Chapter I: Religious Individualism (2)

I was talking one day with M. Renan upon the gradual decrease in the power of religion, on the silence that has fallen on the divine word, which formerly drowned all other sounds. To-day, it is the word of nature and humanity, of free-thought and free sentiment, which is taking the place of oracles and of supernatural revelation, of dogmatic religion. M. Renan, with the openness of mind which is habitual with him, and which partakes indeed largely of scepticism, took up at once my point of view. “Yes,” he said, “we are all marching toward non-religion. After all, why should not humanity do without religious dogmas? Speculation will take the place of religion. Even at the present day, among advanced peoples, dogmas are disintegrating, the incrustations of human thought are breaking up. Most people in France are already non-religious; men of the people hardly believe more than professed men of science; they possess their little fund of ideas, more or less profound, on which they live, without help from the priest. In Germany the work of decomposition is far advanced. In England it is only in its beginnings, but it is moving rapidly. Christianity is everywhere giving place to free-thought. Buddhism and Hinduism are doing the same; in India the mass of intelligent men are free-thinkers, in China there is no state religion. It will take a long while, but religion will in the end disappear, and one may already imagine for Europe a time when it will be a thing of the past.... Islam is the one black spot on the horizon. The Turks are narrow, rebellious against reasoning, hostile to everything that lies beyond literal faith ... but if they will not follow us we shall simply leave them behind, and I think we shall be obliged to do so.” We should add that, if some Christians and Buddhists show themselves as backward as the Turks, we shall leave them behind also. Those members of mankind who think, see, and move forward, are always obliged to drag a long train of those who neither see, nor think, nor wish to move forward. They do move forward, however, in the long run. Professed advocates of the different positive and dogmatic religions count every day for less and less among the truly active members of the human species; and we ask nothing better. Whoever does not count for progress practically does not exist, and ultimately will not exist. Activity of thought is becoming more and more a condition of existence; the preponderant rôle that religions played in the past is to be explained by the fact that religion offered almost the sole field of intellectual and moral activity—the sole issue for the most elevated tendencies of our being. At that time there lay beyond the limits of religion nothing but the grossest and most material occupations; there was no known middle ground between heaven and earth. To-day this middle ground has been discovered—the ground of thought. Science and art are born; and open before us an infinite perspective, where each of us may find an opportunity to employ the best of our gifts. Science offers a field for disinterestedness and research, but does not tolerate vagaries of the imagination. It encourages enthusiasm, but not delirium, and possesses a beauty of its own, the beauty of truth.

_II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith._

[Sidenote: Religious anomy.]

I. We have proposed as the moral ideal what we have called moral anomy—the absence of any fixed moral rule.[118] We believe still more firmly that the ideal toward which every religion ought to tend is religious anomy, the complete enfranchisement of the individual in all religious matters, the redemption of his thought, which is more precious than his life, the suppression of dogmatic faith in every form. Instead of accepting ready-made dogmas, we should each of us be the makers of our own creed. Whatever Montaigne may say, faith is a softer pillow for idleness than doubt. Faith is a species of nest in which idleness lies in shelter, and hides its head under the warmth and darkness of a protecting wing; nay, it is a nest prepared in advance, like those that are sold in the markets and made by men, for birds that are kept in cages. We believe that in the future man will be increasingly unwilling to live in cages and that, if he needs a nest, he will construct it himself twig by twig in the open air, and abandon it when he is weary of it, and remake it, if necessary, every springtime, at each new stage of his thought.

[118] See our _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
sanction_.

[Sidenote: Religious anomy and scepticism.]

