Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 4

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 4

Royer-Collard, "is an uninterrupted succession, not only of ideas, but of explicit or implicit beliefs. The beliefs of the mind are the powers of the soul and the motives of the will. That which determines us to belief we call evidence. Reason renders no account of evidence; to condemn reason to account for evidence, is to annihilate it, for it needs itself an evidence which is fitted for it. These are fundamental laws of belief which const.i.tute intelligence, and as they flow from the same source they have the same authority; they judge by the same right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of another. He who revolts against a single one revolts against all, and abdicates his whole nature."[42]

Let us deduce the consequences of the facts of which we have just given an exposition.

1st. The argument of Kant, which is based upon the character of necessity in principles in order to weaken their objective authority, applies only to the form imposed by reflection on these principles, and does not reach their spontaneous application, wherein the character of necessity no longer appears.

2d. After all, to conclude with the human race from the necessity of believing in the truth of what we believe, is not to conclude badly; for it is reasoning from effect to cause, from the sign to the thing signified.

3d. Moreover, the value of principles is above all demonstration.

Psychological a.n.a.lysis seizes, takes, as it were, by surprise, in the fact of intuition, an affirmation that is absolute, that is inaccessible to doubt; it establishes it; and this is equivalent to demonstration. To demand any other demonstration than this, is to demand of reason an impossibility, since absolute principles, being necessary to all demonstration, could only be demonstrated by themselves.[43]

FOOTNOTES:

[37] On conceptualism, as well as on nominalism and realism, see the _Introduction to the inedited works of Abelard_, and also 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 21, p. 457; 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 20, p. 215, and the work already cited on the _Metaphysics of Aristotle_, p. 49: "Nothing exists in this world which has not its law more general than itself. There is no individual that is not related to a species; there are no phenomena bound together that are not united to a plan. And it is necessary there should really be in nature species and a plan, if every thing has been made with weight and measure, _c.u.m pondere et mensura_, without which our very ideas of species and a plan would only be chimeras, and human science a systematic illusion. If it is pretended that there are individuals and no species, things in juxtaposition and no plan; for example, human individuals more or less different, and no human type, and a thousand other things of the same sort, well and good; but in that case there is nothing general in the world, except in the human understanding, that is to say, in other terms, the world and nature are dest.i.tute of order and reason except in the head of man."

[38] See preceding lecture.

[39] On the just limits of the personality and the impersonality of reason, see the following lecture, near the close.

[40] We have everywhere maintained, that consciousness is the condition, or rather the necessary form of intelligence. Not to go beyond this volume, see farther on, lecture 5.

[41] 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 494.

[42] _Oeuvres de Reid_, vol. iii., p. 450.

[43] We have not thought it best to make this lecture lengthy by an exposition and detailed refutation of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and its sad conclusion; the little that we say of it is sufficient for our purpose, which is much less historical than dogmatical. We refer the reader to a volume that we have devoted to the father of German philosophy, 1st Series, vol. v., in which we have again taken up and developed some of the arguments that are here used, in which we believe that we have irresistibly exposed the capital defect of the transcendental logic of Kant, and of the whole German school, that it leads to skepticism, inasmuch as it raises superhuman, chimerical, extravagant problems, and, when well understood, cannot solve them. See especially lectures 6 and 8.

LECTURE IV.

G.o.d THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES.

Object of the lecture: What is the ultimate basis of absolute truth?--Four hypotheses: Absolute truth may reside either in us, in particular beings and the world, in itself, or in G.o.d. 1. We perceive absolute truth, we do not const.i.tute it. 2. Particular beings partic.i.p.ate in absolute truth, but do not explain it; refutation of Aristotle. 3. Truth does not exist in itself; defence of Plato. 4. Truth resides in G.o.d.--Plato; St.

Augustine; Descartes; Malebranche; Fenelon; Bossuet; Leibnitz.--Truth the mediator between G.o.d and man.--Essential distinctions.

We have justified the principles that govern our intelligence; we have become confident that there is truth outside of us, that there are verities worthy of that name, which we can perceive, which we do not make, which are not solely conceptions of our mind, which would still exist although our mind should not perceive them. Now this other problem naturally presents itself: What, then, in themselves, are these universal and necessary truths? where do they reside? whence do they come? We do not raise this problem, and the problems that it embraces; the human mind itself proposes them, and it is fully satisfied only when it has resolved them, and when it has reached the extreme limit of knowledge that it is within its power to attain.

