Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 27

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 27

The false is the pretension of explaining all human knowledge by the acquisitions of the senses; this pretension is the system itself; we reject it, and the system with it. The true is that sensibility, considered in its external and visible organs, and in its internal organs, the invisible seats of the vital functions, is the indispensable condition of the development of all our faculties, not only of the faculties that evidently pertain to sensibility, but of those that seem to be most remote from it. This true side of sensualism we have everywhere recognized and elucidated in metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and theodicea.

For us, theodicea, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, rest on psychology, and the first principle of our psychology is that the condition of all exercise of mind and soul is an impression made on our organs, and a movement of the vital functions.

Man is not a pure spirit; he has a body which is for the spirit sometimes an obstacle, sometimes a means, always an inseparable companion. The senses are not, as Plato and Malebranche have too often said, a prison for the soul, but much rather windows looking out upon nature, through which the soul communicates with the universe. There is an entire part of Locke's polemic against the theories of innate ideas that is to our eyes perfectly true. We are the first to invoke experience in philosophy. Experience saves philosophy from hypothesis, from abstraction, from the exclusively deductive method, that is to say, from the geometrical method. It is on account of having abandoned the solid ground of experience, that Spinoza, attaching himself to certain sides of Cartesianism,[267] and closing his eyes to all the others, forgetting its method, its essential character, and its most certain principles, reared a hypothetical system, or made from an arbitrary definition spring with the last degree of rigor a whole series of deductions, which have nothing to do with reality. It is also on account of having exchanged experience for a systematic a.n.a.lysis, that Condillac, an unfaithful disciple of Locke, undertook to draw from a single fact, and from an ill-observed fact, all knowledge, by the aid of a series of verbal transformations, whose last result is a nominalism, like that of the later scholastics. Experience does not contain all science, but it furnishes the conditions of all science. s.p.a.ce is nothing for us without visible and tangible bodies that occupy it, time is nothing without the succession of events, cause without its effects, substance without its modes, law without the phenomena that it rules.[268] Reason would reveal to us no universal and necessary truth, if consciousness and the senses did not suggest to us particular and contingent notions. In aesthetics, while severely distinguishing between the beautiful and the agreeable, we have shown that the agreeable is the constant accompaniment of the beautiful,[269] and that if art has for its supreme law the expression of the ideal, it must express it under an animated and living form which puts it in relation with our senses, with our imagination, above all, with our heart. In ethics, if we have placed Kant and stoicism far above epicureanism and Helvetius, we have guarded ourselves against an insensibility and an asceticism which are contrary to human nature. We have given to reason neither the duty nor the right to smother the natural pa.s.sions, but to rule them; we have not wished to wrest from the soul the instinct of happiness, without which life would not be supportable for a day, nor society for an hour; we have proposed to enlighten this instinct, to show it the concealed but real harmony which it sustains with virtue, and to open to it infinite prospects.[270]

With these empirical elements, idealism is guarded from that mystical infatuation which, little by little, gains and seizes it when it is wholly alone, and brings it into discredit with sound and severe minds.

In our works--and why should we not say it?--we have often presented the thought of Locke, whom we regard as one of the best and most sensible men that ever lived. He is among those secret and ill.u.s.trious advisers with whom we support our weakness. More than one happy thought we owe to him; and we often ask ourself whether investigations directed with the circ.u.mspect method which we try to carry into ours, would not have been accepted by his sincerity and wisdom. Locke is for us the true representative, the most original, and altogether the most temperate of the empirical school. Tied to a system, he still preserves a rare spirit of liberty,--under the name of reflection he admits another source of knowledge than sensation; and this concession to common sense is very important. Condillac, by rejecting this concession, carried to extremes and spoiled the doctrine of Locke, and made of it a narrow, exclusive, entirely false system,--sensualism, to speak properly. Condillac works upon chimeras reduced to signs, with which he sports at his ease. We seek in vain in his writings, especially in the last, some trace of human nature. One truly believes himself to be in the realm of shades, _per inania regna_.[271] The _Essay on the Human Understanding_ produces the opposite impression. Locke is a disciple of Descartes, whom the excesses of Malebranche have thrown to an opposite excess: he is one of the founders of psychology, he is one of the finest and most profound connoisseurs of human nature, and his doctrine, somewhat unsteady but always moderate, is worthy of having a place in a true eclecticism.[272]

By the side of the philosophy of Locke, there is one much greater, which it is important to preserve from all exaggeration, in order to maintain it in all its height. Founded in antiquity by Socrates, const.i.tuted by Plato, renewed by Descartes, idealism embraces, among the moderns, men of the highest renown. It speaks to man in the name of what is n.o.blest in man. It demands the rights of reason; it establishes in science, in art, and in ethics fixed and invariable principles, and from this imperfect existence it elevates us towards another world, the world of the eternal, of the infinite, of the absolute.

