Chapter V: Part 5

They claim, too, the honor of bearing the banner of a grand and noble cause, the cause of Liberty. That Christianity alone restored to man, as man, and for no other reason, his rights to liberty, is a fact that the comparative histories of the world, whether Christian or Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront these two histories, and name the nations among whom the idea of the dignity of man's liberty became a general idea, powerful in influence and fruitful in consequence! Another fact equally historic and certain is, that Christianity knew how to adapt itself, and did readily adapt itself, to the different states of society, and the different forms of government; that it set itself up and maintained its rank in republics as well as monarchies, under constitutional regimes as well as in despotisms, in the midst of democratical as well as aristocratical institutions; and, beyond doubt, it was not in free states that it displayed least vigor, or met with the smallest success. {213} These two great facts are nowadays lost sight of. Christianity is accused of being hostile to Liberty and incompatible with the spirit of modern societies; and this is, indeed, the chief charge laid to its score. True it is, that the charge is not without deriving countenance from the history of Europe in modern times; worldly interests, selfish passions, events complex and obscure, in which moral order and social order have been compromised, have as it were suspended in certain countries the liberal action of Christianity, and enlisted momentarily the cause of Liberty under a banner not Christian. The error is profound, but transient; the traditional influences of ages will resume their empire, the grand events their course; Christ's religion and man's liberty will once more remember that each stands in need of the other, and that their alliance in the bosom of order is their natural and necessary condition. That they do misunderstand each other occasions the most serious crisis at this moment in modern society.

{214}

Here, too, is the gravest peril which the Christian religion has in our days to surmount. Appreciate the force of the two sentiments to which I just now referred, the love of science and the love of liberty; understand through what phases of degeneration and of deceptive transformation those sentiments may, in the ardor of pursuit and of combat, have to pass; reckon up, if reckon you can, all the false ideas, the chimerical hopes, which they may suggest; and then add to the amount, and as their consequences, the immoral and anarchical passions which may make those sentiments their pretext and their tools; and in doing this, you will find that you have passed in review the forces of that enemy now waging an implacable war against Christianity, although a war to which Christianity is called upon to put an end.

{215}

I do not in any respect underrate the forces of that army. I disparage no more their quality than their numbers. To maintain the combat worthily and efficaciously we should, at the onset, accord to our adversaries the whole amount of their merits as well as of their strength, and then attack them in their strongest entrenchments. I have charged the enemies of Christianity with puerile presumptuousness when they refuse to see the energy and the progress of the awakening of Christianity. It is of infinite importance to Christians, on their side, not to be blind to the ardor and the effects which that Antichristian demonstration is producing, of which their Faith and their Church are the aim. I am firmly convinced that in this war Christianity will conquer; but it will leave its enemies with arms still in their hands. It will no more gain over them any complete or definitive victory than it will be able to conclude with them any serious or durable peace. In the actual state of men's minds and of society, the struggle will go on between the followers and the opponents of Christianity; the two armies will continue to deploy their forces in the face each of the other; and that of the Christians, in order to defend and to extend its domain, will be incessantly called upon to watch and to combat the movements of its enemy. {216} While combating them it will be also obliged to comply with the terms that truth exacts, and the conditions that liberty imposes. From these exigencies and these conditions Christianity has nothing to dread--that is, if it accepts them boldly, and in its turn imposes them upon its enemies. Let man's science, labors, and systems be submitted to the same tests, and handled with the same freedom of examination, as are being applied to the foundations and the doctrines of Christian faith; this is all that Christians are entitled to, all that they need to demand.

Thus far I have explained the actual state of the Christian religion in France, the sources of its strength and of its weakness, its awakening and its perils. It is my intention now to examine the actual state of those doctrines and systems which repudiate, or which more or less deny and combat Christianity. {217} When I have passed the hostile army in review, I will once more confront Christianity with its adversaries, and endeavor to distinguish, by contrasting them, on which side the truth is, on which side the right, and on which side the hope of future success.

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{218}

Second Meditation.

Spiritualism.

