Chapter IV: Critical Theory of Religious Knowledge (1)

He who says consciousness says science, or at least, the beginning of science. Consciousness implies a representation. In other words, no modification of the ego becomes conscious except by awakening in the mind a representative image of the object that has produced it and of the relation of that object to the ego. All our sensations and all our feelings are accompanied by images. The religious sentiment does not attain to the light of consciousness in any other way. It is because it is a state or conscious movement of the soul that it becomes, it also, a principle of knowledge.

No kind of mental life begins with clear and abstract ideas. An idea is derived from an image, and, in order to produce the image, an external or an internal impression is necessary. It is true that the idea or the image has, in its turn, the mysterious power of reproducing and renewing the sensation or the feeling from which it sprang. On this is based the art of teaching and the power of tradition. But this must not be allowed to produce in us the illusion that originally the idea preceded the sensation. The development of the mental life of children is proof of the contrary. We only know that by which we or our kind have been in some degree affected. Our ideas are simply the algebraic notation of our impressions and movements. That which is outside our life is outside our view. Without the external sensations which represent the action of the world on the ego, we should have no knowledge of the world. Without the subjective reaction of the ego against that action of the world, a reaction which manifests itself in the moral, aesthetic, and religious life of the soul, we should have no moral or religious idea, no notion of the good or the beautiful. All our metaphysical ideas come from that source.

It remains, of course, to inquire what is the worth of ideas of this order. It is the particularly complex and delicate question that we here approach. There is no serious philosophy to-day that does not start with a theory of knowledge. Religious knowledge cannot escape by any special privilege. The criticism of it is all the more necessary, because illusion, in this matter, is so easy, and because it clothes itself in a sacred character. The theologian who undertakes the scientific treatment of dogmas without first measuring the scope of the instrument he employs, and estimating the worth of the materials he uses, knows not what he is doing.

1. _Obsolete Theories of Knowledge_

Formerly three explanations of our knowledge prevailed in philosophy: the hypothesis of a primitive revelation; the idealist theory; and the sensualist theory.

The first was revived three quarters of a century ago by de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre. It no longer needs to be refuted. According to this hypothesis, our ideas came to us, not from within, from the naturally productive force of the mind, but from without, by way of supernatural communication. This communication from God consisted at the outset in the gift to man of a perfect language. The exact word brought with it the right idea. "Man," said de Bonald, "thought his speech before speaking his thought." If errors have crept in and reigned among men, it is because they were not able to preserve without corruption the sacred deposit of that primitive language and philosophy. Is it necessary to show how thoroughly this theory is contradicted by psychology and history? It is said that in certain countries there still exists a Botany, according to which the Great Spirit, having created the trees of the forest, comes in the night each Spring to stick the leaves and blossoms on the branches. The immediate communication of right ideas and supernatural virtues to man in his infancy implies a contradiction; it forces us to imagine in him thoughts prior to the action of his intellect and virtues previous to the action of his will. Lastly, it is to misconceive the nature of the mind to make of it something passive and inert. The mind is the thinking and willing force--that is to say, a force productive of thoughts and volitions. If it is not this, it is nothing. We must affirm, no doubt, that God creates this force and directs its evolution, but it is a contradiction to say at once that He creates it and that it is unproductive. It cannot exist without being productive. It is of its very essence to produce. Mind is only mind in so far as it is a force that produces thought and volition.

The aim of this hypothesis, moreover, was to found the divine authority of an infallible tradition by making it go back to the earliest times. These revealed ideas, by the very fact that they are the ideas of God, have an absolute and eternal value. Man finds them guaranteed in the religious caste, to which the deposit has been confided, and which has preserved them intact. Thus arose the idea of an infallible authority. So they say. But the idea of dogmatic authority never appears in early times; it is of very late date; it is elaborated very slowly, according to a psychological law that we have already discovered. Everywhere, and in the traditions of all religions and Churches, it appears after all other doctrines as the keystone which closes and binds together the arch. It is an ultimate dogma logically derived from other dogmas, and afterwards used as a warrant for them. Such was the dogma of Papal Infallibility promulgated at the Vatican Council of 1870; such, in Protestantism, was the dogma of Biblical infallibility, completed by the theologians of the seventeenth century. To base the value of religious notions on a supernatural authority, with a view to rendering them indisputable, is a vicious circle; the authority, it is evident, is the product of these notions themselves. All systems of authority end by shutting themselves up in this circle and perishing in it.

The idealist theory of the origin of ideas is but the philosophical form of the preceding one. It also is an endeavour to trace back our general ideas to the divine understanding as their primary source. Pure ideas, type-ideas, according to Plato, constitute the intelligible Cosmos of which material phenomena are but the unreal and ephemeral shadows. Clearly to conceive these divine ideas is to reach the transcendent reality of things--it is to possess true knowledge. From Platonism to the realism of scholasticism, from this to the geometry of Spinoza and the dialectic of Hegel, the form of the theory has varied constantly; the substance of it has remained the same. Hegel always said: "The rational is the real," and, for him, as for Plato, absolute knowledge resolved itself into perfect logic.

