Chapter VII (7)

Returning, they visited the church of Las Angustias, where there is a wonderful but tawdrily dressed image of the Blessed Virgin, who is the patroness of the town. The French sisters of charity have a large orphanage and day-school here, established originally by Madame Calderon; but the situation, in the street called Recogidas, is low and damp, and their chapel being almost underground, and into which no sun can ever enter, seriously affects the health of the sisters. Here, as everywhere, they are universally beloved and respected, and the present superior is one eminently qualified, by her loving gentleness and evenness of temper, to win the hearts of all around her. The dress of the people of Granada is singularly picturesque: the women wear crape shawls of the brightest colors, yellow, orange, or red, with flowers stuck jauntily on one side of the head just above the ear; the men have short velvet jackets, waistcoats with beautiful hanging silver buttons (which have descended from father to son, and are not to be bought except by chance), hats with large borders, turned up at the edge, red sashes round the waist, and gaiters of untanned leather, daintily embroidered, open at the knee, with hanging strips of leather and silver buttons. Over the whole, in cold weather, is thrown the "capa," or large cloak, which often conceals the threadbare garments of a beggar, but which is worn with the air of the proudest Spanish 'hidalgo.' This evening, the last which our travellers were to spend in Granada, they had a visit from the king and captain of the gypsies, a very remarkable man, between thirty and forty years of age, and a blacksmith by trade. He brought his guitar, and played in the most marvellous and beautiful way possible: first tenderly and softly; then bursting into the wildest exultation; then again plaintive and wailing, ending with a strain of triumph and rejoicing and victory which completely entranced his hearers. It was like a beautiful poem or a love-tale, told with a pathos indescribable. {333} It was a fitting last remembrance of a place so full of poetry and of the past, with a tinge in it of that sorrowful dark thread which always seems woven into the tissue of earthly lives. Sorrowfully, the next morning, our travellers paid their last visit to the matchless Alhambra, which had grown upon them at every turn. Then came the "good-by" to their good and faithful guide, _Bensaken_, that name so well known to all Granada tourists; and to the kind sisters of charity, whose white "cornettes" stood grouped round the fatal diligence which was to convey them back to Malaga. And so they bade adieu to this beautiful city, with many a hope of a return on some future day, and with a whole train of new thoughts and new pictures in their mind's eye, called forth by the wonders they had seen.

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Original.

Victor Cousin And His Philosophy.

The papers some months since announced the death at Paris of M. Victor Cousin, the well-known eclectic philosopher and Orleanist statesman. The reëstablishment of the Imperial _régime_ in France had deprived him of his political career, never much distinguished; and whatever interest he may have continued to take in philosophy, he produced, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work after the revolution of July, 1830, except prefaces to new editions of his previous writings, or to other writers whose works he edited, and some "Rapports" to the Academy, among which the most notable is that on the unpublished works of Abelard, preceded by a valuable introduction on the scholastic philosophy, which he afterward published in a separate volume under the title of La Philosophie Scholastique.

M. Cousin was born at Paris in 1792, and was, the New American Cyclopedia says, the son of a clock maker, a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he was, of course, brought up without any religious faith or culture, as were no small portion of the youth of France born during the Revolution. Pierre Leroux maliciously accuses Cousin, after he had quarreled with him, of having been, when they were fellow-students together, a great admirer of _L'Ami du Peuple_, the journal in which Marat gained his infamous notoriety. His early destination was literature, and he was always the littérateur rather than the philosopher; but early falling under the influence of M. Royer-Collard, a stanch disciple of the Scottish school, founded by Reid and closed by Sir William Hamilton, he directed his attention to the study of philosophy, became master of conferences in the Normal School, and, while yet very young, professor of the history of philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris. His course for 1818, and a part of is course for 1819 and 1820, have been published from notes taken by his pupils. Being too liberal to suit the government, he was suspended from his professorship in 1824, but was restored in 1828, and continued his lectures up to the Revolution of 1830. Since then he has made no important contributions to philosophical science.

The greater part of M. Cousin's philosophical works are left as fragments or as unfinished courses. {334} His course of 1829-30 ends with the sensist school, and the critical examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. His translation of Plato was completed indeed; but the arguments or introductions, except to a few of the Dialogues, and the Life of Plato promised, have never appeared. He seems to have exhausted his philosophical forces at an early day, and after publishing a new and revised edition of his previous writings, to have devoted himself chiefly to literature, especially to the literary history of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the biography of certain eminent ladies that played a very distinguished part in the political intrigues and insurrections of the period. It is doubtful if any man living had so thorough and minute a knowledge of the literature, the religious controversies, the philosophy, the polities, and the biography of the period from the accession of Louis XIII. to the end of the wars of the Fronde, and the triumph of Mazarin over his enemies, as he possessed. His Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, Duchesse de Chevreuse, and Madame de Hautefort, and his history of the conclusion of the wars of the Fronde, are, as literary works, unrivalled, written with rare simplicity, purity, grace, and delicacy of expression and style, and have an easy natural eloquence and charm never surpassed by any writer even in the French language. He has resuscitated those great dames of the seventeenth century, who live, love, sin, repent, and do penance in his pages as they did in real life. He seems, as a Parisian has said, to have really fallen in love with them, and to have regarded each of them as his mistress, whose honor be must defend at the risk of his life.