Is religious anomy, or the absence of religion, synonymous with scepticism? Since the disappearance of Pyrrhonism and Ænesideinism, scepticism is simply a word which serves as a label for the most dissimilar doctrines. Greek sceptics were fond of calling themselves seekers, Ζητητικοί; a name which is appropriate to every philosopher as distinguished from believer. But how the term scepticism in its modern negative acceptation is abused! If you do not belong to some definite system of thought, you are at once set down as a sceptic. But nothing is further removed from a superficial scepticism than the sympathetic mind which, precisely because it embraces so large a horizon, refuses to confine itself to some one narrow point of view, as in a glade a hundred feet square or in a diminutive valley between two mountains. “You are not dogmatic enough,” the philosopher is sometimes told. “To what system do you belong?” “In what class of thinking insects do you belong?” “To what card in our collection must you be pinned?” A reader always wants to ask an author a certain number of conventional questions. What do you think of such and such a problem? Of such and such another? You are not a spiritualist; are you then a materialist? You are not an optimist; are you then a pessimist? One must reply, yes or no, without explanatory amplification. But what I think is of small importance, even for myself; my point of view is not the centre of the universe. What I am seeking to learn, what you are seeking to learn, is the contents of human thought in all its variety and complexity. If I study myself it is not because I am myself, but because I am a man like other men. If I watch my own little soap bubble, it is because it contains a ray of the sun; my object is precisely to pass beyond the limits of my own horizon and not to remain within them. More than that, people whose ideas are fixed, clear-cut, absolute, are exactly those who have no ideas of their own. Revelation, intuition, religion, categorical and exclusive affirmation, are notions hostile to modern thought, which is in its very essence progressive. There are two sorts of men: those who remain on the surface of things and those who sound the depths of things. There are superficial minds and serious minds. In France almost all those whom we designate as sceptics or as blasés are superficial minds, with an affectation of profundity. They are also often practical Epicureans. There will always be people ready to say, with a certain hero of Balzac’s: “A good fire, a good table; behold the ideal of human life!” Waiting for dinner is the sole occupation of the day. But there will always be other people for whom life consists in an indefatigable activity.

[Sidenote: Feebleness of scepticism.]

The number of sceptics will not necessarily be increased by the final decay and disappearance of religious scepticism, which is a compound of lightness and ignorance, resting on the same foundation as religious prejudice, on the absence of a solid philosophical education. Really serious minds are either positive or speculative; a too positive, common-sense spirit might, if it became general in society, menace it with a certain intellectual debasement; but religion would not hinder its development: witness America. The true means of checking the positive spirit is to cultivate the sense of beauty and the love of art. To speculative minds, on the other hand, belongs the future of humanity; but far from being dependent upon dogma, speculation can flourish only in its absence. It is the life of speculation to ask questions about the deepest concerns of human life; dogma provides ready-made answers, and speculation cannot accept them. The disappearance of positive religions will give scientific and metaphysical speculation a fresh impulse. The speculative spirit is the extreme opposite both of the spirit of faith and of the spirit of absolute negation. An inquirer may suspect his own resources, may recognize his own powerlessness, but he will never give up the search. Strong minds will never be discouraged or disgusted, will never be followers of Mérimée or Beyle. In active mental labour there is something which is worth more than faith and doubt together, as there is in genius something which is worth more at once than the somewhat silly admiration of the multitude and the disdainful criticism of pretended connoisseurs; excess of criticism and excess of credulity are alike powerless. It is good to be aware of one’s own weakness, but from time to time only; one must turn one’s eyes toward the limits of human intelligence, but not rest them there, on pain of paralysis. “Man,” says Goethe, “should believe firmly that the incomprehensible will become comprehensible; but for that he would cease to scrutinize and to try.” In spite of the number of ideas which make their entrance into and exit from the human mind, which rise and set on the human horizon, which flame up and burn out, there is, in every human mind, an element of eternity. On certain autumn nights one may observe a veritable shower of aerolites; hundreds of stars detach themselves from the zenith like luminous flakes of snow; the dome of heaven itself seems to have given way, the worlds hung above the earth seem to have broken loose, and all the stars at once to be descending and about to leave the great firmament of night unvariegated, opaque; but the falling stars go out one by one, and the serene brilliancy of the fixed stars still remains; the storm has passed beneath them and has not troubled the tranquil splendour of their rays, nor the incessant appeal of their fixity and glory. The appeal is one that man will always respond to; under the open sky and the pressure of the problem brought home to him by the great stars, man does not feel himself feeble unless he pusillanimously shuts his eyes. Humanity will lose none of its intellectual power by the disappearance of religious faith; its horizon will grow wider simply, and the luminous points in the immensity of space will grow more numerous. True genius is speculative, and in whatever environment true genius is placed it will speculate; it has speculated hitherto despite of all that orthodox faith could do, it will speculate still more actively in spite of all that scepticism can do.

[Sidenote: Speculation and practice.]