Psychology has long since dispelled the scientific illusion of idealism. We do not wish to recall the pitiful failure of all the attempts formerly made, and even in our own times, to deduce _a priori_ the laws of the physical world. Everywhere, in this domain, the method of observation has superseded the deductive method. The reason of it is simple. An idea, however lofty, can only give out what it contains, _i.e._ other ideas. We know very well that our ideas are in our mind, but they are only in it in the state of ideas. How do we know that the objects which they represent exist outside ourselves? Only by logic can we pass from the idea of a thing to the external reality of that thing. Experience is necessary. Without it our ideas are empty forms. One may conjure with them for ever without ever reaching anything objective. They are shells without kernels. Pure idealism, so far from furnishing a solid theory of knowledge, ends in scepticism, _i.e._ in the negation of knowledge.

The excesses and failures of idealist theories of knowledge have always given rise in history to the opposite theory of sensualist nominalism, according to which our ideas are simply transformed sensations. Unhappily, sensualism, in laying down this axiom, never explained the nature and still less the cause of that marvellous transformation. "There is nothing in the understanding," said Locke, "that was not previously in the senses." To which Leibniz rightly replied: "Except the understanding itself;" that is to say, the force which from sensation draws knowledge. By suppressing this ideal principle, you remove from science all element of necessity--that is to say, all general worth. With Hume, the sensualist theory, so far from giving an account of knowledge, ended in pure phenomenalism, _i.e._ once more, in scepticism. It is, in fact, with isolated sensation as with pure idea; you may press it as much as you will, you will never get out of it anything but what it contains--that is to say, contingencies without any connection between each other. Materialism is still more embarrassed to furnish any theory whatever of knowledge, for it does not even succeed in explaining sensation. Between a mechanical movement and a phenomenon of consciousness there is an impassable abyss. One of the most evident marks of the inferiority of the philosophy of French positivism is that it has not even approached this problem of knowledge, and that it has been able to constitute itself without any other than the popular psychology.

2. _The Kantian Theory of Knowledge_

Thinkers may to-day be divided into two classes: those who date from before Kant, and those who have received the initiation and, so to speak, the philosophical baptism of his critique. These two classes of minds will always have much ado to understand each other. The first are dogmatists or Pyrrhonists. The second no longer comprehend either dogmatism or Pyrrhonism. For them, the point of view has been displaced. Thanks to Kant, we judge both our knowledge and our faculty of knowing; we give an account to ourselves of the conditions in which it performs its functions, of the forms which determine it, and of the limits that it cannot pass. Kant compared, without exaggeration, the revolution which he effected in philosophy to that which the discovery of Copernicus effected in the system of the world. In philosophy also the sun has ceased to move round the earth, and the ancient illusion has been vanquished and dispersed. The idea and the reality no longer coincide; they are disjoined. The intelligible no doubt is real; but it is not certain that all the real is intelligible. Reality appears to us now as surpassing not only our knowledge, but our means of knowing. The religious notion of mystery has entered into consciousness. Man has attained to intellectual humility. Like his body, his mind is a mean between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, between nothing and everything. The deductive philosophy of the unity and necessary and continuous unfolding of an eternal substance, gives place to the philosophy of observation, which will be found to be that of the antinomies whose permanent conflict produces the ascensional progress of the world and of life.

To make Kantism end in scepticism shows a lack of intelligence. His system enables us, on the contrary, to form the _scientific_ theory of science. The truth is to be found neither in dogmatism nor in Pyrrhonism, both of which Pascal combated with equal vigour. In modern science there is a certitude invincible to the subtlest Pyrrhonism; but there is also in it a sense of the limits of our knowing faculty and of the relative character of our most solid constructions which forbids man ever to be puffed up to the point of believing himself to be God. To be in this mean is to be in the truth. The same critique which establishes the validity of human knowledge lays down the limits beyond which it cannot go. We have come to know ourselves better, and that is the mark of all true progress in philosophy. _Know thyself_ is always its first rule and its final fruit.

The Kantian theory of knowledge, while satisfying the mind, at the same time sets forth the essential antinomies whose normal play constitutes the very life of the ego and explains its multiple manifestations.

There are two elements in all knowledge: an _a posteriori_ element which comes from experience, and an _a priori_ element which comes from the thinking subject. The first is the _matter_ of knowledge; the second is the _form_. Separate, these two elements are unproductive. With the first alone we have but a reality not known; with the second alone we have but a knowing without reality. Their union renders them mutually fruitful by organising the data of experience into the necessary forms of thought. The principle of causation, _e.g._, is not in things; it is in the mind, and it is the mind which spontaneously connects all phenomena. Science, at bottom, consists in nothing but the causal connection of things. Where the chain breaks, positive knowledge ends. This clear sense of ignorance on points on which we really are ignorant is still a part of science and one of its principal forces, for it proves that it knows itself very well, and also knows the conditions apart from which it no longer exists. But, whether triumphant or held in check, positive science can neither renounce its task and method nor modify their nature. It can only seek to complete, or rather to lengthen, the chain of phenomena. The success of this ever-identical effort, an effort always in the same direction, is what is called its conquests and its progress. It follows that the irresistible tendency of science will be to extend over the whole of the phenomena the ever-tighter network of an invincible necessity. Determinism is its last word.

