CHAPTER IXA DECISIVE STEP
How is it that primitive man, provided with five senses which bring him into contact with the material world only, has found it possible to conceive the existence of an invisible world peopled with beings whom his eyes cannot see, nor his hands touch, nor his ears hear?
Between the birth of human reason and the invention of writing a long period of time elapsed; when the art of writing was followed by that of printing, man then printed all that he had thought and written, and at present we possess thousands of volumes which will inform us on all the truths and errors which have alternately illuminated and obscured the human mind.
Whoever would take the trouble to examine this mass of documents, and read those which furnish an approximate estimate of the mental activity of our primitive ancestors, will see that the humanegopursued science unconsciously long before scholars appeared, and applied the name of philosophers to themselves, because they had sought patiently and with many discussions, through thousands of centuries, to find the best way of arriving at the truth.
These ancestors of ours were of an enquiring turn of mind.
The appearance of religion amongst men is at the same time the most natural and the most supernatural fact in the history of humanity.
The greater number of philosophers have recognised that the tendency of the human mind to turn towardsthat which is outside the domain of the senses is as powerful in man as the desire of eating and drinking is in all living beings. The ancients acknowledged this to be a true sense, as irresistible as the rest of the operations of our external senses, and they have well named itsensus numinis—the consciousness of the divine. The desire of understanding the secrets with which the Unknown was invested naturally led to the investigation of the influence which these secrets might exercise on the destinies of mankind. Amongst certain peoples this gave birth to the art of divination. To this they abandoned themselves in all sincerity, not doubting that omnipotent beings would always be ready to make their will known to mortals.
The men of modern times have shown that they have the critical faculty more highly developed, and their investigations have dealt more with practical matters. In the eighteenth century, writers, historians and philosophers—Voltaire amongst the number—wishing to know how the phenomenon of mental religion appeared in the world, collected all the data to be obtained from travellers concerning savages; they found that without exception all believed in occult powers, as distinct from material or human forces, and doubted not the efficacy of certain magic arts in use amongst them to attract these powers to themselves, and to constrain them to act on their behalf. Judging by analogy these writers contend that primitive man, doubtless impressed by the alarming phenomena of nature, would make search for the unknown beings around him, whom the storms, the thunders and the lightnings obey, but these beings were invisible, consequently there must be an invisible world in communication with the visible or human world.
In this way were the beliefs of the present-day savages supposed to be those current at the dawn of religious conceptions of humanity.
The ignorance of a subject, of whatever nature, has never prevented the laying down of axioms concerning that subject. Towards the end of the eighteenth century some Portuguese navigators, who never embarked without providing themselves with talisman and amulet,—to protect them during their voyages,—which they calledfeitiços, seeing some negroes of the Gold Coast prostrating themselves with every appearance of reverence, before bones, stones, or the tails of some animals, concluded at once without further investigation that these were considered as divinities by the negroes; and on their return to their native land, they spread the report that savage races worshippedfeitiços. This wordfeitiçoscorresponds to the Latinfactitius, meaning that which is made by hand, as the amulets were which belonged to the Portuguese sailors. The well-known President de Brosses used the name and promulgated the idea, and without having set foot on countries inhabited by negroes, composed and published a book on their fetishes. In this manner the French language was enriched in 1760 by the new word fetish. All this seemed so natural and plausible that the word, and the idea of the adoration of fetishes became quite general; the theory of the worship of fetishes penetrated rapidly, and took deep root in the public mind, it found its way very readily into school books and manuals, and we were taught that the religion of savages consists solely in the worship of fetishes, and learned writers draw the conclusion that fetishism must necessarily have been the primitive religion of humanity.
With what readiness do well-instructed persons, no less than the ignorant, allow themselves to speak without sufficiently reflecting on what they say. In order to elevate material objects, of whatever kind, to the rank of divinities, it would be necessary previously to possess the concept of a divinity. Writers on religion speak of that as existing in primitive times which they seek to describe; they mightas well say that primitive men mummified their dead before they hadmûmor wax to embalm them with. Fetishism cannot be considered as absolutely primitive, seeing that from its nature it must presuppose the previous growth of the predicate God. This idea of De Brosses and his successors will remain for ever a striking anachronism in the history of religion.
The history of all primitive races opens with this note. “Man is conscious of a divine descent, though made from the dust of the earth; the Hindoo doubted it not, though he called Dyn his father, and Prithvi his mother; Plato knew it when he said the earth produced men, but that God formed them.”