I witnessed the birth--not, certainly, the birth of Spiritualism, for this was, like its twin brother Materialism, born in the cradle of Philosophy, and while the steps of Philosophy were still those of an infant--but the birth of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century. This birth was a national reaction against the Sensualism of the eighteenth century--just as the Christian Awakening was a reaction against the impiety of the same epoch. Theories do not escape the influence of events: after the ideas come the facts, to pour upon those ideas floods of light, and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy or of policy, in all their practical consequences. {219} The Sensualism--that is to say, to style it by its true name, the Materialism--of the eighteenth century, did not pass triumphantly through this test: it still reigned in France at the commencement of the nineteenth century, but it was the reign of an antiquated sovereign in decline--a sovereign of whom the public know the defects, and whose successor is at hand.

M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed to take up with systems--he observed, he read, he studied and reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound thinker. {220} His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment, circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented themselves step by step, each on its own account, without troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth; and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34] characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism, scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the results that the inductive process discovers in the facts themselves.

[Footnote 34: In his "Traduction des oeuvres complètes de
Reid," vol. iii, pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 273-451.]

{221}

He had been a great reader of the writings of the Scotch philosophers, held them in high esteem, and walked in their steps; his views were, however, loftier, and his footing firmer, although not less prudent. He had in his short philosophical career two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that he had a friend in M. Maine de Biran, a profound and enthusiastic observer of the human soul in his own soul--a subtle metaphysician, almost a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, name the Saint Theresa of philosophy; his other advantage was, that he had for his disciple M. Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent interpreter of the great philosophers of all ages. M. Cousin, in his turn, has been fortunate in having for his disciple M. Jouffroy--a disciple, of mind original and independent, following a master accomplished in the art of observing intellectual and moral facts, and of describing them and ordering them, without altering their essential character. {222} Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin yields to the ambition of his thought, or is swayed by the intellectual current of opinions in vogue; but very soon his common sense checks, or at least sets him on his guard--a common sense that finds lucid expression, and is distinguished by probity of intent. Such are the founders and the glorious chiefs of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century.

Nor have they failed to find disciples and heirs worthy of such predecessors. For some years past it has been the custom, in certain regions of the learned world, to demand, frivolously enough, and in a tone not free from irony, "What has become of the spiritualistic school--what can it be about?" I will not answer for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, "We are only of yesterday, and we are everywhere--in your domains, your cities, your isles, your fortresses, your communes, your councils, your camps, your tribes, your 'decuries,' in the palace, the senate, the forum; we only leave you your temples." [Footnote 35]

[Footnote 35: Tertullian Apologet., ch. xxxvii.]

{223}

The modern Spiritualists had no such conquests to make, and it is fitting for philosophers to be more modest; but however short my experience may have taught me that the human memory may in similar cases sometimes be, I am astonished that men should so forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and patent. What school of philosophy ever furnished in half a century so many men and so many works, some of eminence, all of them of distinguished merit? I will cite only a few names: MM. de Rémusat, Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire, Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévêque, Bouillier, Janet, some of whom have scarcely disappeared from the stage of the world, and others are only just arrived there--they belong all to the spiritualistic school, to which they have all done honor by important works on philosophy, whether speculative, historical, political, economic, or practical. {224} Their doctrines, it is true, have now been for some time hotly attacked, and the wind of the day does not blow into their sails. They have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this respect, that they have not directed sufficient attention to these polemics; that they have combated in a manner too indirect, or with too little energy; the ideas in whose name their own have been assailed; a certain share of languor and of embarrassment is at this moment the malady of the best minds and of the sincerest convictions. But in spite of the blows which it receives and returns, although with insufficient sturdiness, the spiritualistic school, if we judge it by the names and the works which belong to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains in our century in possession of the domain and of the banner of philosophy.

Its merits will present themselves still more clearly if we examine closely the results of its labors.