The French, we believe, usually count M. Villemain as the most perfect master of their beautiful language; but to our taste he was surpassed by Cousin, if not in the delicacy of phrase, which only a Frenchman born or bred can appreciate, in all the higher qualities of style, as much as he was in depth and richness of feeling, and variety and comprehensiveness of thought. Cousin was by far the greater man, endowed with the richer genius, and, as far as we can judge, equally polished and graceful as a writer. As a philosophical writer, for beauty, grace, elegance, and eloquence he has had no equal since Plato; and he wrote on philosophical subjects with ease and grace, charmed and interested his readers in the dryest and most abstruse speculations of metaphysics. His rhetoric was captivating even if his philosophy was faulty.

M. Cousin called his philosophical system eclecticism. He starts with the assumption that each philosophical school has its special point of view, its special truth, which the others neglect or unduly depress, and that the true philosopher weds himself to no particular school, but studies them all with impartiality, accepts what each has that is positive, and rejects what each has that is exclusive or negative. He resolves all possible schools into four--1st. The Sensist; 2d, the Idealistic--subjectivistic; 3d, the Sceptical; 4th, the Mystic. Each of these four systems has its part of truth, and its part of error. Take the truth of each, and exclude the error, and you have true philosophy, and the whole of it. Truth is always something positive, affirmative; what then is the truth of scepticism, which is a system of pure negation, and not only affirms nothing, but denies that anything can be affirmed? How, moreover, can scepticism, which is universal nescience, be called a system of philosophy? Finally, if you know not the truth in its unity and integrity beforehand, how are you, in studying those several systems, to determine which is the part of truth and which the part of error?

There is no doubt that all schools, as all sects, have their part of truth, as well as their part of error; for the human mind cannot embrace pure unmixed error any more than the will can pure unmixed evil; but the eclectic method is not the method of constructing true philosophy any more than it is the method of constructing true Christian theology. {335} The Catholic acknowledges willingly the truth which the several sects hold; but he does not derived it from them, nor arrived at it by studying their systems. He holds it independently of them; and having it already in its unity and integrity, he is able, in studying them, to distinguish what they have that is true from the errors they mix up with it. It must be the same with the philosopher. M. Cousin was not unaware of this, and he finally asserted eclecticism rather as a method of historical verification, than as the real and original method of constructing philosophy. The name was therefore unhappily chosen, and is now seldom heard.

Eclecticism can never be a philosophy. All it can be is a method, and is, as Cousin held, a method of verification rather than of construction. Cousin's own method was not the eclectic, but avowedly the psychological; that is, by careful observation and profound study of the phenomena of consciousness, to attain to a real ontological science, or science of the soul, of God, and nature. This method was severely criticised by Schelling and other German philosophers, and has been objected to by ontologists generally, as giving not a real ontology, but only a generalization. Dr. Channing called the God asserted by Cousin "a splendid generalization"--a very just criticism, but perhaps not for the precise reason the eloquent Unitarian preacher assigned. Cousin does not maintain, theoretically at least, that we can, by way of induction or deduction from purely psychological facts, attain to a real ontological order. His real error was in the misapplication of his method, which led him to deny what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and terms the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, and the idea of the good, are being, and therefore God, and to represent them as the word of God--the precise error which, Gioberti rightly or wrongly maintains, was committed by Rosmini. It must be admitted that Cousin is not on this point very clear, and that he often speaks of ontology as an induction from psychology, in which case the God he asserts would be, for the reason Channing supposes, only a generalization.

But we think it is possible to clear him from this charge, so far as his intention went, and to defend the psychological method as he professed to apply it. He professed to attain to ontology from the phenomena of consciousness, or the facts revealed to consciousness; but he labors long and hard, as does every psychologist who admits ontology at all, to show, by a careful analysis and classification of these phenomena or facts, that there are among them some, at least, which are not derived from the soul itself, which do not depend on it, and do actually extend beyond the region of psychology, and lead at once into the ontological order. In other words, he claims to find in his psychological observation and analysis real ontological facts. It is from these, not from purely psychological phenomenon, that he professes to rise to ontology. So understood, what is called the psychological method is strictly defensible. Every philosopher does and must begin by the analysis of thought, that is, in the language of Cousin, the fact of consciousness, and there is no other way possible. That the ideal formula enters into every one of my thoughts is not a fact that I know without thought, and it can be determined only by analyzing the thought one thinks, that is, the fact of consciousness. The quarrel here between the psychologists and the ontologists is quite unnecessary.