On the other hand, the ego which knows is an acting ego. Its thought itself, properly speaking, and this display of science, are only one of the forms of its inner activity. It wills, and it must will. If the world acts on it by sensation, it acts incessantly on the world by its volitions. And let it not be said that the will simply represents a mechanical reaction of the ego, exactly equivalent to the action of the external world upon it,--that it is a simple transformation of energy,--for this is not true. Without here raising the question of liberty, it is certain that I do not give back in will simply what I have received under the form of sensation. I deliberate on the motives which urge me to act; I choose between them; I feel myself under obligation; I feel that I should will the good. It is impossible to conceive of moral action without the idea of end. I conceive it, therefore, under a different form from that of mechanical action. Responsibility and obligation are not less the necessary forms of will than logical necessity is the necessary form of thought. But soon there arises in man the most tragical of conflicts. Scientific determinism renders moral activity unintelligible, and moral activity comes into collision with the determinism of science. If mechanical determinism be absolutely true, my will is null; I am simply an automaton. If my responsibility is real, if my personal energy is not an illusion, there is in the world something besides matter, and, for man, there are other than mechanical laws. Thus divided in myself, I ought not to practise what I know, and I cannot do what I ought. I remain floating between a science which is not moral and a morality that I feel to be unscientific. My intellect destroys my will. As the one develops the other dies. The better I know the laws of the world the less reason I have for living and acting. My morality, at each act, gives the lie to my science, and my science, at each affirmation, refutes my morality. Such is the deep malady, the spiritual misery, of the best of our contemporaries. They feel that, with them, vital energy is in inverse proportion to the extent and penetration of thought. It is then that they declare that pessimism, a radical pessimism, is the truth; that existence, will, desire, are the chief evils, and that the supreme effort of science should be to cure us of them by delivering us from all our illusions; after which, in its turn, it will be extinguished itself, like a flame that has consumed the food on which it fed.

Still, the conscious subject is one. You cannot proclaim it vain without at the same time proclaiming the vanity of its ideas as well as of its efforts. The ruin of morality draws after it the ruin of science. Moreover, the conflict of which we speak is different from a theoretical contradiction whose solution may be indefinitely postponed. The conflict is practical; it is of the vital not of the intellectual order. It is an internal dissolution of the being itself, a struggle between its elementary faculties, in which the mind is weakened, droops, and dies.

The solution, therefore, if there be one, can only be a practical one, a solution springing from the will. What is needed is to give the mind confidence in itself. It is necessary to increase the energy of its inner life in order that it may find the strength to believe and to affirm in face of the universe the sovereignty of spirit. This is the same as saying that the solution of the conflict is religion; not an external religion, doubtless, in whose hands the thought and will of man should abdicate--that would in no wise re-establish their inner and living harmony--but an inward religion, an activity of spirit which grasps in itself the supremacy of the universal spirit, and by an act of intimate confidence, an instinctive impulse of the being ready to perish, affirms to itself its own dignity, and makes to spring up out of its own substance the irresistible religion of spirit. Thus the conflict of the theoretic reason and the practical reason eternally engenders religion in the heart of man. Let us show more clearly still this necessary genesis of religion.

In observing, in reasoning, in generalising, I arrive at a certain knowledge of that which surrounds me; this knowledge of external objects forms within me the contents of what I call my knowledge of the world. On the other hand, in acting, in living, in exercising my will, is formed what I call my knowledge of myself. Consciousness of self, and consciousness of the world, condition and determine each other, and cannot exist without each other. But, at the same time, they enter into mortal conflict. The ego desires to master the world, and the world, in the end, devours the ego. Thought triumphs over Nature and contemns it; Nature takes its revenge and swallows up thought in its abyss. The consciousness of self wishes to bring over to itself the knowledge of the world; and this absorbs and devours the consciousness of self. The synthesis and reconciliation can only be found in the consciousness of something superior to self and the world on which both of them absolutely depend. This synthetic and pacificatory consciousness is the consciousness of universal and sovereign Being; it is the sense of the presence of God. To escape from his distress, man has never had any but this means of salvation. The savage has recourse to it, according to his degree of intellectual life, when, under terror of the phenomena of Nature, and of ever-threatening death, he calls to his aid the obscure power of his gods. The philosopher, nourished on speculation, and arrived at the dualistic and divided consciousness of the disciples of Kant, obeys the same instinctive impulse and the same vital necessity when he seeks in the notion of God the conciliation of the conflict which he feels between the ego and the world, between pure reason and the practical reason. He needs a universal Being on whom he feels himself to depend, and on whom he may equally make to depend the whole universe. In uniting himself to Him, he affirms and confirms his own life; he feels God to be active and present, in his thought under the form of logical law, in his will under the form of moral law. He is saved by faith in the interior God, in whom is realised the unity of his being. It is therefore true to say that the human mind cannot believe in itself without believing in God, and that, on the other hand, it cannot believe in God without finding Him within itself.

