Chapter V (1)

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—_Concluded_.

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective
idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence
resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of
idealism considered from point of view of the religious
sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms:
Possibility of universal progress on the hypothesis of
radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation
between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral
idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment:
Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.

II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:
Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity
of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin
of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception
of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.

III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary
systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of
monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and
as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists
in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the
rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without
the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical
and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the
world and of humanity it may be founded on scientific
monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these
expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that
is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the
immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for
the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence,
of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is
eternity _a parte post_ a ground of discouragement or
of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other
worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of
beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of
gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a
universal society.

IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of
immortality from the point of view of monism—Two
possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or
untemporal existence and continuation of life in some
superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its
function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the
systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal
life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction
made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers
between individuality and personality—Eternal life
problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of
the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional
immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional
immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that
of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of
the present life and its evolution into some superior
form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution
permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours
and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its
relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural
selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections
drawn from science—Protestations of affection against
the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III.
Modern opposition between the conception of _function_
and the conception of simple substance, in which
ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of
immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern
philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a
continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity,
but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between
complexity and instability—Three stages of social
evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective
character of individual consciousness—Conception of
progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and
natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the
compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its
dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical
universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their
possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary
psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration
of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification
of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of
love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of
every conception relative to existence, of consciousness,
and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV.
Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the
present state of evolution, do not believe in the
immortality of the individual—Antique and modern
stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy
and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of
philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness,
to the point of to some extent approving one’s own
annihilation.

[Sidenote: The problem of the immanence of being.]

Naturalism consists in believing that nature, together with the beings which compose it, make up the sum total of existence. But even from this point of view there still remains the problem, what existence essentially is, and what special mode of existence is most typical. Is nature material, or mental, or both? The problem of the essence of being is one that cannot be escaped.

[Sidenote: The double-aspect theory.]

The theory that seems to-day to be dominant is the “double-aspect” theory—the theory of two inseparable correlatives subjective and objective, of consciousness and of motion. We have, as M. Taine[143] would say, two texts of the eternal book instead of one. The question is, which of the two texts is original and sacred? Sometimes that which is furnished by introspection alone, sometimes that which objective science endeavours to decipher, are respectively held to be primitive. Thence arise two opposed tendencies, not alone in psychological but in metaphysical speculation; the one toward idealism, the other toward materialism; the one toward what lies within, the other toward what lies without. But these two aspects may and should be conceived as possessing a certain unity; there is an inevitable tendency in the human mind to follow out two converging lines to their point of intersection. There are, therefore, three forms of naturalism: idealism, materialism, monism. These three constitute the three genuine systems of thought from which theism, atheism, and pantheism are respectively derived.

[143] M. Ribot holds the same doctrine.

_I. Idealism._

[Sidenote: Idealism defined.]

If the words thought and idea be interpreted as Descartes and Spinoza understand them, as designating the entire life of the mind, the sum total of the possible content of consciousness, idealism may be defined as the system which resolves all reality into thought, into psychical existence, insomuch that to be is to think or to be thought; to feel or to be felt; to will or to be willed; to be the object or subject of a conscious effort.

[Sidenote: Idealism and the religious instinct.]

It is evident that idealism is one of the systems which is capable of affording a certain satisfaction to the religious sentiment, because the religious sentiment is allied to the instinct for metaphysics, and the instinct for metaphysics finds itself at home among all things of the spirit, of thought, of the moral world. The foundation of theism, as we have said, is _moralism_; the belief, that is to say, that the true power in nature is mental and moral. God is simply a representation of this power, conceived as transcendent. Pantheism itself, after having divinized and materialized the universe and resolved all things, so to speak, into God, tends to become idealistic, to resolve God into the thought which has conceived Him, to deny Him all existence over and above that which He possesses in thought, and for thought, and by virtue of thought. According to the Hindu comparison, the human mind is like the spider that can build its mansion out of materials drawn from its own body, and then reabsorb them.

[Sidenote: Subjective idealism criticised.]

But how shall the mind itself, the central fund of thought that is the origin and end of all things, be conceived? Is it individual or impersonal? English subjective or egoistic idealism, as Mr. Huxley defines it in his “Life of Hume,” replies, that in spite of all demonstration to the contrary, the collection of perceptions which constitute our consciousness may be simply a phantasmagoria which, engendered and co-ordinated by the ego, unrolls its successive scenes upon a background of nonentity. Mr. Spencer retorts that, if the universe is thus simply a projection of our subjective sensations, evolution is a dream; but evolution may be formulated in idealistic quite as well as realistic terms: and a coherent dream is as good as reality. Subjective idealism is therefore difficult to refute logically; but in spite of that fact it will never have many followers. For this apparent simplification of the world is in reality a complication. For subjective idealism involves the ridiculous hypothesis of a chance agreement between the impressions of any given individual and of all other individuals: a difficulty much harder to explain away than the preliminary one of the simple reflection in us of an external world. Mental phenomena are always more complex than material phenomena.

