Chapter VII: Part 7

By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so rigorously philosophical?

Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems, invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the Pantheists by similar means proceeded--nay, are proceeding--to explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite. The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences themselves--I may at once call it by its proper name, the scientific method--was formerly, and remains still, strange to the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to Spinoza. {320} Whether Plotinus plunges into an _ecstacy_ to arrive at and comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of contemplation; or Spinoza, defining _substance_, makes it the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of _idea_ in order to arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his term _substance_--it is the same defect that appears in the labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their development, but in the very point from which they start; for observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction, logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.

{321}

They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts, themselves evident, indestructible.

Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves may lead to questions and controversies.

1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality. He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and distinct from every other being.

2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations which precede them, man has an intimate and assured consciousness.

3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the experience of the human race.

{322}

Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, sometimes formally denies, these facts, which psychology attests and proves. There is, however, a notable difference in this point in the three great representatives of Pantheism. Thanks to the Platonic school, from which he sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different questions of man's liberty and of the reality of good and of evil, soars in an elevated region where the truth now shines in splendor, now obscures itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which the philosopher himself is entangled as soon as he attempts to explain the one and infinite Being and that Being's relations with nature and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and plainer. He formally denies all individuality, all human liberty. Substance, "_the being_" is single and universal. {323} All act of man, as every fact of nature, is produced by fated laws and causes: "Free will is a chimera, flattering to our pride and in reality founded upon our ignorance. All that I can say to those who believe that they can, by virtue of any free decision of the soul, speak or be silent--or, to use a single word, act--is that they dream with their eyes open." [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. E.
Saisset, vol. i, Introduction, p. clii.]

... "Nothing," adds he, "is bad in itself. Good and evil indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are nothing but manners of thinking. Not only has every man the right to seek his good, his pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise. ... The measure of each man's right is his power. ... He who does not yet know reason, or who, having not as yet contracted the habit of virtue, lives according to the laws only of his appetites, is as much in his right as he who regulates his life according to the laws of reason. {324} In other words, just as the sage has an absolute right to do all that his reason dictates to him, or to live according to the laws of his reason, in the same manner has the ignorant man and the madman a right to everything that his appetite impels him to take; in other words, the right to live according to the laws of appetite. ... And he is no more obliged to live according to the laws of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under the laws that govern the nature of a lion. ... Hence we conclude that a compact has only a value proportioned to its utility; where the utility disappears the compact disappears too with it, and loses all its authority. There is, then, folly in pretending to bind a man forever to his word; unless, at least, man so contrive that the breach of the compact shall entail for him that violates it more danger than profit." [Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: Œuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx.]

{325}

Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical, æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety, and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and yet revolutionary." [Footnote 68]

[Footnote 68: Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis
Kant jusqu'a Hegel, by S. Willm: a work crowned by the
Institute: vol. iv, p. 337.]

{326}

"It is impossible," says M. Edmond Scherer, "to read Hegel without asking ourselves if he, be serious. He falls incessantly into a style of images and personifications; and one would suppose one's self, in perusing his writings, to be present at the formation of a mythology, at the development of a world like that of the ancient Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and marched on, passing through all kinds of adventures." [Footnote 69]

[Footnote 69: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 298, 838.]

M. Edmond Scherer's is a mind hard to please, which is ever struck and offended by incoherence of objects, futility of artificial combinations, and vain play upon words, even where he recognizes or admires the genius. The philosophical "rout" is not embarrassed for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the object toward which the dominant idea, once adopted, gives the impulse. In spite of its complexities and of its craving for the reconciliation of religion and of politics, the Pantheism of Hegel has borne its natural fruits. {327} A school has resulted from it, which, in accordance with its proper and independent manifestations, a learned and moderate judge, M. Willm, characterizes in these words: "The new German philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Rüge are the principal chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact with the _Humanism_ of M. Pierre Leroux, the _Positivism_ of M. Auguste Comte, and the _Atheism_ of M. Proudhon. It tends to substitute for the ancient worship the worship of humanity, and to found a new worship dispensing with God, and with morality properly so called. ... There is no such thing as _theology_ but only _anthropology_; for the mind of humanity is the divine mind realized. There is no longer any other piety than devotedness to the objects of humanity; no longer any other prayer than the contemplation of the human mind. ... Man accomplishes every reasonable object if he accomplishes his own peculiar object, and he cannot do better than employ all his faculties to realize his own objects. _Man's will be done:_ such is the principle of the new law." [Footnote 70]

[Footnote 70: Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis
Kant jusqu'a Hegel: by S. Willm: vol. iv, pp. 624, 626.]