That is a _salto mortale_, some superficial spirits will say, astonished at an apparent deduction which thus makes the religious activity of the ego spring from the depths of its own distress and despair. To which we respond: it is, on the contrary, a _salto vitale_, the instinctive and at the same time reflective act which moves the mind to affirm to itself the absolute value of spirit. Considered at this first psychological moment of its birth, the religious faith of spirit in itself and in its sovereignty is only the higher form, and, as it were, the prolongation of the instinct of conservation which reigns in all Nature. The mind, crushed beneath the weight of things, stands up and triumphs in the feeling of the eternal dignity of spirit.

Inward religion, sacred instinct of life, divine, immortal force which necessarily appears at the first movement of spirit, how they misunderstand thee who only see in thee the slavery of man! On the contrary, it is thou alone that breakest all the chains that Nature binds on him, that savest him from death and from extinction, and that openest out to his beneficent activity an infinite career by associating him with the work of God: it is thou that renderest his spontaneity creative, that renewest his forces, and that, plunging him into the fountain whence he issued, maintainest in him an eternal youth!

This issue to the conflict of our faculties is exclusively of the practical order; it is an act of trust, not a demonstration; an affirmation which presupposes, not scientific proofs, but an act of moral energy. This act must be performed, or we must die. There is no constraint except the desire to live, but this is irresistible, if not for each individual in particular, at least for mankind in general. The individual may commit suicide; humanity desires to live, and its life is a perpetual act of faith.

Nevertheless, this practical solution implies the possibility and the hope of a theoretical one; and this in two ways: in the first place, psychologically, because the ego of pure reason is also that of the practical reason and feels itself to be one and the same knowing and acting subject; then, speculatively, because in believing in the sovereignty of spirit in ourselves and in the world we affirm that man and the world have in spirit the principle and the aim of their being. In God present in us, are reconciled, at least in hope, the ego and the world. This religious faith of spirit in itself permits us to anticipate the future solution, and to affirm that at the summit of their complete development, and in their entire perfection, science and the moral life will rejoin and penetrate each other. Mathematicians tell us that two parallel lines meet in infinity. So in God are reconciled the pure reason and the practical reason, which here seem to us to develop themselves on parallel lines without ever being able to meet and to unite. Let us never forget that we spring out of nothingness, or, if you will, out of unconsciousness, and that we slowly emerge into the light of consciousness. Man is in course of being made spirit. If it be well considered, it will be seen that this irreducible antithesis that fills us with despair is the very condition of our spiritual development. The mind only disengages itself from the bonds of its mother, Nature, by an incessant struggle. Struggle means opposition and victory. Experience demonstrates that nothing spiritualises, deepens, or purifies morality more than the contradictions of science; and finally, that nothing helps science more than a high and disinterested morality. These two sisters, enemies in appearance, are twins, and they are seen to grow and triumph together by the exercise they give to each other through their constant contradictions.

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3. _The Two Orders of Knowledge_

... The ego can only be conscious of itself and of its modifications. That which does not touch it in any way remains unknown. Now, the modifications of the ego may be reduced to two groups. The one comes to it from without, representing the action of things upon it; these are sensations. The other springs up within, representing the action of the ego on things, its spontaneous energy, its volitions, and its acts. Thence come the two constituent elements of every consciousness, the distinction between object and subject, the ego and the non-ego, thought and the object of thought. We call _objective_ every idea or quality that it is possible to refer to the object alone, independently of the action or disposition of the subject. We call _subjective_ all knowledge implying identity of subject and object, all discipline bearing on the rules of the spontaneous activity of the ego, since without that activity the rules which should direct it would not exist. In the first case we are conscious of a distinction and even of a radical opposition between the object and the subject of knowledge; in the second, we are conscious of their fundamental identity in this sense, that the thinking and willing subject presents itself to itself as an object of thought and study. In order that the two orders of knowledge, engendered by this duality of origin, may be brought into logical unity, it is necessary either that the subject should enter into the object, that the ego should be absorbed by the non-ego, so that the laws of the non-ego should become the laws of the ego--and that would be materialism; or that the object should enter into the subject so that the laws of the subject should become the law of things--and that would be idealism. Outside these two systems, equally violent and absolute, the two orders of knowledge are irreducible, because in us the consciousness of the ego and the consciousness of the world are at present in conflict. Morality is neither reconciled to science, nor science to morality. In their _rapprochement_, progressive to infinity, a hiatus always subsists.

