and

the one cannot be absolutely known without the other, and the one

cannot be absolutely divined from a knowledge of the other. Conceive a

flower in bloom at some point in infinite space—a sacred flower, the

flower of thought: hands have been groping for it in every direction

throughout an infinite past; some have touched it by chance and then

lost it again before they could seize it. Is the divine flower never

to be plucked? Why not? A negative answer would be simply the outcome

of discouragement, not the expression of probability. Or conceive,

once more, a ray of light following a straight line through space,

not reflected by any solid atom or molecule of air, and an infinity

of eyes in an eternal obscurity seeking for this ray, with no means

of discovering how near to them or how far from them it may, at any

moment, be. The ray pursues its way unimpeded, and innumerable open,

ardent eyes long for it and sometimes seem to feel the presence of

the luminous wave moving forward on its victorious course. Must

their search eternally be vain? If there is no definitive reason for

affirming it, there is still less any categorical reason for denying

it. It is a matter of chance, the man of science might say; it is a

matter, also, of perseverance and intelligence, would be added by the

philosopher.

[161] See on this subject the author’s _Vers d’un philosophe_,

p. 198.

[Sidenote: Positive evidence of ultimate success.]

The fact that we are to-day capable of stating such problems in regard

to the destiny of the universe seems to indicate something like an

advance in the direction of solving them; thought is unable to advance

upon reality beyond a certain point; the conception of an ideal

presupposes the existence of a more or less imperfect realization of

it. In the tertiary period no animal speculated about the universal

society. A true conception of the ideal, if the truth about the matter

could be known mathematically, would be found to possess, in all

probability, an enormous number of chances of being realized; properly

to state a problem is to have begun to solve it. A purely mathematical

calculation of the external probabilities of the case does not,

therefore, express the real value in the domain of intelligence and

morality, because in matters of intelligence and morality, possibility,

probability, and the powers upon which the realization of the fact

depends, lie in thought which is a concentration of inner and, so to

speak, living chances.

[Sidenote: In especial when the infinity of space is taken into

account.]

Over and above infinity of number and eternity of time, a field of

hopefulness lies in the immensity of space, which makes it irrational

for us to judge too absolutely of the future of the universe solely

from our experience of so small a portion of it as our solar, and even

as our stellar system. Are we the only thinking beings in the universe?

We have already seen that, without passing far beyond what science

holds to be certain, one may even now reply in the negative. There

very probably exists an infinity of cold or cooling stars, which have

arrived at about the same point in their evolution as our earth; each

of these stars is physically and chemically analogous to the earth,

and they must have passed through analogous stages of vapourization,

and condensation, and incandescence, and cooling. It is therefore

probable that they have given rise to forms of organic life more

or less analogous to those that we are acquainted with. In effect,

the homogeneity of the organic matter of which our stellar system

is composed (a fact which spectral analysis enables us to ascertain

in regard to even the most remote stars) allows us to infer, by an

induction which is not too improbable, a certain similitude in the most

fundamental types of organic life. Analogous types of mineralization

and crystallization must have given rise to analogous types of

organization, although the number and richness of the forms that are

possible increase as existence grows more complex. We do not see why

the primordial protoplasm should in such and such a satellite of Sirius

be especially different from that of our globe; nay, there may even

obtain a certain cycle of forms and “living numbers,” as Pythagoras

would say, that periodically recur. It is difficult in the actual state

of science to conceive life as appearing except in some form of matter

analogous to the cellule, and to conceive consciousness as otherwise

than centralized in and manifesting itself by vibrations such as those

to which our nervous systems are subject. Conscious life implies a

society of living beings, a sort of social consciousness which the

individual consciousness seems, in a sort, to presuppose. Organic and

conscious life, the conditions of which are so much more determinate

than those of inorganic life, must everywhere, in spite of differences

in the circumstances, have assumed in the course of evolution forms

that, in a number of respects, must have been analogous to animals and

human beings such as we are familiar with. Perhaps the most general

of the laws formulated by Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the correlation

of organs might be found to hold good of the animals existing on the

satellites of distant stars of the twentieth magnitude. In spite of the

infinite variety of the flora and fauna of our globe, and the seemingly

inexhaustible ingenuity that nature has displayed in varying their

forms, it may reasonably be surmised that the difference between the

types of life with which we are acquainted and those with which we are

not acquainted is subject to certain considerable limitations. In spite

of differences of temperature, of light, of attraction, of electricity,

sidereal species, how different soever they may be from terrestrial

species of living beings, must, by the necessities of the case, have

been developed in the direction of sensitiveness and of intelligence,

and have gone in that direction sometimes not as far as we, sometimes

farther. Note also that even on our globe the excessively odd and

monstrous types produced, like those of the tertiary period, as it were

in obedience to a sort of apocalyptic imagination, have proved unable

to maintain themselves. The most enduring species have generally been

the least eccentric, the closest to a uniform and æsthetic type. It is

not excessively improbable, therefore, that the universe contains an

infinite number of human species analogous to humanity as we know it,

in all essential faculties, although, perhaps, very different in the

form of their organs and in the degree of their intelligence. They are

our planetary brothers. Perhaps by comparison with us they are gods;

and in that fact lies, as we have said, the kernel of possible or

actual truth in the ancient beliefs in regard to the divine inhabitants

of the skies.[162]

[162] To understand the enormous differences which, in spite

of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the

planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to

consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial

species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of

society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes.

Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead

of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive

at a point of mental evolution analogous, _mutatis mutandis_,

to that of such and such a human society; for example, that

of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule

the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence

for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort

Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller

influence on the course of things than that of which physically

stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one

extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle,

Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human

beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most

intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants.

Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is

considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the

strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us,

and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of

prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the

struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite

different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might

well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring

star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism,

we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if

evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of

accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such

a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert

the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward

movement of evolution being checked.

Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends

much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants

than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends

upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical

modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that

in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet.

Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system,

for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral

perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness

from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the

temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to

account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent

upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from

the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could

scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and

that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and

intellectual development.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

But, it has been said, if other globes than ours are inhabited by

intelligent and affectionate beings who live as we do upon the daily

bread of science, these beings cannot be notably superior to us, or

they would have given us before this time visible signs of their

existence. To argue thus is not sufficiently to take account of the

terrible power of space to imprison beings in infinite isolation.

It may well be doubted whether beings of a relatively infinite

intelligence, as compared with us, would not find their power unequal

to dealing with such spaces as separate the stars. Our testimony on a

question of the existence of such beings has no more value than that of

a flower in the polar regions, or a bit of moss on the Himalayas, or a

bit of weed in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, would have if it should

declare the earth to be void of really intelligent beings on the ground

that they had never been plucked by a human hand. If, therefore, the

universe somewhere contains beings really worthy of the name of gods,

they are probably so distant from us that they are as unaware of our

existence as we are of theirs. They perhaps have realized our ideals,

and the fact of that realization will perhaps remain unknown to us to

the end.