Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 2

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 2

And I tell you in this nothing that is not very simple. Look. Do you deny that this water is in a vase? Do you deny that this vase is in this hall? Do you deny that this hall is in a larger place, which is in its turn in another larger still? I can thus carry you on to infinite s.p.a.ce.

If you deny a single one of these propositions, you deny all, the first as well as the last; and if you admit the first, you are forced to admit the last.

It cannot be supposed that sensibility, which is not able to give us even the idea of body, alone elevates us to the idea of s.p.a.ce. The intervention of a superior principle is, therefore, here necessary.

As we believe that every body is contained in a place, so we believe that every event happens in time. Can you conceive an event happening, except in some point of duration? This duration is extended and successively increased to your mind's eye, and you end by conceiving it unlimited like s.p.a.ce. Deny duration, and you deny all the sciences that measure it, you destroy all the natural beliefs upon which human life reposes. It is hardly necessary to add that sensibility alone no more explains the notion of time than that of s.p.a.ce, both of which are nevertheless inherent in the knowledge of the external world.

Empiricism is, therefore, convicted of being unable to dispense with universal and necessary principles, and of being unable to explain them.

Let us pause: either all our preceding works have terminated in nothing but chimeras, or they permit us to consider as a point definitely acquired for science, that there are in the human mind, for whomsoever interrogates it sincerely, principles really stamped with the character of universality and necessity.

After having established and defended the existence of universal and necessary principles, we might investigate and pursue this kind of principles in all the departments of human knowledge, and attempt an exact and rigorous cla.s.sification; but ill.u.s.trious examples have taught us to fear to compromise truths of the greatest price by mixing with them conjectures which, in giving brilliancy, perhaps, to the spirit of philosophy, diminish its authority in the eyes of the wise. We, also, following the example of Kant, attempted before you, last year,[21] a cla.s.sification, even a reduction of universal and necessary principles, and of all the notions that are connected with them. This work has not lost for us its importance, but we will not reproduce it. In the interest of the great cause which we serve, and taking thought here only to establish upon solid foundations the doctrine which is adapted to the French genius in the nineteenth century, we will carefully shun every thing that might seem personal and hazardous; and, instead of examining, criticising,[22] and reconst.i.tuting the cla.s.sification which the philosophy of Koenigsberg has given of universal and necessary principles, we prefer, we find it much more useful, to enable you to penetrate deeper into the nature of these principles, by showing you what faculty of ours it is that discovers them to us, and to which they are related and correspond.

The peculiarity of these principles is, that each one of us in reflection recognizes that he possesses them, but that he is not their author. We conceive them and apply them, we do not const.i.tute them. Let us interrogate our consciousness. Do we refer to ourselves, for example, the definitions of geometry, as we do certain movements of which we feel ourselves to be the cause? If it is I who make these definitions, they are therefore mine, I can unmake them, modify them, change them, even annihilate them. It is certain that I cannot do it. I am not, then, the author of them. It has also been demonstrated that the principles of which we have spoken cannot be derived from sensation, which is variable, limited, incapable of producing and authorizing any thing universal and necessary. I arrive, then, at the following consequence, also necessary:--truth is in me and not by me. As sensibility puts me in relation with the physical world, so another faculty puts me in communication with the truths that depend upon neither the world nor me, and that faculty is reason.

There are in men three general faculties which are always mingled together, and are rarely exercised except simultaneously, but which a.n.a.lysis divides in order to study them better, without misconceiving their reciprocal play, their intimate connection, their indivisible unity. The first of these faculties is activity, voluntary and free activity, in which human personality especially appears, and without which the other faculties would be as if they were not, since we should not exist for ourselves. Let us examine ourselves at the moment when a sensation is produced in us; we shall recognize that there is perception only so far as there is some degree of attention, and that perception ends at the moment when our activity ends. One does not recollect what he did in perfect sleep or in a swoon; because then he had lost voluntary activity, consequently consciousness; consequently, again, memory. Pa.s.sion often, in depriving us of liberty, deprives us, at the same time, of the consciousness of our actions and of ourselves; then, to use a just and common expression, one knows not what he does.

It is by liberty that man is truly man, that he possesses himself and governs himself; without it, he falls again under the yoke of nature; he is, without it, only a more admirable and more beautiful part of nature.

