Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 26

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 26

Every thing has its end. This principle is as absolute as that which refers every event to a cause.[254] Man has, therefore, an end. This end is revealed in all his thoughts, in all his ways, in all his sentiments, in all his life. Whatever he does, whatever he feels, whatever he thinks, he thinks upon the infinite, loves the infinite, tends to the infinite.[255] This need of the infinite is the mainspring of scientific curiosity, the principle of all discoveries. Love also stops and rests only there. On the route it may experience lively joys; but a secret bitterness that is mingled with them soon makes it feel their insufficiency and emptiness. Often, while ignorant of its true object, it asks whence comes that fatal disenchantment by which all its successes, all its pleasures are successively extinguished. If it knew how to read itself, it would recognize that if nothing here below satisfies it, it is because its object is more elevated, because the true bourne after which it aspires is infinite perfection. Finally, like thought and love, human activity is without limits. Who can say where it shall stop? Behold this earth almost known. Soon another world will be necessary for us. Man is journeying towards the infinite, which is always receding before him, which he always pursues. He conceives it, he feels it, he bears it, thus to speak, in himself,--how should his end be elsewhere? Hence that unconquerable instinct of immortality, that universal hope of another life to which all worships, all poesies, all traditions bear witness. We tend to the infinite with all our powers; death comes to interrupt the destiny that seeks its goal, and overtakes it unfinished. It is, therefore, likely that there is something after death, since at death nothing in us is terminated. Look at the flower that to-morrow will not be. To-day, at least, it is entirely developed: we can conceive nothing more beautiful of its kind; it has attained its perfection. My perfection, my moral perfection, that of which I have the clearest idea and the most invincible need, for which I feel that I am born,--in vain I call for it, in vain I labor for it; it escapes me, and leaves me only hope. Shall this hope be deceived? All beings attain their end; should man alone not attain his? Should the greatest of creatures be the most ill-treated? But a being that should remain incomplete and unfinished, that should not attain the end which all his instincts proclaim for him, would be a monster in the eternal order,--a problem much more difficult to solve than the difficulties that have been raised against the immortality of the soul. In our opinion, this tendency of all the desires and all the powers of the soul towards the infinite, elucidated by the principle of final causes, is a serious and important confirmation of the moral proof and the metaphysical proof of another life.

When we have collected all the arguments that authorize belief in another life, and when we have thus arrived at a satisfying demonstration, there remains an obstacle to be overcome. Imagination cannot contemplate without fright that unknown which is called death.

The greatest philosopher in the world, says Pascal, on a plank wider than it is necessary in order to go without danger from one side of an abyss to the other, cannot think without trembling on the abyss that is beneath him. It is not reason, it is imagination that frightens him; it is also imagination that in great part causes that remnant of doubt, that trouble, that secret anxiety which the firmest faith cannot always succeed in overcoming in the presence of death. The religious man experiences this terror, but he knows whence it comes, and he surmounts it by attaching himself to the solid hopes furnished him by reason and the heart. Imagination is a child that must be educated, by putting it under the discipline and government of better faculties; it must be accustomed to go to intelligence for aid instead of troubling intelligence with its phantoms. Let us acknowledge that there is a terrible step to be taken when we meet death. Nature trembles when face to face with the unknown eternity. It is wise to present ourselves there with all our forces united,--reason and the heart lending each other mutual support, the imagination being subdued or charmed. Let us continually repeat that, in death as in life, the soul is sure to find G.o.d, and that with G.o.d all is just, all is good.[256]

We now know what G.o.d truly is. We have already seen two of his adorable attributes,--truth and beauty. The most august attribute is revealed to us,--holiness. G.o.d is the holy of holies, as the author of the moral law and the good, as the principle of liberty, justice, and charity, as the dispenser of penalty and reward. Such a G.o.d is not an abstract G.o.d, but an intelligent and free person, who has made us in his own image, from whom we hold the law itself that presides over our destiny, whose judgments we await. It is his love that inspires us in our acts of charity; it is his justice that governs our justice, that of our societies and our laws. If we do not continually remind ourselves that he is infinite, we degrade his nature; but he would be for us as if he were not, if his infinite essence had no forms that pertain to us, the proper forms of our reason and our soul.