The reduction of the external world to subjective terms, the explanation of the optical illusion of objectivity, demands a much greater display of vain ingenuity than any theory of simple perception. More than that, the least effort with the resistance that it encounters is a refutation of egoistic, or as the English again say, solipsistic idealism. In the fact of resistance, subjective sensation and the perception of an objective reality coincide. Even if the manner in which our sensations of resistance are combined in tridimensional space may be conceived as subjective, it is difficult to admit that the materials out of which the structure is made are, as it were, suspended in mid-air. To explain the fact of resistance requires us absolutely to pass beyond the limits of consciousness, for even in the cases in which the sensation of resistance seems to be due to hallucination, the cause of hallucination is always found to be some instance of actual resistance, of friction or stress inside the body. The mistake of a madman, who sees an unfamiliar form take shape and rise before his eyes, is not that of considering the power as existing outside of himself, but of locating it at the extremities of his nerves of touch; whereas it is really in his brain, at the point where the nerves intersect with the cerebral centres. He is right in his sense of the presence of an enemy, but wrong in the direction in which he looks for it.

[Sidenote: Truth in subjective idealism.]

We are obliged, therefore, to admit the hypothesis of a multitude of microcosms, of mine, of yours, of everybody’s, and of a single macrocosm the same for everybody. What is true is that between the great world and every little world there is an incessant communication, by means of which everything that passes in the one is echoed in the other. We live in the universe, and the universe lives in us. The statement is not metaphorical, but literal. If we could look into the consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities, etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. If the traces left by experience on the nervous system could be read, like the writing in a book, the earth might disappear, and its image and history be handed down in certain chosen human brains.

[Sidenote: Realism destined to prevail.]

Active and practical humanity will always believe in realism to the extent of insisting that the world possesses an existence which is independent of any individual thought. We shall dwell no further on subjective idealism, which is more important as a metaphysical curiosity than for any comfort it gives to the religious sentiment.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism.]

Of objective idealism the same cannot be said. In objective idealism, too, all material existence is regarded as a mode of mental existence; being is identified either with the ideal law which presides over the development of the universe, or with the genuine foundation of our consciousness, our sensations, our desires. The world, as Emerson has said, is a precipitate of the soul.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This hypothesis is certainly one of those that may best serve as a substitute for theism, if theism should ever disappear. But idealism, thus understood, is open to the following objection: Is it of any special use to objectify the soul, if the existence of evil, which Plato identified with matter, is thereby left unchanged? It is in vain to translate evolution into psychic terms; no difficulty can be avoided by so doing. The mysterious imperfections of the exterior world are transported bodily into the mind; evil is spiritualized simply. Identifying things with the intellectual law which presides over their evolution in nowise excuses us from explaining why that law is in so many respects bad, and why the intelligence that directs the universe is so often self-contradictory and feeble.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism relatively capable of satisfying the moral instincts.]

In spite of this objection, which will, perhaps, never receive a sufficient reply, it is certain that, so far as our moral and social instincts are concerned, idealism offers us greater ground for hope than either of the remaining systems of thought. In spite of evil and pain, the desire of progress and of salvation, which is the basis of all religious speculation, may rely upon thought as its last resource. But thought, if the doctrine of objective idealism is to be made acceptable, must be understood as including not only intelligence, but also sentiment, desire, and volition, and, in effect, the purely intellectual idealism of a former time is at the present day being succeeded by an idealism that regards the will as the fundamental element in the universe.[144] Universal sensibility is an incident of universal power of will, whereas intelligence, properly so called, at least in so far as the function of intelligence is regarded as representation, is more superficial than sensibility or volition.[145] These three inseparable forms of psychic life[146] constitute the great forces to which moral and religious sentiment must always turn for support.

[144] See Schelling, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wundt, Secrétan, MM.
Ravaison, A. Fouillée, Lachelier, and, to a certain extent, M.
Renouvier.

[145] See Schopenhauer, Horwicz, and M. Fouillée.

[146] See Wundt’s _Psychologie physiologique_.

[Sidenote: Hypothesis of moral progress immanent in the world.]