It is certain that the principles which, in all the orders of knowledge, discover to us absolute and necessary truths, const.i.tute part of our reason, which surely makes its dwelling in us, and is intimately connected with personality in the depths of intellectual life. It follows that the truth, which reason reveals to us, falls thereby into close relation with the subject that perceives it, and seems only a conception of our mind. Nevertheless, as we have proved, we perceive truth, we are not the authors of it. If the person that I am, if the individual _me_ does not, perhaps, explain the whole of reason, how could it explain truth, and absolute truth? Man, limited and pa.s.sing away, perceives necessary, eternal, infinite truth; that is for him a privilege sufficiently high; but he is neither the principle that sustains truth, nor the principle that gives it being. Man may say, My reason; but give him credit for never having dared to say, My truth.

If absolute truths are beyond man who perceives them, once more, where are they, then? A peripatetic would respond--In nature. Is it, in fact, necessary to seek for them any other subject than the beings themselves which they govern? What are the laws of nature, except certain properties which our mind disengages from the beings and phenomena in which they are met, in order to consider them apart? Mathematical principles are nothing more. For example, the axiom thus expressed--The whole is greater than any of its parts, is true of any whole and part whatever. The principle of contradiction, considered in its logical t.i.tle, as the condition of all our judgments, of all our reasonings, const.i.tutes a part of the essence of all being, and no being can exist without containing it. The universal exists, says Aristotle, but it does not exist apart from particular beings.[44]

This theory which considers universals as having their basis in things, is a progress towards the pure conceptualism which we have in the beginning indicated and shunned. Aristotle is much more of a realist than Abelard and Kant. He is quite right in maintaining that universals are in particular things, for particular things could not be without universals; universals give to them their fixity, even for a day, and their unity. But from the fact that universals are in particular beings, is it necessary to conclude that they, wholly and exclusively, reside there, and that they have no other reality than that of the objects to which they are applied? It is the same with principles of which universals are the const.i.tutive elements. It is, it is true, in the particular fact, of a particular cause producing a particular event, that is given us the universal principle of causality; but this principle is much more extensive than the facts, for it is applied, not only to this fact, but to a thousand others. The particular fact contains the principle, but it does not wholly contain it, and, far from giving the basis of the principle, it is based upon it. As much may be said of other principles.

Perhaps it will be replied that, if a principle is certainly more extensive than such a fact, or such a being, it is not more extensive than all facts and all beings, and that nature, considered as a whole, can explain that which each particular being does not explain. But nature, in its totality, is still only a finite and contingent thing, whilst the principles to be explained have a necessary and infinite bearing. The idea of the infinite can come neither from any particular being, nor from the whole of beings. Entire nature will not furnish us the idea of perfection, for all the beings of nature are imperfect.

Absolute principles govern, then, all facts and all beings, they do not spring from them.

Will it be necessary to come to the opinion, then, that absolute truths, being explicable neither by humanity nor by nature, subsist by themselves, and are to themselves their own foundation and their own subject?

But this opinion contains still more absurdities than the preceding; for, I ask, what are truths, absolute or contingent, that exist by themselves, out of things in which they are found, and out of the intelligence that conceives them? Truth is, then, only a realized abstraction. There are no quintessential metaphysics which can prevail against good sense; and if such is the Platonic theory of ideas, Aristotle is right in his opposition to it. But such a theory is only a chimera that Aristotle created for the pleasure of combating it.

Let us hasten to remove absolute truths from this ambiguous and equivocal state. And how? By applying to them a principle which should now be familiar to you. Yes, truth necessarily appeals to something beyond itself. As every phenomenon has its subject of inherence, as our faculties, our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, exist only in a being which is ourselves, so truth supposes a being in which it resides, and absolute truths suppose a being absolute as themselves, wherein they have their final foundation. We come thus to something absolute, which is no longer suspended in the vagueness of abstraction, but is a being substantially existing. This being, absolute and necessary, since it is the subject of necessary and absolute truths, this being which is at the foundation of truth as its very essence, in a single word, is called _G.o.d_.[45]

This theory, which conducts from absolute truth to absolute being, is not new in the history of philosophy: it goes back to Plato.

Plato,[46] in searching for the principles of knowledge clearly saw, with Socrates his master, that the least definition, without which there can be no precise knowledge, supposes something universal and one, which does not come within the reach of the senses, which reason alone can discover; this something universal and one he called _Idea_.

Ideas, which possess universality and unity, do not come from material, changing, and mobile things, to which they are applied, and which render them intelligible. On the other hand, it is not the human mind that const.i.tutes ideas; for man is not the measure of truth.

Plato calls Ideas veritable beings, [Greek: ta ontos onta], since they alone communicate to sensible things and to human cognitions their truth and their unity. But does it follow that Plato gives to Ideas a substantial existence, that he makes of them beings properly so called?

It is important that no cloud should be left on this fundamental point of the Platonic theory.