By thinking upon such a being, man feels a sentiment that is _par excellence_ the religious sentiment. All the beings with whom we are in relation awaken in us different sentiments, according to the qualities that we perceive in them; and should he who possesses all perfections excite in us no particular sentiment? When we think upon the infinite essence of G.o.d, when we are penetrated with his omnipotence, when we are reminded that the moral law expresses his will, that he attaches to the fulfilment and the violation of this law recompenses and penalties which he dispenses with an inflexible justice, we cannot guard ourselves against an emotion of respect and fear at the idea of such a grandeur.

Then, if we come to consider that this all-powerful being has indeed wished to create us, us of whom he has no need, that in creating us he has loaded us with benefits, that he has given us this admirable universe for enjoying its ever-new beauties, society for enn.o.bling our life in that of our fellow-men, reason for thinking, the heart for loving, liberty for acting; without disappearing, respect and fear are tinged with a sweeter sentiment, that of love. Love, when it is applied to feeble and limited beings, inspires us with a desire to do good to them; but in itself it proposes to itself no advantage from the person loved; we love a beautiful or good object, because it is beautiful or good, without at first regarding whether this love may be useful to its object and ourselves. For a still stronger reason, love, when it ascends to G.o.d, is a pure homage rendered to his perfections; it is the natural overflow of the soul towards a being infinitely lovable.

Respect and love compose adoration. True adoration does not exist without possessing both of these sentiments. If you consider only the all-powerful G.o.d, master of heaven and earth, author and avenger of justice, you crush man beneath the weight of the grandeur of G.o.d and his own feebleness, you condemn him to a continual trembling in the uncertainty of G.o.d's judgments, you make him hate the world, life, and himself, for every thing is full of misery. Towards this extreme, Port-Royal inclines. Read the _Pensees de Pascal_.[257] In his great humility, Pascal forgets two things,--the dignity of man and the love of G.o.d. On the other hand, if you see only the good G.o.d and the indulgent father, you incline to a chimerical mysticism. By subst.i.tuting love for fear, little by little with fear, we run the risk of losing respect. G.o.d is no more a master, he is no more even a father; for the idea of a father still to a certain point involves that of a respectful fear; he is no more any thing but a friend, sometimes even a lover. True adoration does not separate love and respect; it is respect animated by love.

Adoration is a universal sentiment. It differs in degrees according to different natures; it takes the most different forms; it is often even ignorant of itself; sometimes it is revealed by an exclamation springing from the heart, in the midst of the great scenes of nature and life, sometimes it silently rises in the mute and penetrated soul; it may err in its expressions, even in its object; but at bottom it is always the same. It is a spontaneous, irresistible emotion of the soul; and when reason is applied to it, it is declared just and legitimate. What, in fact, is more just than to fear the judgments of him who is holiness itself, who knows our actions and our intentions, and will judge them according to the highest justice? What, too, is more just than to love perfect goodness and the source of all love? Adoration is at first a natural sentiment; reason makes it a duty.

Adoration confined to the sanctuary of the soul is what is called internal worship--the necessary principle of all public worships.

Public worship is no more an arbitrary inst.i.tution than society and government, language and arts. All these things have their roots in human nature. Adoration abandoned to itself, would easily degenerate into dreams and ecstasy, or would be dissipated in the rush of affairs and the necessities of every day. The more energetic it is, the more it tends to express itself outwardly in acts that realize it, to take a sensible, precise, and regular form, which, by a proper reaction on the sentiment that produced it, awakens it when it slumbers, sustains it when it languishes, and also protects it against extravagances of every kind to which it might give birth in so many feeble or unbridled imaginations. Philosophy, then, lays the natural foundation of public worship in the internal worship of adoration. Having arrived at that point, it stops, equally careful not to betray its rights and not to go beyond them, to run over, in its whole extent and to its farthest limit, the domain of natural reason, as well as not to usurp a foreign domain.

But philosophy does not think of trespa.s.sing on the ground of theology; it wishes to remain faithful to itself, and also to follow its true mission, which is to love and favor every thing that tends to elevate man, since it heartily applauds the awakening of religious and Christian sentiment in all n.o.ble souls, after the ravages that have been made on every hand, for more than a century, by a false and sad philosophy.