Idealism, thus understood, constitutes one of the most tempting of the solutions of the problem of evil. Optimism being, as we have seen, indefensible, and pessimism being a caricature, the most plausible religious and metaphysical hypothesis at the present day is the conception of a “possible progress owing to the radical spontaneity of all existing things.”[147] The will, according to this hypothesis, with its tendency to indefinite self-expansion, is _par excellence_ the primitive power, the central element in man and in the universe. Freedom of the will in man means the consciousness of this progressive power, which is immanent in all things, and this consciousness may be made the foundation of a moral being. This conception of freedom, which is reconcilable with determinism, becomes an additional motive among the other motives that govern man’s life, and tends to be realized by the very fact that it is conceived and desired. Through the intermediation of this conception, reality possesses a progressive freedom, that is to say, a power of constant union with the whole, and of moral enfranchisement. “In the beginning there obtains a universal antagonism among the forces of the universe, a brutal fatality, an infinite reign of shock and counter-shock, between blind and blindly driven beings; then there arises a progressive organization that makes the evolution of consciousness, and therefore of volition, possible; there arises a gradual union and fraternity among the particulars that constitute the universe. Ill-will, whether it originate in mechanical necessity or in intellectual ignorance, is transitory; good-will is permanent, radical, normal, and fundamental. To cultivate good-will in one’s self is to enfranchise one’s self from the individual and the transitory in favour of the universal and the permanent; it is to become truly free, and by that very fact to become truly loving.”[148]

[147] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d
edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[148] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d
edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[Sidenote: Reconciliation between freedom and determinism.]

Between progressive freedom thus conceived, and the determinism in the midst of which it progresses, there is no opposition; freedom and determinism constitute two aspects of one and the same process of evolution. Determinism essentially consists in a series of actions and reactions existing between other beings and ourselves; but these very actions and reactions constitute the manifestation of the development of our, and their, inner activities. And the source of activity in the universe is none other than an overflowing power, which is hostile to limitation, to impediment of every kind; is, in a word, none other than a self-realizing volition. Freedom, thus understood, may, therefore, be considered in the last resort as the origin of determinism and as one with it.[149] Necessity is, so to speak, the outer surface of freedom—the point of contact between two or more free agents. Freedom is inconceivable apart from a resulting determinism, for to be free is to possess power, is to act and to react, is to determine and to be determined. Determinism, on the other hand, that is to say, reciprocal action, is inconceivable apart from freedom, from internal action, from a spontaneous outbreak of power that tends to be free. So that one may say, without contradiction, that determinism envelops the world, and that free-will constitutes it.

[149] A. Fouillée, _op. cit._

[Sidenote: Ideal liberty the aim of the universe.]

If the shock of wills in the world is unusually brutal, the reason is that they are as yet but half conscious of their powers; as consciousness develops, contest will give way to concurrence. To avoid violent concussion with obstacles in the way, the free agent has less need of acquaintance with them than of acquaintance with itself. As there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to volition, there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to the ideal that every volition aims at. It is probable that life is always and everywhere accompanied by consciousness in some slight degree; and wherever consciousness exists, desire may exist. Nature’s device, as a contemporaneous poet has said, is “I aspire.” The human ideal is, perhaps, no more than the conscious formulation of this aspiration which is common to the whole universe. If so, it follows that ideal freedom is the limit of evolution, and that volition, which aims at ideal freedom, is the principle of it.[150]

[150] “The category of Real Existence does not seem
reconcilable with the notion of liberty; the latter in its
perfection must be conceived under the category of the Ideal,
and in its imperfection under that of Becoming.”—A. Fouillée,
_La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, conclusion.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

It has been objected to this idealist theory of evolution that progress implies an aim and the observance of certain principles in its attainment, while evolution does not.[151] But the precise object of the doctrine in question is to supply evolution with a name and appropriate principles, and to extend the notion of progress to the universe as a whole. It has also been objected to this somewhat panthelistic hypothesis (θέλος), that if everything is free, nothing is free.[152] This objection is not exact, for it would imply, in economics, for instance, that to increase everybody’s well-being would increase the well-being of nobody, or that if everybody equally should be impoverished, everybody would equally be enriched. To universalize a conception is one thing, to suppress it is another. The world cannot at the present day be conceived as distinct from the human race: the two are vitally and intimately related. Endow mankind with an unbiassed freedom of will, and Epicurus would be right in holding that indeterminism is the basis of all things.[153] Similarly, suppose mankind endowed with “a radical goodness of will, which is very distinct from freedom of the will, but nevertheless constitutes a sort of moral freedom in process of formation,”[154] and the germ of such goodness of will should be found in a more or less unconscious form throughout the entire universe. Before the human mind can really produce anything whatever, the whole universe must be like it in labour. Partisans of the theory of goodness of will as the basis of human morality are therefore logical in regarding it as more or less present in some degraded form throughout the whole of nature, even in beings in which intelligence has not yet made its appearance; and goodness of will in such cases is to be considered as accompanied by the obscure beginnings of responsibility, of implicit merit or demerit—one must return in effect to a sort of re-reading of the Hindu theory, according to which the several degrees that exist in nature represent so many stages in morality.

[151] M. Franck, _Essais de critique philosophique_.