{225}

The first and the most important result, in a point of view purely philosophical, is, that the Spiritualists of our days have given to their researches and to their ideas a character really scientific: they have introduced into the study of man and of the intellectual world, the method practiced with so much success in the study of man and of the material world--that is to say, they have taken the observation of facts as the point of departure and the constant guide of their investigations. Are there in man and in the intellectual world, as there are in man and in the material world, facts capable of being observed, seized, described, classified, generalized? This is the question which the spiritualistic school proposed and discussed at the outset. I have no hesitation in saying, that it resolved it in the affirmative, and that, thanks to this school, psychology has assumed its rank among the positive sciences, just as physiology did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, psychology has its special object, its determined domain, in which it proceeds absolutely according to the same method observed by the physical sciences in their domain. {226} That this method, the observation of facts, of their value and their laws, is in psychology more difficult to be followed than in the physical sciences, is certain; but this certainly does not deprive psychology either of its domain or of its scientific character. It is a science by the same right and upon the same conditions as all the others are so. The labors of the spiritualistic school, and particularly those of M. Jouffroy, have given it a solid foundation: and this has been formally recognized by several even among the adversaries of this school, among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot. [Footnote 36]

[Footnote 36: I read in the Métaphysique et la Science of M.
Vacherot:

"_The Metaphysician:_

"In his denial of psychology, I stop at once the author of
the 'positive philosophy,' and I demand of him by what right
he thus banishes from the domain of the experimental sciences
a science of observation.

"_The man of learning:_

"It constitutes in effect 'hiatus' in this philosophy, and a
hiatus which all the sound minds of the positive school are
beginning to admit. M. Littré, for example, may make his
reservations of opinion as to the manner in which our
psychologists understand psychology, and as to the method
which they apply to it; but he has too much sense not to
admit that the intelligence--all that constitutes man's
identity, the moral man--is the object of a peculiar study,
of which many previous works have shown the possibility, and
many practical results prove the high and vital interest."--
Vacherot, la Métaphysique et la Science, vol. iii, p. 181.]

{227}

It is in the name of science and by the processes of science that the Spiritualists of the nineteenth have combated the Sensualists of the eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, absolutely crushed Materialism, that child and legitimate heir of Sensualism; but while dethroning the parent, they have compelled the child sometimes to avow himself boldly, sometimes to transform himself, and to assume other features and other arms than those of his cradle. I will only cite the lecture of M. Cousin on the "Sensualistic Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century," and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on the "Existence of the Soul," [Footnote 37] written on the occasion of the work of M. Broussais: "De l'Irrritation et de la Folie."

[Footnote 37: This essay, first inserted in 1828 in the Revue
Française, has been reprinted in the "Ecrits et discours
divers" of the Duke de Broglie, collected and published in
1863.]

{228}

Whoever, after having read them, would still persist in maintaining the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in refusing to see the consequences to which Sensualism leads, would prove, in my opinion, that he has not understood either the question put, or the doctrine combated and refuted. We have here a result acquired for the science of the intellectual world, and we owe the result to the polemics of the spiritualistic school.

That school has obtained another result more important still, and which belongs no longer to the polemics of simple negation, but to positive doctrine; it has set in the broad light of day the real and fundamental principle of morals, the distinction as to the essentials of moral good and evil, as well as the law of obligation, that "categorical imperative," the sole refuge which Kant found against Skepticism. 229 Neither the interest well defined of each individual, nor the interest of the greater numbers, nor any sentimental sympathy, nor any system of positive written law, can, for the future, be considered as the basis of morals. An attempt is made in the present day to establish another thesis, and to represent morality as absolutely independent of religion. Grave error, which discards from morality, if not its principle, at least its source and its object, its author and its future; an error, however, very different from those errors which dispense even with the principle of morals, and assign as the rule for the conduct of men, motives having in themselves nothing moral, nothing absolute. The fact that man's conscience and man's reason recognize the distinction of moral good and evil, and at the same time the duty of practicing that good as the law of human actions, is a fact which we may now regard as acquired to philosophy. {230} The treatise "Du Bien," in the work of M. Cousin upon "Le Vrai, le Beau, et le Bien," the preface of M. Jouffroy to the "Outlines of Moral Philosophy," by Dugald Stewart, and the "Essia sur la Morale," in the "Mélanges Philosophiques," which M. Jouffroy published in 1833, the book of M. Jules Simon upon "Le Devoir," these are all solid and brilliant works, by which the spiritualistic school has victoriously established the truth to which I have referred.