What, in fact, would not have been the joy of a Socrates and a Plato if they had found the human race in the arms of Christianity! How happy would Plato--who was so evidently embarra.s.sed between his beautiful doctrines and the religion of his times, who managed so carefully with that religion even when he avoided it, who was forced to take from it the best possible part, in order to aid a favorable interpretation of his doctrine--have been, if he had had to do with a religion which presents to man, as at once its author and its model, the sublime and mild Crucified, of whom he had an extraordinary presentiment, whom he almost described in the person of a just man dying on the cross;[258] a religion which came to announce, or at least to consecrate and expand the idea of the unity of G.o.d and that of the unity of the human race; which proclaims the equality of all souls before the divine law, which thereby has prepared and maintains civil equality; which prescribes charity still more than justice, which teaches man that he does not live by bread alone, that he is not wholly contained in his senses and his body, that he has a soul, a free soul, whose value is infinite, above the value of all worlds, that life is a trial, that its true object is not pleasure, fortune, rank, none of those things that do not pertain to our real destiny, and are often more dangerous than useful, but is that alone which is always in our power, in all situations and all conditions, from end to end of the earth, to wit, the improvement of the soul by itself, in the holy hope of becoming from day to day less unworthy of the regard of the Father of men, of the examples given by him, and of his promises. If the greatest moralist that ever lived could have seen these admirable teachings, which in germ were already at the foundation of his spirit, of which more than one trait can be found in his works, if he had seen them consecrated, maintained, continually recalled to the heart and imagination of man by sublime and touching inst.i.tutions, what would have been his tender and grateful sympathy for such a religion! If he had come in our own times, in that age given up to revolutions, in which the best souls were early infected by the breath of skepticism, in default of the faith of an Augustine, of an Anselm, of a Thomas, of a Bossuet, he would have had, we doubt not, the sentiments at least of a Montesquieu,[259] of a Turgot,[260] of a Franklin,[261] and very far from putting the Christian religion and a good philosophy at war with each other, he would have been forced to unite them, to elucidate and fortify them by each other. That great mind and that great heart, which dictated to him the _Phedon_, the _Gorgias_, the _Republic_, would also have taught him that such books are made for a few sages, that there is needed for the human race a philosophy at once similar and different, that this philosophy is a religion, and that this desirable and necessary religion is the Gospel. We do not hesitate to say that, without religion, philosophy, reduced to what it can laboriously draw from perfected natural reason, addresses itself to a very small number, and runs the risk of remaining without much influence on manners and life; and that, without philosophy, the purest religion is no security against many superst.i.tions, which little by little bring all the rest, and for that reason it may see the best minds escaping its influence, as was the case in the eighteenth century. The alliance between true religion and true philosophy is, then, at once natural and necessary; natural by the common basis of the truths which they acknowledge; necessary for the better service of humanity. Philosophy and religion differ only in the forms that distinguish, without separating them. Another auditory, other forms, and another language.

When St. Augustine speaks to all the faithful in the church of Hippone, do not seek in him the subtile and profound metaphysician who combated the Academicians with their own arms, who supports himself on the Platonic theory of ideas, in order to explain the creation. Bossuet, in the treatise _De la Connaissance de Dieu et Soi-meme_, is no longer, and at the same time he is always, the author of the _Sermons_, of the _Elevations_, and the incomparable _Catechisme de Meaux_. To separate religion and philosophy has always been, on one side or the other, the pretension of small, exclusive, and fanatical minds; the duty, more imperative now than ever, of whomsoever has for either a serious and enlightened love, is to bring together and unite, instead of dividing and wasting the powers of the mind and the soul, in the interest of the common cause and the great object which the Christian religion and philosophy pursue, each in its own way,--I mean the moral grandeur of humanity.[262]

FOOTNOTES:

[245] Lectures 4 and 7.

[246] Such is the common vice of nearly all theodiceas, without excepting the best--that of Leibnitz, that of Clarke; even the most popular of all, the _Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard_. See our small work ent.i.tled _Philosophie Populaire_, 3d edition, p. 82.

[247] On the Cartesian argument, see above, part 1st, lecture 4; see also 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, and especially vol. v., lecture 6.