And the practical side of human life has nothing to fear from the growth of the speculative spirit. Given minds sufficiently large, and the fact that they look down upon the earth from a height, does not prevent them from seeing human life as it is and as it should be. Decidedly one must be a man, a patriot, a “tellurian,” as Amiel said, with some contempt; to be so may appear to be a small function in the totality of things, but an upright spirit will not fulfil it with less exactitude because he perceives its limits and its restricted importance. Nothing is in vain, and _a fortiori_ no being is in vain; small functions are as necessary as great. If a man of intelligence happens to be a porter or a scavenger, he should apply himself to that profession with as much devotion as to any other. To do well what one has to do, however humble it may be, is the first of duties. An ant of genius ought not to bring to the ant-hill a grain the less, even though he were capable of taking cognizance of the eternities of time and space.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Doubt as distinguished from scepticism.]

II. Although the suppression of religious dogma does not lead to scepticism, it decidedly does lead to doubt, and we believe that the modern sense of doubt represents a higher stage of civilization than the faith in dogma that distinguished former times. Religious faith is distinguished from philosophic belief by a subjective difference. If the man of faith is not altogether blind, at least he perceives but one point in the intellectual horizon; he has focussed his intelligence upon some one plot of ground, and the rest of the world does not exist for him; he returns day after day to his chosen corner, to the little nest he has made for his thoughts to dwell in, as we said above—returns as a dove returns to the dovecote and sees but it in the immensity of space. Fanaticism marks a still further degree of contraction in one’s intellectual vision. On the contrary, the greater the progress of reflection in the history of the human race, the more completely religious faith becomes merged in, and subordinated to, philosophic conviction; the two cease to be distinguishable except by a difference in the degree of doubt that they involve, a doubt which itself rests upon a clearness in one’s vision of things. As reflection becomes more profound, it manifests here as everywhere its destructive influence upon instinct; everything that is instinctive, primitive, and naïve in faith disappears, and, along with it, disappears everything that constituted its strength, that made it so powerful in the human heart. True strength lies in the human reason, in complete self-consciousness, in a consciousness of the problems of life, of their complexity, of their difficulties.

[Sidenote: Ideal gradation of faith.]

Faith, as we have seen, consists in affirming things not capable of objective verification, with the same subjective satisfaction as if they could be verified: in attributing to the uncertain as great a value as to the certain—nay, perhaps a greater value. The ideal of the philosopher, on the contrary, would be a perfect correspondence between conclusiveness of evidence and degree of belief. The intellectual satisfaction that we take in our beliefs, the degree of tenacity with which we hold them, should vary precisely with the completeness and certainty of our knowledge. A primitive intelligence cannot be content to remain in suspense, it must decide one way or the other; it is the mark of a more perfect intelligence to remain in doubt in reference to what is doubtful. Credulity is intellectual original sin.

[Sidenote: Uncertainty of metaphysics.]

Employing the word certitude strictly for what is certain, and meaning by belief what is plausible or probable only, when one is investigating some mere matter of fact, one may in the end be able to say positively such and such is certain, is what the future will affirm on this point; but, when the degree of certitude involved amounts to no more than to probability or even possibility, and to metaphysical possibility at that, it is ridiculous to say: “I believe such and such a thing; such and such is therefore the dogma that everybody ought to adopt.” Such positive basis for metaphysical inductions as exists is too uneven not to result in a divergence in the lines of the hypotheses which rise from it into the obscure heights of the unknown; no two of our glances toward the infinite are parallel; our attempts at solving metaphysical problems are little more than rockets shot capriciously into the sky. The philosopher can do little more than take cognizance of the divergence of rival hypotheses, and of their equality and equal insufficiency in the eye of reason.

[Sidenote: Postulates for purposes of practice.]