{328}

Such is the inevitable result at which Pantheism, even that kind termed idealistic Pantheism, ultimately arrives, whatever the elevation of mind and the morality of intent in its first authors. This is no scientific doctrine, founded upon the observation of facts and their laws; it is an hypothesis framed by dint of violent abstractions, verbal commutations and reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk with itself. Under the breath of Pantheism all beings--real and personal beings--vanish, and are replaced by an abstraction becoming in its turn the Being _par excellence;_ the sole being, although without personality and without volition, swallowing up all things in a bottomless abyss, which absorbs that being, too, after it has already absorbed everything that it has sought so to explain.

{329}

Was there ever, in the conceptions of mythology, or in the mystical dreams of the human imagination, anything so artificial, anything so vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very beginning, as well as throughout its entire course, loses sight of the best attested facts respecting man and the world; and, shocking equally science and common sense, departs as much from the method of philosophy as from the spontaneous instincts of mankind?

---------------------------------------

{330}

Sixth Meditation.

Materialism.

Materialistic Pantheism is more consistent and more intelligible. I must at once restore to it its genuine name; it has no right to that of Pantheism: it sees God neither in the universe nor in man; the eternal world and ephemeral individuals are, in its eyes, only combinations and different forms of matter. It is Materialism in its principle, and Atheism in its consequences.

Two things strike me in the actual state of men's minds; the progress that Materialism is making, and its constant timidity in that very progress.

{331}

The progress of Materialism is evident; progress in the learned world and in the unlearned world, in the name of the scientific studies and of popular tendencies. A contemporary spiritualistic philosopher, as distinguished by intellectual probity as by the independence and the moderation of his opinions, of whom the Duke de Broglie, on learning his death, exclaimed, "We have lost a sage"--M. Damiron I mean--published eight years ago his "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophie au 18 siècle;" he had read it in successive parts to the _Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques_. He said in his preface, "Men are disposed a second time to have Sensualism; they insist upon something that they may oppose to and substitute for pure and simple Spiritualism: be it so; but then let them at least well understand what it is that they are asking for. {332} It is not merely Locke, the moderate chief of the school, nor is it d'Alembert, nor Saint-Lambert, nor even Helvetius; these keep themselves relatively within bounds: it is Diderot who has so little moderation, it is d'Holbach, it is Naigeon, it is Lalande, and de la Mettrie; it is a whole order of minds, not very eminent, but very decided and very consistent and logical in their materialism; materialists in all and for all, from the soul up to God--not forgetting, be it remembered, liberty, duty, a future life, etc. ... These men, with their heads in the air and their masks in their hand, with a confidence in themselves and a faith almost confounding itself with religion, profess openly as truth, fatalism, egotism, and atheism. This is what men want, and what, if they wish to be logical, men must want, when, closely or remotely, they adhere to a philosophy that reduces everything to sensation, and that which is the object of sensation. Let there then be no illusion upon this subject; all the principles of morals and of religion are at stake. Sensualism _is_ what it is, and _can_ be nothing else. It was made a complete system in the eighteenth century; nothing remains in it that can be either made or remade; and if men recur to it in our days, the mechanism and the form may be altered--for these are variable--but not the essential substance, for that is _not_ so. {333} There are not two manners of being consequent any more in this system than in any other; however the attempt may be made, men can never by any reproduction render it what it is not, and what its nature prevents it from ever being; so we must take it or we must leave it alone; we cannot change its principles." [Footnote 71]

[Footnote 71: Memoires pour servir à l'histoire de la
philosophie au 18 siècle, by Ph. Damiron, member of the
Institute; vol. i, p. xiv. 1858.]

What M. Damiron eight years ago felt would occur, has been accomplished rapidly. Sensualism, in its true nature as Materialism, has resumed its activity and returned to the stage; now tacitly admitted by sober, studious men, now loudly professed and loudly proclaimed by the "enfants terribles" of the school; professed and proclaimed not only with all its principles, but with all its consequences.