This great philosophy has all our preferences, and we shall not be accused of having given it too little place in these lectures. In the eighteenth century it was especially represented in different degrees by Reid and Kant. We wholly accept Reid, with the exception of his historical views, which are too insufficient, and often mixed with error.[273] There are two parts in Kant,--the a.n.a.lytical part, and the dialectical part, as he calls them.[274] We admit the one and reject the other. In this whole course we have borrowed much from the _Critique of Speculative Reason_, the _Critique of Judgment_, and the _Critique of Practical Reason_. These three works are, in our eyes, admirable monuments of philosophic genius,--they are filled with treasures of observation and a.n.a.lysis.[275]

With Reid and Kant, we recognize reason as the faculty of the true, the beautiful, and the good. It is to its proper virtue that we directly refer knowledge in its humblest and in its most elevated part. All the systematic pretensions of sensualism are broken against the manifest reality of universal and necessary truths which are incontestably in our mind. At each instant, whether we know it or not, we bear universal and necessary judgments. In the simplest propositions is enveloped the principle of substance and being. We cannot take a step in life without concluding from an event in the existence of its cause. These principles are absolutely true, they are true everywhere and always. Now, experience apprises us of what happens here and there, to-day or yesterday; but of what happens everywhere and always, especially of what cannot but happen, how can it apprise us, since it is itself always limited to time and s.p.a.ce? There are, then, in man principles superior to experience.

Such principles can alone give a firm basis to science. Phenomena are the objects of science only so far as they reveal something superior to themselves, that is to say, laws. Natural history does not study such or such an individual, but the generic type that every individual bears in itself, that alone remains unchangeable, when the individuals pa.s.s away and vanish. If there is in us no other faculty of knowing than sensation, we never know aught but what is pa.s.sing in things, and that, too, we know only with the most uncertain knowledge, since sensibility will be its only measure, which is so variable in itself and so different in different individuals. Each of us will have his own science, a science contradictory and fragile, which one moment produces and another destroys, false as well as true, since what is true for me is false for you, and will even be false for me in a little while. Such are science and truth in the doctrine of sensation. On the contrary, necessary and immutable principles found a science necessary and immutable as themselves,--the truth which they gave as is neither mine nor yours, neither the truth of to-day, nor that of to-morrow, but truth in itself.

The same spirit transferred to aesthetics has enabled us to seize the beautiful by the side of the agreeable, and, above different and imperfect beauties which nature offers to us, to seize an ideal beauty, one and perfect, without a model in nature, and the only model worthy of genius.

In ethics we have shown that there is an essential distinction between good and evil; that the idea of the good is an idea just as absolute as the idea of the beautiful and that of the true; that the good is a universal and necessary truth, marked with the particular character that it ought to be practised. By the side of interest, which is the law of sensibility, reason has made us recognize the law of duty, which a free being can alone fulfil. From these ethics has sprung a generous political doctrine, giving to right a sure foundation in the respect due to the person, establishing true liberty, and true equality, and calling for inst.i.tutions, protective of both, which do not rest on the mobile and arbitrary will of the legislator, whether people or monarch, but on the nature of things, on truth and justice.

From empiricism we have retained the maxim which gives empiricism its whole force--that the conditions of science, of art, of ethics, are in experience, and often in sensible experience. But we profess at the same time this other maxim, that the foundation of science is absolute truth, that the direct foundation of art is absolute beauty, that the direct foundation of ethics and politics is the good, is duty, is right, and that what reveals to us these absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, is reason. The foundation of our doctrine is, therefore, idealism rightly tempered by empiricism.

But what would be the use of having restored to reason the power of elevating itself to absolute principles, placed above experience, although experience furnishes their external conditions, if, to adopt the language of Kant,[276] these principles have no objective value?