[152] M. Franck, _op. cit._

[153] The author argued the point at length, in 1873, in his
book on Epicurus. See also his _Morale anglaise_, 2 partie, pp.
385-386, 2d edition.

[154] A. Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition.

[Sidenote: Moral idealism and the religious sentiment.]

_Hypotheses fingo_ is the mother of metaphysics. Moral idealism of the kind we have just epitomized from the pages of a contemporary author is decidedly no more than a hypothesis, and a hypothesis open to discussion; but it is assuredly the form of idealism that is least incompatible with the theory of evolution, and with the facts of natural history and of human history.[155] Moreover, it affords unusual scope for the religious sentiment, freed from its mysticism and transcendence. If the unknown activity which lies at the basis of the natural world has produced in the human race a consciousness of goodness, and a deliberate desire for it, there is reason to hope and to believe that the last word of ethics and metaphysics is not a negative.

[155] This form of idealism is equally compatible with the
prevailing monistic doctrines, and is in some cases, as notably
in that of M. Fouillée, confounded with them. See below.

[Sidenote: Religion interpreted in the light of this hypothesis.]

We have a number of times cited Schleiermacher’s definition of religion: the sense of our absolute dependence in regard to the universe and its principle. When the religious sentiment becomes transformed into a moral idealism its correct formula tends to be the inverse of the preceding: a sense of the dependence of the universe upon the determination that goodness shall prevail, of which we are conscious in ourselves and which we conceive to be or to be capable of becoming the directing principle of universal evolution. The notion of the moral and social ideal of freedom is, therefore, according to this doctrine, not a mere superficial accident in the universe, but a revelation and growing consciousness of the most fundamental laws of the universe, of the true essence of things, which is the same in all beings in different degrees and in diverse combinations. Nature represents an eternal ascent toward a more and more clearly conceived ideal, which dominates its progress from beginning to end. As one climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas, and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. Ancient peoples generally regarded the mountains as a transition between earth and sky; it was from the mountains that the soul, profiting by the impulse lent it by the last touch of earth, took its freest flight: the mountains constituted a pathway toward the open heavens. And that may be an element of profundity in these naïve ideas which ascribe to nature aspirations which are more properly human. Do there not exist in nature great unfinished sketches, hints and lines leading upward? Nature has done all that unconsciously, has blindly piled block on block of stone slowly toward the stars. It is man’s privilege to read a meaning into her work, to make use of her efforts, to employ past centuries as the materials out of which to build the future; by scaling the heights of nature man will reach the sky.

_II. Materialism._

Properly to estimate idealism it must be contrasted with its opposite, materialism.

[Sidenote: Materialism difficult to define.]

We shall say but a few words on the subject of pure materialism, because of all systems of thought materialism is the farthest removed from those which give rise to religious and to metaphysical theories. Absolute materialism is somewhat difficult to define, because matter is one of the vaguest of words. To aim at representing the ultimate elements of matter as wholly independent of thought, of consciousness, of life, is evidently chimerical; such an effort leads straight to the pure indeterminism of matter as conceived by Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel; to an indefinite dyad, to a theory of virtuality and of the identity of non-being. Also materialists are obliged to regard as determinate and material the primitive force of which the world constitutes simply a development. If, for example, according to the most recent theories, all matter should prove to be reducible to hydrogen, materialism would regard hydrogen as constituting a sort of material or substantial unity in the world. Variety would exist only in the forms displayed by the primitive element, hydrogen, or, if you prefer, pre-hydrogen.

[Sidenote: Materialism criticised.]

It must be confessed that this conception is somewhat naïve and nominalistic; the word material or chemical can never express more than the outside, than the exterior properties of the primordial element. The hydrogen atom itself is probably in a high degree composite, is itself probably a world of little worlds, held in place by gravitation. The very conception of an indivisible atom is philosophically infantine. Thomson and Helmholtz have shown that our atoms are little vortices of energy, and have succeeded in producing experimentally analogous vortices formed of vapour; for instance, of the vapour chlor-hydrate of ammonia. Each vortex is composed always of the same particles; no one particle can be separated from the others; each vortex possesses, therefore, a stable individuality. When the attempt is made to cut the vortices, they fly the blade or bend about it, and prove to be indivisible. They are capable of contraction, of dilation, of partial interpenetration and distortion, but never of dissolution. And certain men of science have thence inferred that we possess thus a material proof of the existence of atoms. And so indeed we do, providing an atom be understood to be something as complex, as little primordial, and as relatively enormous as a nebula. Atoms are indivisible as a nebula is indivisible by a knife blade, and the atom of hydrogen is about as simple as the solar system. To explain the universe by hydrogen is like explaining it by the sun and the planets. The rise of the actual world out of hydrogen can be conceived only on condition of ascribing to the alleged atoms of hydrogen something more than physicists and chemists know them to possess. Materialism, therefore, must enlarge its principle if it is to prove productive: enlarge, as Diderot would say, your atheism and your materialism.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some theory to account for life.]