On the banks of the Rhine, Tacitus listened to the war-songs of the Germans; they were to him in an unknown tongue. “It resembles the whisperings of birds,” he said, but added, “They are cries of valour,” and his ear caught the sound of two words which recurred frequently, “Tuisto Mannus!”
We now know what formed the basis of these songs; the Germans were celebrating their lineal ancestors under the names of Tuisto, and Mannus, his son. Tuisto appears to have been one form of Tiu, the Aryan god of light. Tacitus tells us that the Germans “called by the names of gods that hidden thing which they did not perceive except by reverence.”[62]Mannus, so the Germans considered, sprang from the earth, which they venerated as their mother-earth who before nourishing her children on its fruits first gave them life. This Mannus, grandson of the god of light, meant originally man.
Certain races living beyond the pale of organised religious systems having been interrogated have furnished the following information concerning their belief.
A very low race in India is supposed to worship the sun under the name of Chando or Cando; they declared to the missionaries who had settled amongst them that Chando had created the world. “How is that possible! Who then has created the sun itself?” They replied with “We do not mean the visible Chando, but an invisible one.”[63]
“Our god,” said the original natives of California to those who asked in what god they believed, “our god has neither father nor mother, and his origin is quite unknown. But he is present everywhere, he sees everything even at midnight, though himself invisible to human eyes. He is the friend of all good people, and he punishes the evil-doers.”
A Blackfoot Indian, when arguing with a Christian missionary, said: “There were two religions given by the Great Spirit, one in a book for the guidance of the white men, who, by following its teaching, will reach the white man’s heaven; the other is in the heads of the Indians, in the sky, rocks, rivers and mountains. And the red men who listen to God in nature, will hear his voice, and find at last the heaven beyond.”
These Indians consider that that external nature which to us is at the same time the veil and the revelation of the Divine, is sufficient to teach them so much concerning the Supreme Being that missionaries are superfluous.
Amongst those whose thoughts are occupied by the origin of religious perception in man, there exist several theories; the first, that the idea of infinity is a necessity to the mind of man, and that by enlarging the boundaries of space and of time, it arrives at that which is without space and without time. Thus may a true philosopher reason; but primitive man was no philosopher, and the infinite of philosophy had no existence for him. Another theory is that man is naturally endowed with religiousinstincts, which render him—alone of all living creatures—capable of perceiving the infinite in the invisible; but the nature of this innate instinct not being clearly defined, it is in vain that we try to explain one mystery by another. Others again affirm that religious impressions were the result of a supernatural revelation, but they seem vague with regard to the time in the life of humanity, to which people, and in what manner this came to pass. At the same time they draw attention to the fact that men have always arrived at conclusions rapidly, and, as they consider, without due reflection; one of these conclusions is thatGod is. Let us, for the sake of argument, replace the wordmanby the wordintuitive senseor apprehension, and we shall understand why this intuitive sense renders it a superfluous task to make great researches as to the reasons of man’s decision thatGod is. This intuitive sense is wise, and utters at times great truths; but the philosophers who consider it their metier to seek for the reason of things are not content with what satisfies intuitive sense, and they act on their right.
In our days the religious problem is viewed from two sides. What is understood by these words—the conception of God? This is the question of questions; and the names of the writers on the subject, both philosophical and theological, are too numerous to give. It is a psychological and thought impelling study.
How did the idea of God first arise in the minds of primitive man? This is another question which few try and answer. It is a historical study.
This presentation of the problem is perhaps not calculated to inspire excitement or let loose agitating passions; and apparently the end of the nineteenth century will not witness the renewal of the philosophical debates on the subject which characterised the last half of the eighteenth.
Never either, before or since, has there been so much agitation, nor have men’s minds been so tossed by diversecurrents. Many various theories were promulgated at the time, but opinions grouped themselves chiefly round two diametrically opposite schools of thought, towards one or the other of which they leaned.
According to Hume, Condillac and their adherents, matter alone exists; our understanding, our feelings, our will are only transformed sensations. This was pure materialism. Pure idealism was represented by Berkeley, who went so far as to deny the reality of matter; according to him the bodies making up the universe have no real existence; the true realities were God and the ideas He produced in us.
Those who preserved their ancient beliefs were the most troubled, they began to ask themselves whether the foundations of their faith were solid, and they much desired to see certain problems solved. These thoughts had exercised the minds of the sages of India, the thinkers of Greece, the dreamers of Alexandria, and the divines and scholars of the Middle Ages. They were the old problems of the world, what we know of the Infinite, the questions of the beginning and end of our existence; the questions of the possibility of absolute certainty in the evidence of the senses, of reason or of faith.