But the problem of action presents itself to the philosopher no less than to the rest of mankind. For purposes of conduct some one among the diverging lines of human speculation must be chosen; philosophic thought must be left to describe its curves and circles above our heads while we walk, if not sure-footedly at least in some definite direction, upon the earth. One is sometimes for practical purposes obliged to rely on doubtful premises as if they were certain. Such a choice, however, is simply an inferior and exceptional means of choosing among hypotheses which one has neither the time nor the power exactly to test. One cuts loose from one’s doubts, but the expedient is a purely practical one; cutting the Gordian knots of life cannot be adopted as one’s habitual intellectual procedure. Faith which leans with an equal sense of security upon the certain and the uncertain, the evident and the doubtful, should be but a provisional state of mind forced upon one by some practical necessity. One ought never, so to speak, to believe once for all, to subscribe one’s allegiance forever. Faith should never be regarded as more than a second best, and a provisional second best. The instant that action is no longer necessary, one must revert to one’s doubt, to one’s scruples, to all the precautions of science. Kant did violence to the natural order of things when he ascribed to faith and morals a predominance over reasoning; when he gave to the practical reason, whose commandments may be the expression simply of acquired habits, control over the critical and scientific reason. His moral philosophy consists in erecting a foregone conclusion into a rule, whereas, as a matter of fact, one ought not to make up one’s mind definitely until all the evidence is in, until every alternative choice has been considered and rejected, if at all, on good grounds; our beliefs should be relied upon in practice exactly in proportion to their probability in the actual state of our knowledge. Alternatives do not exist in the outer world, they do not exist in a state of complete knowledge. The moral ideal is not to multiply them, nor to make a leap in the dark the habitual method of intellectual procedure. There is no such thing as a categorical imperative or a religious _credo_ for the traveller under unknown skies; he is not to be saved by faith but by active and constant self-control, by the spirit of doubt and criticism.

[Sidenote: Doubt and the religious sentiment.]

Doubt is not, at bottom, as profoundly opposed as might be believed to what is best in the religious sentiment, it is even a product of the religious sentiment. For doubt is simply a consciousness that one’s thought is not absolute—cannot seize the absolute either directly or indirectly; and so, consequently, doubt is the most religious attitude of the human mind. Even atheism is often less irreligious than a positive belief in the imperfect and inconsistent God of religion. To be in doubt about God is a form of the sense of the divine. Moreover, the constant inquiry that doubt provokes does not necessarily exclude the erection of an altar to the unknown God, but it excludes everything in the nature of a determinate religion, the erection of an altar that bears a name, the establishment of a cult that consists in rites. In the cemeteries in Tyrol, a little marble basin rests on each tomb; it gathers water from the rain and the swallows from the eaves of the neighbouring church come and drink from it; this clear water, that comes from on high, is a thousand times more sacred, more deeply blessed than that which sleeps in the holy-water vessel in the church, and over which the priest has stretched his hands. Why should religion, so to speak, sequestrate, retire from public circulation, everything it touches? That alone is truly sacred which is consecrated to the use of mankind as a whole, which passes from hand to hand, which is worn out in process of time in the service of humanity. There has been enough and to spare of closed houses, closed temples, closed souls—of cloistered and walled-in lives, of smothered or extinguished hearts; what is wanted is an open heart and life under the open sky, under the incessant benediction of the sun and clouds.

[Sidenote: Modesty of doubt.]

Philosophy is often accused of pride because it rejects faith, but it was the father of philosophy, Socrates, who first said: “I know but one thing, that I know nothing.” It is precisely because the philosopher knows how much he does not know that he is not certain in regard to all things, but is reduced to remain in doubt, to wait anxiously and reverentially for the germination of the seed of truth in the distant future. To regard as certain what one does not positively know is to violate one’s intellectual conscience. From the point of view of the individual, as from the point of view of society, doubt is in certain cases a duty—doubt, or if you prefer, methodical ignorance, humility, self-abnegation in matters intellectual. Where philosophy is ignorant it is morally obliged to say to others and to itself: “I do not know; I doubt, I hope, nothing more.”

[Sidenote: Morality of doubt.]

The most original, and one of the most profoundly moral products of the present century, of the century of science, is precisely this sincere sense of doubt, of the seriousness of every act of faith, of its not being a matter to be undertaken lightly, of its being a graver engagement than many others that one hesitates to assume; to give in one’s faith to an opinion has come to be like attesting one’s allegiance to it by the mediæval signature, which was written in one’s blood and bound one for all eternity. At the point of death especially, which is the very period when religion says to a man, “Abandon thyself for an instant, yield to the force of example, of custom, to the natural disposition to affirm as certain what thou dost not know, to fear of damnation, and thou shalt be saved”—at the point of death when a blind act of faith is a last weakness and a last cowardice, doubt is assuredly the highest and most courageous position the human thought can assume: it is a fight to the finish without surrender; it is death with all one’s wounds before, in the presence of the problem still unsolved, but faced to the end.

_III. Substitution of metaphysical hypotheses for dogma._

[Sidenote: Scope of metaphysics.]

