Chapter XVII: Appendix: 371 (15)

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

Not only is it certain that every effect supposes a cause, and every quality a being, but it is equally certain that an effect of such a nature supposes a cause of the same nature, and that a quality or an attribute marked with such or such essential characters supposes a being in which these same characters are again found in an eminent degree. Whence it follows, that we have very legitimately concluded from truth in an intelligent cause and substance, from beauty in a being supremely beautiful, and from a moral law composed at once of justice and charity in a legislator supremely just and supremely good.

And we have not made a geometrical and algebraical theodicea, after the example of many philosophers, and the most illustrious. We have not deduced the attributes of God from each other, as the different terms of an equation are converted, or as from one property of a triangle the other properties are deduced, thus ending at a God wholly abstract, good perhaps for the schools, but not sufficient for the human race. We have given to theodicea a surer foundation--psychology. Our God is doubtless also the author of the world, but he is especially the father of humanity; his intelligence is ours, with the necessity of essence and infinite power added. So our justice and our charity, related to their immortal exemplar, give us an idea of the divine justice and charity. Therein we see a real God, with whom we can sustain a relation also real, whom we can comprehend and feel, and who in his turn can comprehend and feel our efforts, our sufferings, our virtues, our miseries. Made in his image, conducted to him by a ray of his own being, there is between him and us a living and sacred tie.

Our theodicea is therefore free at once from hypothesis and abstraction. By preserving ourselves from the one, we have preserved ourselves from the other. Consenting to recognize God only in his signs visible to the eyes and intelligible to the mind, it is on infallible evidence that we have elevated ourselves to God. By a necessary consequence, setting out from real effects and real attributes, we have arrived at a real cause and a real substance, at a cause having in power all its essential effects, at a substance rich in attributes. I wonder at the folly of those who, in order to know God better, consider him, they say, in his pure and absolute essence, disengaged from all limitative determination. I believe that I have forever removed the root of such an extravagance.[282] No; it is not true that the diversity of determinations, and, consequently, of qualities and attributes, destroys the absolute unity of a being; the infallible proof of it is that my unity is not the least in the world altered by the diversity of my faculties. It is not true that unity excludes multiplicity, and multiplicity unity; for unity and multiplicity are united in me. Why then should they not be in God? Moreover, far from altering unity in me, multiplicity develops it and makes its productiveness appear. So the richness of the determinations and the attributes of God is exactly the sign of the plenitude of his being. To neglect his attributes, is therefore to impoverish him; we do not say enough, it is to annihilate him,--for a being without attributes exists not; and the abstraction of being, human or divine, finite or infinite, relative or absolute, is nonentity.

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

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

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

The universe, which comprises nature and man, manifests God. Is this saying that it exhausts God? By no means. Let us always consult psychology. I know myself only by my acts; that is certain; and what is not less certain is, that all my acts do not exhaust, do not equal my power and my substance; for my power, at least that of my will, can always add an act to all those which it has already produced, and it has the consciousness, at the same time that it is exercised, of containing in itself something to be exercised still. Of God and the world must be said two things in appearance contrary,--we know God only by the world, and God is essentially distinct and different from the world. The first cause, like all secondary causes, manifests itself only by its effects; it can even be conceived only by them, and it surpasses them by all of the difference between the Creator and the created, the perfect and the imperfect. The world is indefinite; it is not infinite; for, whatever may be its quantity, thought can always add to it. To the myriads of worlds that compose the totality of the world, may be added new worlds. But God is infinite, absolutely infinite in his essence, and an indefinite series cannot equal the infinite; for the indefinite is nothing else than the finite more or less multiplied and capable of continuous multiplication. The world is a whole which has its harmony; for a God could make only a complete and harmonious work. The harmony of the world corresponds to the unity of God, as indefinite quantity is a defective sign of the infinity of God. To say that the world is God, is to admit only the world and deny God. Give to this whatever name you please, it is at bottom atheism. On the one hand, to suppose that the world is void of God, and that God is separate from the world, is an insupportable and almost impossible abstraction. To distinguish is not to separate. I distinguish myself, but do not separate myself from my qualities and my acts. So God is not the world, although he is in it everywhere present in spirit and in truth.[283]

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

Let us sum up this _resume_. Setting out from the observation of ourselves in order to preserve ourselves from hypothesis, we have found in consciousness three orders of facts. We have left to each of them its character, its rank, its bearing, and its limits. Sensation has appeared to us the indispensable condition, but not the foundation of knowledge. Reason is the faculty itself of knowing; it has furnished us with absolute principles, and these absolute principles have conducted us to absolute truths. Sentiment, which pertains at once to sensation and reason, has found a place between both. Setting out from consciousness, but always guided by it, we have penetrated into the region of being; we have gone quite naturally from knowledge to its objects by the road that the human race pursues, that Kant sought in vain, or rather misconceived at pleasure, to wit, that reason which must be admitted entire or rejected entire, which reveals to us existences as well as truths. Therefore, after having recalled all the great metaphysical, aesthetical, and moral truths, we have referred them to their principle; with the human race we have pronounced the name of God, who explains all things, because he has made all things, whom all our faculties require,--reason, the heart, the senses, since he is the author of all our faculties.

