Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 3

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 3

The possession of the origin of the idea of cause is by no means sufficient for the possession of the origin of the principle of causality; for the idea and the principle are things essentially different. You have established, I would say to M. de Biran, that the idea of cause is found in that of productive volition:--you will to produce certain effects, and you produce them; hence the idea of a cause, of a particular cause, which is yourself; but between this fact and the axiom that all phenomena which appear necessarily have a cause, there is a gulf.

You believe that you can bridge it over by induction. The idea of cause once found in ourselves, induction applies it, you say, wherever a new phenomenon appears. But let us not be deceived by words, and let us account for this extraordinary induction. The following dilemma I submit with confidence to the loyal dialectics of M. de Biran:

Is the induction of which you speak universal and necessary? Then it is a different name for the same thing. An induction which forces us universally and necessarily to a.s.sociate the idea of cause with that of every phenomenon that begins to appear is precisely what is called the principle of causality. On the contrary, is this induction neither universal nor necessary? It cannot supply the place of the principle of cause, and the explanation destroys the thing to be explained.

It follows from this that the only true result of these various psychological investigations is, that the idea of personal and free cause precedes all exercise of the principle of causality, but without explaining it.

The theory which we combat is much more powerless in regard to other principles which, far from being exercised before the ideas from which it is pretended to deduce them, precede them, and even give birth to them. How have we acquired the idea of time and that of s.p.a.ce, except by aid of the principle that the bodies and events, which we see are in time and in s.p.a.ce? We have seen[32] that, without this principle, and confined to the data of the senses and consciousness, neither time nor s.p.a.ce would exist for us. Whence have we deduced the idea of the infinite, except from the principle that the finite supposes the infinite, that all finite and defective things, which we perceive by our senses and feel within us, are not sufficient for themselves, and suppose something infinite and perfect? Omit the principle, and the idea of the infinite is destroyed. Evidently this idea is derived from the application of the principle, and it is not the principle which is derived from the idea.

Let us dwell a little longer on the principle of substances. The question is to know whether the idea of subject, of substance, precedes or follows the exercise of the principle. Upon what ground could the idea of substance be anterior to the principle that every quality supposes a substance? Upon the ground alone that substance be the object of self-observation, as cause is said to be. When I produce a certain effect, I may perceive myself in action and as cause; in that case, there would be no need of the intervention of any principle; but it is not, it cannot be, the same, when the question is concerning the substance which is the basis of the phenomena of consciousness, of our qualities, our acts, our faculties even; for this substance is not directly observable; it does not perceive itself, it conceives itself.

Consciousness perceives sensation, volition, thought, it does not perceive their subject. Who has ever perceived the soul? Has it not been necessary, in order to attain this invisible essence, to set out from a principle which has the power to bind the visible to the invisible, phenomenon to being, to wit, the principle of substances?[33] The idea of substance is necessarily posterior to the application of the principle, and, consequently, it cannot explain its formation.

Let us be well understood. We do not mean to say that we have in the mind the principle of substances before perceiving a phenomenon, quite ready to apply the principle to the phenomenon, when it shall present itself; we only say that it is impossible for us to perceive a phenomenon without conceiving at the same instant a substance, that is to say, to the power of perceiving a phenomenon, either by the senses or by consciousness, is joined that of conceiving the substance in which it inheres. The facts thus take place:--the perception of phenomena and the conception of the substance which is their basis are not successive, they are simultaneous. Before this impartial a.n.a.lysis fall at once two equal and opposite errors--one, that experience, exterior or interior, can beget principles; the other, that principles precede experience.[34]

To sum up, the pretension of explaining principles by the ideas which they contain, is a chimerical one. In supposing that all the ideas which enter into principles are anterior to them, it is necessary to show how principles are deduced from these ideas,--which is the first and radical difficulty. Moreover, it is not true that in all cases ideas precede principles, for often principles precede ideas,--a second difficulty equally insurmountable. But whether ideas are anterior or posterior to principles, principles are always independent of them; they surpa.s.s them by all the superiority of universal and necessary principles over simple ideas.[35]

We should, perhaps, beg your pardon for the austerity of this lecture.