[248] _Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne_, p. 24: "The infinite being, inasmuch as infinite, is not a mover, a cause; neither is he, inasmuch as infinite, an intelligence; neither is he a will; neither is he a principle of justice, nor much less a principle of love. We have no right to impute to him all these attributes in virtue of the single argument that every contingent being supposes a being that is not so, that every finite supposes an infinite. The G.o.d given by this argument is the G.o.d of Spinoza, is rigorously so; but he is almost as though he were not, at least for us who with difficulty perceive him in the inaccessible heights of an eternity and existence that are absolute, void of thought, of liberty, of love, similar to nonent.i.ty itself, and a thousand times inferior, in his infinity and eternity, to an hour of our finite and perishable existence, if during this fleeting hour we know what we are, if we think, if we love something else than ourselves, if we feel capable of freely sacrificing to an idea the few minutes that have been accorded to us."

[249] This theodicea is here _in resume_, and in the 4th and 5th lectures of part first, as well as in the lecture that follows. The most important of our different writings, on this point, will be found collected and elucidated by each other, in the Appendix to the 5th lecture of the first volume of the 1st Series.--See our translation of this entire Series of M. Cousin's works, under the t.i.tle of the History of Modern Philosophy.

[250] 3d Series, vol. iv., advertis.e.m.e.nt to the 3d edition: "Without vain subtilty, there is a real distinction between free will and spontaneous liberty. Arbitrary freedom is volition with the appearance of deliberation between different objects, and under this supreme condition, that when, as a consequence of deliberation, we resolve to do this or that, we have the immediate consciousness of having been able, and of being able still, to will the contrary. It is in volition, and in the retinue of phenomena which surround it, that liberty more energetically appears, but it is not thereby exhausted. It is at rare and sublime moments in which liberty is as much greater as it appears less to the eyes of a superficial observation. I have often cited the example of d'a.s.sas. D'a.s.sas did not deliberate; and for all that, was d'a.s.sas less free, did he not act with entire liberty? Has the saint who, after a long and painful exercise of virtue, has come to practise, as it were by nature, the acts of self-renunciation which are repugnant to human weakness; has the saint, in order to have gone out from the contradictions and the anguish of this form of liberty which we called volition, fallen below it instead of being elevated above it; and is he nothing more than a blind and pa.s.sive instrument of grace, as Luther and Calvin have inappropriately wished to call it, by an excessive interpretation of the Augustinian doctrine? No, freedom still remains; and far from being annihilated, its liberty, in being purified, is elevated and enn.o.bled; from the human form of volition it has pa.s.sed to the almost divine form of spontaneity. Spontaneity is essentially free, although it may be accompanied with no deliberation, and although often, in the rapid motion of its inspired action, it escapes its own observation, and leaves scarcely a trace in the depths of consciousness.

Let us transfer this exact psychology to theodicea, and we may recognize without hypothesis, that spontaneity is also especially the form of G.o.d's liberty. Yes, certainly, G.o.d is free; for, among other proofs, it would be absurd that there should be less freedom in the first cause than in one of its effects, humanity; G.o.d is free, but not with that liberty which is related to our double nature, and made to contend against pa.s.sion and error, and painfully to engender virtue and our imperfect knowledge; he is free, with a liberty that is related to his own divine nature, that is a liberty unlimited, infinite, recognizing no obstacle. Between justice and injustice, between good and evil, between reason and its contrary, G.o.d cannot deliberate, and, consequently, cannot will after our manner. Can one conceive, in fact, that he could take what we call the bad part? This very supposition is impious. It is necessary to admit that when he has taken the contrary part, he has acted freely without doubt, but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of having been able to choose the other part. His nature, all-powerful, all-just, all-wise, is developed with that spontaneity which contains entire liberty, and excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of volition, and the mechanical operation of necessity. Such is the principle and the true character of the divine action."

[251] _Timaeus_, p. 119, vol. xii. of our translation.

[252] _De l'Art de prolonger sa Vie_, etc.

[253] On the spirituality of the soul, see all our writings. We will limit ourselves to two citations. 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 25, p.