One would be greatly deceived if he reduced this difference to the ordinary opposition between the physical and the spiritual, between external and internal phenomena. Sensation, the foundation and the starting point of the objective order of knowledge, is just as internal as volition. On the other hand, man is a part of what we call Nature; and, as such, he is the theatre of a crowd of internal and external phenomena which, so far as that is possible, should be observed, described, explained, by the principle of causality, like all the other phenomena of the physical order. For example, the mechanism of memory and that of logic, the correlation between mental activities and the physiological modifications of the cerebro-spinal system, the laws of association of ideas, the stable forms of the human understanding, all that psychology that is now called "scientific psychology," rightfully enters into the domain of the sciences of Nature. It is a province that may be explored like all the others. The psychological observations made in it are objective not less than those of physiology, for the reason that the phenomena that are observed, while occurring in the ego, are nevertheless produced in it without the voluntary intervention of the ego, and even without its express consent. Moreover, they do not imply or provoke on the part of the ego any moral judgment properly so called.

On the other hand, take the sciences of Nature which deal with the objects most widely removed from man, with astronomy or geology, _e.g._; no longer consider the bare external results; consider rather that spiritual force which we call thought, and which has the virtue of producing these sciences; what are they but the external revelation of the creative and organising energy of the thinking subject, the revelation of spirit to spirit? The work, seen from this subjective side, serves simply to set forth the worth of the worker. You speak then of the ordinary savant or of the intellectual genius, of the good or bad scientific workman. The philosophy of science becomes a necessarily subjective discipline. "Science," in fact, is simply an abstraction. In the reality there are only minds more or less ignorant, conscious, at each step, of their strength and of their impotence, of their defeats and victories,--minds condemned to a perpetual effort to struggle out of the night from which they slowly mount. When you think of this most disinterested side of the scientific life you ask yourself what is the basis, in the last resort, of this confidence of mind in itself--the foundation of all the rest. You see clearly that this activity of pure intellect demands, like all other human activity, attention, forgetfulness of self, a heroism, in short, going to the point of contempt of common enjoyments, and of the sacrifice of life itself. You have then left the domain of the sciences of Nature and have entered the realms of spirit, and there rise around you the problems which form the object of the moral disciplines.

Such is the intimate complexity of the two orders of knowledge that a persevering reflection discovers them to be everywhere mingled, and it is with difficulty that they are disentangled. All knowledge is an aggregate (_ensemble_) of judgments; but the judgments which constitute physical knowledge and those that constitute moral science are not of the same nature. The first are judgments of _existence_, bearing solely on the causality, the succession, the distribution of phenomena, _i.e._ on the relations of objects to each other, apart from the subject. The basis on which they rest is sensation, and, as sensation has for necessary forms time and space, time and space will also be the forms and limits of these judgments. Forming homogeneous quantities, time and space give the notion of figure and of number, so that mathematics is the foundation and the necessary framework of all the physical sciences. They rise above this abstract science of the forms of sensibility in the order of their complexity, and form a hierarchy from rational mechanics to sociology, of which Comte and so many others vainly endeavour to make a simple social mechanics. The destiny of this universal objective science is to progress for ever without ever being completed; for it is of the same nature as number--that is to say, essentially indefinite and imperfect. It not only finds an inexhaustible subject of study in the external world; it encounters a mystery impenetrable to its methods and analyses in the very subject that creates it, and which, in creating it, remains outside the mechanism it sets in motion.

In fact, when the thinking subject considers itself, or considers things in relation to itself, it brings to bear upon itself and them a second series of judgments of an altogether different character. It estimates them and it estimates itself according to a _norm_ which is in itself. It declares them to be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor in life, harmonious or discordant. In other words, it is no longer the idea of number--it is the category of _the good_ which becomes the necessary form of these new judgments, which, for this reason, are called judgments of _estimation_ or of dignity, and it is clear that between these two kinds of judgments there is no common measure. They can no more encounter each other than two balls rolled on different planes.

Will it be said that the judgments founded on the concept of _the good_ are insignificant and worthless because neither man nor the good of man can be the measure of things? If this remark is useful for abating human pride and preventing childish illusions, it does not efface the primordial distinction between good and evil inherent to the human mind, nor would one wish to deduce from it the vanity of all morality, and the equal worth of all the manifestations of life. The proof, moreover, that the rule of _the good_ is above man is that it judges and condemns him pitilessly; it is that consciousness, independently of the painful or agreeable sensations that it receives from things, establishes between them a fitness (_convenance_), a hierarchy, and constitutes the harmonious unity of the universe itself in the supreme idea of the sovereign good. If the legitimacy of the confidence which the conscience has in its rule is to be contested, I do not see why we should not contest that of the confidence of pure thought in itself. Then everything crumbles to pieces, both science and conscience, in the same abyss.