{334}

A profound sentiment of hesitation and embarrassment clings, nevertheless, to the doctrine of Materialism. The most distinguished of its adepts struggle to give explanations that look like disavowals, and many repudiate the charge of being Materialists as if it were an insult. "I have never," says M. de Remusat, "observed without astonishment the testy sensibility of philosophers upon this point. Who is there that has not witnessed the indignation manifested by the followers of the philosophy of sensation when they hear retraced to them the positive consequences of this doctrine? It seems just as if their rightful claims were being disavowed, or as if they were being denounced; as if the Inquisition were still at hand, with its tortures and its auto-da-fès; or as if their refuters were sending them to martyrdom. A general timidity reigns throughout their school; they seem to think freedom of opinions never sufficiently assured, and society never tolerant enough, for their philosophy to declare and avow itself for such as it is. {335} Whether from shame or from fear, Materialism asks to be tenderly handled, suspects that every one who defines her has the designs of a persecutor, makes protestations of her good intentions, and is alarmed at her very faith. She defends herself from the imputation of believing only in the senses, even while making sensation the one universal fact. It might be said that she blushes at matter just as persons infirm of faith blush at the name of Jesus. Perhaps this may be an indirect proof of the distrust which their cause inspires in Materialists, and an involuntary avowal that the human mind belongs not to them." [Footnote 72]

[Footnote 72: Essais de philosophie, by Charles de Remusat:
vol. ii, p. 179.]

Whence arise, what signify, these two contradictory facts: on the one side, the perseverance and the facility with which, in our days, Materialism reproduces and propagates itself; on the other side, the uneasiness and the timidity which it inspires in many of those even who admit it?

{336}

Materialism is the doctrine of appearances. "Specious doctrine," says M. Vacherot, "to those whose conception of things depends solely upon their ability to picture them to themselves." [Footnote 73]

[Footnote 73: La métaphysique et la science, vol. i, p. 171.]

It is by their material appearances that, at the outset, the external world and man himself manifest themselves to the human mind. It is only by reflection and by a process of observation within itself that it penetrates beyond mere appearances, and discovers what appearances alone would never enable it to see. To minds at once active and superficial, inquisitive, impatient to acquire science, although not very nice as to the kind, Materialism is a commodious and apparently clear solution of certain difficult and obscure questions which fasten irresistibly upon the human understanding.

{337}

Besides all this, these questions, and the different solutions of which they are susceptible, have their epochs of ardor or languor, of favor or discredit. In our days, the fruitful activity and the brilliant progress of the sciences of the material world, come in aid of the doctrine of Materialism. This progress is, however, far from being as exclusive of other progress as is often said. Although less popular than a few years ago, Spiritualism has not ceased to be an active and influential doctrine in the elevated region of philosophy, and the Christian awakening persists and develops itself energetically in the face of the adversaries of Christianity. The times in which we live are entitled to more justice than men accord to them; intellectual labors are now very extensive and very varied; the most different tendencies coexist, and pursue their independent career. Even in this, Materialism is again the doctrine of appearances; it is neither so strong nor so near its triumph as it has the air of being.

{338}

Nothing proves this better than the hesitation and persistent embarrassment of the most distinguished among its adherents. The circumstance noticed by M. de Remusat twenty-five years ago, is recurring at the present day as plainly as ever. Sometimes we find disavowals of the consequences of the principle of Materialism, and attempts of all kinds to escape from those consequences; sometimes we find efforts made to disguise the principle itself under purer colors. A general and enduring instinct in man persists in protesting against the appearances upon which Materialism is founded. Man does not believe either himself or the universe to be exclusively matter. The distinction between matter and mind is a natural and spontaneous, a primitive and permanent, belief of the human race.

And is this, then, merely an instinct and an aspiration, a proud pretension of human nature? Is it not, on the contrary, the innate sentiment, the intimate knowledge of that essential fact in humanity of which observation recognizes and evidences the existence?

{339}

The fact to which I allude is the following: As soon as a consciousness of life is awakened in man--as soon as he feels and perceives what is taking place within him--he has a perception of himself as of a real, personal, and distinct being. He gives voice to this feeling and this perception as soon as he uses the word "I," and he does so before he has any clear knowledge in detail of the being whose existence he so recognizes and affirms.

When, in the natural development of life, man thus makes himself as a real and personal being, the object of his own observation, he recognizes in himself as such real and personal being certain facts in their nature essentially different. On the one side, he recognizes a body inherent in his being, which forms part of his being, and through which he communicates with the external world, either by the impressions which he receives from that world, or by the modes in which he acts upon that world. {340} On the other side, whether he regard himself as, so to say, the theater of action, or as the very actor, he recognizes himself to be a single being, a being permanent and abiding, ever the same in the midst of the variety of his personal impressions or of his actions upon the world beyond him; and this, too, in spite of the complications and incessant transformations of his body, the organ and the medium of those impressions and actions.

Thus it is that in man's consciousness there is a manifestation and proof at once of the unity and of the complex nature of the human being; that is, in accordance with the spontaneous language of mankind, at once of the distinction and of the union of the soul and of the body. This is the primitive and essential fact of man in his actual life.