What good could result from having determined with a precision until then unknown the respective domains of experience and reason, if, wholly superior as it is to the senses and experience, reason is captive in their inclosure, and we know nothing beyond with certainty? Thereby, then, we return by a _detour_ to skepticism to which sensualism conducts us directly, and at less expense. To say that there is no principle of causality, or to say that this principle has no force out of the subject that possesses it,--is it not saying the same thing? Kant avows that man has no right to affirm that there are out of him real causes, time, or s.p.a.ce, or that he himself has a spiritual and free soul. This acknowledgment would perfectly satisfy Hume; it would be of very little importance to him that the reason of man, according to Kant, might conceive, and even could not but conceive, the ideas of cause, time, s.p.a.ce, liberty, spirit, provided these ideas are applied to nothing real. I see therein, at most, only a torment for human reason, at once so poor and so rich, so full and so void.

A third doctrine, finding sensation insufficient, and also discontented with reason, which it confounds with reasoning, thinks to approach common sense by making science, art, and ethics rest on sentiment. It would have us confide ourselves to the instinct of the heart, to that instinct, n.o.bler than sensation, and more subtle than reasoning. Is it not the heart, in fact, that feels the beautiful and the good? Is it not the heart that, in all the great circ.u.mstances of life, when pa.s.sion and sophism obscure to our eyes the holy idea of duty and virtue, makes it shine forth with an irresistible light, and, at the same time, warms us, animates us, and gives us the courage to practise it?

We also have recognized that admirable phenomenon which is called sentiment; we even believe that here will be found a more precise and more complete a.n.a.lysis of it than in the writings where sentiment reigns alone. Yes, there is an exquisite pleasure attached to the contemplation of the truth, to the reproduction of the beautiful, to the practice of the good; there is in us an innate love for all these things; and when great rigor is not aimed at, it may very well be said that it is the heart which discerns truth, that the heart is and ought to be the light and guide of our life.

To the eyes of an unpractised a.n.a.lysis, reason in its natural and spontaneous exercise is confounded with sentiment by a mult.i.tude of resemblances.[277] Sentiment is intimately attached to reason; it is its sensible form. At the foundation of sentiment is reason, which communicates to it its authority, whilst sentiment lends to reason its charm and power. Is not the widest spread and the most touching proof of the existence of G.o.d that spontaneous impulse of the heart which, in the consciousness of our miseries, and at the sight of the imperfections of our race which press upon our attention, irresistibly suggests to us the confused idea of an infinite and perfect being, fills us, at this idea, with an inexpressible emotion, moistens our eyes with tears, or even prostrates us on our knees before him whom the heart reveals to us, even when the reason refuses to believe in him? But look more closely, and you will see that this incredulous reason is reasoning supported by principles whose bearing is insufficient; you will see that what reveals the infinite and perfect being is precisely reason itself;[278] and that, in turn, it is this revelation of the infinite by reason, which, pa.s.sing into sentiment, produces the emotion and the inspiration that we have mentioned. May heaven grant that we shall never reject the aid of sentiment! On the contrary, we invoke it both for others and ourself.

Here we are with the people, or rather we are the people. It is to the light of the heart, which is borrowed from that of reason, but reflects it more vividly in the depths of the soul, that we confide ourselves, in order to preserve all great truths in the soul of the ignorant, and even to save them in the mind of the philosopher from the aberrations or refinements of an ambitious philosophy.

We think, with Quintilian and Vauvenargues, that the n.o.bility of sentiment makes the n.o.bility of thought. Enthusiasm is the principle of great works as well as of great actions. Without the love of the beautiful, the artist will produce only works that are perhaps regular but frigid, that will possibly please the geometrician, but not the man of taste. In order to communicate life to the canvas, to the marble, to speech, it must be born in one's self. It is the heart mingled with logic that makes true eloquence; it is the heart mingled with imagination that makes great poetry. Think of Homer, of Corneille, of Bossuet,--their most characteristic trait is pathos, and pathos is a cry of the soul. But it is especially in ethics that sentiment shines forth.

Sentiment, as we have already said, is as it were a divine grace that aids us in the fulfilment of the serious and austere law of duty. How often does it happen that in delicate, complicated, difficult situations, we know not how to ascertain wherein is the true, wherein is the good! Sentiment comes to the aid of reasoning which wavers; it speaks, and all uncertainties are dissipated. In listening to its inspirations, we may act imprudently, but we rarely act ill: the voice of the heart is the voice of G.o.d.