But while I am endowed with activity and liberty, I am also pa.s.sive in other respects; I am subject to the laws of the external world; I suffer and I enjoy without being myself the author of my joys and my sufferings; I feel rising within me needs, desires, pa.s.sions, which I have not made, which by turns fill my life with happiness and misery.

Finally, besides volition and sensibility, man has the faculty of knowing, has understanding, intelligence, reason, the name matters little, by means of which he is elevated to truths of different orders, and among others, to universal and necessary truths, which suppose in reason, attached to its exercise, principles entirely distinct from the impressions of the senses and the resolutions of the will.[23]

Voluntary activity, sensibility, reason, are all equally certain.

Consciousness verifies the existence of necessary principles, which direct the reason quite as well as that of sensations and volitions. I call every thing real that falls under observation. I suffer; my suffering is real, inasmuch as I am conscious of it: it is the same with liberty: it is the same with reason and the principles that govern it.

We can affirm, then, that the existence of universal and necessary principles rests upon the testimony of observation, and even of the most immediate and surest observation, that of consciousness.

But consciousness is only a witness,--it makes what is appear; it creates nothing. It is not because consciousness announces it to you, that you have produced such or such a movement, that you have experienced such or such an impression. Neither is it because consciousness says to us that reason is constrained to admit such or such a truth, that this truth exists; it is because it exists that it is impossible for reason not to admit it. The truths that reason attains by the aid of universal and necessary principles with which it is provided, are absolute truths; reason does not create them, it discovers them.

Reason is not the judge of its own principles, and cannot account for them, for it only judges by them, and they are to it its own laws. Much less does consciousness make these principles, or the truths which they reveal to us; for consciousness has no other office, no other power than in some sort to serve as a mirror for reason. Absolute truths are, therefore, independent of experience and consciousness, and at the same time, they are attested by experience and consciousness. On the one hand, these truths declare themselves in experience; on the other, no experience explains them. Behold how experience and reason differ and agree, and how, by means of experience, we come to find something which surpa.s.ses it.

So the philosophy which we teach rests neither upon hypothetical principles, nor upon empirical principles. It is observation itself, but observation applied to the higher portion of our knowledge, which furnishes us with the principles that we seek, with a point of departure at once solid and elevated.[24]

This point of departure we have found, and we do not abandon it. We remain immovably attached to it. The study of universal and necessary principles, considered under their different aspects, and in the great problems which they solve, is almost the whole of philosophy; it fills it, measures it, divides it. If psychology is the regular study of the human mind and its laws, it is evident that that of universal and necessary principles which preside over the exercise of reason, is the especial domain of psychology, which in Germany is called rational psychology, and is very different from empirical psychology. Since logic is the examination of the value and the legitimacy of our different means of knowing, its most important employment must be to estimate the value and the legitimacy of the principles which are the foundations of our most important cognitions. In fine, the meditation of these same principles conducts us to theodicea, and opens to us the sanctuary of philosophy, if we would ascend to their true source, to that sovereign reason which is the first and last explanation of our own.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] 1st Series of our Course, vol. i.

[19] 1st Series, vol. i.

[20] Ibid.

[21] 1st Series, vol. i., Fragments of the Course of 1817.

[22] See that criticism, 1st Series, vol. v., _Kant_, lecture 8.

[23] This cla.s.sification of the human faculties, save some differences more nominal than real, is now generally adopted, and makes the foundation of the psychology of our times. See our writings, among others, 1st Series, Course of 1816, lectures 23 and 24: _Histoire du moi_; ibid., _Des faits de Conscience_; vol. iii., lecture 3, _Examen de la Theorie des Facultes dans Condillac_; vol. iv., lecture 21, _des Facultes selon Reid_; vol. v., lecture 8, _Examen de la Theorie de Kant_; 3d Series, vol iv., _Preface de la Premiere Edition, Examen des Lecons de M. Laromiguiere, Introduction aux Oeuvres de M. de Biran, etc._

[24] This lecture on the existence of universal and necessary principles, which was easily comprehended, in 1818, by an auditory to which long discussions had already been presented during the two previous years, appearing here without the support of these preliminaries, will not perhaps be entirely satisfactory to the reader.