What is certain, and this is all the ontologist need assert, or, in fact, can assert, that ontology is neither an induction nor a deduction from psychological data. God is not, and cannot be, the generalization of our own souls. {336} But it does not follow from this that we do not think that which is God, and that it is from thought we do and must take it. We take it from thought and by thinking. What is objected to in the psychologists is the assumption that thought is a purely psychological or subjective fact, and that from this psychological or subjective fact we can by way of induction attain to ontological truth. But as we understand M. Cousin, and we studied his works with some care thirty or thirty-five years ago, and had the honor of his private correspondence, this he never pretends to do. What he claims is that in the analysis of consciousness we detect a class of facts or ideas which are not psychological or subjective, but really ontological, and do actually carry us out of the region of psychology into that of ontology. That his account of these facts or ideas is to be accepted as correct or adequate we do not pretend, but that he professes to recognize them and distinguish them from purely psychological facts is undeniable.

The defect or error of M. Cousin on this point was in failing, as we have already observed, to identify the absolute or necessary ideas he detects and asserts with God, the only _ens necessarium et reale_, and in failing to assert their objectivity to the whole subject, and in presenting them only as objective to the human personality. He never succeeded in cutting himself wholly loose from the German nonsense of a subjective-object or objective-subject, and when he had clearly proved an idea to be objective to the reflective reason and the human personality, he did dare assert it to be objective in relation to the whole subject. It was impersonal, but might be in a certain sense subjective, as Kant maintained with regard to the categories. There always seemed to remain in his mind some confusion between the subject and object, and hence his translator in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, never ventures to translate _le moi et le non-moi_, subject and object, or the soul and the world, but introduces into the language such barbarisms as the _me_ and the _not-me_. Indeed, at the time those Specimens were published, there were few, if any, of the scholars of the modern Athens that understood or could be made to understand the real distinction between objective and subjective; and we observed the other day, in looking over the _Einleitung_ of a German professor, that he speaks of the objective-object, the objective-subject, the subjective-object, and the subjective-subject.

It is very easy to understand why Kant should assert objective-subjective, for he held that the categories are necessary, irresistible, and indestructible forms of the subject, but independent of the human will or personality, or of proper human activity, nay, the very conditions of that activity, imposed on us not by our will, but by the very constitution all of our intellectual nature. But why Cousin should have hesitated to assert the complete disjunction between subject and object in thought is what we are unable to explain. He maintains strenuously that the object is distinct from the personality of the subject, or that it is always, in his own language, _le-non-moi_, but not that it is distinct from the whole soul. He distinguishes the subject between personal activity and impersonal. The personal is subjective, the impersonal is objective, but objective in relation to what? To the personal only. There is, no doubt, the distinction he asserts, and it is recognized by all our theologians in their distinction between _actus humanus_ and _actus hominis_. The _actus humanus_ is an act of free will, the _actus hominis_ is an involuntary act; but both are acts of the subject, man. All action of man, whether personal or impersonal, voluntary or involuntary, is subjective, but for involuntary acts he is not held morally accountable.

{337}

This same failure to mark the real distinction between subjective and objective, and making it simply the distinction between personal and impersonal, _le moi_ and _le non-moi_, has greatly deprecated the value in his philosophy of the distinction M. Cousin notes between intuition and reflection. According to him they are but two modes of the activity of one in the same reason--which reason, he asserts is our faculty of intelligence. Reason, he says, is our only faculty of knowing, by which we know all that we do know, whatever the sphere or object of our knowledge. Reason, then, is subjective, and consequently so are all its modes of activity. Intuition is as subjective as reflection, and hence the distinction between intuition and reflections, really so important when rightly understood, says nothing in favor of the objectivity of what M. Cousin calls absolute or necessary ideas. It is in his philosophy simply a distinction between personal and impersonal, between the spontaneous activity and the reflective of the same subject; yet it is on this very distinction that he bases the validity of his ontology and his whole metaphysical system. By it he explains genius, inspiration, revelation, and religious faith. These are operations of the spontaneous reason, and divine because the activity of the spontaneous reason is not personal. In this way, he legitimates all the religions of all ages and nations. He places prophetic and apostolic inspiration and the inspiration of genius in the same category, and resolves them all, in the last analysis, into what we commonly called enthusiasm. But as reason, whether personal or impersonal, is subjective, a faculty of the human soul, it is not easy to see why its spontaneous activity should be more divine or authoritative then its reflective activity. Does M. Cousin hold with the Arabs that the ravings of the maniac are divine inspirations?

Cousin seems to us never to have clearly understood the real character of the distinction between intuition and reflection, on which he rightly insists. Intuition is impersonal, divine, infallible, authoritative, he maintains, while reflection, partaking of the imperfections and pettiness of our own personality, is individual, fallible, and without authority, save as supported by intuition. All that we ever do or can know is given us primarily in intuition, and what is so given constitutes the common sense, the common faith or belief of the race. There is less, but there can never be more, in reflection than in intuition. The difference between the two is the difference between _seeing_ and _beholding_. I see what is before me, but to behold it I look. I look that I may determine what it is I see. But it is clear from this illustration that the intuition is as much the act of the subject as is the reflection. The only difference between them is that asserted by Leibnitz between simple perception and apperception. In simple perception I perceive all the objects before me, without noting or distinguishing them; in apperception I note that it is I who perceive them, and distinguish them both from myself and from one another. The intuition is _à posteriori_, and is no synthetic judgment _à priori_, as Kant terms what must precede experience in order to render experience possible.