In reality, the good, the beautiful, the relations of fitness and of harmony, are so many principles of knowledge, which progress, like physical knowledge, by the culture of the mind. The form of the moral judgments is universal, and identical in every man; it is this form alone which constitutes man as a moral being; but the contents of this form vary unceasingly in history, according to times and places. Everywhere and always man has sought the good, but he has not always placed it in the same things; he has formed different ideas of it, and these ideas have become more and more noble and pure in proportion as his life itself has been ennobled and purified. That is why there is a history of morality, of religion, of aesthetics, as there is a history of the natural sciences, although progress in these two classes has been of an opposite nature and accomplished according to different laws. However this may be, we may conclude that if mathematics, by the concept of number, the abstract form of sensation, is the mould and framework of the sciences of Nature, ethics, by _the categorical imperative_, the abstract form of the activity of spirit, is the foundation of the moral sciences, which are as diverse as the various activities of the ego, each having special rules and criteria, no doubt, but always falling under the common form of obligation.

Distinct and often in conflict, these two orders of knowledge are none the less _solidaire_; they are always developed by their action the one upon the other, and tend to a higher unity, the need for which gives rise to attempts, renewed from age to age, at a metaphysical synthesis. If you take the disciplines as taught in the schools to-day, you will find that they are almost all mixed sciences such as history, social economy, politics, philosophy, etc. So soon as the savant rises above the simple description of phenomena, and wishes to organise his cosmos by formulating the unity and harmony of it, he necessarily borrows this principle of organisation and of harmony from the experience of his subjective life. On the contrary, religion, art, morality, can only be realised in the conditions prescribed to them by science properly so called, and the last problem always propounded to human thought at each stage of its development is the conciliation of the _moral idea_ acquired by the exercise of the will, and the _scientific idea_ furnished by its experience of the world.

There is no question, then, of separating the two orders of knowledge, but of referring each of them to its true source, and preventing a confusion which, mixing everything up, renders everything uncertain. It is impossible in good psychology to trace to one centre the divergent manifestations of our spiritual life, and to drive the moral into the physical or the physical into the moral. Our spiritual life is like an ellipse with two centres of light: on the one side, the centre of _receptive life_, where all the sensations received are elaborated into phenomenal knowledge; on the other, the centre of _active life_, at which are concentrated all the revelations of the mind's own inner energy. The line of the ellipse described by the relation and the distance of these two centres is the approximate but never perfect synthesis of the two kinds of data which thus arrive in consciousness. He who does not distinguish these two centres, and transforms the ellipse into a circumference with equal rays and an unique centre, necessarily remains in chaos and old night.

From these general considerations is naturally deduced the specific character of religious knowledge, its inward nature and its range.

4. _The Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge_

The first contrast that we have seen to arise between the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge is that the first is _objective_, and that the second can never pass out of _subjectivity_. This does not mean that the second is less certain, but that it is of another order, and is produced in another way and with other characteristics.

In one sense, the knowledge of Nature is subjective, for it depends on our mental constitution, and on the laws of our knowing faculty. But religious and moral knowledge is subjective in a different manner and for a deeper reason. The object of scientific knowledge is always outside the ego, and it is in knowing it as an object outside the ego that the objectivity of that knowledge consists. But the object of religious or moral knowledge--God, the Good, the Beautiful--these are not phenomena that may be grasped outside the ego and independently of it. God only reveals Himself in and by piety; the Good, in the consciousness of the good man; the Beautiful, in the creative activity of the artist. This is only saying that the object of these kinds of knowledge is immanent in the subject himself, and only reveals itself by the personal activity of that subject. Absolutely eliminate the religious and moral subject, or rather take from him all personal activity, and you suppress, for him, the object of morality and religion.

Let us take up again that striking antithesis of the two orders of knowledge. What is at once the basis and the sign of the objectivity of the natural sciences?

One may theoretically ask whether the world of science, the world that _appears_ to us, is exactly the real world, existing outside of us. It is thus that in the philosophy of Kant the famous question as to _the thing in itself_ is stated. But it is equally certain that in the name of that philosophy this question ought logically to be discarded. One is astonished that the author of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ did not immediately close that door opened to scientific scepticism. After his critique, in fact, it is evident that that substratum which some are forced to imagine as a support to phenomena--that the indeterminate and indeterminable substance that they represent beneath the forms and qualities of things,--is both a non-being and nonsense. _Das Ding an sich ist ein Unding_. (The thing in itself is an unthing.) It is a remnant of ancient metaphysics which ought to be eliminated from modern philosophy. In allowing it to introduce itself into our theory of knowledge, it overturns it as would a heterogeneous element. He that persists in distinguishing between the thing in itself and the phenomenal thing will never be able to give an account of the objectivity of the sciences of Nature, and of the kind of certitude that belongs to them.

That which appears to us from without is not doubtless all the reality of the world; but it is a real world. By his calculations, Leverrier came first to suspect the existence of a large planet as yet unperceived; then he came to measure its volume, to trace its orbit, and finally to mark its place at a given time. He said to his brother astronomers: "Look there!" and the planet appeared at the end of their telescopes.

How explain, moreover, without this reality of science, the power that science gives to man over Nature? His power, is it not always exactly in proportion to his knowledge?