But the instant materialism is “enlarged,” the universal element must at once be regarded as alive and is not what is called brute matter. Every generation of physicists, as Mr. Spencer says, discovers in so called brute matter forces the existence of which the best informed physicist would some years previous have disbelieved. When we perceive solid bodies, sensitive in spite of their inertia to the action of forces, the number of which is infinite; when the spectroscope proves to us that terrestrial molecules move in harmony with molecules in the stars; when we find ourselves obliged to infer that the innumerable vibrations traverse space in all directions, the conception which is forced upon us is not that of a universe of dead matter but rather that of a universe everywhere alive; alive in the general sense of the word, if not in the restricted.[156] The notion of life is perhaps more human and more subjective, but after all more complete and concrete than the notion of movement and of force; for we cannot hope to discover the truth at any great distance from the subjective, since subjectivity is the necessary form in which truth appears to us.

[156] Mr. Spencer himself has a little forgotten this fact in a
number of his own somewhat too mechanical constructions.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some sort of mind-stuff theory.]

The second emendation to which materialism must submit, if it is to satisfy the metaphysical instincts of mankind, is to include in the primordial element not only life but some germ of mind. But primitive matter conceived as a force capable of living and ultimately of thinking is not what is scientifically and vulgarly regarded as matter, far less as hydrogen. The pure materialist, thumping the rotundity of the earth with his fist, and relying grossly on his sense of touch, cries: “Matter is everything,” but matter is analyzable into force, and force is simply a primitive form of life. Materialism therefore issues into a sort of animism; in the presence of the circling world, the materialist is obliged to say it is alive. Nor can he stop there; the world is force, is action, is life—and something more; for in and by me the world thinks. _E pur si pensa!_

[Sidenote: Passes readily into idealism.]

Behold us landed once more in idealism. And, indeed, as Lange and M. Taine have well shown, materialism easily passes to idealism; pure materialism results in an abstract mechanism, which is analyzable into the laws of logic and of thought. And the basis of this mechanism—atoms and motion—consists in enfeebled subtilized and rarefied tactual and visual sensations, taken ultimately as the expression of the final reality. The alleged foundation of objective reality is simply a residuum of our most essential sensations. Materialism is advocated in the name of positive science; but it, not less than idealism, belongs really to the poetry of metaphysics; its poetry is recorded simply in terms of atoms and motion, instead of in terms of the elements of consciousness. Materialistic symbols are more matter of fact, more neighbour to the visible reality, possess a wider compass and generality, but they are none the less symbols simply. Materialism is in some sort a tissue of metaphor in which scientific terms lose their scientific signification, and gain a metaphysical signification in its stead, transferred, as they are, to a domain that lies beyond the range of experience. The man of science who speculates thus upon the nature of things is, unknown to himself, a modern Lucretius.

[Sidenote: Materialism and the notion of infinity.]

And finally, materialism, properly so called, has been invaded by a notion which has been at all times peculiarly adapted to satisfy the metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind; the notion of infinity, whether in the direction of greatness or the opposite. Men of science go to the trouble of estimating the number of molecules in a drop of water; they tell us that the thousandth part of a millimeter of water contains 228,000,000 molecules; they say that a pinhead contains the fourth power of 20,000,000 atoms, and that, if the atoms could be counted a billion every second, it would take 253,678 years to complete the task. But all such calculations are simply arithmetical _jeux d’esprit_. These figures, which are so great in appearance, really amount to nothing, and a grain of sand, no doubt, contains literally an infinite number of particles.

[Sidenote: Final breakdown of materialism.]

The argument against the notion of infinity, based on the logical impossibility of an infinite number, is not decisive;[157] it rests upon a begging of the question, namely, that everything in the universe is innumerable—that is to say, is capable of being precisely included within the limits of an intelligence like our own. Logic, on the contrary, insists that in homogeneous matter, like space, time, and quantity, there is no limit to the possibility of division and multiplication, and that, consequently, they may proceed beyond any given number. If so called “purely scientific” materialism does not admit that nature is coextensive with man’s conception of what is possible—if it denies the parallelism between thought and nature—it by that very fact denies also the rationality of nature, which is precisely the principle upon which every philosophy that pretends to be purely scientific ultimately relies. Whoever rejects the notion of infinity is obliged, in the last resort, to suppose a species of contradiction between the activity of the human mind, which is unable to stop at any given point, and nature, which stops, for no reason in particular, at a determinate point in time and space. The conception of infinity may be said to be forced upon materialism, and that very notion contains one of the antinomies against which intelligence, by the very fact of its employment, is ultimately brought to a standstill; it is precisely in the act of counting that intelligence achieves the conception of the innumerable; it is by exhausting every given quantity that it achieves the conception of the inexhaustible; it is by reaching ever beyond the limits of the known that it comes in touch with the unknowable; and all these conceptions mark the point where we feel our intelligence becoming feeble and beyond which our sight grows dim. Back of matter, which thought takes cognizance of, and back of thought, which takes cognizance of itself, lies infinity, which envelops both of them, and which seems the most fundamental aspect of matter itself. It was not without reason that the ancients called matter, abstractly considered, as independent of its diverse forms, the infinite ἄπειρον. Materialism thus leaves us, as other systems do, in the presence of that ultimate mystery which all religions have symbolized in their myths, and which metaphysics will always be obliged to recognize, and poetry to express, by the instrumentality of images.