{341}

In proportion as the human being develops himself, as he extends the circle of his observations upon the world and upon himself, special facts confirm the general truth of which I have just given a summary, and prove the essential distinction of the soul and the body by the essential diversity of the properties of each. Thus the body, in its organization and in its life, is subject to fixed and pre-established laws, over which man's will has no control or power; whereas the soul is essentially free, and capable of determining itself and of acting from motives foreign to the laws which govern the body. Fatality is the condition of the human being in corporeal existence; liberty is his privilege in his moral life. I say in his moral life, and the expression reveals between the soul and the body another essential and ineffaceable difference. The body is strange to every idea of morality, abandoned to the exigencies of its necessities and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tendency but to satisfy them. {342} The soul has needs and desires of quite a different kind, and they are often contrary to those of the body; and however often the soul may yield to the tendencies of the body, not seldom also does it withstand and surmount them; and this both in persons of obscure condition, and in those who stand in the public gaze of men. When the body is dominant in man, man tends toward Materialism; when he listens to the aspirations of soul it is, on the contrary, to Spiritualism that his nature rises. The complexity of his nature manifests itself in the development of his life as in the first instinct of his consciousness; at whatever epoch he is the subject either of his own or of our observation he cannot be called exclusively body, matter, without facts giving his assertion at each step the flattest contradiction.

Whence comes this essential and primordial fact--the fact of the complexity and yet unity of the human being? How is this union of soul and body accomplished? their mutual influences exercised, how? Here, according to religion, is the mystery; here, for philosophy, lies the problem.

{343}

Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is only a product and an ephemeral form of matter!

I shall not refuse myself the pleasure of refuting this hypothesis by the mouth of a contemporary philosopher, whom I shall soon myself have to combat. "Nothing," says M. Vacherot, "proves that the hypothesis of Materialism is true; on the contrary, positive facts evidence its falsity. ... If the soul be only the result of the play of the organs, how is it that the soul is able to resist the impressions and the appetites of the body, to direct, concentrate, and govern its faculties? If the will be but the instinct in a different form, how explain its empire over the instinct? {344} This fact is an irresistible argument; it is the rock upon which Materialism has always wrecked itself, and upon which it will continue to do so. ... The wisdom of the ancients pronounced its decree more than two thousand years ago. 'Do we not see,' says Socrates, according to Plato, 'that the soul governs all the elements of which it is pretended that it is composed? that the soul resists them throughout the whole course of life, and subdues them in every way, repressing some harshly and painfully, as where the gymnastic or the medical method is resorted to; repressing others more gently, rebuking these, warning those, speaking to desires, to anger, to fear, as to things of a nature alien to its own? So Homer, in the "Odyssey," represents Ulysses as

"Smiting his breast, and chiding thus his heart:
Bear this, O heart, thou that hast worse endured." [Footnote 74]

[Footnote 74:
Στῆθος δὲ πληξὰς, κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ,
Τέτλαθι δὲ, κραδίη. καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ᾿ ἔτλης.
Odyssey, Book xx, v. 17.]

{345}

"'Do you think,' adds Socrates, 'that Homer would have so expressed himself had, in his conception, the soul been a mere harmony, necessarily governed by the passions of the body? Did he not rather think that the soul ought to govern and master those passions, and that the soul is something far more divine than any harmony?'" [Footnote 75]

[Footnote 75: La Métaphysique et la science, by M. Vacherot,
vol. i, p. 174; Plato, Phæd, xliii.]

Materialists themselves have felt the feebleness of their hypothesis; to support it they have invented a second hypothesis. "No force without matter, no matter without force," [Footnote 76] says Dr. Buchner, at the present day one of the most resolute interpreters of the doctrine. That is to say, not being able to explain facts by matter alone, as matter is observed and conceived naturally by the human mind, they endow matter with what they term _force_, a principle of movement and of production.

[Footnote 76: Le Materialisme contemporain en Allemagne, by
M. Paul Janet, of the Institute, p. 20. 1864.]

{346}

"Matter and force are," it is now said, "inseparable; both have existed from all eternity." Thus, imperiously urged by instinct and by their observation of facts, they begin again by distinguishing and naming separately matter and force; then, all at once, they confound them, treat them as united in their essence and from all eternity, and conclude by believing that they have succeeded in giving an explanation of man and of the world!