This doctrine is so simple, is to such an extent in all our powers, is so conformed to all our instincts, that it scarcely appears a philosophic doctrine, and, at the same time, if you examine it more closely, if you compare it with all celebrated doctrines, you will find that it is related to them and differs from them, that it is none of them and embraces them all, that it expresses precisely the side of them that has made them live and sustains them in history. But that is only the scientific character of the doctrine which we present to you; it has still another character which distinguishes it and recommends it to you much more. The spirit that animates it is that which of old inspired Socrates, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, which makes your hearts beat when you are reading Corneille and Bossuet, which dictated to Vauvenargues the few pages that have immortalized his name, which you feel especially in Reid, sustained by an admirable good sense, and even in Kant, in the midst of, and superior to the embarrassments of his metaphysics, to wit, the taste of the beautiful and the good in all things, the passionate love of honesty, the ardent desire of the moral grandeur of humanity. Yes, we do not fear to repeat that we tend thither by all our views; it is the end to which are related all the parts of our instruction; it is the thought which serves as their connection, and is, thus to speak, their soul. May this thought be always present to you, and accompany you as a faithful and generous friend, wherever fortune shall lead you, under the tent of the soldier, in the office of the lawyer, of the physician, of the savant, in the study of the literary man, as well as in the studio of the artist! Finally, may it sometimes remind you of him who has been to you its very sincere but too feeble interpreter!

FOOTNOTES:

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

[264] In 1804.

[265] Died, 1814.

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

[267] FRAGMENTS DE PHILOSOPHIE CARTESIENNE, p. 429: _Des Rapports du Cartesienisme et du Spinozisme_.

[268] Part 1st, lectures 1 and 2.

[269] Part 2d.

[270] Part 3d.

[271] On Condillac, 1st Series, vol. i., _passim_, and particularly vol. iii., lectures 2 and 3.

[272] We have never spoken of Locke except with sincere respect, even while combating him. See 1st Series, vol. i., course of 1817, _Discours d'Ouverture_, vol. ii., lecture 1, and especially 2d Series, vol. iii., _passim_.

[273] See 1st Series, vol. iv., lectures on Reid.

[274] _Ibid._, vol. v.

[275] For more than twenty years we have thought of translating and publishing the three _Critiques_, joining to them a selection from the smaller productions of Kant. Time has been wanting to us for the completion of our design; but a young and skilful professor of philosophy, a graduate of the Normal School, has been willing to supply our place, and to undertake to give to the French public a faithful and intelligent version of the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century. M. Barni has worthily commenced the useful and difficult enterprise which we have remitted to his zeal, and pursues it with courage and talent.

[276] Part 1st, Lecture 3.

[277] Lecture 5, _Mysticism_.

[278] This pretended proof of sentiment is in fact, the Cartesian proof itself. See lectures 4 and 16.

[279] M. Jacobi. See the _Manual of the History of Philosophy_, by Tennemann, vol. ii., p. 318.

[280] On spontaneous reason and reflective reason, see 1st part, lect. 2 and 3.

[281] Lectures 4 and 5.

[282] See particularly lecture 5.

[283] We place here this analogous passage on the true measure in which it may be said that God is at once comprehensible and incomprehensible, 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, p. 12: "We say in the first place that God is not absolutely incomprehensible, for this manifest reason, that, being the cause of this universe, he passes into it, and is reflected in it, as the cause in the effect; therefore we recognize him. 'The heavens declare his glory.' and 'the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made;' his power, in the thousands of worlds sown in the boundless regions of space; his intelligence in their harmonious laws; finally, that which there is in him most august, in the sentiments of virtue, of holiness, and of love, which the heart of man contains. It must be that God is not incomprehensible to us, for all nations have petitioned him, since the first day of the intellectual life of humanity. God, then, as the cause of the universe, reveals himself to us; but God is not only the cause of the universe, he is also the perfect and infinite cause, possessing in himself, not a relative perfection, which is only a degree of imperfection, but an absolute perfection, an infinity which is not only the finite multiplied by itself in those proportions which the human mind is able always to enumerate, but a true infinity, that is, the absolute negation of all limits, in all the powers of his being. Moreover, it is not true that an indefinite effect adequately expresses an infinite cause; hence it is not true that we are able absolutely to comprehend God by the world and by man, for all of God is not in them. In order absolutely to comprehend the infinite, it is necessary to have an infinite power of comprehension, and that is not granted to us. God, in manifesting himself, retains something in himself which nothing finite can absolutely manifest; consequently, it is not permitted us to comprehend absolutely. There remains, then, in God, beyond the universe and man, something unknown, impenetrable, incomprehensible. Hence in the immeasurable spaces of the universe, and beneath all the profundities of the human soul, God escapes us in that inexhaustible infinitude, whence he is able to draw without limit new worlds, new beings, new manifestations. God is to us, therefore, incomprehensible; but even of this incomprehensibility we have a clear and precise idea; for we have the most precise idea of infinity. And this idea is not in us a metaphysical refinement, it is a simple and primitive conception which enlightens us from our entrance into this world, both luminous and obscure, explaining everything, and being explained by nothing, because it carries us at first, to the summit and the limit of all explanation. There is something inexplicable for thought,--behold then whither thought tends; there is infinite being,--behold then the necessary principle of all relative and finite beings. Reason explains not the inexplicable, it conceives it. It is not able to comprehend infinity in an absolute manner, but it comprehends it in some degree in its indefinite manifestations, which reveal it, and which veil it; and, further, as it has been said, it comprehend it so far as incomprehensible. It is, therefore, an equal error to call God absolutely comprehensible, and absolutely incomprehensible. He is both invisible and present, revealed and withdrawn in himself, in the world and out of the world, so familiar and intimate with his creatures, that we see him by opening our eyes, that we feel him in feeling our hearts beat, and at the same time inaccessible in his impenetrable majesty, mingled with every thing, and separated from every thing, manifesting himself in universal life, and causing scarcely an ephemeral shadow of his eternal essence to appear there, communicating himself without cessation, and remaining incommunicable, at once the living God, and the God concealed, '_Deus vivus et Deus absconditus_.'"