[157] See Renouvier’s arguments and Lotze’s and Fouillée’s
replies to them in the _Revue philosophique_.

[Sidenote: Apologue.]

By the seaside stood a great, upright mountain that pierced the sky like an arrow-head, and the waves beat upon its base. In the morning, when the first light of the sun touched the ancient rocks, they shivered, and a voice rose from the gray stones and mingled with the sound made by the blue sea; and mountain and wave conversed together. The sea said: “The heavens have been mirrored in my shifting waves a million years, and in all that time have held as high aloof from me and stood as motionless.” And the mountain said: “I have climbed toward the heavens a million years, and they are still as high above me as ever.” One day a ray of sun fell smiling upon the brow of the mountain, and the mountain questioned it on the distant heavens from which it came. The ray was about to reply, but was reflected suddenly from the mountain to the sea, and from a scintillating wave back to the heavens from which it came. And the ray is still _en route_ across the infinite, toward the nebulæ of Maïa, in the Pleiades, which were so long invisible, or toward some point farther still, and has not yet replied.

_III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds._

[Sidenote: Monism.]

The word infinite, ἄπειρον, which the ancients applied to matter, the moderns have applied to mind. The reason, no doubt, is that matter and mind are two aspects of one and the same thing. The synthesis of these two aspects is attempted by monism.

[Sidenote: Monism to-day prevalent.]

I. It is not our purpose here to pass judgment upon the theoretical pretensions of monism as a system of metaphysics. We observe simply that the trend of modern thought is toward this system. Materialism is simply a mechanical monism, the fundamental law of which is conceived as capable of being completely formulated in mathematical terms. Idealism is simply a monism the essential law of which is conceived as mental, as pertaining to the intelligence or to the will. This latter form of monism numbers many adherents in Germany and in England. In France it has been advocated by M. Taine, and we have just seen that it is maintained at the present moment under a somewhat different form by M. Fouillée, who regards it as a reconciliation of naturalism and idealism, and no doubt also as a possible reconciliation between what is essential in pantheism and in theism.[158] In our judgment the balance must be more evenly trimmed than the philosophers above cited have done, between the material and mental aspects of existence, between objective science and subjective, conscious knowledge. Monism, therefore, essentially consists simply in a hypothesis that combines the least questionable facts dealt with by science, those which are inseparable from the elementary facts of consciousness. The fundamental unity imported by the term monism is not to be confounded with Spinoza’s unity of substance, nor with the absolute unity advocated by the Alexandrians, nor with Spencer’s unknowable force, nor with anything in the nature of a final cause, such as is spoken of, for example, by Aristotle. Neither do we affirm the existence of any unity of figure and form in the universe. We are content to admit, by a hypothesis at once scientific and metaphysical, the fundamental homogeneity of all things, the fundamental identity of nature. Monism, in our judgment, should be neither transcendent nor mystical, but immanent and naturalistic. The world is one continuous Becoming; there are not two kinds of existence nor two lines of development, the history of which is the history of the universe.

[158] See the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: The fundamental conception of philosophy is that of life.]

Instead of endeavouring to resolve matter into mind or mind into matter, we recognize them both as united in this synthesis, which science itself (and science is a stranger to anything in the nature of moral or religious prejudice) is obliged to recognize: the synthesis known as _life_. Science tends every day still further to extend the domain of life, and there exists no fixed point of demarcation between the organic and the inorganic world. We do not know whether the foundation of life is _will_, or _idea_, or _thought_, or _sensation_, although in sensation we no doubt approach the central point; it seems to us probable simply that consciousness, which constitutes for us everything, should count for something in every mode of being, and that there is, so to speak, no being in the universe which is entirely abstracted from self. But, leaving these hypotheses to one side, what we can affirm with certainty is that life, by the very fact of its development, tends to engender consciousness; and that progress in life ultimately comes to be one with progress in consciousness, in which what is movement in one aspect is sensation in another. Considered from within everything, even the intellectual forms of time and space, is resolvable by the psychologist into sensation and desire;[159] and, considered from without, everything is resolvable by the physicist into emotion; to feel and to move seem to be the two formulæ that express the entire inner and outer universe, the concave and convex aspects of things; but to feel that one’s self moves is the formula that expresses self-conscious life which is still so infrequent in the great totality of things, but which is becoming increasingly more common. The very meaning of progress in life consists in what is expressed by the gradual fusion of these two. Life means, in fact, development toward sensation and thought.