We, therefore, give a prominent place to this n.o.ble element of human nature. We believe that man is quite as great by heart as by reason. We have a high regard for the generous writers who, in the looseness of principles and manners in the eighteenth century, opposed the baseness of calculation and interest with the beauty of sentiment. We are with Hutcheson against Hobbes, with Rousseau against Helvetius, with the author of Woldemar[279] against the ethics of egoism or those of the schools. We borrow from them what truth they have, we leave their useless or dangerous exaggerations. Sentiment must be joined to reason; but reason must not be replaced by sentiment. In the first place, it is contrary to facts to take reason for reasoning, and to envelop them in the same criticism. And then, after all, reasoning is the legitimate instrument of reason; its value is determined by that of the principles on which it rests. In the next place, reason, and especially spontaneous reason, is, like sentiment, immediate and direct; it goes straight to its object, without pa.s.sing through a.n.a.lysis, abstraction, and deduction, excellent operations without doubt, but they suppose a primary operation, the pure and simple apperception of the truth.[280]

It is wrong to attribute this apperception to sentiment. Sentiment is an emotion, not a judgment; it enjoys or suffers, it loves or hates, it does not know. It is not universal like reason; and as it still pertains on some side to organization, it even borrows from the organization something of its inconstancy. In fine, sentiment follows reason, and does not precede it. Therefore, in suppressing reason, we suppress the sentiment which emanates from it, and science, art, and ethics lack firm and solid bases.

Psychology, aesthetics, and ethics, have conducted us to an order of investigations more difficult and more elevated, which are mingled with all the others, and crown them--theodicea.

We know that theodicea is the rock of philosophy. We might shun it, and stop in the regions--already very high--of the universal and necessary principles of the true, the beautiful, and the good, without going farther, without ascending to the principles of these principles, to the reason of reason, to the source of truth. But such a prudence is, at bottom, only a disguised skepticism. Either philosophy is not, or it is the last explanation of all things. Is it, then, true that G.o.d is to us an inexplicable enigma,--he without whom the most certain of all things that thus far we have discovered would be for us an insupportable enigma? If philosophy is incapable of arriving at the knowledge of G.o.d, it is powerless; for if it does not possess G.o.d, it possesses nothing.

But we are convinced that the need of knowing has not been given us in vain, and that the desire of knowing the principle of our being bears witness to the right and power of knowing which we have. Accordingly, after having discoursed to you about the true, the beautiful, and the good, we have not feared to speak to you of G.o.d.

More than one road may lead us to G.o.d. We do not pretend to close any of them; but it was necessary for us to follow the one that was open to us, that which the nature and subject of our instruction opened to us.

Universal and necessary truths are not general ideas which our mind draws by way of reasoning from particular things; for particular things are relative and contingent, and cannot contain the universal and necessary. On the other hand, these truths do not subsist by themselves; they would thus be only pure abstractions, suspended in vacuity and without relation to any thing. Truth, beauty, and goodness are attributes and not ent.i.ties. Now there are no attributes without a subject. And as here the question is concerning absolute truth, beauty and goodness, their substance can be nothing else than absolute being.

It is thus that we arrive at G.o.d. Once more, there are many other means of arriving at him; but we hold fast to this legitimate and sure way.

For us, as for Plato, whom we have defended against a too narrow interpretation,[281] absolute truth is in G.o.d,--it is G.o.d himself under one of his phases. Since Plato, the greatest minds, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, agree in putting in G.o.d, as in their source, the principles of knowledge as well as existence. From him things derive at once their intelligibility and their being. It is by the partic.i.p.ation of the divine reason that our reason possesses something absolute. Every judgment of reason envelops a necessary truth, and every necessary truth supposes necessary being.

If all perfection belongs to the perfect being, G.o.d will possess beauty in its plenitude. The father of the world, of its laws, of its ravishing harmonies, the author of forms, colors, and sounds, he is the principle of beauty in nature. It is he whom we adore, without knowing it, under the name of the ideal, when our imagination, borne on from beauties to beauties, calls for a final beauty in which it may find repose. It is to him that the artist, discontented with the imperfect beauties of nature and those that he creates himself, comes to ask for higher inspirations.

It is in him that are summed up the main forms of every kind of beauty, the beautiful and the sublime, since he satisfies all our faculties by his perfections, and overwhelms them with his infinitude.

G.o.d is the principle of moral truths, as well as of all other truths.