In this, what do they more than add an abstraction to an abstraction, and an hypothesis to an hypothesis? We are here in the presence of facts that are certain and yet perplexing; in presence of an external world, which evidently has not always been such as it is, which had a beginning, which is continuing to develop itself according to certain laws, and which is tending to certain ends; in the presence, too, of man, evidently a being at once one and complex, identical and yet variable. The ancients gave names and explanations to those incontestible facts, but the names and explanations are now rejected! {347} Still, names and explanations are needed; man must put something in the place of God, Creator, and Providence--in the place of mind, and matter, and soul, and body. It is not for the first time that man finds himself confronted by this necessity, or that he essays to satisfy it; many abstractions, many words, have been already employed for this purpose. _God_ was replaced by _nature_, by _substance_, by _cause_; the _human soul_ was transformed into _vital principle_; the vital principle was elevated to the dignity of soul. It seems that these words, these abstractions, have had their time and lost their credit; and so now it is _force_ which replaces _them_; _force_ is mind, _force_ is soul, _force_ creates, _force_ is God. It is enough now that they incorporate force with body; the problem no longer exists; man and the universe are laid bare!

{348}

When Leibnitz, to combat the Idealism of Descartes, and the Pantheism of Spinoza, developed the idea of force, he did not foresee that that very notion would be one day made use of to reduce to nonentities God, the human soul, all real and personal being, all first and final cause; to reduce, in short, everything to a medley of mechanics and dynamics incarnate in matter!

However specious it may appear to superficial minds, or to minds prejudiced in its favor by the peculiar nature of their studies and of their habitual labors, Materialism, like Pantheism, is only an hypothesis--an hypothesis constructed by dint of mere abstractions and purely verbal assertions. These not only disregard or suppress the facts which they pretend to explain, but are in direct contradiction with facts themselves recognized and proved by psychological observation. It is, in effect, an hypothesis, (I am forced here to repeat what I before affirmed of Pantheism,) equally revolting to true science and to common sense.

{349}

The hypothesis of Materialism has but a single merit; it is more consistent than those of the other systems. But even to this merit Materialism loses its title whenever it shrinks from pushing its principles boldly to their consequences, whether philosophical or practical: that is to say, whenever it shrinks from denying man's liberty, a moral law, the necessary principles of the human mind--whenever, in short, it shrinks from proclaiming its ultimate results, which are, as M. Damiron puts them, Fatalism, Egotism, Atheism. Philosophers are right in seeking for truth and in respecting truth for itself and at every risk; but there are some consequences which are the clearest evidence of a vice in principle; and this vice, in Materialism, is the blind forgetfulness of the best proved facts and the most essential elements of human nature.

---------------------------------------

{350}

Seventh Meditation.

Skepticism.

There are two kinds of Skepticism, experimental Skepticism and systematic Skepticism. Experimental Skepticism is the result of the incertitude which arises in men's minds from the spectacle of the infinite variety, discordance, and mobility of human opinions. Systematic Skepticism, on the other hand, challenges the power itself of the human understanding, and declares it incapable of knowing things in their essence--reality in itself. The one is doubt applied in practice; the other is doubt affirmed as a principle.

{351}

In an essay on Skepticism, written in 1830, M. Jouffroy treated experimental and practical skepticism with great contempt: this skepticism "founds itself," says he, "only upon the apparent contradictions of human judgment. To prove that there is a contradiction either between the results at which each faculty of the mind when taken separately arrives, or between the final results attained by different faculties, as by the sense and by the reason; to establish that there is a contradiction of a like nature between the opinions received by different men or by different nations, or between those opinions themselves, which, at different epochs, have variously for a time contented humanity; then to conclude from all this that the human intelligence regards in turn as true things which are contradictory, and that consequently there is for that intelligence no truth at all: such is all the mechanism in which this second-rate skepticism consists which has fascinated, and still continues to fascinate, whole hosts of little minds. Long ago this skepticism was refuted, and at all its points; long ago the unity of human truth was demonstrated, after having been admitted _à priori_ in all ages by their leading minds. {352} This kind of skepticism is a theme upon which men will long continue to dilate; the darling subject for wits, it merits not to arrest the attention of philosophers."