At first, if any one should pretend that in Plato Ideas are beings subsisting by themselves, without interconnection and without relation to a common centre, numerous pa.s.sages of the _Timaeus_ might be objected to him,[47] in which Plato speaks of Ideas as forming in their whole an ideal unity, which is the reason of the unity of the visible world.[48]

Will it be said that this ideal world forms a distinct unity, a unity separate from G.o.d? But, in order to sustain this a.s.sertion, it is necessary to forget so many pa.s.sages of the _Republic_, in which the relations of truth and science with the Good, that is to say, with G.o.d, are marked in brilliant characters.

Let not that magnificent comparison be forgotten, in which, after having said that the sun produces in the physical world light and life, Socrates adds: "So thou art able to say, intelligible beings not only hold from the _Good_ that which renders them intelligible, but also their being and their essence."[49] So, intelligible beings, that is to say, Ideas, are not beings that exist by themselves.

Men go on repeating with a.s.surance that the Good, in Plato, is only the idea of the good, and that an idea is not G.o.d. I reply, that the Good is in fact an idea, according to Plato, but that the idea here is not a pure conception of the mind, an object of thought, as the peripatetic school understood it; I add, that the Idea of the Good is in Plato the first of Ideas, and that, for this reason, while remaining for us an object of thought, it is confounded as to existence with G.o.d. If the Idea of the Good is not G.o.d himself, how will the following pa.s.sage, also taken from the _Republic_, be explained? "At the extreme limits of the intellectual world is the Idea of the Good, which is perceived with difficulty, but, in fine, cannot be perceived without concluding that it is the source of all that is beautiful and good; that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, that in the invisible world it directly produces truth and intelligence."[50] Who can produce, on the one hand, the sun and light, on the other, truth and intelligence, except a real being?

But all doubt disappears before the following pa.s.sages from the _Phaedrus_, neglected, as it would seem designedly, by the detractors of Plato: "In this transition, (the soul) contemplates justice, contemplates wisdom, contemplates science, not that wherein enters change, nor that which shows itself different in the different objects which we are pleased to call beings, but science as it exists in that which is called being, _par excellence_...."[51]--"It belongs to the soul to conceive the universal, that is to say, that which, in the diversity of sensations, can be comprehended under a rational unity.

This is the remembrance of what the soul has seen during its journey _in the train of Deity_, when, disdaining what we improperly call beings, it looked upwards to the only true being. So it is just that the thought of the philosopher should alone have wings; for its remembrance is always as much as possible with _the things which make G.o.d a true G.o.d, inasmuch as he is with them_."[52]

So the objects of the philosopher's contemplation, that is to say, Ideas, are in G.o.d, and it is by these, by his essential union with these, that G.o.d is the true G.o.d, the G.o.d who, as Plato admirably says in the _Sophist_, partic.i.p.ates in _august and holy intelligence_.[53]

It is therefore certain, that, in the true Platonic theory, Ideas are not beings in the vulgar sense of the word, beings which would be neither in the mind of man, nor in nature, nor in G.o.d, and would subsist only by themselves. No, Plato considers Ideas as being at once the principles of sensible things, of which they are the laws, and the principles also of human knowledge, which owes to them its light, its rule, and its end, and the essential attributes of G.o.d, that is to say, G.o.d himself.

Plato is truly the father of the doctrine which we have explained, and the great philosophers who have attached themselves to his school have always professed this same doctrine.

The founder of Christian metaphysics, St. Augustine, is a declared disciple of Plato: everywhere he speaks, like Plato, of the relation of human reason to the divine reason, and of truth to G.o.d. In the _City of G.o.d_, book x., chap. ii., and in chap. ix. of book vii. of the _Confessions_, he goes to the extent of comparing the Platonic doctrine with that of St. John.

He adopts, without reserve, the theory of Ideas. _Book of Eighty-three Questions_, question 46: "Ideas are the primordial forms, and, as it were, the immutable reasons of things; they are not created, they are eternal, and always the same: they are contained in the divine intelligence; and without being subject to birth and death, they are the types according to which is formed every thing that is born and dies."[54]

"What man, pious, and penetrated with true religion, would dare to deny that all things that exist, that is to say, all things that, each of its kind, possess a determinate nature, have been created by G.o.d? This point being once conceded, can it be said that G.o.d has created things without reason? If it is impossible to say or think this, it follows that all things have been created with reason. But the reason of the existence of a man cannot be the same as the reason of the existence of a horse; that is absurd; each thing has therefore been created by virtue of a reason that is peculiar to it. Now, where can these reasons be, except in the mind of the Creator? For he saw nothing out of himself, which he could use as a model for creating what he created: such an opinion would be sacrilege.[55]

"If the reasons of things to be created and things created are contained in the divine intelligence, and if there is nothing in the divine intelligence but the eternal and immutable, the reasons of things which Plato calls Ideas, are the eternal and immutable truths, by the partic.i.p.ation in which every thing that is is such as it is."[56]

St. Thomas himself, who scarcely knew Plato, and who was often enough held by Aristotle in a kind of empiricism, carried away by Christianity and St. Augustine, let the sentiment escape him, "that our natural reason is a sort of partic.i.p.ation in the divine reason, that to this we owe our knowledge and our judgments, that this is the reason why it is said, that we see every thing in G.o.d."[57] There are in St. Thomas many other similar pa.s.sages, of perhaps an expressive Platonism, which is not the Platonism of Plato, but of the Alexandrians.