859: "It is impossible to know any phenomenon of consciousness, the phenomena of sensation, or volition, or of intelligence, without instantly referring them to a subject one and identical, which is the _me_; so we cannot know the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, of smell, of taste, etc., without judging that these are not phenomena in appearance, but phenomena which belong to something real, which is solid, impenetrable, figured, colored, odorous, savory, etc. On the other hand, if you did not know any of the phenomena of consciousness, you would never have the least idea of the subject of these phenomena; if you did not know any of the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, etc., you would not have any idea of the subject of these phenomena: therefore the characters, whether of the phenomena of consciousness, or of exterior phenomena, are for you the only signs of the nature of the subjects of these phenomena. In examining the phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In the first rank among the primary qualities is solidity, which is given to you in the sensation of resistance, and inevitably accompanied by form, etc. On the contrary, when you examine the phenomena of consciousness, you do not therein find this character of resistance, of solidity, of form, etc.; you do not find that the phenomena of your consciousness have a figure, solidity, impenetrability, resistance; without speaking of secondary qualities which are equally foreign to them, color, savor, sound, smell, etc. Now, as the subject is for us only the collection of the phenomena which reveal it to us, together with its own existence in so far as the subject of the inherence of these phenomena, it follows that, under phenomena marked with dissimilar characters and entirely foreign to each other, the human mind conceives dissimilar and foreign subjects. Thus as solidity and figure have nothing in common with sensation, will, and thought, as every solid is extended for us, and as we place it necessarily in s.p.a.ce, while our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, are for us unextended, and while we cannot conceive them and place them in s.p.a.ce, but only in time, the human mind concludes with perfect strictness that the subject of the exterior phenomena has the character of the latter, and that the subject of the phenomena of consciousness has the character of the former; that the one is solid and extended, and that the other is neither solid nor extended. Finally, as that which is solid and extended is divisible, and as that which is neither solid nor extended is indivisible, hence divisibility is attributed to the solid and extended subject, and indivisibility attributed to the subject which is neither extended nor solid. Who of us, in fact, does not believe himself an indivisible being, one and identical, the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow? Well, the word body, the word matter, signifies nothing else than the subject of external phenomena, the most eminent of which are form, impenetrability, solidity, extension, divisibility. The word mind, the word soul, signifies nothing else than the subject of the phenomena of consciousness, thought, will, sensation, phenomena simple, unextended, not solid, etc. Behold the whole idea of spirit, and the whole idea of matter! See, therefore, all that must be done in order to bring back matter to spirit, and spirit to matter: it is necessary to pretend that sensation, volition, thought, are reducible in the last a.n.a.lysis to solidity, extension, figure, divisibility, etc., or that solidity, extension, figure, etc., are reducible to thought, volition, sensation."

1st Series, vol. iii., lecture I, _Locke_. "Locke pretends that we cannot be certain _by the contemplation of our own ideas_, that matter cannot think; on the contrary, it is in the contemplation itself of our ideas that we clearly perceive that matter and thought are incompatible.

What is thinking? Is it not uniting a certain number of ideas under a certain unity? The simplest judgment supposes several terms united in a subject, one and identical, which is _me_. This identical _me_ is implied in every real act of knowledge. It has been demonstrated to satiety that comparison exacts an indivisible centre that comprises the different terms of the comparison. Do you take memory? There is no memory possible without the continuation of the same subject that refers to self the different modifications by which it has been successively affected. Finally, consciousness, that indispensable condition of intelligence,--is it not the sentiment of a single being? This is the reason why each man cannot think without saying _me_, without affirming that he is himself the identical and one subject of his thoughts. I am _me_ and always _me_, as you are always yourself in the most different acts of your life. You are not more yourself to-day than you were yesterday, and you are not less yourself to-day than you were yesterday.

This ident.i.ty and this indivisible unity of the _me_ inseparable from the least thought, is what is called its spirituality, in opposition to the evident and necessary characters of matter. By what, in fact, do you know matter? It is especially by form, by extension, by something solid that stops you, that resists you in different points of s.p.a.ce. But is not a solid essentially divisible? Take the most subtile fluids,--can you help conceiving them as more or less susceptible of division? All thought has its different elements like matter, but in addition it has its unity in the thinking subject, and the subject being taken away, which is one, the total phenomenon no longer exists. Far from that, the unknown subject to which we attach material phenomena is divisible, and divisible _ad infinitum_; it cannot cease to be divisible without ceasing to exist. Such are the ideas that we have, on the one side, of mind, on the other, of matter. Thought supposes a subject essentially one; matter is infinitely divisible. What is the need of going farther?