We beseech him to consult carefully the first volume of the 1st Series of our Course, which contains an abridgment, at least, of the numerous lectures of 1816 and 1817, of which this is a _resume_; especially to read in the third, fourth, and fifth volumes of the 1st Series, the developed a.n.a.lyses, in which, under different forms, universal and necessary principles are demonstrated as far as may be, and in the third volume of the 2d Series the lectures devoted to establish against Locke the same principles.

LECTURE II.

ORIGIN OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.

_Resume_ of the preceding Lecture. A new question, that of the origin of universal and necessary principles.--Danger of this question, and its necessity.--Different forms under which truth presents itself to us, and the successive order of these forms: theory of spontaneity and reflection.--The primitive form of principles; abstraction that disengages them from that form, and gives them their actual form.--Examination and refutation of the theory that attempts to explain the origin of principles by an induction founded on particular notions.

We may regard as a certain conquest of the experimental method and of true psychological a.n.a.lysis, the establishment of principles which at the same time that they are given to us by the surest of all experiences, that of consciousness, have a bearing superior to experience, and open to us regions inaccessible to empiricism. We have recognized such principles at the head of nearly all the sciences; then, searching among our different faculties for that which may have given them to us, we have ascertained that it is impossible to refer them to any other faculty than to that general faculty of knowing which we call reason, very different from reasoning, to which it furnishes its laws.

That is the point at which we have arrived. But is it possible to stop there?

In human intelligence, as it is now developed, universal and necessary principles are offered to us under forms in some sort consecrated. The principle of causality, for example, is thus enounced to us:--Every thing that begins to appear necessarily has a cause. Other principles have this same axiomatic form. But have they always had it, and did they spring from the human mind with this logical and scholastic apparel, as Minerva sprang all armed from the head of Jupiter? With what characters did they show themselves at first, before taking those in which they are now clothed, and which can scarcely be their primitive characters? In a word, is it possible to find the origin of universal and necessary principles, and the route which they must have followed in order to arrive at what they are to-day? A new problem, the importance of which it is easy to feel; for, if it can be resolved, what light will be shed upon these principles! On the other hand, what difficulties must be encountered! How can we penetrate to the sources of human knowledge, which are concealed, like those of the Nile? Is it not to be feared that, in plunging into the obscure past, instead of truth, one may encounter an hypothesis; that, attaching himself, then, to this hypothesis, he may transport it from the past to the present, and that, being deceived in regard to the origin of principles, he may be led to misconceive their actual and certain characters, or, at least, to mutilate and enfeeble those which the adopted origin would not easily explain? This danger is so great, this rock is so celebrated in shipwrecks, that before braving it one should know how to take many precautions against the seductions of the spirit of the system. It is even conceived that great philosophers, who were timid in no place, have suppressed the perilous problem. In fact, by undertaking to grapple with this problem at first, Locke and Condillac went far astray,[25] and it must be said, corrupted all philosophy at its source. The empirical school, which lauds the experimental method so much, turns its back upon it, thus to speak, when, instead of commencing by the study of the actual characters of our cognitions, as they are attested to us by consciousness and reflection, it plunges, without light and without guidance, into the pursuit of their origin. Reid[26] and Kant[27] showed themselves much more observing by confining themselves within the limits of the present, through fear of losing themselves in the darkness of the past. Both freely treat of universal and necessary principles in the form which they now have, without asking what was their primitive form. We much prefer this wise circ.u.mspection to the adventurous spirit of the empirical school. Nevertheless, when a problem is given out, so long as it is not solved, it troubles and besets the human mind.

Philosophy ought not to shun it then, but its duty is to approach it only with extreme prudence and a severe method.

We cannot recollect too well, for the sake of others and ourselves, that the primitive state of human cognitions is remote from us; we can scarcely bring it within the reach of our vision and submit it to observation; the actual state, on the contrary, is always at our disposal: it is sufficient for us to enter into ourselves, to fathom consciousness by reflection, and make it give up what it contains.