[159] See the author’s study on _L’idée de temps_ (_Revue
philosophique_, April, 1885).

[Sidenote: Life and activity.]

Side by side with the tendency which life thus displays to take possession of itself by consciousness, it seeks to widen the sphere of its operation by a more and more profound activity. Life is productivity. At the lowest stage of consciousness life leads only to the inner development of the solitary cell; at the highest stage of consciousness, life manifests itself in intelligent and moral productivity. Expansion, far from being opposed to the nature of life, is in harmony with its nature, is the very condition of life, properly so called, just as in generation the need to engender another individual results in that individual’s existence being, as it were, a condition of our own. The fact is that life does not consist in nutrition only, it consists in production, and pure egoism involves not an expansion of self but a diminution and mutilation of self. Also the individual, by the mere fact of growth, tends to become both social and moral.[160] It is this fact of the fundamental sociality of mankind which is the basis of the moral instinct, and of what is most profound and durable in the religious and metaphysical instinct. Metaphysical speculation, like moral action, thus springs from the very source of life. To live is to become a conscious, a moral, and ultimately a philosophical being. Life is activity in one or other of its more or less equivalent forms: moral activity, and what may be called metaphysical activity, that is to say, activity of thought, binds up the individual with the universe.

[160] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, p. 447, _et
seq._

[Sidenote: No final cause in nature.]

Up to this point we have made no mention of anything in the nature of a final cause. Morality, in our judgment, is as independent as the so-called religious instinct of anything in the nature of a primordial end and aim. Morality in the beginning is simply a more or less blind, unconscious, or, at best, subconscious power. As this power becomes endowed with self-consciousness, it directs itself toward more and more rational objects: _duty_ is self-conscious and organized morality. Just as humanity moves blindly forward without in the first instance possessing any notion of its destination, so also moves nature.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Monism and the problem of destiny.]

All this being true, what is the destiny of mankind in the world? Does monism allow a place for the hopes on which the moral and metaphysical sentiments have always relied in their effort to save thought and good-will from the charge of vanity?

[Sidenote: Natural selection and the possible evolution of gods.]

If evolution may be conceived as possessing from the beginning a certain aim and as being on the whole providential,—a metaphysical hypothesis which unhappily is guiltless of the smallest trace of scientific induction,—it may also be conceived as resulting in beings capable of proposing to themselves a certain aim, and of dragging nature after them toward it. Natural selection would thus finally be converted into moral and, in some sort, divine selection. Such an hypothesis is, no doubt, as yet a rash one, but is at least in the direction of the trend of scientific thought, and it is not formally in contradiction with present knowledge. Evolution, in effect, can and will produce species and types superior to humanity as we know it; it is not probable that we embody the highest achievement possible in life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but that evolution may be able to bring forth, nay, has not already brought forth, what the ancients called gods?

[Sidenote: Possibility of arresting process of dissolution.]

Such speculation offers a permanent support for what is best in the religious sentiment for sociality, not only with all living and knowing beings, but with the creatures of thought and superior power with which we people the universe. Provided such beings are in no sense anti-real, provided they might somewhere exist, if not in the present at least in the future, the religious sentiment may attach itself to them without check from the scientific sentiment. And in so doing it becomes one with the metaphysical and poetic impulse. The believer is transmuted into a philosopher or a poet, but into a poet whose poetry is his life, and who dreams of a universal society of real or possible beings who shall be animated to a goodness of will analogous to his own. The statement that Feuerbach proposed, of what is essential in moral and religious sentiment (the reaction of human desire on the universe), may then be interpreted in a higher sense as referring to a desire and a hope both that, first, the sociality with which we feel ourselves personally to be animated may, as biology would lead us to believe, be discovered in all beings that exist at the summit of universal evolution; and second, that these beings thus placed at the front by evolution, will one day succeed in securing what they have gained, in preventing dissolution, and that they may thereby permanently establish in the universe the love of social or rather universal well-being.

[Sidenote: The highest possible conception in the realms of morals.]

Thus understood, the religious sentiment may still be regarded as ultra-scientific, but no longer as anti-scientific. It is, no doubt, taking much for granted to suppose that beings who have arrived at a high degree of evolution may determine from that point on the direction that the evolutionary process is to take, but, after all, since we are unable to affirm with certitude that such is not or may not become the fact, the moral and social sentiment urges us to act in such manner as to turn as far as in us lies the process of evolution in that direction. If, as we have said, morality is a species of productivity, every moral being must turn his eyes toward the future, must hope that his work will not die, must watch over the safety of that portion of himself that he has delivered to someone else—of his love—by which not only he has devoted himself to others, but has made others in a sense his own; has acquired rights over them, has conquered them, so to speak, by subjecting himself to them. By labouring for humanity and for the universe with which humanity is bound up, I acquire certain rights over the universe. There arises between us a relation of reciprocal dependence. The highest conception of morals and metaphysics is that of a sort of sacred league between the higher beings of the earth, and even of the universe, for the advancement of what is good.

