These universal and necessary principles once admitted and characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others, like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that they regulate the realities of the external world, as they regulate our intellectual activity.Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he placed man himself in the middle of the world.
To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why does the spiritualistic school so stop short, why does it not advance to the very end of the path upon which it has entered? It admits God as the being in whom these necessary principles reside, and from whom man has received them; what does this mean but that it recognizes in God the author and instructor of man? And to recognize in God the author and the instructor of man, what is this but to recognize the fact of the creation, and the fact of the primitive revelation inherent in the fact of the creation?These two truths are involved in the fact that the necessary principles exist in the mind of man, and that man derives them, not from his relations with the external world, but from himself, and from the source whence he himself emanates—from God, his Creator. God has created man armed at all points, as well in the order of the intellect as of matter, complete in his soul as in his body: that is to say, God has given to him at his creation the necessary principles of his intellectual life, just as he has given him the necessary mechanism of his physical organization. Scientific psychology thus mounts up to that supreme point where it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its part, inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing and proclaiming the existence of that light to which it so attains.
What was the import, what the form, of that primitive revelation? Has the revelation itself been renewed at any epoch subsequent to the creation? If so, by what instruments and with what incidents has it been renewed? These are questions to which I shall recur, but which for the moment I do not approach; I wish here only to establish the fact of the divine revelation in the sphere and in the terms of scientific psychology.
Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclusion. I repeat here what I said in the first series of these Meditations, when speaking of the dogma of the creation:
"The only serious opponents of the dogma of the creation are those who maintain that the universe, the earth, and man upon the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the state in which they now are. No one, however, can hold this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many ages man has existed on the earth is a question that has been largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry in no way affects the dogma of the creation itself; it is a certain and recognized fact that man has not always existed on the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man, therefore, had a beginning: man has come upon the earth." [Footnote 40]
[Footnote 40: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian Religion, page 18.]
He did not come there by spontaneous generation—that is to say, by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter. Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the progressive transformation of species does not explain better the existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth.This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts; even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology. God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors.
The whole current of history contains the same teaching. I admit that error abounds in history, that it is full of false assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated, legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that, the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains there, that certain historical events are authenticated and attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two, because connected with the subject which engages me.It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man; had become manifest to him by different acts or under different forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a succession of revelations—revelations characterized at one time by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to Christianity.We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the relations of the Creator with his creatures.
If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history, into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its peculiar scientific object—the study of the human soul—I am far from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error. While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not see what was implied in that man besides—that is, revelation as well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had deduced from psychology.In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves to it too exclusively.
From this twofold error sprang another still more serious. Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism—a transformation as unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete!
A man of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one who will never be suspected of any undue bias for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, avowing to me recently the high esteem with which M. Alexandre Vinet inspired him, borrowed an expression of Pascal's: "The heart has its reasons, which the reason does not comprehend." [Footnote 41]
[Footnote 41: Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is a slight difference. Pascal said, "Le cœur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît point:" "The heart has reasons that the reason knows not at all." Pensées de Pascal, edition of M. Faugère, 1844, vol. ii, p. 172.]
I only admit half of what is implied in this conciliatory phrase; and these are my reasons.
True religious faith, or, to call things by their real names, Christian faith, is founded upon instincts and upon sentiment at the same time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason do not accept the sentiments of the heart, on which side is the fault? Is the fault with the heart, that it feels them, or is it with the reason, that it does not comprehend them?
My reply to this question is easy. I reject the distinction made. I admit no such persons as are respectively styled the heart, the reason. Here is only an attempt at a psychological anatomy; no true enunciation of a real fact. Man, the human being, is essentially one, and single: he has the faculty of self-observation and self-study, but in exercising it he does not destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his mere reason, it is himself, and his whole self, that makes himself the object of his observation and of his study, and that cannot but recognize himself and accept himself in his entirety. He has no right to say, with an air of scientific disdain, "My reason comprehends not the reasons of my heart."He must perforce say: "I comprehend not myself;" he must perforce proclaim, not the incoherency of his being, but the insufficiency or the incompetency of what he styles his reason.
Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personifications that mislead; the one personifies by images, the other by abstractions. Both have need of them—the one for its creations, the other for its studies; I am far from seeking to deny their respective use. All that I contend for is, that we must not misconceive the real import of these expedients of human language; we must not, by taking them for realities, lose sight of or destroy what are really and genuinely realities, the entities of divine creation.
I insist the more on this error, because in the philosophy of our time it is a common and a potent error, and the source too of other errors, deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral and practical point of view. Condillac and his disciples had set apart and specially studied in man the faculty of sensation, and they were thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out of it alone, man himself and the whole man.Kant and his school considered particularly in man the faculty of the reason and judgment, and very soon reason came with them to constitute the whole man. I am far from intending to examine in its fundamental principles and its entirety the system of Kant, the greatest philosophical work upon the human understanding that any man has produced since the time of Plato. I single out this fact, that it treats the reason as the proper, special, and paramount object of philosophy. Warned by his profound, scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit himself to a point of view so narrow, although so lofty; he studied man's reason under its different aspects, he constituted himself the critic of pure reason, the critic of practical reason, the critic of æsthetic reason—that is, of reason applied to the discrimination of the beautiful; he decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as many different faculties as he found different phases in the intellectual and moral life of man; but the faculty that he styled the reason remained the basis of his study and of his system.It became in his school, and in the schools akin to it, pre-eminently the intellectual substance, the basis of man and of philosophy; and the human being himself, in his personal unity, with all his life and his free will, entirely disappeared from their teaching.
As results of this system I will cite only two facts, very different in their nature, both very foreign to the founder of the system and his disciples, but which serve the better to reveal that system's faultiness, as these facts are, although its indirect, remote, and involuntary, nevertheless, its undeniable consequences.
When, in 1793, the frenzied men who disposed, as masters, of the destinies of France, abolished the Christian religion and Christian worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to men an object to adore. They instituted the worship of reason.The church of Notre-Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a temple of reason; a young woman was made to figure there as the goddess of reason; and the orator of the National Convention, Chaumette, cried aloud as he pointed her out to the people, "Behold living Reason; we celebrate here to-day the sole true worship, the worship of Liberty and of Reason."
At the distance of three quarters of a century from the date of these revolutionary orgies, in 1865, not in France but in England, a man of earnest intentions, superior mind, and extensive learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes a book entitled, "Rationalism in Europe;" and the object of this book is to establish, that all the good effected in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, all the progress made by states in justice, in humanity, in liberty, and general happiness—whether in the sphere of science or of practical industry—is due to the influence of Rationalism, to its developments and its conquests.Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he attaches no precise and philosophical meaning to the word "Rationalism;" he does not trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor the place occupied in it by the pure, the practical, or the aesthetic reason; he only retraces the intellectual and social history of Europe, and all the happy results that this history commemorates, all the salutary consequences of the activity of the human mind, of the liberty of man's thought, of the amelioration of human institutions and manners, he sums up all in a single name, attributes them to a single cause, and assigns all the honor to the progress of Rationalism!
Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his work, a single reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: he asks himself whether, in extolling the happy effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too much:
"Utility is perhaps the highest motive to which reason can attain. … It is from the moral or religious faculty alone that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. … The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth for its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of the spirit of Rationalism into politics, has produced, and is producing, some of the most splendid instances of self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, the general tendency of these influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and both in actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible. With a far higher level of average excellence than in former times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred years has been mainly the history of the action of Christianity upon the world.Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently sustained. …"This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecutions; the decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments, which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered the character of mankind; the emancipation of suffering nationalities; the abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the asceticism which paralyzed the material progress of mankind, may be justly regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilization; but when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual interests to what they believed to be right, and when we realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost something in our progress." [Footnote 42]
[Footnote 42: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii, 1866, third edition, pp. 403-409.]
But to leave England and Mr. Lecky, and to return once more to France. I turn to the pages of a rationalistic philosopher more profound, and more profoundly troubled, too, in his sentiments than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in an essay of M. Edmond Scherer, entitled "The Crisis of Protestantism," [Footnote 43] the following passage:
[Footnote 43: Mélanges d'histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254. 1864.]
"That which is really imperiled is not so much Protestantism; it is Christianity, it is very religion. As for natural religion, that exists only in books. Religions which have vital force and influence are positive religions; that is, religions which have a Church, and particular rites, and dogmas. What are these dogmas? Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the solutions of the great problems which have ever disquieted the mind of man—the origin of the world, and of evil; the expiation; the future of humanity. The doctrines of religion are a sort of revealed metaphysics.