In what then does this objectivity of science consist if it is not founded on the pretended knowledge of the thing in itself? In the necessary link that scientific thought establishes between phenomena. This necessity does not come from experience, for it is something ideal, which our mind adds to all experience. But, as we can only think according to these necessary laws, we necessarily objectivise in all scientific study. We thus affirm, of necessity, the fundamental unity of the laws of thought and the laws of phenomena. Experience always confirms this immediate affirmation. Now this necessity, it is objectivity itself; it is the only noumenon that we are authorised to seek behind phenomena in Nature, and behind the manifestations of pure reason in spirit.

The first effect of this objective necessity is to eliminate from the work of science the feelings and the subjective will of the ego. A thinking and acting subject is no doubt necessary in making science; but the characteristic of science is to see what it studies apart from the subject, apart even from the psychical phenomena that it observes in the ego itself. Posited outside the ego, the laws that it promulgates appear to us therefore independent of it. This elimination of the subject from the conclusions of science thus becomes the sign and the measure of their objectivity. Where the elimination is complete, as in astronomy and physics, the objectivity is entire. On the contrary, history, _e.g._ where the elimination can never be absolute, always tends towards objectivity, but never reaches it.

It is altogether otherwise with religious knowledge. With it we enter at once into the subjective order--that is to say, into an order of psychological facts, of determinations and internal dispositions of the subject itself, the succession of which constitutes his personal life. To eliminate the ego would not here be possible; for this would be both to eliminate the materials and to dry up the living spring of knowledge. An ancient illusion pretended that we know God, as we know the phenomena of Nature, and that the religious life springs from that objective knowledge as by a sort of practical application. The very opposite is true. God is not a phenomenon that we may observe apart from ourselves, or a truth demonstrable by logical reasoning. He who does not feel Him inside his heart will never find Him outside. The object of religious knowledge only reveals itself in the subject, by the religious phenomena themselves. It is with the religious consciousness as with the moral consciousness. In this the subject feels obliged, and this obligation itself constitutes the revelation of the moral object which obliges us. There is no good known outside that. The same in religion: we never become conscious of our piety without--at the same time that we feel religiously moved--perceiving, more or less obscurely, in that very emotion the object and the cause of religion, _i.e._ God.

Observe the natural and spontaneous movement of piety: a soul feels itself to be trusting, that it is established in peace and light; is it strong, humble, resigned, obedient? It immediately attributes its strength, its faith, its humility, its obedience, to the action of the Divine Spirit within itself. Anne Doubourg, dying at the stake, prayed thus: "O God, Do not abandon me lest I should fall off from Thee." The prophet of Israel said: "Turn me, O Lord, and I shall be turned." And the father in the Gospels cried: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." To feel thus in our personal and empirical activity the action and the presence of the Spirit of God within our own spirit, is the mystery, but it is also the source, of religion.

It will be seen how much religious knowledge and the science of Nature differ by their very origin. The one is the theory of the receptive and logical life of the ego; the other is the theory of its active and spontaneous life. As both the receptive and the active life are one, however, the two orders of knowledge are neither isolated nor independent. But they must never be confounded. Their results will always remain heterogeneous; they are not of the same order, and cannot supply the place of each other. If you were to admit, _e.g._, that philosophers may succeed (as they have often been believed to do) in establishing a veritable objective science of God, and if they were thus to know God in Himself and apart from the religious ego, that scientific knowledge of God, even if it were possible, would not be religious knowledge; for to know God religiously is to know Him in His relation to us--that is to say, in our consciousness, in so far as He is present in it and determines it towards piety. This is the sense in which it is permissible to maintain that religion is as independent of metaphysics as it is of cosmology. It is the same with the knowledge of the world. To know the world as an astronomer or a physicist is not to know it religiously. To know it religiously is, while taking it as it is, and in no wise contradicting the scientific laws according to which it is governed, to determine its value in relation to the life of spirit; it is to estimate it according as it is a means, a hindrance, or a menace, to the progress of that life. In the same way, to know ourselves religiously is not to construct scientific psychology; but that psychology being once constructed, and properly constructed, it is to realise ourselves in our relation both to God and to the world, forcing ourselves to surmount the contradictions from which we suffer, in order that we may attain to unity and peace of mind. Thus, not only can religious knowledge never cast off its subjective character; it is in reality nothing but that very subjectivity of piety considered in its action and in its legitimate development.

The inner nature of these two orders of knowledge having been defined, it becomes evident that each of them is valid in its own domain, and that they cannot legitimately encroach upon each other. To try to establish by religious faith the reality of any phenomenon whatsoever, of which experimental science or intellectual criticism are the sole judges; or to wish to formulate by means of objective science a moral judgment which springs from the subjective consciousness--these are two equivalent encroachments and abuses. Experimental science has the right to forbid the religious consciousness to do violence to it; but the religious consciousness has an equal right to restrict science to its true limits. We must prevent confusion if we would put an end to the conflicts between them. To enclose God in any phenomenal form is, properly speaking, superstition or _idolatry_; to confine or dissipate the soul in external phenomenism, and to deny the seriousness and value of its religious and moral activity, is _infidelity_, properly so called.