By way of amends, however, for these remarks, M. Jouffroy makes an immense concession to the systematic skepticism which declares the human mind incapable of knowing things as they really are in themselves, for he admits this skepticism to be rationally legitimate; "the foundation of all belief," says he, "is an act of faith, blind but irresistible. In effect there is no contradiction between faith and skepticism; for man believes by instinct and doubts by reason. ... Skeptics fall into no contradiction when, in the practice of life, they believe their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in consequence; they obey the laws of their instinctive nature by so believing, and they obey their rational natures by confessing that their beliefs are illegitimate. {353} So we equally excuse humanity which believes, and skepticism which doubts; but we cannot equally excuse the philosophers who have combated skepticism by striving to demonstrate the rational legitimacy of human belief. When men affirm that mankind believes, and that skeptics do so with mankind, they affirm a fact in itself incontestable; when they add that mankind believes itself right in believing, that is to say, virtually admits that the human intelligence sees things as they are, this is true too, and skeptics do not deny it; but when, grappling with skepticism itself, men pretend to show that the human intelligence really sees things as they are, this is a pretension which I cannot understand. What! do they not perceive that this pretension is nothing less than the pretension of demonstrating the human intelligence by the human intelligence, which has been, is, and will be eternally impossible? We believe skepticism forever invincible, because we regard skepticism as the final word of the reason concerning the reason itself." [Footnote 77]

[Footnote 77: Mélanges philosophique, pp. 238-240.]

{354}

I do not agree with M. Jouffroy in his disdain for experimental and practical skepticism. This is not, it is true, a system which philosophers are called upon to refute, but a fact which ought to occupy an important place with them, for by showing to us how incomplete human science is, and human error how frequent, it sets us on our guard against all presumptuous confidence in our own ideas, and against intolerance toward the ideas of others--two of the most dangerous infirmities to which human intelligence and society are liable. But as for the reasoning which impels M. Jouffroy to accept the systematic and definitive skepticism as to the intrinsic reality of things, I repudiate it altogether. If that were, as he says, "the final word of the reason respecting the reason itself," it would be the negation, or to use a better expression, the suicide, of man's reason and of the human intelligence.

{355}

In his discourse which he pronounced in 1813, on resuming his functions at the "Faculté des Lettres," M. Royer-Collard summed up his conclusions upon this fundamental question--conclusions very different, more different essentially than even apparently they are, from those arrived at by M. Jouffroy. Whereas M. Jouffroy believes systematic skepticism forever invincible, "because he regards it as the final word of the reason concerning the reason," M. Royer-Collard, on the contrary, ends his discourse with these words: "We cannot divide man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding, in [it?] invades it throughout." I would confirm this conclusion of M. Royer-Collard, by carrying still further the reasoning which led him to it.

{356}

"The most general result," says he, "presented by the history of modern philosophy--its most striking characteristic when contrasted with ancient philosophy--is its skepticism with respect to the existence of the external world; that world in which mankind has so long believed, which begins to reveal itself in us with our existence itself, and in the bosom of which we are forced to perceive ourselves as mere fragments of its immensity. ... I am not here to reason in favor of the received opinion; that opinion needs neither proofs nor defenders; it is rooted deeply enough in our most intimate nature to brave all attack. It is not the world that risks anything at the hands of the philosophers; it is rather the honor of philosophy which suffers some discredit; it is rather philosophy that relieves the vulgar from a part of the respect which philosophy yet demands at its hands, when it gives birth to paradoxes bearing, seemingly, the very impress of folly. {357} Moreover, whether the material world really exist or not, is not a matter in controversy; this question would resolve itself into one still more general--whether all those facilities of ours, of which the authority is indivisible, are organs of truth or organs of falsehood; and upon this point we shall ever be driven to accept the testimony of those very organs. The sole question which belongs to philosophical analysis, consists in examining if it be certain that our faculties attest to us the existence of an external world, and if the human race believes in this existence; for if it believes in it, this universal belief becomes a fact in our intellectual constitution; and whether this fact be a primitive one, or a deduction from any anterior fact--whether it be the immediate teaching of nature or an acquisition by reasoning--it is entitled to its place unmutilated in the synthetic table of science. Has it disappeared? Then the man of philosophy is not the man of nature; science is false, and consequently, the analysis without fidelity; and one may rest assured that philosophers have inserted in the understanding some principle, or some fact, which was not there before; or that they have not collected with care all the principles and facts which are actually there."