But philosophical questions must be treated philosophically: it does not belong to us to change their character. On other subjects, another language. Psychology has its own language, the entire merit of which is a severe precision, as the highest law of psychology itself is the shunning of every hypothesis, and an inviolable respect for facts. This law we have religiously followed. While investigating the origin of universal and necessary principles, we have especially endeavored not to destroy the thing to be explained by a systematic explanation. Universal and necessary principles have come forth in their integrity from our a.n.a.lysis. We have given the history of the different forms which they successively a.s.sume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. Their certainty is the same under all their forms, in all their applications; it has neither generation nor origin; it is not born such or such a day, and it does not increase with time, for it knows no degrees. We have not commenced by believing a little in the principle of causality, of substances, of time, of s.p.a.ce, of the infinite, etc., then believing a little more, then believing wholly. These principles have been, from the beginning, what they will be in the end, all-powerful, necessary, irresistible. The conviction which they give is always absolute, only it is not always accompanied by a clear consciousness. Leibnitz himself has no more confidence in the principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient reason, than the most ignorant of men; but the latter applies these principles without reflecting on their power, by which he is unconsciously governed, whilst Leibnitz is astonished at their power, studies it, and for all explanation, refers it to the human mind, and to the nature of things, that is to say, he elevates, to borrow the fine expression of M. Royer-Collard,[36] the ignorance of the ma.s.s of men to its highest source. Such is, thank heaven, the only difference that separates the peasant from the philosopher, in regard to those great principles of every kind which, in one way or another, discover to men the same truths indispensable to their physical, intellectual, and moral existence, and, in their ephemeral life, on the circ.u.mscribed point of s.p.a.ce and time where fortune has thrown them, reveal to them something of the universal, the necessary, and the infinite.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] First Series, vol. iv., lectures 1, 2, and 3.

[26] _Ibid._, vol. iv., etc.

[27] _Ibid._, vol. v., lecture 8.

[28] We have everywhere called to mind, maintained, and confirmed by the errors of those who have dared to break it, this rule of true psychological a.n.a.lysis, that, before pa.s.sing to the question of the origin of an idea, a notion, a belief, any principle whatever, the actual characters of this idea, this notion, this belief, this principle, must have been a long time studied and well established, with the firm resolution of not altering them under any pretext whatever in wishing to explain them. We believe that we have, as Leibnitz says, settled this point. See 1st Series, vol. i., Programme of the Course of 1817, and the Opening Discourse; vol. iii., lecture 1, _Locke_; lecture 2, _Condillac_; lecture 3, almost entire, and lecture 8, p. 260; 2d Series, vol. iii., _Examen du Systeme de Locke_, lecture 16, p. 77-87; 3d Series, vol. iv., _Examination of the Lectures of M. Loremquiere_, p.

268.

[29] This theory of spontaneity and of reflection, which in our view is the key to so many difficulties, continually recurs in our works. One may see, vol. i. of the 1st Series, in a programme of the Course of 1817, and in a fragment ent.i.tled _De la Spontaneite et de la Reflexion_; vol. iv. of the same Series, Examination of Reid's Philosophy, _pa.s.sim_; vol. v., Examination of Kant's System, lecture 8; 2d Series, vol. i., _pa.s.sim_; vol. iii., Lectures on Judgment; 3d Series, _Fragments Philosophiques_, vol. iv., preface of the first edition, p. 37, etc.; it will be found in different lectures of this volume, among others, in the third, On the value of Universal and Necessary Principles; in the fifth, On Mysticism; and in the eleventh, Primary Data of Common Sense.

[30] On immediate abstraction and comparative abstraction, see 1st Series, vol. i., Programme of the Course of 1817, and everywhere in our other Courses.

[31] On M. de Biran, on his merits and defects, see our _Introduction_ at the head of his Works.

[32] See lecture 1.

[33] See vol. i. of the 1st Series, course of 1816, and 2d Series, vol.

iii., lecture 18, p. 140-146.

[34] We have developed this a.n.a.lysis, and elucidated these results in the 17th lecture of vol. ii. of the 2d Series.