And in establishing it, it has paid a remarkable act of homage to another fact, and rendered an immense service by enforcing a truth, with which are intimately connected man's rights in this world, as well as his prospects beyond this world: I mean the fact of man's liberty. This is no question of pure theory and scientific curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution has for man, in time present and time future, the most important practical consequences. Upon what grounds would the claim of man to liberty in the social state rest, what would become of his hopes and fears of a future eternity, if man were not a being morally free and responsible for the decisions which determine his acts? {231} The civil liberty of man during his life on earth, and his future destiny after his life on earth, closely depend upon the fact of his free volition and upon the responsibility which accompanies it. Without free volition man falls in this world, without rights, under the yoke of whatever force may take possession of him, or use him as its instrument; what remains for man, then, but to tremble at the destiny which awaits him beyond this world by virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign Master? To the spiritualistic school belongs the honor of having firmly established and rendered plain the psychological fact of the freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has it allowed itself to be troubled and blinded by the ontological questions which that fact suggests, or by the difficulty attending the solution of these questions. Consequently, it has accepted upon this point the limits of man's science, and at the same time maintained the rights of man's nature. It has laid in man's liberty and man's responsibility the legitimate foundation of political liberty, as well as that of the personal morality of man and of man's future.

{232}

Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century is at once scientific, moral, liberal. Eminent merits, rare combination in any time, and still more so in our time!

With these great merits, and in spite of them, two omissions are still remarkably striking.

The spiritualistic school, our contemporary, has halted abruptly before the sovereign problems which weigh upon the human soul, and which, in the first series of these "Meditations," I styled natural problems; [Footnote 38] it has in no respect furthered their solution according to reason, or accepted their solution according to Christianity; its "Theodicy" has remained far in arrear of its Psychology.

[Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
Religion.]

Halted it has, also, before any practical solution of these same problems; nor has it eliminated either any faith or any law which suffices for man's soul or man's conduct in life--in short, any religion. {233} M. Jules Simon, in his work entitled "La Religion Naturelle," MM. Saisset and De Rémusat, in their "Essais de Philosophie Religieuse," have striven, irrespectively of all positive revelation, to give to man's soul and to man's conduct that satisfaction and that religious rule which both require. I doubt their counting much upon the success of their attempts; I doubt their believing that their natural religion, or their religious philosophy, are sufficient substitutes for Christianity. Far other things than such drops of science are required to appease the thirst of humanity for religion.

Whence, in the spiritualistic school, this double hiatus--this twofold weakness, whence?

In my opinion, the causes are themselves twofold. The spiritualistic school has been at once too timid and too proud. It has not seen in the psychological facts which it was observing and describing, all that they contain and reveal upon the subject of the great natural problems of man and of the world; it has neglected the cosmological facts and the historical facts which concur to throw light upon those problems; its psychology has remained isolated and incomplete. {234} It has, at the same time, failed to see the limits of psychology and of human science in general; not having succeeded in advancing the torch of science into the regions where access to it is denied, it has refused to accept the light descending upon man by another way than that of science.

Like Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Reid, and Kant, M. Cousin, now the most eminent representative of the spiritualistic school, establishes, by virtue of psychological observation, these two great facts: first, that there exist universal and necessary principles manifesting themselves in the human mind, and reigning there without being capable of being subverted, which are called into action by sensations coming from the external world; secondly, that these sensations, so coming from the external world, do not in any way supply the human mind with these universal and necessary principles, and that they can explain neither their presence nor their origin. {235} Such, for instance, are the principles, that everything which begins to appear has a cause--that every quality belongs to a substance! [Footnote 39] Sensualism is not in a position to account in any way for these two principles, or to find them among those facts that form all its psychology.

[Footnote 39: Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, pp. 19-66. 1857.]

I am not called upon to develop or to discuss this idea, which, for my part, I fully admit; enough that I mention it as a fundamental doctrine of the spiritualistic school.

The philosophers, who have admitted the existence of these universal and necessary principles, have assigned them different names, and have enumerated and classified them differently; but whether they style them "ideas," or "innate ideas," or "laws," or "forms," or "categories of the understanding"--whether they enlarge or limit their number--they agree as to their nature, and declare them inherent in the human mind itself, which applies them, so to say, as its own peculiar property in its appreciation of the external world; so far is the mind from borrowing them from that world!