"Considered in its form, dogma is the supernatural—not merely because religions were born at an epoch when the imagination was greedy of miracles, and when the imagination, in hernäiveté, associated herself with everything; but also because, as may be readily understood, it is impossible for a positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation; it is necessarily a history of the intervention of God in the destinies of man, the account of acts by which God created and saved the world—it is that or it is nothing. We see then at once that in religion everything is not religious. There is in every religion a multitude of elements, historical, physical, and metaphysical, as to which its dogmas may come into conflict with science. Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I would here speak. The religious sentiment has also its critical action;italso may enter into a struggle with religion.
"As long as the authority of the priest or of the book preserves its prestige, the believer receives his religion ready made for him, without himself making distinctions; but as soon as that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not entirely reject his first belief, will at least no longer accept it without reservations. He only retains so much of it as enlightens or touches him, so much as commends itself to his understanding or to his heart; so much, in a word, as gives a satisfaction to his religious requirements.
"Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes the measure of religious truth. It receives all in religion that addresses itself to the soul, all that nourishes and fortifies the soul, all that raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all that unites the soul to God.Religious sentiment appropriates it all, but it appropriates nothing more. Let but a thing become indifferent, and it feels it as an importunity, and looks upon it in the light of an element strange, useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this reason, doctrines purely speculative as well as facts purely marvelous. Man requires his religion to be entirely religious; that is to say, to be in all respects in direct relation with piety, and, so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. The more his faith purifies itself, the more a man eliminates from his religion dogmas which, having no root either in the divine nature or man's nature, appear on that very account to have no ground to exist at all.
"At first sight this gradual emancipation of faith and this corresponding progress of religion in the ways of Spiritualism, seem a natural process by means of which religious opinion and the human mind contrive to maintain themselves in a state of constant equilibrium.We imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that we catch a glimpse of the religious future of humanity in a sort of Christian Rationalism, a rational Christianity not excluding fervor of devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man's thought.
"I demand nothing better as far as I am concerned; but I cannot refrain from asking, not without anxiety, whether Christian Rationalism is really a religion. What remains in the crucible after the operation just detailed? Is the residue really the essence of the positive dogmas, or is it but acaput mortuum?When Christianity is rendered translucent to man's mind, conformable to man's reason and man's moral appreciation of things, does it still possess any great virtue? Does it not very much resemble Deism, and is it not equally lean and sterile? Does not the potent influence of religious belief reside in its dogmatic formulas and marvelous legends just as much as in anything more essentially religious that it possesses?Is there not even somewhat of superstition in genuine piety, and is it possible for piety to dispense with that popular system of metaphysics, that attractive mythology, which men strive to eliminate from it? Do not the elements which you pretend to abstract from religion constitute the alloy, without which the precious metal becomes unsuitable for the rough usages of life? In short, when criticism shall have succeeded in overthrowing the supernatural as useless, and dogmas as irrational; when the religious sentiment on the one side, and a scrupulous reason on the other, shall have penetrated man's belief, assimilated and transformed it; when no other authority shall remain standing, save that of the personal conscience of each individual; when, in a word, man having torn every vail and penetrated every mystery, shall behold that God face to face to whom he aspires, will it not be discovered that that God is, after all, nothing else than man himself, the conscience and the reason of humanity personified? Will not religion, in the very attempt to become more religious, have ceased to exist?"
Such, according to the views of its most eminent representatives, are the potent influences and the final results of Rationalism. After having confusedly attributed to it all the progress of man's thought and of man's civilization, Mr. Lecky expresses the apprehension that he has lowered the nature of man, by depriving him (these are his very words) "of our noblest quality, of the divine spark, the principle in us of everything that is heroic," the complete and pure devotedness of Christian faith. M. Scherer asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing, and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself; and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has its reasons, which the reason comprehends not."
Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, at the same time, throws such light upon the subject of my meditations as this involuntary, this invincible anxiety observable in men of lofty sentiments and profound convictions, when confronting the chasms in their system, and dealing with the incoherences of their own convictions. However profound, however different my own conviction may be, I have no desire to engage, either with them or against them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. I have been engaged all my life in frequent and ardent polemics. Those could not be well avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely to combat human opinions, but to grapple with human affairs; and called upon to resolve, upon the instant, practical and urgent questions. But while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience has taught me their inconveniences and their perils.The combatants on each side are prone to make use of weapons of too offensive a nature; men involve themselves for party interests and party honor, and push their conclusions with obstinate pertinacity beyond the strictness of truth, sometimes even beyond their own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any similar rock; but avoiding all personal polemics, all controversy of detail, I will express upon the essence of Rationalism, although only in a general manner, my sincere and intimate convictions.
There are in Rationalism two fundamental errors. First, it mutilates man while it studies him; it holds as of no account several of the constituent elements and essential facts of human nature, of which it ignores the meaning and the import. Secondly, Rationalism extends the pretensions of human science beyond its rights, and beyond its legitimate limits.
The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are certainly not sufficient reasons for scientific conviction, nor conclusive proofs in support of any particular system whatever. The instinctive belief of the human race in one or more supernatural forces is no demonstration of the reality of the supernatural; and the aspirings of man's soul for a life beyond this terrestrial one does not rationally prove the soul's immortality. Error may occur in human instincts or sentiments just as much as in human ideas. But when these instincts and these sentiments are universal, permanent, indestructible, encountered in all ages and in all countries—when they resist and survive all attacks, all doubts of reason or science—they are, beyond all question, considerable facts, and facts which the human understanding cannot but recognize and respect. If these instincts and sentiments do not solve the problems which trouble man's understanding, at least they demand imperiously some solution; if they throw no light upon his road to science, they oblige him to see that that road has its mysteries.Rationalism mutilates humanity when it ignores such facts, regarding them as vain illusions because it cannot explain them; and when, after this mutilation, it assigns the entire empire to a single portion of the human nature, to a single faculty, called by it reason, as if reason constituted the entire man, Rationalism does in the intellectual world what it would be doing in the physical world did it deny the reality of night because it only sees the day clearly.
Rationalism is the more wrong in thus discarding facts which it does not explain, that in its proper domain similar facts occur, and that its science of reason arrives also finally at mysteries. I mentioned it before, as a truth acquired to philosophy, that there exist in the human mind certain universal and necessary principles, neither furnished to the mind by impressions derived from the external world, nor created by the mind itself; and that those principles are inherent in the nature of the mind, and come to it from another source than that of sensation, or any discovery of man's own thought.We have here a psychological fact which, after the profound studies of the spiritualistic school from the time of Plato down to M. Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To what does this fact tend, and what is its logical consequence? What but God, creation, revelation, and the relations of God with man? Will Rationalism give any better explanation of these divine laws of the human mind than it has given of the instincts and of the sentiments of the human heart? or will it ignore the one result as it has ignored the other?
But now to touch upon the radical and permanent error of Rationalism. It regards all things as accessible to the researches and to the methods of human science. When Spiritualism has recognized and proclaimed the essential and necessary facts which constitute the intellectual and moral being by it styled man, it halts abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary the very door of which it has reached; it does not resign itself to adore what lies behind the vail; it is inconsequent and timid, although respectful and modest.Rationalism, on the contrary, is presumptuous and audacious; its ambition is to see clearly, to touch what is in the center of the sanctuary, as it sees and touches what is on its outside. Its pretension is that it may study and know, by its ordinary processes, as well the invisible world, its Sovereign and its laws, as the visible world in which man is now placed; and it wars upon Christianity because Christianity admits no such pretension. But Christianity here encounters another adversary, Positivism. Positivism arrests its progress, saying: "I do not know, nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be not a really existing thing. It is a mere loss of time to think of it, for nothing can be known about it with certainty. All religion, all metaphysics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there is no science but the science of the physical world, of its facts and of its laws!"
I seek no quarrel with words, even when they provoke it. Positivism is a word, in language a barbarism, in philosophy a presumption. Unlike Geology, Ideology, Theology, Physics, it qualifies a doctrine, not by its object, but by its supposed merit. All science pretends to positiveness—that is, to be founded upon fact and truth. But "Positivism" alone arrogates to itself this quality. It is an arrogance, in my opinion, radically unjustifiable.