Nor is it true to say that all our knowledge is given in the primitive intuition. What is given in the primitive intuition is simply the ideal, self-evident truths, as say some, first principles of all science, which are at the same time the first principles of all reality, and could not be the first principles of science if they were not the first principles of reality, say others. Even they who assert that the ideal formula, _Ens creat existentias_, is intuitive, never pretend that anything more than the ideal element of thought or experience is intuitive. The ideal formula is simply the scientific reduction of the categories of Aristotle and Kant to three, and their identification with reality; that is, their reduction to being, existence, and the creative act of being, which is the real nexus between them. These three categories must be given intuitively, or _à priori_, because without them the intelligence is not constituted, and no science, no experience, is possible. {338} But in them, while the principles of all science are given, no knowledge or apprehension of particular things is given. The intuition constitutes, we would say creates, the faculty of intelligence, but all science is acquired either by the exercise of that faculty or by divine revelation addressed to it.

Reduced to its proper character as asserted by M. Cousin, intuition is empirical, and stands opposed not to reflection, but to discursion, and is simply the immediate and direct perception of the object without the intervention of any process, more or less elaborate, of reasoning. This is, indeed, not an unusual sense of the word, perhaps its more common sense, but it is a sense that renders the distinction between intuition and reflection of no importance to M. Cousin, for it does not carry him out of the sphere of the subject, or afford any basis for his ontological inductions. He has still the question as to the objectivity and reality of the ideal to solve, and no recognized means of solving it. His ontological conclusions, therefore, as a writer in The Christian Examiner told him as long ago as 1836, rest simply on the credibility of reason or faith in its trustworthiness, which can never be established, because it is assumed that to the operation of reason no objective reality is necessary, since the object, if impersonal, may for aught that appears be included in the subject. Notwithstanding his struggles and efforts of all sorts, we think, therefore, that it must be conceded that Cousin remained in the sphere of psychology, and that the facts the study and analysis of consciousness gave him, have in his system no ontological value, for he fails to establish their real objectivity. His passage from psychology is a leap over a gulf by main strength, not a regular dialectic passage, which he professes to have found, or which he promises to provide, and which the true analysis of thought discloses.

M. Cousin professes to have reduced the categories of Kant and Aristotle to two, substance and cause, or substance and phenomenon. But, as he in fact identifies cause with substance, declaring substance to be substance only in so much as it is cause, and cause to be cause only in so much as it is substance, he really reduces them to the single category of substance, which you may call indifferently substance or cause. But though every substance is intrinsically and essentially a cause, yet, as it may be something more than cause, it is not necessary to insist on this, and it may be admitted that he recognizes two categories. Under the head of substance he ranges all that is substantial, or that pertains to real and necessary being, and under the head of cause the phenomenal, or the effects of the causative action of substance. He says he understands by substance the universal and absolute substance, the universal, necessary, and real being of the theologians, and by phenomena not mere modes or appearances of substance, but finite and relative substances, and calls them phenomena only in opposition to the one absolute substance. They are created or produced by the causative action of substance. If this has any real meaning, he should recognize three categories, as in the ideal formula, _Ens creat existentias_, that is, being, existence, or creature, and the creative act of being, the real nexus between substance or being and contingent existences, for it is that which places them and binds them to the creator. In the ideal formula the categories are all reduced to three, which really include them all and in their real relation. Whatever there is to be known must be arranged under one or another of the three terms of the formula, for whatever is conceivable must be being, the creative act of being, or the product of that act, that is to say, existences. The ideal formula is complete, for it asserts in their logical relation the first principles of all the knowable (_omne scibile_) and all the real (_omne reale_), and of all the knowable because of all the real, for what is not real is not knowable. M. Cousin's reduction to substance and cause, or being and phenomena, besides being not accurately expressed, is unscientific and defective.

{339}

We do not think M. Cousin ever intended to deny the creative act of being, or the reality of existences, or what he calls phenomena, but he includes the act in his conception of substance. God is in his own intrinsic nature, he maintains, causative or creative, and cannot, therefore, not cause or create. Hence, creation is necessary. Being causative in his essence, essentially a cause, and cause being a cause only inasmuch as it causes or is actually a cause, God is, if we may so speak, forced to create, and to be continuously creating, by the intrinsic and eternal necessity of his own being. This smacks a little of Hegelianism, which teaches that God perfects or fills out his own being, or realizes the possibilities of his own nature, in creating, and arrives at self-consciousness first in man--a doctrine which our Boston transcendentalists embodied in their favorite aphorism, "In order to be you must do"--as if without being it is possible to do, as if imperfection could make itself perfection, or anything by itself alone could make itself more than it is!