{236}

These universal and necessary principles once admitted and characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others, like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that they regulate the realities of the external world, as they regulate our intellectual activity. {237} Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he placed man himself in the middle of the world.

To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why does the spiritualistic school so stop short, why does it not advance to the very end of the path upon which it has entered? It admits God as the being in whom these necessary principles reside, and from whom man has received them; what does this mean but that it recognizes in God the author and instructor of man? And to recognize in God the author and the instructor of man, what is this but to recognize the fact of the creation, and the fact of the primitive revelation inherent in the fact of the creation? {238} These two truths are involved in the fact that the necessary principles exist in the mind of man, and that man derives them, not from his relations with the external world, but from himself, and from the source whence he himself emanates--from God, his Creator. God has created man armed at all points, as well in the order of the intellect as of matter, complete in his soul as in his body: that is to say, God has given to him at his creation the necessary principles of his intellectual life, just as he has given him the necessary mechanism of his physical organization. Scientific psychology thus mounts up to that supreme point where it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its part, inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing and proclaiming the existence of that light to which it so attains.

What was the import, what the form, of that primitive revelation? Has the revelation itself been renewed at any epoch subsequent to the creation? If so, by what instruments and with what incidents has it been renewed? These are questions to which I shall recur, but which for the moment I do not approach; I wish here only to establish the fact of the divine revelation in the sphere and in the terms of scientific psychology.

{239}

Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclusion. I repeat here what I said in the first series of these Meditations, when speaking of the dogma of the creation:

"The only serious opponents of the dogma of the creation are
those who maintain that the universe, the earth, and man upon
the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively,
in the state in which they now are. No one, however, can hold
this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many
ages man has existed on the earth is a question that has been
largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry
in no way affects the dogma of the creation itself; it is a
certain and recognized fact that man has not always existed on
the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone
different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man,
therefore, had a beginning: man has come upon the earth."
[Footnote 40]

[Footnote 40: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
Religion, page 18.]

{240}

He did not come there by spontaneous generation--that is to say, by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter. Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the progressive transformation of species does not explain better the existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth. {241} This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts; even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology. God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors.

The whole current of history contains the same teaching. I admit that error abounds in history, that it is full of false assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated, legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that, the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains there, that certain historical events are authenticated and attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two, because connected with the subject which engages me. {242} It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man; had become manifest to him by different acts or under different forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a succession of revelations--revelations characterized at one time by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to Christianity. {243} We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the relations of the Creator with his creatures.

If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history, into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its peculiar scientific object--the study of the human soul--I am far from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error. While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not see what was implied in that man besides--that is, revelation as well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had deduced from psychology. {244} In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves to it too exclusively.

From this twofold error sprang another still more serious. Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism--a transformation as unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete!

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{245}

Third Meditation.

Rationalism.

A man of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one who will never be suspected of any undue bias for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, avowing to me recently the high esteem with which M. Alexandre Vinet inspired him, borrowed an expression of Pascal's: "The heart has its reasons, which the reason does not comprehend." [Footnote 41]

[Footnote 41: Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is
a slight difference. Pascal said, "Le cœur a des raisons que
la raison ne connaît point:" "The heart has reasons that the
reason knows not at all." Pensées de Pascal, edition of M.
Faugère, 1844, vol. ii, p. 172.]

I only admit half of what is implied in this conciliatory phrase; and these are my reasons.

{246}

True religious faith, or, to call things by their real names, Christian faith, is founded upon instincts and upon sentiment at the same time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason do not accept the sentiments of the heart, on which side is the fault? Is the fault with the heart, that it feels them, or is it with the reason, that it does not comprehend them?

My reply to this question is easy. I reject the distinction made. I admit no such persons as are respectively styled the heart, the reason. Here is only an attempt at a psychological anatomy; no true enunciation of a real fact. Man, the human being, is essentially one, and single: he has the faculty of self-observation and self-study, but in exercising it he does not destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his mere reason, it is himself, and his whole self, that makes himself the object of his observation and of his study, and that cannot but recognize himself and accept himself in his entirety. He has no right to say, with an air of scientific disdain, "My reason comprehends not the reasons of my heart." {247} He must perforce say: "I comprehend not myself;" he must perforce proclaim, not the incoherency of his being, but the insufficiency or the incompetency of what he styles his reason.

Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personifications that mislead; the one personifies by images, the other by abstractions. Both have need of them--the one for its creations, the other for its studies; I am far from seeking to deny their respective use. All that I contend for is, that we must not misconceive the real import of these expedients of human language; we must not, by taking them for realities, lose sight of or destroy what are really and genuinely realities, the entities of divine creation.

I insist the more on this error, because in the philosophy of our time it is a common and a potent error, and the source too of other errors, deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral and practical point of view. Condillac and his disciples had set apart and specially studied in man the faculty of sensation, and they were thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out of it alone, man himself and the whole man. {248} Kant and his school considered particularly in man the faculty of the reason and judgment, and very soon reason came with them to constitute the whole man. I am far from intending to examine in its fundamental principles and its entirety the system of Kant, the greatest philosophical work upon the human understanding that any man has produced since the time of Plato. I single out this fact, that it treats the reason as the proper, special, and paramount object of philosophy. Warned by his profound, scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit himself to a point of view so narrow, although so lofty; he studied man's reason under its different aspects, he constituted himself the critic of pure reason, the critic of practical reason, the critic of æsthetic reason--that is, of reason applied to the discrimination of the beautiful; he decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as many different faculties as he found different phases in the intellectual and moral life of man; but the faculty that he styled the reason remained the basis of his study and of his system. {249} It became in his school, and in the schools akin to it, pre-eminently the intellectual substance, the basis of man and of philosophy; and the human being himself, in his personal unity, with all his life and his free will, entirely disappeared from their teaching.

As results of this system I will cite only two facts, very different in their nature, both very foreign to the founder of the system and his disciples, but which serve the better to reveal that system's faultiness, as these facts are, although its indirect, remote, and involuntary, nevertheless, its undeniable consequences.

When, in 1793, the frenzied men who disposed, as masters, of the destinies of France, abolished the Christian religion and Christian worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to men an object to adore. They instituted the worship of reason. {250} The church of Notre-Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a temple of reason; a young woman was made to figure there as the goddess of reason; and the orator of the National Convention, Chaumette, cried aloud as he pointed her out to the people, "Behold living Reason; we celebrate here to-day the sole true worship, the worship of Liberty and of Reason."

At the distance of three quarters of a century from the date of these revolutionary orgies, in 1865, not in France but in England, a man of earnest intentions, superior mind, and extensive learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes a book entitled, "Rationalism in Europe;" and the object of this book is to establish, that all the good effected in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, all the progress made by states in justice, in humanity, in liberty, and general happiness--whether in the sphere of science or of practical industry--is due to the influence of Rationalism, to its developments and its conquests. {251} Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he attaches no precise and philosophical meaning to the word "Rationalism;" he does not trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor the place occupied in it by the pure, the practical, or the aesthetic reason; he only retraces the intellectual and social history of Europe, and all the happy results that this history commemorates, all the salutary consequences of the activity of the human mind, of the liberty of man's thought, of the amelioration of human institutions and manners, he sums up all in a single name, attributes them to a single cause, and assigns all the honor to the progress of Rationalism!

{252}

Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his work, a single reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: he asks himself whether, in extolling the happy effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too much:

"Utility is perhaps the highest motive to which reason can
attain. ... It is from the moral or religious faculty alone
that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. ...
The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth for
its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of
error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political
movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of
the spirit of Rationalism into politics, has produced, and is
producing, some of the most splendid instances of
self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, the general tendency of
these influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and both in
actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible.
With a far higher level of average excellence than in former
times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of
self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or
religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice
during the last eighteen hundred years has been mainly the
history of the action of Christianity upon the world.
{253}
Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic
spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a
cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and
beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the
Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it
is by their influence alone that it can be permanently
sustained. ...