How much was comprehended in these enquiries.
One hundred years previously, the cautious reasoner, Descartes, instead of asking “What do we know?” posed in its place the question, “How do we know?”
This was in fact a fundamental question which appealed to philosophers who followed Descartes, as of the utmost importance, and they also asked themselves, “After what manner does the human mind acquire what it knows?”
What is called Locke’s tenet, “Nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu,” Leibnitz answered by “Nihil—nisi intellectus.” Noiré gives this sentiment a fresh turn by saying: “There is nothing in this plant thatwas not already in the soil, the water and the atmosphere, but that which causes this plant to be a plant.”
Condillac, who agreed with Locke, thus formulated his opinion: “Penser c’est sentir”; or, “In order to feel it is necessary to possess senses,” which is self-evident.
Nevertheless, this sentence scandalised some of the philosophers, they considered it degraded thought. It degraded thought only in Condillac’s mouth, since he and his school had previously taken out ofsentiror sensation all that possessed the right to be called thought; but for those who admit that sensation is really impregnated with thought it is no degradation; it is then true to say that thought is sensation, in the same way as an oak-tree may be said to be the acorn; and a little reflection will show us that “the acorn is far more wonderful than the oak, and perceiving far more wonderful than thinking.” This was not acknowledged by some who disagreed as to the nature of reason and sensation; they considered the former a mysterious power that could only be a direct gift of the Creator, and the senses, to which we owe our perceptions, appeared so natural and simple, as not to require a scientific explanation.
If philosophers, such as Descartes and Leibnitz, succeeded in influencing certain enlightened spirits, their language was not understood by the general public; and Berkeley’s idealism when pushed to the extreme point, proved too abstract to counterbalance the sensualist doctrines; its language hardly penetrated beyond the inner circle of the experts dealing with the subject, whereas the writings of Locke, Condillac and Hume permeated all classes of society; everywhere the same questions were asked, and often unanswered amidst the maze of metaphysics, in which it would have been difficult to obtain a precise explanation of a science not yet clearly defined.
It is natural that reason after its high flight in pursuit of truth, frightened by the obstacles met in its ascent, andby the contradictions found in itself, should fall heavily to earth, exclaiming with Voltaire, “O metaphysics, we are as advanced as in the times of the Druids.” This same feeling of distrust towards proceedings which resulted only in hypothesis, was also expressed by Newton, who, recognising that philosophy moved nowhere so freely nor with such certainty as in the domain of facts, recently cried, “O physics, preserve me from metaphysics.”
“Towards the end of the eighteenth century the current public opinion had been decidedly in favour of materialism, but a reaction was slowly setting in in the minds of independent thinkers when Kant appeared”; he came so exactly in the nick of time that one almost doubts whether the tide was turning, or whether he turned the tide.
To sketch briefly the chief points in Kant’s system such as he has given us in his book calledCritique of Pure Reason, is a rash proceeding; my object, which is to satisfy the imperious and more immediate wants of our moral being, could only be attained by ignoring the irradicable difficulties; this is excusable if we, unlearned members of society, are to form any idea of this same philosophy.
The technical terms which abound in philosophical works are useful in the exposition of a system, but rather the reverse for those who are striving to grasp its salient features; for understanding these terms partially only, or not understanding them at all, they are tempted to imagine that they take in the meaning; this leads to vague notions being entertained on a subject which is nevertheless earnestly studied. Generally I abstain from the use of esoteric terms, but Kant having coined fresh ones to express his ideas it behoves us to use his own formula. To paraphrase them so as to render them intelligible without multiplying them might only further obscure the sense, and yet, on the other hand, to enterfreely into further developments would require a volume, and the end would be better served by going direct to Kant’s work. Hence the embarrassment I feel on approaching the subject.
Kant undertook a work which no one before him had attempted. Instead of criticising, as was then the fashion, the result of our knowledge, whether in religion or in history, or science, he shut his eyes resolutely to all that philosophy, whether sensualistic or spiritualistic asserted as true, and making Descartes his starting point he boldly went to the root of the matter; he questioned whether human reason had the power of perceiving the truth, and in cases where this power existed—but with limits—he sought to discover why these limits existed. He therefore resolved to subject reason itself to his searching analysis, and thus to assist, as it were, at the birth of thought. He accomplished this extraordinary task with an ease of which no one previously would have been capable.
The world is governed by immutable laws, and the human race is subject to them. Kant gives an account of those which it must necessarily obey in order to pass from a passive “mirror” into a conscious mind.