But the doctrine that substance is essentially cause, and must from intrinsic necessity cause in the sense of creating, is not tenable. We are aware that Leibnitz, a great name in philosophy, defines substance to be an active force, a _vis activa_, but we do not recollect that he anywhere pretends that its activity necessarily extends beyond itself. God is _vis activa_, if you will, in a supereminent degree; he is essentially active, and would be neither being nor substance if he were not; he is, as say Aristotle and the schoolmen, most pure act; and hence the theologians discover in him a reason for the eternal generation of the Son, and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, or why God is necessarily indivisible Trinity; but nothing in this implies that he must necessarily act _ad extra_, or create. He acts eternally from the necessity of his own divine nature, but not necessarily out of the circle of his own infinite being, for he is complete in himself, the plenitude of being, and always and everywhere suffices for himself, and therefore for his own activity. Creation, or the production of effects exterior to himself, is not necessary to the perfection of his activity, adds and can add nothing to him, as it does and can take nothing from him. Hence, though we cannot conceive of him without conceiving him as infinitely, eternally, and essentially active, we can conceive of him as absolute substance or being without conceiving him to be necessarily acting or creating _ad extra_.

M. Cousin evidently confounds the interior act of the divine being with his exterior acts, or acts _ad extra_, or creative acts. God being most pure act, says the eclectic philosopher, he must be infinitely active, and if infinitely active he must develop himself in creation; therefore, creation is necessary, and God cannot but create. This denies while it asserts that God is in himself most pure act, and assumes that his nature has possibilities that can be realized only in external acts. It makes the creation necessary to the perfection of his being, and assumes either that he is not in himself _ens perfectissimum_, or most perfect being, or that the creation, the world, or universe, is itself God; that is, the conception of God as most perfect being includes both substance and cause, both being and phenomenon. Hence, with the contradiction of which M. Cousin gives more than one example, and which no pantheistic philosopher does or can escape, in asserting creation to be necessary, he declares it to be impossible; for the phenomena substantially considered are God himself, indistinguishable from him, and necessary to complete our conception of him as absolute substance, or most perfect being.

{340}

In the preface to the third edition of his Philosophical Fragments, M. Cousin says the expression, "Creation is necessary," is objectionable, as irreverent, and appearing to imply that God in creating is not free, and he willingly consents to retract it. But we cannot find that he does retract it, and, if he retracts the expression, he nowhere retracts the thought. He denies that he favors a system of fatalism, and labors hard to prove that though God cannot but create, yet that in creating he is free. God, he says, must act according to his own essential nature, and cannot act contrary to his own wisdom and goodness; yet in acting he acts freely. There is a distinction between liberty and free will. Free will is liberty accompanied by deliberation and struggles between opposite motives and tendencies. In God there can be no hesitancy, no deliberation, no struggle of choice between good and evil. Yet is he none the less free for that. There are sublime moments when the soul acts spontaneously, with terrible energy, without any deliberation. Is the soul in these sublime moments deprived of liberty? The saint, when, by long struggles and severe discipline, he has overcome all his internal enemies, and henceforth acts right spontaneously, without deliberating--is he less free than he who is still in the agony of the struggle, or are his acts less meritorious? Is the liberty of God taken away by denying that he is free to act contrary to his nature?

Whether the distinction here asserted between liberty and free will is admissible or not, or whether all that is alleged be true or much of it only error, we pass over, as the discussion of the question of liberty would lead further than we can now go; but in all he says he avoids the real question at issue. Certainly, there can be no hesitancy on the part of God, no interior struggle as to choice between good and evil, no deliberation as to what he shall do or not do; nothing that implies the least possible imperfection can be in him. Certain, again, is it that God is not free to alter his own nature, to change his own attributes, or to act contrary to them, to the eternal essences of things, or to his own eternal ideas. But that is not the question. The real question is, Is be free to create or not create at his own will and pleasure? Among the infinite number of contingents possible, and all according with his own essential attributes, is he free to select such as he chooses, and at his own will and pleasure give them existence? This is the only question he had to answer, and this question he studiously avoids, and fails, therefore, to show that they are wrong who accuse him of asserting creation as the necessary and not the free act of God. The charge of asserting universal fatalism and pantheism he therefore fails to meet. He fails to vindicate the liberty of God, and therefore, though he asserts it, the liberty of man. All pantheism is fatalistic, and the doctrine of Spinoza is not more decidedly pantheistic than the system adopted and defended by Cousin.