* * * * *

II. What scientific facts may be urged in bar of such hopes as to the destiny of the universe and of humanity?

[Sidenote: Immanence of dissolution.]

The most discouraging aspect of the theory of evolution is that of dissolution, which seems to be inevitably incident to it. From Heracleitus to Mr. Spencer, philosophers have regarded these two ideas as inseparable. But does evolution necessarily result in dissolution? Our experience, both of the life of individuals and of worlds, seems, so far as the past is concerned, to make for a reply in the affirmative. Our whole acquaintance has been with worlds which have gone or are going to shipwreck. When the corpse of a sailor is thrown into the sea, his friends take notice of the exact point of latitude and longitude at which his body disappeared in the ocean. Two figures on a bit of paper are all that exists of what was a human life. An analogous destiny may be supposed to be in reserve for the terrestrial globe and for humanity as a whole. They may some day sink out of sight in space and dissolve beneath the moving waves of ether; and at that period, if some neighbouring and friendly star observe us, it may take the latitude and longitude in infinite space of the point in the celestial abyss where we disappeared—the angle made by the last rays that left the earth; and the measure of this angle, made by two extinct rays, may be the sole trace to remain of the whole sum of human effort in the world of thought.

[Sidenote: Has been observed in the past only.]

Nevertheless, the duty of science being equally in its denials and in its affirmations to keep within the limits of certainty, it is important not to model our conception of the future too absolutely upon our knowledge of the past.

[Sidenote: The future may differ from the past.]

Up to the present time there has been no individual, nor group of individuals, nor world which has attained complete self-consciousness, complete consciousness of its life and of the laws of its life. We are unable, therefore, either to affirm or to demonstrate that dissolution is essentially and eternally incident to evolution by the very law of being: the law of laws is to us simply _x_. If thought is ever to understand the law of laws, it will be by realizing the law in its own person. And such a height of development is conceivable; if it is impossible to prove its existence, it is still more impossible to prove its non-existence. It may be that if complete self-consciousness, if complete consciousness is ever achieved, it will produce a corresponding power great enough to arrest the process of dissolution. Beings who are capable, in their infinite complication of movements in the world, of distinguishing those which make for evolution as against those which make for dissolution, might be capable of defeating the latter and of securing the unimpeded operation of the former. If a bird is to cross the sea it needs a certain breadth of wing; its destiny depends on some inches, more or less, of feathers. Seabirds that desert the shore before their wings have attained the proper strength are one after another engulfed in the waves, but when their wings are full grown they can cross the ocean. A world also needs, so to speak, a certain breadth of wing to secure its flight in infinite space—its fate depends on some small increments, more or less, in the development of consciousness; beings may one day be produced capable of traversing eternity without danger of being engulfed, and evolution may be established once for all in security against a recoil; for the first time in the onward movement of the universe a definitive result may be achieved. According to the profound symbolism of the Greek religion, time is the father of worlds. The power of evolution which the moderns regard as ruling over all things is the ancient Saturn who devours his offspring. Which of his children shall deceive him and vanquish him—what Jupiter shall some day prove strong enough to chain up the divine and terrible power that engendered him? The problem for him when he shall arise—for this god of light and intelligence—will be to check the eternal and blind impulse of destruction without at the same time arresting the impulse of productivity. Nothing, after all, can justify one in affirming scientifically that such a problem is forever insoluble.

[Sidenote: The inexhaustible resources of nature.]

The great resource of nature is number, the possible combinations of which are infinite and constitute the secret of the eternal mechanism of the universe. Fortuitous combination and selection, which have produced so many marvels in the past, may give rise to still greater marvels in the future. It is on that fact that Heracleitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and later the men like Laplace, Lamarck, and Darwin based their conception of the part played by chance in the universe, and of the point of union between luck and destiny. There is in the history of the world—as in the history of a people, a belief, or a science—a certain number of partings of the way, where the least impulse toward one side or toward the other suffices to destroy or to preserve the accumulated effort of centuries. We must happily have passed an infinity of such cross-roads to have attained our present point of development. And at each new point of the kind we encounter once more the same danger and run the same risk of losing everything that we have gained. The number of times that a fortunate soldier has evaded death will not make the next shot fired at him deviate a millimetre from its appointed path, but if our successes in the past are no guarantee of success in the future, our failures in the past do not constitute a definitive proof of failure in the future.

[Sidenote: Even chances that the future may not resemble the past.]