{358}

Having thus formalized the question, M. Royer-Collard follows it up with an inquiry as exact as it is profound, of the psychological fact of the perception of the external world which accompanies the fact of sensation: this inquiry leads him to this conclusion:

"Sensation has no object; sensation is merely relative to the
sentient being; if not perceived, sensation does not exist. But
the perception, which affirms an external existence, supposes
two things--the mind which perceives, and the object which is
perceived; the being that thinks, and the being that is the
subject-matter of thought. Just as the sensation is relative to
the mind, so is the act of the perception relative to it also,
and just so does it suppose the mind; the object, on the
contrary, supposes neither the mind nor the mind's perception.
{359}
The object does not exist because we perceive it; but we
perceive it because it exists--because we are endowed with the
faculty of perception. In a city inhabited no longer, there
remain no sensation, no idea, no judgment; the houses remain,
and even the streets, and with them nature, with all nature's
laws, which are not suspended in their course. To the universe,
the energetic presence of its Creator suffices; it does not
require our presence; the absence of spectators would not make
it languish; it existed before us, it will exist after us; its
reality is independent of us and of our thoughts--it is
absolute. The authority which persuades us of this is no less
than that of the consciousness itself; it is the authority of
the primitive laws of thought, and to man's mind those laws are
absolute laws of truth. The same draught may convey the
impression of sweetness and of bitterness, because sensation is
relative to the variable state of sensibility, and sensibility
itself is relative to organization; but the laws of the mind
are an immutable standard.
{360}
The imperfection of knowledge does not render it uncertain, and
although it admits of degrees, it does not admit of
contradiction. Our limited faculties do not, it is true,
perceive all that there is in things; but still, what they do
perceive, is in effect there just as they perceive it. ...
If a man call upon me to prove this by reasoning, I shall, in
my turn, demand of him, too, that he first prove to me by
reasoning that reasoning is more convincing than perception;
that he at least prove that the memory, without which there is
no such thing as reasoning, is a faculty more to be relied upon
than those faculties whose testimony they reject.

"Intellectual life is an uninterrupted succession, not merely
of ideas, but of beliefs, explicit or implicit. The beliefs of
the mind are the force of the soul and the moving incentives of
the will. Whatever determines us to believe we call _evidence_.
... Reason renders no account of what is evident; to condemn it
to do so is to annihilate it, for it also has need of an
evidence peculiar to itself.
{361}
Did not reasoning rest upon principles anterior to the reason,
analysis would be without end, and synthesis without
commencement. The fundamental laws of belief constitute the
intelligence itself; and as those laws all flow from the same
source, they have the same authority; they judge by the same
right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of
another. Whoever revolts against any single one of these laws,
revolts against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. Are
there weapons of legitimate use against that faculty by which
we perceive the external world? These same weapons may be
turned against the conscience, the memory, the moral sense,
against reason itself. ... Let but, in any single point, the
nature of knowledge--the nature, I say, and not the degree--be
made subordinate to our means of knowing, and all certitude is
at an end; nothing is true, nothing is false. But it is not
enough to say this; for all is true and false altogether, since
truth and falsehood no longer differ from sweet and bitter.
{362}
The void itself is then deprived of its absolute nullity: it
enters into the domain of the relative; it is something,
nothing, according to the conformation of the spectator's eye.
The useful is the sole subject that the understanding
contemplates, the sole subject for which the heart has to make
its laws. A legislation capricious and without efficacy, which
applies only shifting rules to actions, and which has none for
the intentions and for the desires. This is not mere
declamation; all these consequences have been deduced from
skeptical doctrines with an exactitude leaving nothing to be
either desired or contested. It is then a fact that public and
private morality, the order of society and the happiness of
individuals, are directly at stake in the controversy between
true philosophy and false philosophy respecting the reality of
knowledge. For when existences themselves become problems, what
force remains to the bond that unites them? We cannot divide
the entire man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as
soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding it
invades it throughout." [Footnote 78]

[Footnote 78: Fragments de M. Royer-Collard, in the works of
Reid, translation of M. Jouffroy, vol. iv, pp. 426-451.]

{363}

I retrench nothing, change nothing in these remarkable words that express so energetically the conclusions of the common sense of mankind. I would only render them still more complete, by illustrating in its primitive and indestructible unity the fact upon which they are founded. "We cannot divide man," says M. Royer-Collard. Here is precisely the risk that philosophical science incurs, and to which it too often succumbs. It divides man in order to study him; and after having so studied him, when it seeks to deduce from its laborious operation what man in his complete and living reality is, we find the result a strange misapprehension, because science has neglected to re-establish the unity which it broke. {364} It puts together, it is true, the scattered members, but the being itself has disappeared; and then it is that philosophers know not how to solve the problems or to extricate themselves from the doubts by which they are confronted. Entire, living, one, the human being explained himself; mutilated and severed into distinct parts, that being loses all power and falls into obscurity.

What is sensation, what perception, judgment, reasoning, reason, will, consciousness? They are the human being, feeling, perceiving, judging, reasoning, willing, and observing what is passing within him. This is no troop of actors playing, each his part, in a complex drama; but a being single and alive, actor and sole spectator in the drama of his proper life.