We are far from believing that M. Cousin thought himself a pantheist, for we do not think he ever understood his own system. He was more than most men the dupe of words, and, though not destitute of philosophical genius, philosophy was never his natural vocation, any more than it was his original destination. He was always, as we have said, the littérateur rather than the philosopher. Much allowance should also, no doubt, be made for the unsettled state of philosophy in France when he became, under Royer-Collard, master of conferences in the Normal School of Paris, and the confused state of philosophical language that was then in use. Throughout his whole ontology, he is misled by taking the word substance instead of _ens_ or being. He says that he understands by substance, when he asserts, as he does, that there is only one substance, what the fathers and doctors of the church mean by the one supreme, necessary, absolute, and eternal being, the _Ego sum Qui sum_, I am that I am, of Exodus, the name under which God revealed himself to Moses. This is an improper use of the word. {341} No doubt being is substance, or substantial, but the two terms are not equivalents. Being has primary reference to that which is, as opposed to that which is not, or nothing; substance is something, and so far coincides with being, but something in opposition to attribute, mode, or accident, or something capable of supporting attributes, modes, or accidents. Being is absolute in and of itself, and therefore strictly speaking one, and it is only in a loose sense that we speak of beings in the plural number, or call creatures beings. There is and can be but one only being, God, for he only can say, _Ego sum Qui sum_, and whatever existences there may be distinguished from him have their being not in themselves, but in him, according to what St. Paul says, "in him we live, and move, and have our being: in _ipso vivimus, et movemur, et sumus._" There is in this view nothing pantheistic, for being is complete in itself and sufficient for itself. Consequently, there can be nothing distinguishable from being except placed by the free creative act of being, that is, creation or creatures. The creature is not being, but it holds from being by the creative act, and may be and is a substance, distinct from the divine substance. Being is one, substances may be manifold. Hence, in the ideal formula, the first term or category is _ens_, not _substans_ or _substantia_.

Cousin, misled by Descartes and Spinoza, and only imperfectly acquainted with the scholastic philosophy, adopts the term substance instead of being, and maintains sturdily, from first to last, that there is and can be but one substance. Whence it follows that all not in that one substance is unsubstantial and phenomenal, without attributes, modes, or activity. Creatures may have their being in God and yet be substances and capable of acting from their own centre as second causes; but, if there is only one substance, they cannot themselves be substances in any sense at all, and can be only attributes, modes, or phenomena of the one only substance, or God. God alone is in himself their substance and reality, and their activity is really his activity. By taking for his first category substance instead of _ens_ or being, M. Cousin found himself obliged virtually to deny the second. He says he calls the second category phenomena, only in opposition to the one universal substance, that he holds them to relative or finite substances. This shows his honorable intentions, but it cannot avail him, for he says over and over again that there is and can be but one substance. Either substance is one and one only, he says formally, or it is nothing. The unity of substance is vital in his system, and unity of substance is the essential principle, of pantheism. He himself defines substance as that which exists in itself and not in another.

M. Cousin say pantheism is the divinization of nature, or nature taken in its totality as God. But this is sheer atheism or naturalism, not pantheism. The essence of pantheism is in the denial of substantial creation or the creation of substances. The pantheist can, in a certain manner, even admit creation, the creation of modes or phenomena, and there are few pantheists who do not assert as much. The test is as to the creation of substance, or existences that can support attributes, modes, or accidents of their own, instead of being simply attributes, modes, or accidents of the one substance, and thus capable of acting from their own centre as proper second causes. He who denies the creation of such existences is a pantheist, and he who affirms it is a theist and no pantheist, however he may err in other matters. Had M. Cousin understood this, he would have seen that he had not escaped the error of Spinoza. With only one substance, it is impossible to assert the creation of substances. The substance of the soul and of the world, if there is only one substance, is God, and they are only phenomenal or mere appearances; the only activity in the universe is that of God; and what we call our acts are his acts. {342} Whatever is done, whether good or evil, he does it, not only as _causa eminens_ or _causa causarum_, but as direct and immediate actor. The moral consequences of such a doctrine are easy to be seen, and need not be dwelt upon.

No doubt M. Cousin, when repelling the charge of pantheism preferred against him, on the ground of his maintaining that there is only one substance, thought he had said enough in saying that he used the word phenomena in the sense of finite or relative substances; but if there is only one substance, how can there be any finite and relative substances? And he, also, should have considered that his use of the word phenomena was the worst word he could have chosen to convey the idea of substance, however finite, for it stands opposed to substance. He says _le moi_ and _le non-moi_ are in relation to substance phenomenal. Who from this could conclude them to be themselves substances? He says he could not maintain that they are modes or appearances of substance only, because he maintains that they are forces, causes. But it sometimes happens to a philosopher to be in contradiction with himself, and always to the pantheist, because pantheism is supremely sophistical and self-contradictory. It admits of no clear, consistent, logical statement. Besides, no man can always be on his guard, and when his system is false, the force of truth and his good sense and just feeling will often get the better of his system. He has, indeed, said the soul (_le moi_) and the world (_le non-moi_) are forces, causes; but he has also said, as his system requires him to say, that their substantial activity is the activity of the one only substance, which is God.