If any conclusion is legitimate, it is that which distinguishes thought from matter. G.o.d can indeed make them exist together, and their co-existence is a certain fact, but he cannot confound them. G.o.d can unite thought and matter, he cannot make matter thought, nor what is extended simple."

[254] See 1st part, lecture 1.

[255] See lecture 5, _Mysticism_.

[256] 4th Series, vol. iii., _Santa-Rosa_: "After all, the existence of a divine Providence is, to my eyes, a truth clearer than all lights, more certain than all mathematics. Yes, there is a G.o.d, a G.o.d who is a true intelligence, who consequently has a consciousness of himself, who has made and ordered every thing with weight and measure, whose works are excellent, whose ends are adorable, even when they are veiled from our feeble eyes. This world has a perfect author, perfectly wise and good. Man is not an orphan; he has a father in heaven. What will this father do with his child when he returns to him? Nothing but what is good. Whatever happens, all will be well. Every thing that he has done has been done well; every thing that he shall do, I accept beforehand, and bless. Yes, such is my unalterable faith, and this faith is my support, my refuge, my consolation, my solace in this fearful moment."

[257] See our discussion on the _Pensees de Pascal_, vol. i. of the 4th Series.

[258] See the end of the first book of the _Republic_, vol. ix. of our translation.

[259] _Esprit des Lois_, _pa.s.sim_.

[260] Works of Turgot, vol. ii., _Discours en Sorbonne sur les Avantages que l'etabliss.e.m.e.nt du Christianism a procures au Genre Humain_, etc.

[261] In the _Correspondence_, the letter to Dr. Stiles, March 9, 1790, written by Franklin a few months before his death: "I am convinced that the moral and religious system which Jesus Christ has transmitted to us is the best that the world has seen or can see."--We here re-translate, not having the works of Franklin immediately at hand.

[262] We have not ceased to claim, to earnestly call for, the alliance between Christianity and philosophy, as well as the alliance between the monarchy and liberty. See particularly 3d Series, vol. iv., _Philosophie Contemporaine_, preface of the second edition; 4th Series, vol. i., _Pascal_, 1st and 2d preface, _pa.s.sim_; 5th Series, vol. ii., _Discours a la Chambre des Paris pour le Defence de l'Universite et de la Philosophie_. We everywhere profess the most tender veneration for Christianity,--we have only repelled the servitude of philosophy, with Descartes, and the most ill.u.s.trious doctors of ancient and modern times, from St. Augustine and St. Thomas, to the Cardinal de la Lucerne and the Bishop of Hermopolis. Moreover, we love to think that those quarrels, originating in other times from the deplorable strife between the clergy and the University, have not survived it, and that now all sincere friends of religion and philosophy will give each other the hand, and will work in concert to encourage desponding souls and lift up burdened characters.

LECTURE XVII.

ReSUMe OF DOCTRINE.

Review of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the relation of each one of them to the modern school that has recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated it.--Experience and empiricism.--Reason and idealism.--Sentiment and mysticism.--Theodicea. Defects of different known systems.--The process that conducts to true theodicea, and the character of certainty and reality that this process gives to it.

Having arrived at the limit of this course, we have a final task to perform,--it is necessary to recall its general spirit and most important results.

From the first lecture, I have signalized to you the spirit that should animate this instruction,--a spirit of free inquiry, recognizing with joy the truth wherever found, profiting by all the systems that the eighteenth century has bequeathed to our times, but confining itself to none of them.

The eighteenth century has left to us as an inheritance three great schools which still endure--the English and French school, whose chief is Locke, among whose most accredited representatives are Condillac, Helvetius, and Saint-Lambert; the Scotch school, with so many celebrated names, Hutcheson, Smith, Reid, Beattie, Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart;[263] the German school, or rather school of Kant, for, of all the philosophers beyond the Rhine, the philosopher of Koenigsberg is almost the only one who belongs to history. Kant died at the beginning of the nineteenth century;[264] the ashes of his most ill.u.s.trious disciple, Fichte,[265] are scarcely cold. The other renowned philosophers of Germany still live,[266] and escape our valuation.