Truths of the religious and moral order are known by a subjective act of what Pascal calls _the heart_. Science can know nothing about them, for they are not in its order. In the same way the phenomena of Nature are only known and measured by observation and calculation. Neither the heart nor religious faith can decide with respect to them. Each order has its certitude. We must not say that in the one the certitude is greater than in the other. Science is not more sure of its object than moral or religious faith is of its own; but it is sure in a different way. Scientific certitude has at its basis intellectual evidence. Religious certitude has for its foundation the feeling of subjective life, or moral evidence. The first gives satisfaction to the intellect; the second gives to the whole soul the sense of order re-established, of health regained, of force and peace. It is the happy feeling of deliverance, the inward assurance of "salvation."

It is not surprising, lastly, that these two kinds of knowledge or of certitude should spring up and propagate themselves by different means. Objective science transmits itself by objective demonstration. The subjective life of the savant has nothing to do with it. To convince us of the reality of his discoveries, an astronomer does not need to be a good man. On the contrary, a fundamentally immoral man will always be a detestable professor of ethics. Religion is only propagated by religious men. It may also be added that, in religious knowledge, the intellectual demonstration or the idea has no value except in so far as it serves as the expression and the vehicle of the personal life of the subject. This is the secret and the mystery of eloquence. The _si vis me flere, dolendum_, is true in all the moral disciplines, as much and more than in aesthetics. One gains nothing by attempting to demonstrate objectively the existence of God. That demonstration is ineffective towards those who have no piety; for those who have, it is superfluous. The true religious propaganda is effected by inward contagion. _Ex vivo vivus nascitur_. Accuracy in theology is much less important in religion than warmth of piety. Pitiful arguments have in all ages been followed by admirable conversions. Those who are scandalised at this have not yet penetrated into the essence of religious faith.

For want of this clear and frank separation between our two orders of knowledge, one sees, on the one hand, philosophers pretending to transform ethics and philosophy into objective science, and, on the other, savants naively giving forth their objective science as a metaphysic and as a solution of the enigma of life. Two illusions, in whose train everything is mixed up and founded. Objective ethics are everything you could wish--except ethics. You might as well speak of a round square. When an objective science transforms itself into metaphysics, it ceases to be science and becomes subjective philosophy. This goes without saying.

And yet, in distinguishing the two orders we must not isolate them, nor above all must we lose sight of their solidarity, their close connection, and correspondence. The subject is one, and has a clear consciousness of his unity; that is why he always tends towards a synthesis. Phenomenal science cannot complete itself without borrowing from the subjective consciousness of the ego the ideas of unity, of plan, and of harmony. On the other hand, the moral and religious consciousness, in order to express itself, needs to borrow from phenomenal science the data which it uses, and, consequently, it should always avoid contradicting them. Thus we tend towards the synthetic harmony of a continuous effort and of an indefectible faith; but we discard none the less resolutely the philosophy of logical unity. We obstinately refuse to admit that the subjective order can ever be deduced, by way of consequence and application, from the objective order of knowledge: that is the error of materialistic Pantheism; and, _vice versa_, that the objective order of phenomenal science can or ought to be deduced from the religious or moral order: that is the opposite error of all the dogmatisms. The mental cannot be simply reduced to the physical, or the physical entirely to the mental. We must respect the fruitful antinomies of life from which the necessary progress springs. The tendency towards harmony is there, not the harmony itself. This is the reward promised, the aim proposed, to effort. Our philosophy ought to regard the spiritual life in its becoming--that is to say, in its growth and in its conflicts, without wishing, like all idealist and materialist speculations, to make of the actual and transient moment the eternal metaphysical reality.

5. _Teleology_

Subjective in essence and origin, religious knowledge is _teleological_ in its procedure, and this second characteristic springs from the first.

Teleology is the form of all organic life and of all conscious activity. Now, what is moral knowledge but the theory of the conscious life of spirit?

Without the principle of causation, phenomena, in science, would not be connected; without the idea of end, or principle of direction, biological and psychical facts could not be organised--that is to say, hierarchised.

Mechanism and teleology: these then are the two new terms for the antithesis formed by the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge. But it is a prejudice to believe that the one form of explanation excludes the other or renders it superfluous. We have examples to the contrary not only in the machines constructed by man, but also in all living organisms, in which, according to Claude Bernard, the _directive idea_ of life is realised in an absolute determinism.

The mechanical explanation of phenomena and the determinism of science only become exclusive of teleology when they are transformed into metaphysical materialism--that is to say, when it is affirmed, _a priori_, and by a subjective act, that there is nothing in the universe but matter and the movements of matter. But then, it is clear that materialism, which believes itself to be scientific, becomes a philosophy, and like all other philosophies it falls under the jurisdiction not only of the objective science of the world, but of the consciousness of the ego.