I knew its founder, M. Auguste Comte, personally. I had some communication with him in the period from 1824 to 1830. I then was struck by the elevation of his sentiments and by the vigor of his mind.In October, 1832, at the moment when I was entering upon my functions as Minister of Public Instruction, he came to me and formally demanded that I should create for him in the "College of France" a professorship of general history for the physical and mathematical sciences. I see no cause to express myself here otherwise than I have already done in my "Memoirs" as to the impression produced upon me by his conversation and his personal bearing. "He explained to me drearily and confusedly his views upon man, society, civilization, religion, philosophy, history. He was a man single-minded, honest, of profound convictions, devoted to his own ideas, in appearance modest, although at heart prodigiously vain; he sincerely believed that it was his calling to open a new era for the mind of man and for human society. While listening to him, I could hardly refrain from expressing my astonishment that a mind so vigorous should at the same time be so narrow as not even to perceive the nature and bearing of the facts with which he was dealing, and the questions which he was authoritatively deciding; that a character so disinterested should not be warned by his own proper sentiments—which were moral in spite of his system—of its falsity and its negation of morality.I did not even make any attempt at discussion with M. Comte: his sincerity, his enthusiasm, and the delusion that blinded him, inspired me with that sad esteem that takes refuge in silence. Had I even judged it fitting to create the chair which he demanded, I should not for a moment have dreamed of assigning it to him." [Footnote 44]
[Footnote 44: "Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon temps," t. iii, pp. 125-7. In the sixth volume of these Mémoires I have rectified an error inadvertently committed by me as to the epoch of my first relations with M. Auguste Comte.]
I should have been as silent and still more sad if I had then known the trials through which M. Auguste Comte had already passed. He had been, in 1823, a prey to a violent attack of mental alienation, and in 1827, during a paroxysm of gloomy melancholy, he had thrown himself from the Pont des Arts into the Seine, but had been rescued by one of the king's guard. More than once, in the course of his subsequent life, this mental trouble seemed upon the point of recurring.
Many will be tempted to demand how a man so little master of himself, and whose mind was under so little government, could ever have succeeded in producing a doctrine so considerable, and in exercising such real influence upon the philosophical world. The fact is nevertheless beyond question. Whether the cause is to be referred to the merit of M. Comte and of his doctrine, or to the state of men's minds at the time, it is certain that not only in France but in Europe, and particularly in England, numerous and honorable disciples came over to his ideas, and that Positivism became a school wanting neither in sincerity nor credit. When such men as M. Littré, at Paris, and Mr. J. Stuart Mill, in London, declare themselves his adherents, the doctrine has claims to a serious examination.
M. Auguste Comte lived constantly, as far as he was individually concerned, under the empire of a fixed idea, which occasioned him many a painful disappointment; and he lived, as far as his system was concerned, under the empire of a false idea, which associated with views just in themselves and sometimes grand, one pervading and permanent error.
His fixed personal idea consisted in his thinking himself called to regenerate human science and human society by the single virtue of his doctrine. Besides their share in the presumptuousness which is the common character of mankind, minds that are inventive and fond of systematizing are particularly prone to extend beyond their legitimate bearings—nay, beyond all bounds—the pretensions and the hopes which their ideas suggest. M. Auguste Comte was one of the most striking instances, as well as one of the most honest victims, of this intellectual intoxication—the noblest although not the least fantastic form of human pride.The Christian religion has its apostles and it has its missionaries, speaking in the name of a Master other than themselves, and preaching a faith they did not themselves originate. M. Auguste Comte was his own proper apostle—the inventor and missionary of his own proper faith. Of profound convictions, with no selfish, worldly views, he aspired to the entire empire of the intellect, believing both the interests of social order and the honor of the human mind involved in the triumph of his doctrine; he ardently desired not only its propagation, but its organization as a permanent and potent institution, to insure and perpetuate his triumph. The real and practical government of nations, according to him, was only, as it ought to be only, a sort of stewardship, charged with the duty of realizing and carrying into effect the ideas of thinking men. "The systematic separation of the two elementary forces, the Spiritual and the Temporal," so he wrote to Mr. J. Stuart Mill, "constitutes certainly the principal condition for adenouementof the actual situation.I admit that the special requirements of a situation where