THE INFINITE.
TRANSITORY VIEW OF THE ACTUAL STATE OF PHILOSOPHY.
1. In the works on transcendental philosophy which have been published of late years, we find the words infinite, absolute, indeterminate, unconditioned, frequently repeated, and made to play a very prominent part in the explanation of the most recondite secrets which can be presented to the consideration of man. The words finite, relative, determinate, conditional, are easily combined with these; and from this combination they pretend that a ray of light will arise to dissipate the darkness of philosophical questions.
2. In spite of the bad use many make of such words, we must confess that the fact indicated is consoling by reason of the great desire there is to use them. This desire marks an effort in the human mind to raise itself from the mire in which the impious school of the last century has sunk it.
3. What was the world in the eyes of the false philosophers who preceded the French revolution? A mass of matter, subject to simple mechanical laws of motion, the whole explanation of which was given in two words, blind necessity. What was the human mind? Nothing but matter. What was thought? A modification of matter. In what did the difference between thinking and non-thinking matter consist? In a little greater or less subtilty,in a more or less happy disposition of atoms. What was morality? An illusion. What were sentiments? A material phenomenon. What was the origin of man? That of matter,—a phenomenon offered by a quantity of molecules, which at one moment happen to be disposed one way, and a moment after in a very different way. If you inquired if there were a destiny beyond the grave, We argue that question! they would answer with a scornful smile. Have you such a word as religion? The scorn increased and changed into contempt. Do you recognize the dignity of the human race? O, yes! we admit this dignity, and we are of opinion that it is of the same nature as that of the brutes, only it has reached a higher degree of perfection. We do not deny that your form may be more noble and elegant than that of the monkey, nor do we dispute the superiority of your intelligence; but we would have you take good care not to make pretensions to a nobler origin or a loftier destiny. The course of ages may develop and perfect the monkey form, and render it equal with yours; it may develop and perfect his cerebral organs, so that from this very monkey, whose extravagant motions and ridiculous attitudes now amuse, men will be born such as were Plato, Saint Augustine, Leibnitz, or Bossuet.
4. With such a system, it was useless to deal in ideas: they retained only sensations. Whatever could occupy the mind of man, whether the most imbecile or endowed with the loftiest genius, was nothing more than a sensation transformed. The very brutes possessed all the elements of human intelligence; to think was only to feel more perfectly. Such was the last term of their analysis; such the result of their most accurate observation; such the solution their profoundest philosophy gave to the problems of man's understanding. Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche and Leibnitz were nothingbut sublime dreamers, whose genius strongly contrasted with their ignorance of the true nature of things. None of them knew any thing about ideology or metaphysics; these sciences were an unknown world until Locke and Condillac came and discovered them.
5. This school, as fatal as frivolous, has involved and stifled mind in matter. The butterfly could not unfold his wings of fair and various colors; he was forced to lay them off and to change into a stupid and filthy worm, entangled in a covering as loathsome and unclean as itself. In this consisted progress. The limit of ideological perfection was to deny ideas; that of metaphysical studies, to deny spirits; that of morals, to deny morality; that of society, to deny authority; that of politics, to establish license; that of religion, to deny God. Thus, human reason, thinking to advance, marched in a retrograde direction; and proposed to raise the edifice of its knowledge, when there was nothing left to demolish: thus they imagined to attain a scientific result by denying every thing, and by finally denying themselves.
6. At present, there is a reaction against so degrading a philosophy. We have only to open the writings of the philosophers of this age to convince ourselves of this consoling truth. We everywhere meet the word idea in contraposition to that of sensation; that of mind to that of matter; that of activity of thought to that of bodily motion; those of cause, order, liberty, of free will, morality, infinity. The ideas which accompany them are sometimes inexact, sometimes extravagant; but at the bottom of all this we distinguish an anxious desire to rise from the abyss down to which an atheistical and material philosophy had dragged the human mind. Some who have contributed to the reaction do not admit a free and intelligent God, distinct from the universe. What we have said above istherefore true, that pantheism is atheism in disguise; nevertheless, the atheism of the pantheist now-a-days is an atheism which is ashamed to confess itself such, and which sometimes, perhaps, deceives itself, being persuaded that it is not.
7. The atheism of modern philosophers unites itself with the infinite: it does not reject those great ideas which as relics of a primitive tradition were common in the old world, and were afterwards fixed, cleared up and elevated by the superior teaching of Christianity. The philosophy of the last century sat down in the darkness and shadow of death and declared itself alone in possession of light and life. Philosophy now still remains in obscurity, but it is not satisfied with it, and gropes about in the dark, seeking some outlet to the regions of light. Hence those desperate efforts to resolve itself, not into matter, but into the focus of intelligence, into theme, that is, the mind: hence the continual use of the words absolute, unconditional, infinite, words which, notwithstanding they ordinarily lead to absurdities, do yet indicate a sublime aspiration.
8. These observations show that we do not confound the philosophy of to-day with that of the past century; that we do not regard the pantheism of to-day as a pure materialism, and that, notwithstanding the atheism of which we accuse the doctrine of certain philosophers, we do not deny that they have, even in the midst of their extravagance, preserved a kind of horror of it, and that, lost as they are in the labyrinth of their speculations, they seek the thread which shall conduct them to the gates of truth.
9. This act of justice we willingly render to modern philosophers, but it will not prevent us from combating their pretension to a merit they do not possess. They style themselves restorers of the spirituality of the soul, and of human liberty; and when they speak of God theyalmost exact a tribute of gratitude from him for having replaced him upon his throne. Before making such proud pretensions they ought to have considered that they are even yet far from the truth with respect both to God and to man, not only as Christianity has at all times taught it, but also as the most illustrious modern philosophers have professed it. They are ambitious to be called restorers, but their restoration with its licentious frequency is a new revolution, at times as terrible as the evil it attempts to combat.
10. Another consideration ought to have moderated their zeal to be thought inventors, which is that they have said nothing concerning God, the human mind, thought, ideas, the liberty of freewill, which may not be read in all the works of the philosophers who flourished before, or even in the beginning of, the eighteenth century. Open the text-books of the schools, and you will find many things which they would have us believe to be important discoveries. The great philosophers gloried in knowing what they had before learned when children. The philosophical tradition of sound ideas was not interrupted during the past century. In many parts of Europe schools existed which taught them with scrupulous fidelity. And besides human schools, there was that of the God-Man, the Church of Jesus Christ, which, among its supernatural dogmas, preserved even natural truths, notwithstanding the senseless efforts which have been made to obliterate them.
11. To what, then, are the invention and restoration reduced? Invention there is not, either with respect to God, to the human mind, or to morality, for nothing true has been said of them which had not already been said. Restoration, properly so called, there is not; for what does not perish cannot be restored. The truth exists; and has been known and revered during the whole six thousandyears it has refused to bow the knee to Baal. Let not deserters say, when they turn and come back to the truth that they have restored it, but that they have recovered it; not that they give, but that they receive it; not that they enlighten the world, but that they are blind, and that it is the goodness of Providence which opens their eyes to the light.