In any material object I may seek to obtain, such as a table, my interests are concentrated in the table itself, not on the tools which the workman has used in its manufacture; but if it were a question of thought, then the means by which it was produced by the human mind engage us; and these means, of course, consist in the proper use of the instruments at man’s disposal.
That which was at the origin of mankind is repeated at the birth of every human being; he comes into the world in a lethargic condition, but endowed with latent instincts which we name in one word, sense; common to man and to animals, it places them in relationship with the things exterior to themselves; this sense, or capability of sensation, is merely the general faculty of feeling. No newly-born child would emerge from its torpor if it were not surrounded by material objects which affirm their presence by reacting on him; his first act, at the moment when he perceives his surroundings is the transference of his own mind, until now isolated in itself alone, towards the objects which solicit his attention.
The sense which operates in each child is inward, we name it briefly—sensation—to distinguish it from the five external senses, which are more familiar to us, since even at school their functions and modes of action have been explained to us.
For instance, we know that it is only necessary to touch the strings of an instrument to cause them to vibrate, the vibrations are communicated to the air, and are then called waves of sound; they diffuse themselves with an incredible swiftness in space, advancing and retreating in the manner of the waves of the sea, they reach our ears, touch the auditory nerve, cause the tympanum to vibrate, penetrate to the brain, and give us instantaneously the sensation of sound. And it is to the waves of light passing through the ether, and communicating with the optic nerve of the organ of sight, that we owe the sensation of sight of the objects before us.
The vacant look of a newly-born infant, implies that it has undergone an experience, it has felt something of the nature of a shock; a shock always implies resistance and yielding. In the child it is the human eye becoming conscious of itself amidst the impressions produced on it by the confused sight of external objects, and hearing thenoises which occur around him. This instance is analogous to the vibratory movement of the waves described and even drawn in all manuals on physics.
It is strange that a natural phenomenon which learned men have taken some trouble to analyse, should find expression in the following commonplace phrase. “From the clash of opinions light is generated.” If this phrase were not only on our lips, but also implanted in our mind, we should more readily have grasped the physiological fact of sensation.
Sensation plays such an important part in the world of humanity, that all the sciences, both physical and moral, deal with it; but we, who grumble so readily and continuously at feeling either too hot or too cold, probably never enquire what philosophy has to do with purely bodily impressions.
Sensations come to us from without, but they would leave us in a condition of perturbation only, if whilst receiving them we were passive as a mirror on which external objects are reflected; we might have continued to sleep—perchance to dream—if a mental act on our part did not mark the awakening of our intelligence when in contact with the material world, and thus have proved the existence of a power within us hitherto latent, but quite capable of accepting, knowing, and realising sensations which come to us without having been summoned.
We are nearing the solution of the problem. Descartes had asked: How we know. Kant had clearly explained that all our knowledge has its commencement in our senses, which give us pure intuitions, that is to say, a clear direct view of external objects, and he also proved that intelligence would not have been aroused without the aid of material objects. But still greater discoveries awaited Kant.
We feel that nothing in ourselves is so free as thought. It comprehends the whole world, it mounts to the stars,it descends to the bowels of the earth, arrested perhaps in its path by special objects on which it dwells at will; but although free to encircle the universe, it may not choose its path, thought is obliged—like the sun—to follow one which has been previously traced out for it; of this we can readily convince ourselves.
All objects of which we become conscious must be placed by us in the imagination side by side in space, and at a distance from ourselves, here or there; as being now present, or as having been, or about to be; but always in succession,i.e., in time, time past, present and future.
According to Kant, Space and Time are two fundamental or inevitable conditions of all sensuous manifestations, and he was the first to observe that they are imposed by so absolute a power that no effort, on our part, would enable us to escape from them, any more than we could avoid seeing the light of day at noon, unless we are either blind or have our eyes shut.
We must make it clear that what we call Space and Time, being forms of our sensuous intuition, do not exist apart from ourselves, or, as Max Müller says, “depend on us as recipients, as perceivers.” It is we who say there can be noHerewithout aThere, and noNowwithout aThen; and this is necessary, since we are dependent on the mould of our minds, which work in accordance with their constitutions.
When opening a dictionary at the letters P. H. E. we should soon arrive at the word Phenomenon and its meaning: whatever is presented to the senses, or affects us physically or morally.