Beyond the limits of science there lies still a field for hypothesis, and for that other science called metaphysics, the aim of which is to estimate the comparative value of hypotheses; to know, to suppose, to reason, to inquire, are of the essence of the modern mind; we no longer need dogma. Religion, which in the beginning was a naïve science, has ultimately become the enemy of science; in the future it must give way before science or must become merged in some really scientific hypothesis; an hypothesis, that is to say, which acknowledges itself to be such, which declares itself to be provisional, which measures its utility by the amount it explains; and aspires to nothing better than to give place to an hypothesis that shall be more inclusive. Science and research outweigh stationary adoration. The eternal element in religion is the tendency which produced there the need of an explanation, of a theory that shall bind mankind and the world together; the indefatigable activity of mind which declines to stop at the brute fact which produced in former times the tangle of contradictory myths and legends now transmuted into the co-ordinate and harmonious body of science. What is respectable in religion is precisely the germ of the spirit of metaphysics and scientific investigation, which is to-day proving fatal to religions.

[Sidenote: Distinction between metaphysical and religious sentiment.]

Religious sentiment properly so called must not be confounded with the instinct for metaphysics, the two are utterly distinct. The first is destined to decline with the extension of knowledge; the other, under some form or other, will always continue. The instinct for free speculation corresponds in the first place to an indestructible sense of the limits of positive knowledge: it is an echo in us of the undying mystery of things. It corresponds to an invincible tendency in the human mind to the need for an ideal; to the need, not only of the intelligence but of the heart, to pass beyond the limits of the visible and tangible world. The wings of the soul are too long to fly close to the earth, the soul is formed to move in long swoops and circles in the open sky. All it needs is to be lifted above the earth; often it is unable to do this of itself, and its long wings beat and trail in the dust. And to what power is it to look for its preliminary start? To its very desire for unknown spaces, to its desire for an infinite and insecure ideal. Nature, as positive science reveals it to us, is, no doubt, the sole incontestable divinity, the _deus certus_, as the Emperor Aurelius called the Sun; but its very certitude constitutes an element of inferiority. Sun-light is not the most brilliant light; the reality can have no lasting pretensions to be regarded as divine. The ideal God is necessarily the _deus incertus_, a problematical, perhaps even fictitious God.

[Sidenote: Persistence of metaphysical problems.]

This sense at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of human aspirations makes it forever inadmissible for man to abandon all effort to solve the great problem of the origin and destiny of the universe. The child, Spencer says, may hide his head under the bed-clothes, and for an instant escape consciousness of the darkness outside; but in the long run the consciousness subsists, the imagination continues to dwell upon what lies beyond the limits of human conception. The progress of human thought has consisted less in discovering answers to ultimate problems than in discovering more precise methods of formulating the problems themselves; the enigmas are no longer stated in primitive terms. This change in statement is a proof of the progress and growth in the human mind; but the problems unhappily are as difficult as ever to solve. Up to the present moment no sufficient answer has been suggested, the mystery has simply been transposed from one place to another; so much so that Spencer says the scientific interpretation of the universe is as full of mysteries as theology; and he compares human knowledge to a luminous globe in the midst of infinite darkness. The larger the globe becomes the greater the depth and extent of darkness that it reveals, insomuch that increase of science but enlarges the abyss of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Possible finiteness of the unknown.]

One must, however, be on one’s guard against exaggeration. The universe is infinite, no doubt, and consequently the material of human science is infinite, but the universe is dominated by a certain number of simple laws with which we may become continuously better and better acquainted. Many generations of men would be necessary to master in all their complexity the vedic epics, but we are able even to-day to formulate the principles which dominate them, and it is not impossible that we may some day be able to do the same for the epic of the universe. We may be able even to go the length of achieving precision in our ignorance, of marking in the infinite chain of phenomena the links which must forever be hidden from us. It is not accurate, therefore, to say that our ignorance increases with our knowledge, although it may be considered as probable that our knowledge will always be aware of something that escapes it, and may come in time to be able more and more distinctly to define, however negatively, the nature of this residuum. The infinity of the unknowable, even, is no more than hypothetical. We perhaps flatter ourselves in the belief that we possess anything that is infinite—even ignorance. Perhaps the sphere of our knowledge is like the terrestrial globe, enveloped by but a thin atmosphere of the unknowable and unknown; perhaps there is no basis and foundation of the universe, just as there is no basis and foundation of the earth; perhaps the ultimate secret of things is the gravitation of phenomena. The unknown is the air we breathe, but it is perhaps no more infinite than the earth’s atmosphere, and one’s consciousness of an unknowable infinity can no more be regarded as the basis of knowledge than the atmosphere of the earth can be regarded as the foundation upon which the earth rests.[119]

[119] The notion of the unknowable has been the subject of a
lively discussion in England and in France. See on this point
the work of M. Paulhan in the _Revue philosophique_, t. vi. p.
279.