It were easy to justify these criticisms by any number of citations from M. Cousin's several works, but it is not necessary, for we are attempting neither a formal exposition nor a formal refutation of his system; we are merely pointing out some of his errors and mistakes, for the benefit of young and ingenuous students of philosophy, who need to be shown what it is necessary to shun on the points taken up. Most, if not all, of M. Cousin's mistakes and errors arose from his having considered the question of method before he had settled that of principles. He says a philosopher's whole philosophy is in his method. Tell me what is such or such a philosopher's method, and I will tell you his philosophy. But this is not true, unless by method he means both principles and method taken together. Method is the application of principles, and presupposes them, and till they are determined it is impossible to determine the method to be adopted or pursued. The human mind has a method given it in its very constitution, and we cannot treat the question of method till we have ascertained the principles of that constitution. Principles are not found or obtained by the exercise of our faculties, because without them the mind can neither operate nor even exist. Principles are and must be given by the creator of the mind itself. To treat the question of method before we have ascertained what principles are thus given, is to proceed in the dark and to lose our way.

Undoubtedly, every philosopher must begin the construction of his philosophy by the analysis of thought, either as presented him in consciousness or as represented in language, or both together. This is a mental necessity. Since philosophy deals only with thought or what is presented in thought, its first step must be to ascertain what are the elements of thought. So far as this analysis is psychological, philosophy begins in psychology; but whether what is called the psychological method is or is not to be adopted, we cannot determine till we have ascertained the elements, and ascertained whether they are all psychological or not. If on inquiry it should turn out that in every thought there is both a psychological and an ontological element given simultaneously and in an indissoluble synthesis, it is manifest that the exclusively psychological method would lead only to error. {343} It would leave out the onto logical element, and be unable to present in its true character even the psychological; for, if the psychological element in the real order and in thought exists only in relation with the ontological, it can be apprehended and treated in its true character only in that relation. Whether such be the fact or not, how are we to determine till we know what are the principles alike of all the knowable and of all the real--that is, have determined the categories?

The error of the psychological method is not that it asserts the necessity of beginning our philosophizing with the analysis of thought, or what M. Cousin calls, not very properly, the fact of consciousness, but in proceeding to study the facts of the human soul, as if man were an isolated existence, and the only thing existing; and after having observed and classified these facts, either stopping with them, as does Sir William Hamilton, or proceeding by way of induction, as most psychologists do, to the conclusion of ontological principles--an induction which both Sir William Hamilton and Schelling have proved, in their criticisms of Cousin's method, is invalid, because no induction is valid that concludes beyond the facts or particulars from which it is made. The facts being all psychological, nothing not psychological can be concluded from them. Cousin feels the force of this criticism, but, without conceding that his method is wrong or defective, seeks to avoid it by alleging that among the facts of consciousness are some which, though revealed by consciousness or contained in thought, are some which are not psychological, and hence psychology leads of itself not by way of induction, but directly, to ontology. The answer is pertinent, for if it be true that there is an ontological element in every thought, the analysis of thought discloses it. But, hampered and blinded by his method, Cousin fails, as we have seen, to disengage a really ontological element, and in his blundering explanation of it deprives it of all real ontological character. His God is anthropomorphous, when not a generalization or a pure abstraction. What deceives the exclusive psychologists, and makes them regard their inductions of ontology from psychological facts as valid, is the very important fact that there are no exclusively psychological facts; and in their psychology, though not recognized by them as such, and according to their method ought not to be such, there are real ontological elements--elements which are not psychological, and without which there could be no psychological elements. These elements place us directly in relation with the ontological reality, and the mistake is in not seeing or recognizing this fact, and in assuming that the ontological reality, instead of being given, as it is, intuitively, is obtained by induction from the psychological. Ontology as an induction or a logical conclusion is sophistical and false; as given intuitively in the first principles of thought, it is well founded and true. The mistake arises from having attempted to settle the question of method before having settled the question of principles. The simple fact is that the soul is not the only existence, nor an isolated existence. It exists and operates only in relation with its creator and upholder, with the external world, and with other men or society, so that there are and can be no purely psychological facts. The soul severed from God, or the creative act of God, cannot live, cannot exist, but drops into the nothing it was before it was created. Principles are given, not found or obtained by our own activity, for, as we have said, the mind cannot operate without principles. The principles, as most philosophers tell us, are self-evident, or evidence themselves. If real principles, they are and must be alike the principles of being and of knowing, of science and reality. They must include in their real relations both the psychological and the ontological. As the psychological does not and cannot exist without the ontological, and, indeed, not without the creative act of the ontological, science is possible only on condition that the ontological and the psychological, as to their ideal principles, are intuitively given, and given in their real synthesis, as it has been abundantly shown they are given in the ideal formula. {344} The ontological and psychological being given intuitively and simultaneously in their real relation, it follows necessarily that neither the exclusively psychological method nor the exclusively ontological method can be accepted, and that the method must be synthetic, because the principles themselves are given in their real synthesis. Clearly, then, the principles must determine the method, not the method the principles. It is not true, then, to say that all one's philosophy is in one's method, but that it is all in one's principles. If M. Cousin had begun by ascertaining what are the principles of thought, necessarily asserted in every thought and without which no thought is possible, he could never have fallen into his pantheism, which every thought repudiates, and which cannot even be asserted without self-contradiction, because in every thought there is given as essential to the very existence of thought the express contradictory of pantheism of every form.