Setting out from certain facts, we shall not be liable to wander subsequently into hypotheses, or if, in ascending to the primitive state, we fall into any error, we shall be able to perceive it and repair it by the aid of the truth which an impartial observation shall have given us; every origin which shall not legitimately end at the point where we are, is by that alone convicted of being false, and will deserve to be discarded.[28]

You know that a large portion of the last year was spent upon this question. We took, one by one, universal and necessary questions submitted to our examination, in order to determine the origin of each one of them, its primitive form, and the different forms which have successively clothed it; only after having operated thus upon a sufficiently large number of principles, did we come slowly to a general conclusion, and that conclusion we believe ourselves ent.i.tled to express here briefly as the solid result of a most circ.u.mspect a.n.a.lysis, and, at least, a most methodical labor. We must either renew before you this labor, this a.n.a.lysis, and thereby run the risk of not being able to complete the long course that we have marked out for ourselves, or we must limit ourselves to reminding you of the essential traits of the theory at which we arrived.

This theory, moreover, is in itself so simple, that, without the dress of regular demonstrations upon which it is founded, its own evidence will sufficiently establish it. It wholly rests upon the distinction between the different forms under which truth is presented to us. It is, in its somewhat arid generality, as follows:

1st. One can perceive truth in two different ways. Sometimes one perceives it in such or such a particular circ.u.mstance. For example, in presence of two apples or two stones, and of two other similar objects placed by the side of the first, I perceive this truth with absolute certainty, viz., that these two stones and these two other stones make four stones,--which is in some sort a concrete apperception of the truth, because the truth is given to us in regard to real and determinate objects. Sometimes I also affirm in a general manner that two and two equal four, abstracting every determinate object,--which is the abstract conception of truth.

Now, of these two ways of knowing truth, which precedes in the chronological order of human knowledge? Is it not certain, may it not be avowed by every one, that the particular precedes the general, that the concrete precedes the abstract, that we begin by perceiving such or such a determinate truth, in such or such a case, at such or such a moment, in such or such a place, before conceiving a general truth, independently of every application and different circ.u.mstances of place and time?

2d. We can perceive the same truth without asking ourselves this question: Have we the ability not to admit this truth? We perceive it, then, by virtue alone of the intelligence which has been given us, and which enters spontaneously into exercise; or rather, we try to doubt the truth which we perceive, we attempt to deny it; we are not able to do it, and then it is presented to reflection as superior to all possible negation; it appears to us no longer only as a truth, but as a necessary truth.

Is it not also evident, that we do not begin by reflection, that reflection supposes an anterior operation, and that this operation, in order not to be one of reflection, and not to suppose another before it, must be entirely spontaneous; that thus the spontaneous and instinctive intuition of truth precedes its reflection and necessary conception?

Reflection is a progress more or less tardy in the individual and in the race. It is, _par excellence_, the philosophic faculty; it sometimes engenders doubt and skepticism, sometimes convictions that, for being rational, are only the more profound. It constructs systems, it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by the force of habit as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature. It presides over the acquisition of nearly all our cognitions. Children, the people, three-fourths of the human race never pa.s.s beyond it, and rest there with boundless security.

The question of the origin of human cognitions is thus resolved for us in the simplest manner: it is enough for us to determine that operation of the mind which precedes all others, without which no other would take place, and which is the first exercise, and the first form of our faculty of knowing.[29]

Since every thing that bears the character of reflection cannot be primitive, and supposes an anterior state, it follows, that the principles which are the subject of our study could not have possessed at first the reflective and abstract character with which they are now marked, that they must have shown themselves at their origin in some particular circ.u.mstance, under a concrete and determinate form, and that in time they were disengaged from this form, in order to be invested with their actual, abstract, and universal form. These are the two ends of the chain; it remains for us to seek how the human mind has been from one to the other, from the primitive state to the actual state, from the concrete state to the abstract state.

How can we go from the concrete to the abstract? Evidently by that well-known operation which is called abstraction. Thus far, nothing is more simple. But it is necessary to discriminate between two sorts of abstractions.

In presence of several particular objects, you omit the characters which distinguish them, and separately consider a character which is common to them all--you abstract this character. Examine the nature and conditions of this abstraction; it proceeds by means of comparison, and it is founded on a certain number of particular and different cases. Take an example: examine how we form the abstract and general idea of color.

Place before my eyes for the first time a white object. Can I here at the first step immediately arrive at a general idea of color? Can I at first place on one side the whiteness, and on the other side the color?

a.n.a.lyze what pa.s.ses within you. You experience a sensation of whiteness.