[Sidenote: Distinction between religion and metaphysics.]

Unknowable or not, infinite or finite, the unknown will always be the object of metaphysical hypotheses. But is to admit the perpetuity of metaphysical hypotheses to admit the eternity of religion? The question involves an ambiguity of words. Spencer defines religious thought as that which deals with all that lies beyond the sphere of the senses, but that is precisely the field of philosophic thought; philosophy in its entirety, therefore, and not religion only, is included in Spencer’s definition. Nay more, science itself is in part included in Spencer’s definition, for science, which takes cognizance of everything within the reach of perception and reasoning, by that very fact undertakes to fix the limit of their power, and thus indirectly touches upon the field of the unknowable—if not to enter it, at least to outline it, and that itself constitutes a sort of negative acquaintance with it. Knowledge is essentially critical and self-critical. The eternity of philosophy and of science must, no doubt, be admitted; but the eternity of religion, as that word is usually understood, in nowise follows from that admission.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s unknowable.]

According to Spencer, the unknowable itself is not absolutely unknowable. Among the mysteries, which become more mysterious as they are more deeply reflected upon, there will remain, Spencer thinks, for man one absolute certitude—that he is in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy which is the source of all things. The formula of human certitude is open to discussion. The man of science is more inclined to believe in an infinite number of energies than in an infinite energy, in a sort of mechanical atomism, a subdivision of force _ad infinitum_ rather than in monism. Moreover, no religion can stop with the bare affirmation of the existence of an eternal energy or infinity of energies. It must maintain the existence of some relation between these energies and human morality, between the direction of these energies and that of the moral impulse in mankind. But a relation of this sort is the last thing in the world that can be deduced from the doctrine of evolution. Hypotheses in regard to the matter may of course be devised, but, far from possessing a character of certitude, such hypotheses would rather, from the point of view of pure science, display a positive improbability. Human morality, if it be considered scientifically, is a question that concerns the struggle for existence and not a question that concerns the universe. What distinguishes the natural forces, with which science deals, from gods, is precisely that the former are indifferent to the morality or immorality of our lives. In spite of our increasing admiration for the complexity of the phenomena of the world, for the solidarity that obtains among them, for the latent or active life which animates all things, we have not yet demonstrably discovered in the world a single element of divinity. Science does not reveal to us a universe spontaneously labouring for the realization of what we call goodness: goodness is to be realized, if at all, only by our bending the world to our purposes, by enslaving the gods that we once adored, by replacing the reign of God by the reign of man.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s followers in France.]