All our duties are comprised in justice and charity. These two great precepts have not been made by us; they have been imposed on us; from whom, then, can they come, except from a legislator essentially just and good? Therein, in our opinion, is an invincible demonstration of the divine justice and charity:--this demonstration elucidates and sustains all others. In this immense universe, of which we catch a glimpse of a comparatively insignificant portion, every thing, in spite of more than one obscurity, seems ordered in view of general good, and this plan attests a Providence. To the physical order which one in good faith can scarcely deny, add the certainty, the evidence of the moral order that we bear in ourselves. This order supposes the harmony of virtue and goodness; it therefore requires it. Without doubt this harmony already appears in the visible world, in the natural consequences of good and bad actions, in society which punishes and rewards, in public esteem and contempt, especially in the troubles and joys of conscience. Although this necessary law of order is not always exactly fulfilled, it nevertheless ought to be, or the moral order is not satisfied, and the intimate nature of things, their moral nature, remains violated, troubled, perverted. There must, then, be a being who takes it upon himself to fulfil, in a time that he has reserved to himself, and in a manner that will be proper, the order of which he has put in us the inviolable need; and this being is again, G.o.d.

Thus, on all sides, on that of metaphysics, on that of aesthetics, especially on that of ethics, we elevate ourselves to the same principle, the common centre, the last foundation, of all truth, all beauty, all goodness. The true, the beautiful, and the good, are only different revelations of the same being. Human intelligence, interrogated in regard to all these ideas which are incontestably in it, always makes us the same response; it sends us back to the same explanation,--at the foundation of all, above all, G.o.d, always G.o.d.

We have arrived, then, from degree to degree, at religion. We are in fellowship with the great philosophies which all proclaim a G.o.d, and, at the same time, with the religions that cover the earth, with the Christian religion, incomparably the most perfect and the most holy. As long as philosophy has not reached natural religion,--and by this we mean, not the religion at which man arrives in that hypothetical state that is called the state of nature, but the religion which is revealed to us by the natural light accorded to all men,--it remains beneath all worship, even the most imperfect, which at least gives to man a father, a witness, a consoler, a judge. A true theodicea borrows in some sort from all religious beliefs their common principle, and returns it to them surrounded with light, elevated above all uncertainty, guarded against all attack. Philosophy may present itself in its turn to mankind; it also has a right to man's confidence, for it speaks to him of G.o.d in the name of all his needs and all his faculties, in the name of reason and sentiment.

Observe that we have arrived at these high conclusions without any hypothesis, by the aid of processes at once very simple and perfectly rigorous. Truths of different orders being given, truths which have not been made by us, and are not sufficient for themselves, we have ascended from these truths to their author, as one goes from the effect to the cause, from the sign to the thing signified, from phenomenon to being, from quality to subject. These two principles--that every effect supposes a cause, and every quality a subject--are universal and necessary principles. They have been put by us in their full light, and demonstrated in the manner in which principles undemonstrable, because they are primitive, can be demonstrated. Moreover, to what are these necessary principles applied? To metaphysical and moral truths, which are also necessary. It was therefore necessary to conclude in the existence of a cause and a necessary being, or, indeed, it was necessary to deny either the necessity of the principle of cause and the principle of substance, or the necessity of the truths to which we applied them, that is to say, to renounce all notions of common sense; for these very principles and these truths, with their character of universality and necessity, compose common sense.

Not only is it certain that every effect supposes a cause, and every quality a being, but it is equally certain that an effect of such a nature supposes a cause of the same nature, and that a quality or an attribute marked with such or such essential characters supposes a being in which these same characters are again found in an eminent degree.

Whence it follows, that we have very legitimately concluded from truth in an intelligent cause and substance, from beauty in a being supremely beautiful, and from a moral law composed at once of justice and charity in a legislator supremely just and supremely good.

And we have not made a geometrical and algebraical theodicea, after the example of many philosophers, and the most ill.u.s.trious. We have not deduced the attributes of G.o.d from each other, as the different terms of an equation are converted, or as from one property of a triangle the other properties are deduced, thus ending at a G.o.d wholly abstract, good perhaps for the schools, but not sufficient for the human race. We have given to theodicea a surer foundation--psychology. Our G.o.d is doubtless also the author of the world, but he is especially the father of humanity; his intelligence is ours, with the necessity of essence and infinite power added. So our justice and our charity, related to their immortal exemplar, give us an idea of the divine justice and charity.