The Cartesian philosophy, in spite of its profound originality, and its wholly French character, is full of the Platonic spirit. Descartes has no thought of Plato, whom apparently he has never read; in nothing does he imitate or resemble him: nevertheless, from the first, he is met in the same regions with Plato, whither he goes by a different route.

The notion of the infinite and the perfect is for Descartes what the universal, the Idea, is for Plato. No sooner has Descartes found by consciousness that he thinks, than he concludes from this that he exists, then, in course, by consciousness still, he recognizes himself as imperfect, full of defects, limitations, miseries, and, at the same time, conceives something infinite and perfect. He possesses the idea of the infinite and the perfect; but this idea is not his own work, for he is imperfect; it must then have been put into him by another being endowed with perfection, whom he conceives, whom he does not possess:--that being is G.o.d. Such is the process by which Descartes, setting out from his own thought, and his own being, elevated himself to G.o.d. This process, so simple, which he so simply exposes in the _Discours de la Methode_, he will put successively, in the _Meditations_, in the _Responses aux Objections_, in the _Principes_, under the most diverse forms, he will accommodate it, if it is necessary, to the language of the schools, in order that it may penetrate into them. After all, this process is compelled to conclude, from the idea of the infinite and the perfect, in the existence of a cause of this idea, adequate, at least, to the idea itself, that is to say, infinite and perfect. One sees that the first difference between Plato and Descartes is, that the ideas which in Plato are at once conceptions of our mind, and the principles of things, are for Descartes, as well as for all modern philosophy, only our conceptions, amongst which that of the infinite and perfect occupies the first place; the second difference is, that Plato goes from ideas to G.o.d by the principle of substances, if we may be allowed to use this technical language of modern philosophy; whilst Descartes employs rather the principle of causality, and concludes--well understood without syllogism--from the idea of the infinite and the perfect in a cause also perfect and infinite.[58] But under these differences, and in spite of many more, is a common basis, a genius the same, which at first elevates us above the senses, and, by the intermediary of marvellous ideas that are incontestably in us, bears us towards him who alone can be their substance, who is the infinite and perfect author of our idea of infinity and perfection. For this reason, Descartes belongs to the family of Plato and Socrates.

The idea of the perfect and the finite being once introduced into the philosophy of the seventeenth century, it becomes there for the successors of Descartes what the theory of ideas became for the successors of Plato.

Among the French writers, Malebranche, perhaps, reminds us with the least disadvantage, although very imperfectly still, of the manner of Plato: he sometimes expresses its elevation and grace; but he is far from possessing the Socratic good sense, and, it must be confessed, no one has clouded more the theory of ideas by exaggerations of every kind which he has mingled with them.[59] Instead of establishing that there is in the human reason, wholly personal as it is by its intimate relation with our other faculties, something also which is not personal, something universal which permits it to elevate itself to universal truths, Malebranche does not hesitate to absolutely confound the reason that is in us with the divine reason itself. Moreover, according to Malebranche, we do not directly know particular things, sensible objects; we know them only by ideas; it is the intelligible extension and not the material extension that we immediately perceive; in vision the proper object of the mind is the universal, the idea; and as the idea is in G.o.d, it is in G.o.d that we see all things. We can understand how well-formed minds must have been shocked by such a theory; but it is not just to confound Plato with his brilliant and unfaithful disciple.

In Plato, sensibility directly attains sensible things; it makes them known to us as they are, that is to say, as very imperfect and undergoing perpetual change, which renders the knowledge that we have of them almost unworthy of the name of knowledge. It is reason, different in us from sensibility, which, above sensible objects, discovers to us the universal, the idea, and gives a knowledge solid and durable. Having once attained ideas, we have reached G.o.d himself, in whom they have their foundation, who finishes and consummates true knowledge. But we have no need of G.o.d, nor of ideas, in order to perceive sensible objects, which are defective and changing; for this our senses are sufficient. Reason is distinct from the senses; it transcends the imperfect knowledge of what they are capable; it attains the universal, because it possesses something universal itself; it partic.i.p.ates in the divine reason, but it is not the divine reason; it is enlightened by it, it comes from it,--it is not it.