"This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant
picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of
the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecutions; the
decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments,
which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered
the character of mankind; the emancipation of suffering
nationalities; the abolition of the belief in the guilt of
error, which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the asceticism
which paralyzed the material progress of mankind, may be justly
regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilization; but
when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some
former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual
interests to what they believed to be right, and when we
realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is
impossible to deny that we have lost something in our
progress." [Footnote 42]

[Footnote 42: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii, 1866,
third edition, pp. 403-409.]

{254}

But to leave England and Mr. Lecky, and to return once more to France. I turn to the pages of a rationalistic philosopher more profound, and more profoundly troubled, too, in his sentiments than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in an essay of M. Edmond Scherer, entitled "The Crisis of Protestantism," [Footnote 43] the following passage:

[Footnote 43: Mélanges d'histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254.
1864.]

{255}

"That which is really imperiled is not so much Protestantism;
it is Christianity, it is very religion. As for natural
religion, that exists only in books. Religions which have vital
force and influence are positive religions; that is, religions
which have a Church, and particular rites, and dogmas. What are
these dogmas? Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the
solutions of the great problems which have ever disquieted the
mind of man--the origin of the world, and of evil; the
expiation; the future of humanity. The doctrines of religion
are a sort of revealed metaphysics.

"Considered in its form, dogma is the supernatural--not merely
because religions were born at an epoch when the imagination
was greedy of miracles, and when the imagination, in her
_näiveté_, associated herself with everything; but also
because, as may be readily understood, it is impossible for a
positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation;
it is necessarily a history of the intervention of God in the
destinies of man, the account of acts by which God created and
saved the world--it is that or it is nothing. We see then at
once that in religion everything is not religious. There is in
every religion a multitude of elements, historical, physical,
and metaphysical, as to which its dogmas may come into conflict
with science. Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I
would here speak. The religious sentiment has also its critical
action; _it_ also may enter into a struggle with religion.

{256}

"As long as the authority of the priest or of the book
preserves its prestige, the believer receives his religion
ready made for him, without himself making distinctions; but as
soon as that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not entirely
reject his first belief, will at least no longer accept it
without reservations. He only retains so much of it as
enlightens or touches him, so much as commends itself to his
understanding or to his heart; so much, in a word, as gives a
satisfaction to his religious requirements.

"Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes the measure of
religious truth. It receives all in religion that addresses
itself to the soul, all that nourishes and fortifies the soul,
all that raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all
that unites the soul to God.
{257}
Religious sentiment appropriates it all, but it appropriates
nothing more. Let but a thing become indifferent, and it feels
it as an importunity, and looks upon it in the light of an
element strange, useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this
reason, doctrines purely speculative as well as facts purely
marvelous. Man requires his religion to be entirely religious;
that is to say, to be in all respects in direct relation with
piety, and, so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. The
more his faith purifies itself, the more a man eliminates from
his religion dogmas which, having no root either in the divine
nature or man's nature, appear on that very account to have no
ground to exist at all.

"At first sight this gradual emancipation of faith and this
corresponding progress of religion in the ways of Spiritualism,
seem a natural process by means of which religious opinion and
the human mind contrive to maintain themselves in a state of
constant equilibrium.
{258}
We imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that we catch a
glimpse of the religious future of humanity in a sort of
Christian Rationalism, a rational Christianity not excluding
fervor of devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man's
thought.

"I demand nothing better as far as I am concerned; but I cannot
refrain from asking, not without anxiety, whether Christian
Rationalism is really a religion. What remains in the crucible
after the operation just detailed? Is the residue really the
essence of the positive dogmas, or is it but a _caput
mortuum?_ When Christianity is rendered translucent to man's
mind, conformable to man's reason and man's moral appreciation
of things, does it still possess any great virtue? Does it not
very much resemble Deism, and is it not equally lean and
sterile? Does not the potent influence of religious belief
reside in its dogmatic formulas and marvelous legends just as
much as in anything more essentially religious that it
possesses?
{259}
Is there not even somewhat of superstition in genuine piety,
and is it possible for piety to dispense with that popular
system of metaphysics, that attractive mythology, which men
strive to eliminate from it? Do not the elements which you
pretend to abstract from religion constitute the alloy, without
which the precious metal becomes unsuitable for the rough
usages of life? In short, when criticism shall have succeeded
in overthrowing the supernatural as useless, and dogmas as
irrational; when the religious sentiment on the one side, and a
scrupulous reason on the other, shall have penetrated man's
belief, assimilated and transformed it; when no other authority
shall remain standing, save that of the personal conscience of
each individual; when, in a word, man having torn every vail
and penetrated every mystery, shall behold that God face to
face to whom he aspires, will it not be discovered that that
God is, after all, nothing else than man himself, the
conscience and the reason of humanity personified? Will not
religion, in the very attempt to become more religious, have
ceased to exist?"

