Chapter XVI: Appendix: 371 (14)

But philosophy does not think of trespassing 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 noble 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 embarrassed 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 God 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 institutions, 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 superstitions, 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 entitled _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 God given by this argument is the God 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 nonentity 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 title of the History of Modern Philosophy.

[250] 3d Series, vol. iv., advertisement 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'Assas. D'Assas did not deliberate; and for all that, was d'Assas 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 passive 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 ennobled; from the human form of volition it has passed 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 God's liberty. Yes, certainly, God 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; God is free, but not with that liberty which is related to our double nature, and made to contend against passion 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, God 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 space, while our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, are for us unextended, and while we cannot conceive them and place them in space, 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 analysis 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 identity 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 space. 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. God can indeed make them exist together, and their co-existence is a certain fact, but he cannot confound them. God 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 God, a God 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_, _passim_.

[260] Works of Turgot, vol. ii., _Discours en Sorbonne sur les Avantages que l'etablissement 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, _passim_; 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 illustrious 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 illustrious 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, analogous 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 analysis; but Reid stops there, and Kant builds upon analysis 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 destitute of reality. Dogmatical in analysis, 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 God 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 mass 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. 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 analysis, 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. Space 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 passions, 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 illustrious 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 circumspect 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, constituted 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 noblest 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 analytical 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 analysis.[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 space? 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 pass away and vanish. If there is in us no other faculty of knowing than sensation, we never know aught but what is passing 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 institutions, 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 space, 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, space, 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, nobler 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 circumstances of life, when passion 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 analysis 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 analysis, reason in its natural and spontaneous exercise is confounded with sentiment by a multitude 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 God 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, passing 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 nobility of sentiment makes the nobility 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 God.

We, therefore, give a prominent place to this noble 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 passing through analysis, 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 God 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 God, it is powerless; for if it does not possess God, 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 God.

More than one road may lead us to God. 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 entities. 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 God. 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 God,--it is God himself under one of his phases. Since Plato, the greatest minds, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, agree in putting in God, 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 participation 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, God 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.

God 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, God.

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, God, always God.

We have arrived, then, from degree to degree, at religion. We are in fellowship with the great philosophies which all proclaim a God, 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 God in the name of all his needs and all his faculties, in the name of reason and sentiment.