M. Cousin professes to be able, from the method a philosopher follows in philosophizing, to foretell his philosophy; but although we would speak with the greatest respect of our former master, from whom we received no little benefit, we must say that we have never met a man, equally learned and equally able, so singularly unhappy in explaining the systems of the various schools of philosophy of which he professes to give the history. We cannot now call to mind a single instance in which he has seized and presented the kernel of the philosophical system he has undertaken to explain. He makes the Theaetetus of Plato an argument against the sensists, or the doctrine of the origin of all our ideas in sensation--when one has but to read that Dialogue to perceive that what Plato is seeking to prove is that the knowledge of the sensible, which is multiple, variable, and evanescent, is no real science at all. Plato is not discussing at all the question of how we know, but what we must know in order to have real science. Cousin's exposition of what he calls the Alexandrian theodicy, or of neoplatonism, is, notwithstanding he had edited the works of Proclus, a marvel of misapprehension alike of the Alexandrian doctrine and of Christian theology. He describes with a sneer the scholastic philosophy as being merely "a commentary on the Holy Scriptures and texts from the fathers." He edited the works of Descartes, but never understood more of that celebrated philosopher than enough to imbibe some of his worst errors. He has borrowed much, directly or indirectly, from Spinoza, but never comprehended his system of pantheism, as is evident from his judgment that Spinoza erred only in being too devout and too filled and penetrated with God!

He misapprehends entirely Leibnitz's doctrine of substance, as we have already seen. His own system is in its psychological part borrowed chiefly from Kant, and in its ontological part from Hegel, neither of whom has he ever understood. He has the errors of these two distinguished Germans without their truths or their logical firmness. And perhaps there was no system of philosophy, of which he undertook to give an account, that he less understood than his own. He seems, after having learned something of the great mediaeval philosophers in preparing his work, Philosophic Scholastique, to have had some suspicions that he had talked very foolishly, and had been the dupe of his own youthful zeal and enthusiasm; for, though he afterward published a new edition of his works without any essential alteration, as we infer from the fact that they were placed at Rome on the Index, he published, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work, and turned his attention to other subjects. Even in his work on the Scholastics, as well as in his account of Jansenism in his work on Madame de Sablé, we recollect no re-assertion of his pantheism, nor even an unorthodox opinion.

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It was a great misfortune for M. Cousin as a philosopher that he knew so little of Catholic theology, and that what little he did know, apparently caught up at second-hand, only served to mislead him. We are far from building science on faith or founding philosophy on revelation, in the sense of the traditionalists; yet we dare affirm that no man who has not studied profoundly the Gospel of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, the great Greek and Latin fathers, and the mediaeval doctors of the church, is in a condition to write anything deserving of serious consideration on philosophy. The great controversies that have been called forth from time to time on the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the two natures and the two wills in the one person of our Lord, the Real Presence of our Lord's body, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist, liberty and necessity, the relations of nature and grace, and of reason and faith, throw a brilliant light on philosophy far surpassing all the light to be derived from Gentile sources, or by the most careful analysis of the facts of our own consciousness. The effort, on the one hand, to demolish, and on the other to sustain, Catholic dogma, has enlightened the darkest and most hidden passages of both psychology and ontology, and placed the Catholic theologian, really master of the history of his science, on a vantage ground which they who know it not are incapable of conceiving. Before him your Descartes, Spinozas, Kants, Fichtes, Schellings, Hegels, Cousins, dwindle to philosophical pigmies.

The excellent M. Augustin Cochin thinks that M. Cousin rendered great service to the cause of religion by the sturdy warfare he carried in defence of spiritualism against the gross sensism and materialism of the eighteenth century, and nobody can deny very considerable merit to his Critical Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. Dr. C. S. Henry translated it some years ago, in this country, and published it under the rather inappropriate title of Consin's Psychology, and it has no doubt had much influence in unseating Locke from the philosophical throne he formerly occupied. But the reaction against Locke and Condillac, as well as the philosophers of Auteuil, had commenced long before Consin became master of conferences in L'Ecole Normale; and we much doubt if the subtiler and more refined rationalism be has favored is a less dangerous enemy to religion and society than the sensism of Condillac, or the gross materialism of Cabanis, Garat, and Destutt de Tracy. Under his influence infidelity in France has modified its form, but only, as it seems to me, to render itself more difficult of detection and refutation. Pantheism is a far more dangerous enemy than materialism, for its refutation demands an order of thought and reasoning above the comprehension of the great mass of those who are not incapable of being misled by its sophistries. The refutation of the pantheism of our days requires a mental culture and a philosophical capacity by no means common. Thousands could comprehend the refutation of Locke or Condillac, where there is hardly one who can understand the refutation of Hegel or Spinoza.