But this is only an ethnographical enumeration of the schools of the eighteenth century. It is above all necessary to consider them in their characters, a.n.a.logous or opposite. The Anglo-French school particularly represents empiricism and sensualism, that is to say, an almost exclusive importance attributed in all parts of human knowledge to experience in general, and especially to sensible experience. The Scotch school and the German school represent a more or less developed spiritualism. Finally, there are philosophers, for example, Hutcheson, Smith, and others, who, mistrusting the senses and reason, give the supremacy to sentiment.

Such are the philosophic schools in the presence of which the nineteenth century is placed.

We are compelled to avow, that none of these, to our eyes, contains the entire truth. It has been demonstrated that a considerable part of knowledge escapes sensation, and we think that sentiment is a basis neither sufficiently firm, nor sufficiently broad, to support all human science. We are, therefore, rather the adversary than the partisan of the school of Locke and Condillac, and of that of Hutcheson and Smith.

Are we on that account the disciple of Reid and Kant? Yes, certainly, we declare our preference for the direction impressed upon philosophy by these two great men. We regard Reid as common sense itself, and we believe that we thus eulogize him in a manner that would touch him most.

Common sense is to us the only legitimate point of departure, and the constant and inviolable rule of science. Reid never errs; his method is true, his general principles are incontestable, but we will willingly say to this irreproachable genius,--_Sapere aude_. Kant is far from being as sure a guide as Reid. Both excel in a.n.a.lysis; but Reid stops there, and Kant builds upon a.n.a.lysis a system irreconcilable with it. He elevates reason above sensation and sentiment; he shows with great skill how reason produces by itself, and by the laws attached to its exercise, nearly all human knowledge; there is only one misfortune, which is that all this fine edifice is dest.i.tute of reality. Dogmatical in a.n.a.lysis, Kant is skeptical in his conclusions. His skepticism is the most learned, most moral, that ever existed; but, in fine, it is always skepticism. This is saying plainly enough that we are far from belonging to the school of the philosopher of Koenigsberg.

In general, in the history of philosophy, we are in favor of systems that are themselves in favor of reason. Accordingly, in antiquity, we side with Plato against his adversaries; among the moderns, with Descartes against Locke, with Reid against Hume, with Kant against both Condillac and Smith. But while we acknowledge reason as a power superior to sensation and sentiment, as being, _par excellence_, the faculty of every kind of knowledge, the faculty of the true, the faculty of the beautiful, the faculty of the good, we are persuaded that reason cannot be developed without conditions that are foreign to it, cannot suffice for the government of man without the aid of another power: that power which is not reason, which reason cannot do without, is sentiment; those conditions, without which reason cannot be developed, are the senses. It is seen what for us is the importance of sensation and sentiment: how, consequently, it is impossible for us absolutely to condemn either the philosophy of sensation, or, much more, that of sentiment.

Such are the very simple foundations of our eclecticism. It is not in us the fruit of a desire for innovation, and for making ourself a place apart among the historians of philosophy; no, it is philosophy itself that imposes on us our historical views. It is not our fault if G.o.d has made the human soul larger than all systems, and we also aver that we are also much rejoiced that all systems are not absurd. Without giving the lie to the most certain facts signalized and established by ourself, it was indeed necessary, on finding them scattered in the history of philosophy, to recognize and respect them, and if the history of philosophy, thus considered, no longer appeared a ma.s.s of senseless systems, a chaos, without light, and without issue; if, on the contrary, it became, in some sort, a living philosophy, that was, it should seem, a progress on which one might felicitate himself, one of the most fortunate conquests of the nineteenth century, the very triumphing of the philosophic spirit.

We have, therefore, no doubt in regard to the excellence of the enterprise; the whole question for us is in the execution. Let us see, let us compare what we have done with what we have wished to do.

Let us ask, in the first place, whether we have been just towards that great philosophy represented in antiquity by Aristotle, whose best model among the moderns is the wise author of the Essay on the _Human Understanding_.

There is in the philosophy of sensation what is true and what is false.