those two forces are confounded may authorize, and sometimes oblige, philosophers, in the interest of a final regeneration, to participate, by way of exception, in actual political life, although an inclination for such a life exposes them to the danger of many a quicksand, and demands that their principles should be firmly settled, to avoid the risk of a real deviation. To embody my thought upon this subject in a palpable example relative to a great occurrence, I blame the philosopher Condorcet for having suffered himself to be returned as member to our glorious Convention, in which men of action were leaders, and properly so, whereas Condorcet could never be so placed as to regard things from the same point of view; hence that false position for which in the sequel he had so cruelly to suffer.But on the contrary, I should have regarded it as very natural for him to develop a great activity in the club of the Jacobins; for, placed beyond the sphere of the government, properly so called, that club constituted at that time a sort of spiritual power, in that remarkable and so little comprehended combination of things which characterized the revolutionary régime. … I have learned with much satisfaction," he added, still addressing Mr. Mill, "that the wise energy of your resistance has succeeded in triumphing over the blind persistence of your friends who urge you toward a parliamentary career. I shall propose in my last volume, and in direct terms, the institution, by individual efforts, of an European committee, charged permanently with the direction of a common movement of philosophical regeneration, when once Positivism shall have planted its standard—that is, its lighthouse, I should term it—in the midst of the disorder and confusion that reigns; and I hope that this will be the result of the publication of my work in its complete state." [Footnote 45]
[Footnote 45: Letters of the 20th November, 1841, and 4th March, 1842, published in the work of M. Littré, entitled, "Auguste Comte and the Positive Philosophy," pp. 424, 425, 427, 429.]
One can scarcely refrain from a smile when he contemplates these dreams reduced to the form of system, ignoring every sentiment of reality, and expounded with the confidence of fanaticism in the name of a science called Positive. Here it is that we find the fixed and dominant idea that pervaded and compromised the whole life of M. Auguste Comte. Whoever did not accept his doctrine and his system, was for him either a retrogradist full of prejudice, or an ignoramus without scientific education, or an interested and jealous enemy. Whoever, on the other hand, lent himself to his views on any point, or for any time, however short, became in the eyes of M. Comte his conquest and his property, his philosophical serf, as it were, bound to his master by the tenure of duty, and the render of services from which he could never hope to enfranchise himself, without the risk of being treated upon the instant as a deserter or a rebel, and of seeing at once broken the closest and most approved bonds of intimacy and friendship.He had so entire a confidence in his own intellectual superiority, and in the rights which it conferred, that he expressed it sometimes with anäivetéamounting almost to idolatry. One day, believing that he had won over to his ideas M. Armand Marrast, then the editor of theNational, he wrote thus to his wife: "Marrast no longer feels any repugnance in admitting the indispensable fact of my intellectual superiority; he is in this respect, in my opinion, especially influenced by Mill, whom he holds, and with reason, in high account. To speak plainly and in general terms, I believe that, at the point at which I have now arrived, I have no occasion to do more than to continue to exist; the kind of preponderance which I covet cannot, henceforth, fail to devolve upon me." [Footnote 46]
[Footnote 46: Letter of the 3d December, 1842: "Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive;" p. 324.]
Shortly after the date of this letter, M. Comte was separated from his wife and embroiled with Mr. Mill himself, who had not, as the former fancied, fulfilled toward him all the duties of an accepted and loyal disciple.
I pass from the fixed idea of the man to the false idea of his system; it appears over and over again at each step in the "Cours de philosophie positive" of M. Auguste Comte, [Footnote 47] and in the imposing biography consecrated to his memory by his most accomplished disciple, M. Littré. [Footnote 48]
[Footnote 47: Six volumes 8vo., published in the interval from 1830 to 1842 inclusive.]
[Footnote 48: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive. 8vo. 1863.]
I extract from different parts of these volumes the passages in which the fundamental doctrine is most clearly expressed:
"Positive philosophy is the whole body of human knowledge. Human knowledge is the result of the study of the forces belonging to matter, and of the conditions or laws governing those forces." [Footnote 49]
[Footnote 49: Ibid., p. 42.]
"The fundamental character of positive philosophy is, that it regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws, and considers as absolutely inaccessible to us, and as having no sense for us, every inquiry into what is termed either primary or final causes." [Footnote 50]
[Footnote 50: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste Comte, vol. i, p. 14.]