{260}

Such, according to the views of its most eminent representatives, are the potent influences and the final results of Rationalism. After having confusedly attributed to it all the progress of man's thought and of man's civilization, Mr. Lecky expresses the apprehension that he has lowered the nature of man, by depriving him (these are his very words) "of our noblest quality, of the divine spark, the principle in us of everything that is heroic," the complete and pure devotedness of Christian faith. M. Scherer asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing, and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself; and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has its reasons, which the reason comprehends not."

{261}

Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, at the same time, throws such light upon the subject of my meditations as this involuntary, this invincible anxiety observable in men of lofty sentiments and profound convictions, when confronting the chasms in their system, and dealing with the incoherences of their own convictions. However profound, however different my own conviction may be, I have no desire to engage, either with them or against them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. I have been engaged all my life in frequent and ardent polemics. Those could not be well avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely to combat human opinions, but to grapple with human affairs; and called upon to resolve, upon the instant, practical and urgent questions. But while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience has taught me their inconveniences and their perils. {262} The combatants on each side are prone to make use of weapons of too offensive a nature; men involve themselves for party interests and party honor, and push their conclusions with obstinate pertinacity beyond the strictness of truth, sometimes even beyond their own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any similar rock; but avoiding all personal polemics, all controversy of detail, I will express upon the essence of Rationalism, although only in a general manner, my sincere and intimate convictions.

There are in Rationalism two fundamental errors. First, it mutilates man while it studies him; it holds as of no account several of the constituent elements and essential facts of human nature, of which it ignores the meaning and the import. Secondly, Rationalism extends the pretensions of human science beyond its rights, and beyond its legitimate limits.

{263}

The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are certainly not sufficient reasons for scientific conviction, nor conclusive proofs in support of any particular system whatever. The instinctive belief of the human race in one or more supernatural forces is no demonstration of the reality of the supernatural; and the aspirings of man's soul for a life beyond this terrestrial one does not rationally prove the soul's immortality. Error may occur in human instincts or sentiments just as much as in human ideas. But when these instincts and these sentiments are universal, permanent, indestructible, encountered in all ages and in all countries--when they resist and survive all attacks, all doubts of reason or science--they are, beyond all question, considerable facts, and facts which the human understanding cannot but recognize and respect. If these instincts and sentiments do not solve the problems which trouble man's understanding, at least they demand imperiously some solution; if they throw no light upon his road to science, they oblige him to see that that road has its mysteries. {264} Rationalism mutilates humanity when it ignores such facts, regarding them as vain illusions because it cannot explain them; and when, after this mutilation, it assigns the entire empire to a single portion of the human nature, to a single faculty, called by it reason, as if reason constituted the entire man, Rationalism does in the intellectual world what it would be doing in the physical world did it deny the reality of night because it only sees the day clearly.

Rationalism is the more wrong in thus discarding facts which it does not explain, that in its proper domain similar facts occur, and that its science of reason arrives also finally at mysteries. I mentioned it before, as a truth acquired to philosophy, that there exist in the human mind certain universal and necessary principles, neither furnished to the mind by impressions derived from the external world, nor created by the mind itself; and that those principles are inherent in the nature of the mind, and come to it from another source than that of sensation, or any discovery of man's own thought. {265} We have here a psychological fact which, after the profound studies of the spiritualistic school from the time of Plato down to M. Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To what does this fact tend, and what is its logical consequence? What but God, creation, revelation, and the relations of God with man? Will Rationalism give any better explanation of these divine laws of the human mind than it has given of the instincts and of the sentiments of the human heart? or will it ignore the one result as it has ignored the other?