The alleged reconciliation of science and religion in Spencer’s pages is not made out except by virtue of an ambiguity in terms. Partisans of religion have, however, hastened to welcome these apparent concessions in their favour and have based on them an argument for the perpetuity of dogmas. Jouffroy has told us how dogmas become extinct; recently one of his successors at the Sorbonne endeavoured to show “how dogmas come into being again,” and he took his stand with Spencer on an ambiguity in terms. By dogmas M. Caro meant the principal points of the original doctrine of the soul—as if one could apply the name dogma to philosophical hypotheses, even though they be eternal hypotheses! The important thing, however, is to understand each other; if problems which constantly recur, and constantly receive hypothetical solutions, are to be called dogmas, then dogmas do come to life again, and may be expected always to do so; _multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, cadentque_.... But if terms be employed as a philosopher should employ them, with precision, how can metaphysical conclusions be regarded as dogmas? Examine the writings of Heraclitus, the evolutionist; Plato, the contemplator of ideas; Aristotle, the formulater of the laws of thought; Descartes, the inquirer who sought in an abyss of doubt for the absolute criterion of truth; Leibnitz, who regarded himself as the mirror of the universe; Spinoza, lost in the heart of infinite substance; Kant, resolving the universe into thought and thought into the moral law; where are the dogmas in these great metaphysical poems? They are not systems of dogma, they are systems marked by the individuality of genius, although containing something of the eternal philosophy, the _perennis philosophia_ of Leibnitz. Every system, as such, is precisely the means of demonstrating the insufficiency of the central idea which dominates it, and the necessity for the human mind of passing beyond it. To systematize is to develop a group of ideas to their logical conclusion, and, by that very fact, to show how much they do not include, how far they fall short of exhausting human thought as a whole; to construct is to demonstrate the weight of the material one is building with, and the impossibility of piling it up to heaven. Every system requires a certain number of years to bring it to completion, and then, when the edifice is achieved, one may one’s self mark the points where it will begin to crack, what columns will yield first, where its ultimate decay will begin. To recognize that the subsidence and decay of a thing is rational, is to be resigned to it and in some measure consoled for it; but whatever is useful is necessarily transitory, for it is useful for an end; and it is thus that the utility of a system implies that it will some day make way for something else. “Ἀνάγκη στῆναι,” says dogma; “ἀνάγκη μὴ στῆναι,” the philosopher says. Systems die and dogmas die; sentiments and ideas survive. Whatever has been set in order falls into disorder, boundaries become obliterated, structures fall into dust; what is eternal is the dust itself, the dust of doctrine, which is always ready to take on a new form, to fill a new mould, and which, far from receiving its life from the fugitive forms it fills, lends them theirs. Human thoughts live, not by their contours but from within. To understand them they must be taken, not as they appear in any one system, but as they appear in a succession of different and often diverse systems.

[Sidenote: Instability of metaphysics.]

As speculation and hypothesis are eternal, so also is the instinct for philosophy and metaphysics which corresponds to them eternal, though it is perpetually changing. It appears at the present day as something widely different from the intimate certitude of dogma, of confident and placid faith. If independence of mind and freedom of speculation are not without their sweetness, their attractiveness, their intoxication, they are not without their bitterness and disquietude. We must make up our minds to-day to accept a certain modicum of intellectual suffering as inseparable from our treasure of intellectual joy; for the life of the spirit, like that of the body, follows a just mean between pleasure and pain. Intense metaphysical emotion, like intense æsthetic emotion, possesses always an element of sadness.[120] The day will come when the graver moods of the human heart will sometimes demand satisfaction as they demanded and found satisfaction in Heraclitus and Jeremiah. It is inevitable that there should be an element of melancholy in the emotional setting of metaphysical speculation—as there inevitably is in the perception of the sublimity we feel ourselves incapable of attaining, in the experience of doubt, of intellectual evil, of moral evil, of sensible evil which are mingled with all our joys, and of which doubt itself is but a reverberation in consciousness. There is an element of suffering in all profound philosophy as in all profound religion.

[120] See our _Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine_, 1st
part.

[Sidenote: Communion with the universe.]

One day when I was seated at my desk my wife came up to me and exclaimed: “How melancholy you look! What is the matter with you? Tears, _mon Dieu_! Is it anything that I have done?” “Of course it is not; it is never anything that you have done. I was weeping over a bit of abstract thought, of speculation on the world and the destiny of things. Is there not enough misery in the world to justify an aimless tear? and of joy to justify an aimless smile?” The great totality of things in which man lives may well demand a smile or a tear from him, and it is his conscious solidarity with the universe, the impersonal joy and pain that he is capable of experiencing, the faculty, so to speak, of impersonalizing himself, that is the most durable element in religion and philosophy. To sympathize with the whole universe, to inquire the secret of it, to wish to contribute to its amelioration, to overpass the limits of our egoism and live the life of the universe, is the distinguishing pursuit of humanity.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

Religion, therefore, may pass away without in the least affecting the metaphysical instinct, or the emotion which accompanies its exercise. When the Hebrews were marching toward the promised land they felt that God was with them, God had spoken and had told them what lay beyond, and at night a pillar of fire lighted them on their way. The pillar of fire has burned out, and we are no longer sure that God is with us; we possess no other fire to light us on our way through infinite night but that of our intelligence. If we could but be sure that there is a promised land—that others may attain it as well as we—that the desert really has an end! But we are not certain even of that; we are seeking for a new world and are not positive that it exists; nobody has journeyed thither, nobody has returned thence, and our sole hope of repose lies in discovering it. And we shall go forward forever, the puppets of an indefatigable hope.