Omit the individuality of this sensation, and you wholly destroy it; you cannot neglect the whiteness, and preserve or abstract the color; for, a single color being given, which is a white color, if you take away that, there remains to you absolutely nothing in regard to color. Let a blue object succeed this white object, then a red object, etc.; having sensations differing from each other, you can neglect their differences, and only consider what they have in common, that they are sensations of sight, that is to say, colors, and you thus obtain the abstract and general idea of color. Take another example: if you had never smelled but a single flower, the violet, for instance, would you have had the idea of odor in general? No. The odor of the violet would be for you the only odor, beyond which you would not seek, you could not even imagine another. But if to the odor of the violet is added that of the rose, and other different odors, in a greater or less number, provided there be several, and a comparison be possible, and consequently, knowledge of their differences and their resemblances, then you will be able to form the general idea of odor. What is there in common between the odor of one flower and that of another flower, except that they have been smelled by aid of the same organ, and by the same person? What here renders generalization possible, is the unity of the sentient subject which remembers having been modified, while remaining the same, by different sensations; now, this subject can feel itself identical under different modifications, and it can conceive in the qualities of the object felt some resemblance and some dissimilarity, only on the condition of a certain number of sensations experienced, of odors smelled. In that case, but in that case alone, there can be comparison, abstraction, and generalization, because there are different and similar elements.

In order to arrive at the abstract form of universal and necessary principles, we have no need of all this labor. Let us take again, for example, the principle of cause. If you suppose six particular cases from which you have abstracted this principle, it will contain neither more nor less ideas than if you had deduced it from a single one. To be able to say that the event which I see must have a cause, it is not indispensable to have seen several events succeed each other. The principle which compels me to p.r.o.nounce this judgment, is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in respect to its object, it cannot change in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or less number of its applications. The only difference that it is subject to in regard to us, is, that we apply it whether we remark it or not, whether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The question is not to eliminate the particularity of the phenomenon, wherein it appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a man, in order immediately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner, the necessity of a cause for every thing that begins to exist. Here, it is not because I have been the same, or have been affected in the same manner in several different cases, that I have come to this general and abstract conception. A leaf falls: at the same instant I think, I believe, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A man has been killed: at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this death must have a cause.

Each one of these facts contains particular and variable circ.u.mstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit, both of them cannot but have a cause. Now, I am perfectly able to disengage the universal from the particular, in regard to the first fact as well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the first quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of causality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the second, nor in the third, nor in a thousandth; for a thousand are not nearer than one to the infinite, to absolute universality. It is the same, and still more evidently, with necessity. Pay particular attention to this point: if necessity is not in the first fact, it cannot be in any; for necessity cannot be formed little by little, and by successive increment. If, at the first murder that I see, I do not exclaim that this murder necessarily has a cause, at the thousandth murder, although it shall have been proved that all the others have had causes, I shall have the right to think that this new murder has, very probably, also its cause; but I shall never have the right to declare that it necessarily has a cause. But when necessity and universality are already in a single case, that case alone is sufficient to ent.i.tle us to deduce them from it.[30]

We have established the existence of universal and necessary principles: we have marked their origin; we have shown that they appear to us at first from a particular fact, and we have shown by what process, by what sort of abstraction the mind disengages them from the determinate and concrete form which envelops them, but does not const.i.tute them. Our task, then, seems accomplished. But it is not,--we must defend the solution which we have just presented to you of the problem of the origin of principles against the theory of an eminent metaphysician, whose just authority might seduce you. M. Maine de Biran[31] is, like us, the declared adversary of the philosophy of sensation,--he admits universal and necessary principles; but the origin which he a.s.signs to them, puts them, according to us, in peril, and would lead back by a _detour_ to the empirical school.

Universal and necessary principles, if expressed in propositions, embrace several terms. For example, in the principle that every phenomenon supposes a cause; and in this, that every quality supposes a substance, by the side of the ideas of quality and phenomenon are met the ideas of cause and substance, which seem the foundation of these two principles. M. de Biran pretends that the two ideas are anterior to the two principles which contain them, and that we at first find these ideas in ourselves in the consciousness that we are cause and substance, and that, these ideas once being thus acquired, induction transports them out of ourselves, makes us conceive causes and substances wherever there are phenomena and qualities, and that the principles of cause and substance are thus explained. I beg pardon of my ill.u.s.trious friend; but it is impossible to admit in the least degree this explanation.