Therein we see a real G.o.d, with whom we can sustain a relation also real, whom we can comprehend and feel, and who in his turn can comprehend and feel our efforts, our sufferings, our virtues, our miseries. Made in his image, conducted to him by a ray of his own being, there is between him and us a living and sacred tie.

Our theodicea is therefore free at once from hypothesis and abstraction.

By preserving ourselves from the one, we have preserved ourselves from the other. Consenting to recognize G.o.d only in his signs visible to the eyes and intelligible to the mind, it is on infallible evidence that we have elevated ourselves to G.o.d. By a necessary consequence, setting out from real effects and real attributes, we have arrived at a real cause and a real substance, at a cause having in power all its essential effects, at a substance rich in attributes. I wonder at the folly of those who, in order to know G.o.d better, consider him, they say, in his pure and absolute essence, disengaged from all limitative determination.

I believe that I have forever removed the root of such an extravagance.[282] No; it is not true that the diversity of determinations, and, consequently, of qualities and attributes, destroys the absolute unity of a being; the infallible proof of it is that my unity is not the least in the world altered by the diversity of my faculties. It is not true that unity excludes multiplicity, and multiplicity unity; for unity and multiplicity are united in me. Why then should they not be in G.o.d? Moreover, far from altering unity in me, multiplicity develops it and makes its productiveness appear. So the richness of the determinations and the attributes of G.o.d is exactly the sign of the plenitude of his being. To neglect his attributes, is therefore to impoverish him; we do not say enough, it is to annihilate him,--for a being without attributes exists not; and the abstraction of being, human or divine, finite or infinite, relative or absolute, is nonent.i.ty.

Theodicea has two rocks,--one, which we have just signalized to you, is abstraction, the abuse of dialectics; it is the vice of the schools and metaphysics. If we are forced to shun this rock, we run the risk of being dashed against the opposite rock, I mean that fear of reasoning that extends to reason, that excessive predominance of sentiment, which developing in us the loving and affectionate faculties at the expense of all the others, throws us into anthropomorphism without criticism, and makes us inst.i.tute with G.o.d an intimate and familiar intercourse in which we are somewhat too forgetful of the august and fearful majesty of the divine being. The tender and contemplative soul can neither love nor contemplate in G.o.d the necessity, the eternity, the infinity, that do not come within the sphere of imagination and the heart, that are only conceived. It therefore neglects them. Neither does it study G.o.d in truth of every kind, in physics, metaphysics, and ethics, which manifest him; it considers in him particularly the characters to which affection is attached. In adoration, Fenelon retrenches all fear that nothing but love may subsist, and Mme. Guyon ends by loving G.o.d as a lover.

We escape these opposite excesses of a refined sentimentality and a chimerical abstraction, by always keeping in mind both the nature of G.o.d, by which he escapes all relation with us,--necessity, eternity, infinity, and at the same time those of his attributes which are our own attributes transferred to him, for the very simple reason that they came from him.

I am able to conceive G.o.d only in his manifestations and by the signs which he gives of his existence, as I am able to conceive any being only by the attributes of that being, a cause only by its effects, as I am able to conceive myself only by the exercise of my faculties. Take away my faculties and the consciousness that attests them to me, and I am not for myself. It is the same with G.o.d,--take away nature and the soul, and every sign of G.o.d disappears. It is therefore in nature and the soul that he must be sought and found.

The universe, which comprises nature and man, manifests G.o.d. Is this saying that it exhausts G.o.d? By no means. Let us always consult psychology. I know myself only by my acts; that is certain; and what is not less certain is, that all my acts do not exhaust, do not equal my power and my substance; for my power, at least that of my will, can always add an act to all those which it has already produced, and it has the consciousness, at the same time that it is exercised, of containing in itself something to be exercised still. Of G.o.d and the world must be said two things in appearance contrary,--we know G.o.d only by the world, and G.o.d is essentially distinct and different from the world. The first cause, like all secondary causes, manifests itself only by its effects; it can even be conceived only by them, and it surpa.s.ses them by all of the difference between the Creator and the created, the perfect and the imperfect. The world is indefinite; it is not infinite; for, whatever may be its quant.i.ty, thought can always add to it. To the myriads of worlds that compose the totality of the world, may be added new worlds.