[35] We have already twice recurred, and more in detail, to the impossibility of legitimately explaining universal and necessary principles by any a.s.sociation or induction whatever, founded upon any particular idea, 2d Series, vol. iii., _Examen du Systeme de Locke_, lecture 19, p. 166; and 3d Series, vol. iv., _Introduction aux Oeuvres de M. de Biran_, p. 319. We have also made known the opinion of Reid, 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 489. Finally, the profoundest of Reid's disciples, the most enlightened judge that we know of things philosophical, Sir W. Hamilton, professor of logic in the University of Edinburgh, has not hesitated to adopt the conclusions of our discussion, to which he is pleased to refer his readers:--_Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, etc._, by Sir William Hamilton, London, 1852. Appendix I, p. 588.

[36] _Oeuvres de Reid_, vol. iv., p. 435. "When we revolt against primitive facts, we equally misconceive the const.i.tution of our intelligence and the end of philosophy. Is explaining a fact any thing else than deriving it from another fact, and if this kind of explanation is to terminate at all, does it not suppose facts inexplicable? The science of the human mind will have been carried to the highest degree of perfection it can attain, it will be complete, when it shall know how to derive ignorance from the most elevated source."

LECTURE III.

ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.

Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism.--Recurrence to the theory of spontaneity and reflection.

After having recognized the existence of universal and necessary principles, their actual characters, and their primitive characters, we have to examine their value, and the legitimacy of the conclusions which may be drawn from them,--we pa.s.s from psychology to logic.

We have defended against Locke and his school the necessity and universality of certain principles. We now come to Kant, who recognizes with us these principles, but confines their power within the limits of the subject that conceives them, and, so far as subjective, declares them to be without legitimate application to any object, that is to say, without objectivity, to use the language of the philosopher of Koenigsberg, which, right or wrong, begins to pa.s.s into the philosophic language of Europe.

Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,--have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in s.p.a.ce, and every succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness attests. If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the external world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality, it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our senses are dest.i.tute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul.

Nothing exists; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where, since in reality there is neither time nor s.p.a.ce. Since the principle of sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are only our modes of conception, G.o.d, whom all these principles reveal to us, will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes with all the others in the breath of the Critique.

Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of universal and necessary principles; but an involuntary disciple of his century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he places himself in the att.i.tude of an adversary, he makes to it the immense concession that these principles are applied only to the impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond experience, their power expires. This concession has ruined the whole enterprise of the German philosopher.

This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meeting it. He thought to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions do not extend themselves beyond the inclosure of the human mind; and at the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which direct it. But, according to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard, "one does not encounter skepticism,--as soon as he has penetrated into the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe circ.u.mspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the employment and legitimate applications of our different faculties; but when it is applied to the legitimacy itself of our faculties, it no longer elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. In fact, with what would you have reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question? Kant himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to restrain and save, at least in morals, and he put German philosophy upon a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great man--for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his genius, merit for him this name--undertaken with Hume an ingenious and learned controversy; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and Hume remains master of the field of battle.

What matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human mind universal and necessary principles, if these principles only serve to cla.s.sify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality? The human mind is, then, as Kant himself well expressed it, like a banker who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values;--he possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.[37]

The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of facts; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the explanation destroy what it pretends to explain; otherwise it does not explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question to explain is the belief of the human mind, and the system of Kant annihilates it.

In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and necessary principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:--we believe them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no minds of ours to conceive them. We regard them as independent of us; they seem to us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth that is in them. So, in order to express faithfully what pa.s.ses within us, it would be necessary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws of our mind, therefore they have no absolute value out of mind; we should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them.

And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of principles. We have established[38] that the necessity of believing supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of power to do it; but before all reflection, intelligence spontaneously seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, is not the sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity of which the German school speaks so much.

Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflective and somewhat scholastic habits held him captive.

Is it true that there is no judgment, even affirmative in form, which is not mixed with negation?

It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time negative; in fact, to affirm that a thing exists, is to deny its non-existence; as every negative judgment is at the same time affirmative; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of the thing in question, supposes some exercise of reflection, in the course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment seems to be in its necessity; and then recurs the celebrated objection:--if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and your own ways of conceiving; it is the human mind that transports its laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity.

We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty:--it is not true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative judgment, and reciprocally. But is reason exercised only on the condition of reflection? Is there not a primitive affirmation which implies no negation? As we often act without deliberating on our action, without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective; so reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error.

Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly different from it. We do not find, then, in any primitive fact, that every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not.

We thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet.

Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing. If one contradicts this primitive affirmation, the faculty of knowing falls back up upon itself, examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived; it cannot; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first; it adheres to the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this same truth; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and there triumphing over doubt; as though reflective evidence of it were the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the distinction between spontaneous reason and reflective reason. Reflection is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the sole reason that truth is truth, and because G.o.d has made the reason to perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear.

a.n.a.lyze, in fact, with impartiality, the fact of spontaneous apperception, and you will be sure that it has nothing subjective in it except what it is impossible it should not have, to wit, the _me_ which is mingled with the fact without const.i.tuting it. The _me_ inevitably enters into all knowledge, since it is the subject of it. Reason directly perceives truth; but it is in some sort augmented, in consciousness, and then we have knowledge. Consciousness is there its witness, and not its judge; its only judge is reason, a faculty subjective and objective together, according to the language of Germany, which immediately attains absolute truth, almost without personal intervention on our part, although it might not enter into exercise if personality did not precede or were not added to it.[39]

Spontaneous apperception const.i.tutes natural logic. Reflective conception is the foundation of logic properly so called. One is based upon itself, _verum index sui_; the other is based upon the impossibility of the reason, in spite of all its efforts, not betaking itself to truth and believing in it. The form of the first is an affirmation accompanied with an absolute security, and without the least suspicion of a possible negation; the form of the second is reflective affirmation, that is to say, the impossibility of denying and the necessity of affirming. The idea of negation governs ordinary logic, whose affirmations are only the laborious product of two negations.

Natural logic proceeds by affirmations stamped with a simple faith, which instinct alone produces and sustains.

Now, will Kant reply that this reason, which is much purer than that which he has known and described, which is wholly pure, which is conceived as something disengaged from reflection, from volition, from every thing that const.i.tutes personality, is nevertheless personal, since we have a consciousness of it, and since it is thus marked with subjectivity? To this argument we have nothing to respond, except that it is destroyed in the excess of its pretension. In fact, if, that reason may not be subjective, we must in no way partic.i.p.ate in it, and must not have even a consciousness of its exercise, then there is no means of ever escaping this reproach of subjectivity, and the ideal of objectivity which Kant pursued is a chimerical, extravagant ideal, above, or rather beneath, all true intelligence, all reason worthy the name; for it is demanding that this intelligence and this reason should cease to have consciousness of themselves, whilst this is precisely what characterizes intelligence and reason.[40] Does Kant mean, then, that reason, in order to possess a really objective power, cannot make its appearance in a particular subject, that it must be, for example, wholly outside of the subject which I am? Then it is nothing for me; a reason that is not mine, that, under the pretext of being universal, infinite, and absolute in its essence, does not fall under the perception of my consciousness, is for me as if it were not. To wish that reason should wholly cease to be subjective, is to demand something impossible to G.o.d himself. No, G.o.d himself can understand nothing except in knowing it, with his intelligence and with the consciousness of this intelligence.

There is subjectivity, then, in divine knowledge itself; if this subjectivity involves skepticism, G.o.d is also condemned to skepticism, and he can no more escape from it than men; or indeed, if this is too ridiculous, if the knowledge which G.o.d has of the exercise of his own intelligence does not involve skepticism for him, neither do the knowledge which we have of the exercise of our intelligence, and the subjectivity attached to this knowledge, involve it for us.

In truth, when we see the father of German philosophy thus losing himself in the labyrinth of the problem of the subjectivity and the objectivity of first principles, we are tempted to pardon Reid for having disdained this problem, for limiting himself to repeating that the absolute truth of universal and necessary principles rests upon the veracity of our faculties, and that upon the veracity of our faculties we are compelled to accept their testimony. "To explain," says he, "why we are convinced by our senses, by consciousness, by our faculties, is an impossible thing; we say--this is so, it cannot be otherwise, and we can go no farther. Is not this the expression of an irresistible belief, of a belief which is the voice of nature, and against which we contend in vain? Do we wish to penetrate farther, to demand of our faculties, one by one, what are their t.i.tles to our confidence, and to refuse them confidence until they have produced their claims? Then, I fear that this extreme wisdom would conduct us to folly, and that, not having been willing to submit to the common lot of humanity, we should be deprived of the light of common sense."[41]

Let us support ourselves also by the following admirable pa.s.sage of him who is, for so many reasons, the venerated master of the French philosophy of the nineteenth century. "Intellectual life," says M.