What is this one and single being doing when he feels, perceives, judges, reasons, wills, and watches what is occurring within himself? He is taking cognizance at once of himself, and what is not himself. {365} His own existence and the existence of that which is not himself, reveal themselves to him from the very first in those diverse facts and acts which philosophical science discriminates, and calls by the particular names of sensation, perception, judgment, reason, will, consciousness. The primitive and essential fact at the root of all, is the fact itself of the cognizance which man takes of himself, and of what is not himself. A cognizance, at first confused, and always incomplete, but at the same time direct and certain. Not by way of deduction, nor as a mere appearance, but by way of immediate intuition, and as a positive reality, does the human being become aware of his own existence and of that existence which is not his. This fact is lost sight of, or at least is not characterized exactly and as it is in itself, when it is said that man believes naturally and inevitably in his own existence, and in that of the external world. This is a very different thing from _belief:_ it is _knowledge_ itself of that double reality, internal and external, called by the name of Man and World. {366} Philosophers ignore, and they change the nature of this fact, when, merely playing with verbal distinctions and reasonings, they condemn the human mind not to issue forth from itself, when they refuse to it the right to affirm as real, out of the mind and in itself, that which, in the mind and for the mind, the mind yet admits to be true.

The human being may deceive himself, and often does deceive himself in such or such a special affirmation as to external realities; it has of them only a knowledge incomplete, and liable to error; but its general and permanent affirmation as to their existence is still folly justified and legitimate; it knows them as it knows itself, by the same proof and by the same natural process. M. Royer-Collard expresses admirably this great fact when he says: "The universe does not exist because we perceive it; but we perceive it because it exists. ... It needs not our presence; the absence of spectators would not make it languish away; it was before us, it will still be after us; its reality is independent of us: it is absolute."

{367}

Systematic skepticism is not, like Materialism and Pantheism, an hypothesis invented, although unsuccessfully invented, in order to solve the grand problem of soul and body, of finite and infinite; its error is not less considerable, although of a different character. It consists in a defective examination of the primitive fact of the human mind, and in the misapprehension of the nature and the import of that fact. This fact is by no means, as M. Jouffroy affirms, "a faith blind and irresistible," disavowed by rational science; it is really the natural knowledge, and the earliest knowledge acquired by the human being when it enters into activity; a knowledge, confused and incomplete, either of itself or of what is not itself; but still a knowledge direct and certain of the existence of itself, and of the existence of what is not itself. "Man believes by instinct and doubts by reason," adds M. Jouffroy; "skeptics obey the law of their instinctive nature when they believe, like the mass of mankind, in their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in consequence; so also they obey their rational nature when they confess that their beliefs are illegitimate."

{368}

This is strangely to _ignore_--I permit myself the use of this, here, incorrect expression--at once the reality of facts, and the value of words. What M. Jouffroy terms _instinct_, is the intuitive consciousness of internal reality and of external reality, and this consciousness the human being acquires directly by the complete and indivisible exercise of all his faculties; what he terms _reason_ is the result of the isolated operation of one of the faculties of the human being, who virtually forgets, when he decomposes himself for his own study, what he really is. Skepticism is not the "final word of the reason respecting the reason;" it is the suicide of the reason by a negation falsely termed scientific, of natural evidence, and of the common sense of mankind.

---------------------------------------

{369}

Eighth Meditation.

Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity.

The different systems, of each of which I have endeavored to show the essential and characteristic vice, do not remain confined to learned regions, or to the classes to which, from profession or from taste, man and the world are a special object of study. The breath of science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, unseen itself, places even where ignorance reigns. How often in remote cities and even rural districts, among a population alien to every kind of study, have I met with and discovered the traces of Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pantheism, Materialism, Skepticism; and yet these had been imported, imperceptibly and in manner that the sense could not detect, like a noxious miasma, into places where their very names were unknown; and yet they bore everywhere their natural fruits! {370} There is a contagion in the intellectual as well as in the moral order; and the facility, the rapidity, the universality of communication, which contribute so much to the force and the grandeur of modern civilization, are as much at the disposal of evil as of good, of error as of truth.

The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and Materialism seem very readily to prevail. {371} After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it even their refuge. These different social facts, and the influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy, manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or taciturn.

Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very general--impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious perplexity.

I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single way. {372} Others there are where different currents cross and combat one another, and impel society at the same moment toward different objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the different principles and elements of our society, good or the reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I have made, either as to that important movement or as to the confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time, believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind.

{373}