But G.o.d is infinite, absolutely infinite in his essence, and an indefinite series cannot equal the infinite; for the indefinite is nothing else than the finite more or less multiplied and capable of continuous multiplication. The world is a whole which has its harmony; for a G.o.d could make only a complete and harmonious work. The harmony of the world corresponds to the unity of G.o.d, as indefinite quant.i.ty is a defective sign of the infinity of G.o.d. To say that the world is G.o.d, is to admit only the world and deny G.o.d. Give to this whatever name you please, it is at bottom atheism. On the one hand, to suppose that the world is void of G.o.d, and that G.o.d is separate from the world, is an insupportable and almost impossible abstraction. To distinguish is not to separate. I distinguish myself, but do not separate myself from my qualities and my acts. So G.o.d is not the world, although he is in it everywhere present in spirit and in truth.[283]

Such is our theodicea: it rejects the excesses of all systems, and contains, we believe at least, all that is good in them. From sentiment it borrows a personal G.o.d as we ourselves are a person, and from reason a necessary, eternal, infinite G.o.d. In the presence of two opposite systems,--one of which, in order to see and feel G.o.d in the world, absorbs him in it; the other of which, in order not to confound G.o.d with the world, separates him from it and relegates him to an inaccessible solitude,--it gives to both just satisfaction by offering to them a G.o.d who is in fact in the world, since the world is his work, but without his essence being exhausted in it, a G.o.d who is both absolute unity and unity multiplied, infinite and living, immutable and the principle of movement, supreme intelligence and supreme truth, sovereign justice and sovereign goodness, before whom the world and man are like nonent.i.ty, who, nevertheless, is pleased with the world and man, substance eternal, and cause inexhaustible, impenetrable, and everywhere perceptible, who must by turns be sought in truth, admired in beauty, imitated, even at an infinite distance, in goodness and justice, venerated and loved, continually studied with an indefatigable zeal, and in silence adored.

Let us sum up this _resume_. Setting out from the observation of ourselves in order to preserve ourselves from hypothesis, we have found in consciousness three orders of facts. We have left to each of them its character, its rank, its bearing, and its limits. Sensation has appeared to us the indispensable condition, but not the foundation of knowledge.

Reason is the faculty itself of knowing; it has furnished us with absolute principles, and these absolute principles have conducted us to absolute truths. Sentiment, which pertains at once to sensation and reason, has found a place between both. Setting out from consciousness, but always guided by it, we have penetrated into the region of being; we have gone quite naturally from knowledge to its objects by the road that the human race pursues, that Kant sought in vain, or rather misconceived at pleasure, to wit, that reason which must be admitted entire or rejected entire, which reveals to us existences as well as truths.

Therefore, after having recalled all the great metaphysical, aesthetical, and moral truths, we have referred them to their principle; with the human race we have p.r.o.nounced the name of G.o.d, who explains all things, because he has made all things, whom all our faculties require,--reason, the heart, the senses, since he is the author of all our faculties.

This doctrine is so simple, is to such an extent in all our powers, is so conformed to all our instincts, that it scarcely appears a philosophic doctrine, and, at the same time, if you examine it more closely, if you compare it with all celebrated doctrines, you will find that it is related to them and differs from them, that it is none of them and embraces them all, that it expresses precisely the side of them that has made them live and sustains them in history. But that is only the scientific character of the doctrine which we present to you; it has still another character which distinguishes it and recommends it to you much more. The spirit that animates it is that which of old inspired Socrates, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, which makes your hearts beat when you are reading Corneille and Bossuet, which dictated to Vauvenargues the few pages that have immortalized his name, which you feel especially in Reid, sustained by an admirable good sense, and even in Kant, in the midst of, and superior to the embarra.s.sments of his metaphysics, to wit, the taste of the beautiful and the good in all things, the pa.s.sionate love of honesty, the ardent desire of the moral grandeur of humanity.

Yes, we do not fear to repeat that we tend thither by all our views; it is the end to which are related all the parts of our instruction; it is the thought which serves as their connection, and is, thus to speak, their soul. May this thought be always present to you, and accompany you as a faithful and generous friend, wherever fortune shall lead you, under the tent of the soldier, in the office of the lawyer, of the physician, of the savant, in the study of the literary man, as well as in the studio of the artist! Finally, may it sometimes remind you of him who has been to you its very sincere but too feeble interpreter!

FOOTNOTES:

[263] Still living in 1818, died in 1828.

[264] In 1804.

[265] Died, 1814.

[266] This was said in 1818. Since then, Jacobi, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, with so many others, have disappeared. Sch.e.l.ling alone survives the ruins of the German philosophy.