As long as knowledge comes to us only by the way of our senses, it follows that in speaking of affinity, electricity and magnetism as natural phenomena, which are known to us only by their effect on Space and Time, we speak in accordance with our method of representation, and not as they arein themselves, since we have not the least idea what these natural forces arein themselves. We recognise musical sounds because our ears hear them, and we appreciate colours because our eyes see them; we take cognisance of them as they appear to us, but we are ignorant of both the one and the other as they are in actuality, that is independently of our organs which correspond to them. Thus all the objects that we know—from the manner of our knowledge—become for us phenomena, and the world in which we live is a world of phenomena.
Besides these fundamental forms of sensuous intuition Space and Time, Kant by his analysis of Pure Reason discovered other conditions of our knowledge which could not have come from without. He divides them into twelve distinct classes, and in the phraseology of philosophy they are called Categories of the Understanding. Aristotle had previously arranged a table of Categories, but in his Logic Aristotle concerns himself with the laws of thought in general, the abstraction derived from the practical use made of them; whilst Kant studies the facts first themselves, or first principles, in their relation with certain fixed objects.
The different categories have certain traits in common, not a single one of our thoughts but will find a place in the one or the other. Another feature which characterises all is, that without them no experience would be possible, they rule our understanding. This is very marked in thecategory called Plurality. Let us try to think of anything without thinking of it at the same time as one or many, and we shall find it an impossibility. We cannot think of an apple or speak of an apple without picturing more than one; and Max Müller has demonstrated that rational speech is impossible, if we cannot when speaking decide whether the subject of a sentence consists of one or many.
The ideas ofCauseandEffectbelong to those first principles that reason draws from itself, and the category of causality is one of the most important. We never experience a sensation, of whatever kind, without attaching it, involuntarily and necessarily, to some external object which we know possesses the qualities corresponding to our sensations. Thus the impressions of heat or cold, sweet or bitter, blue or yellow, evoke immediately the picture of certain objects which are hot or cold, such as fire or ice; or which are sweet or bitter, such as sugar or absinth; or blue, as the sky; or yellow, as the lemon; and these external objects we consider as the causes, and our bodily sensations as the effects.
There are certain universal truths which are self-evident, and were evolved not by experience only or argument, nor science, as they are the natural appanage of common-sense,e.g., such axioms as the following: the whole is greater than the part; a straight line is the shortest distance between two points; each body occupies space; every event occupies time; every effect has a cause. All these are more certain than that the sun will rise to-morrow; common-sense has always known them, and the entirehuman race has not waited for the coming of Kant to recognise these facts.
It is strange that the majority of men who know so many things that are true by intuition, often make mistakes when they begin to reflect. They imagine that all things falling under their observation have the power of making themselves known directly, as if they entered an empty space in the imagination which was ready to receive them. Are they ignorant of the fact that in order to think of an external object, it is not necessary to have it in actuality—as it exists in nature—before one’s eyes, but that it suffices to imprint its image on the mind? This is very simple, and no doubt common-sense itself would see a truism which might be passed in silence. “What is there extraordinary,” common-sense might say, “if in thinking of a lemon, for instance, there should be at once presented to the mind a yellow fruit, of acid flavour, and of a certain shape—a lemon in fact?”
This remark is useful only in showing our natural incapacity for experiencing a sensation, of whatever kind, without connecting it with an external object possessing corresponding attributes to the sensation, and which was its cause.
In any case the truism is not to be ignored, since Aristotle, great philosopher as he was, did not consider it beneath his dignity to employ it. He said: “I think of a stone; the stone is not in my mind, but its form is.”
To prove to common-sense that its remark has no connection with the thesis recently laid down, would serve no good purpose. A personal mental act, if it be lawful to personate a quality, would alone convince common-sense of its error; but when once convinced common-sense would then have changed to something higher than it had previously been. It will have mounted up one stage towards reason, and in following this route under the guidance of increasing reason, it will end by understandingthis truth as demonstrated by Kant: he who cannot distinguish a real object from its representation will never understand the working of the human mind.
The importance of this truth must excuse my digression.
The name of Kant will always be intimately connected with the word metaphysics, not because he buried himself in it, as some have supposed who only know his system of philosophy by hearsay; but because his labours consisted in forbidding reason to approach this science which is constantly threatening to invade it, and to get the upper hand by putting itself in its place.
Kant was the first to trace with decision the line of demarcation between the knowledge of which our reason is capable, and that of which it is incapable. No one has drawn so sharp a line between the knowable and the unknowable; this was to explain metaphysics. Alfred Fouillée has defined them as “the critical study of problems which the mind seeks to unravel from a necessity of its nature, although another necessity of its nature renders it incapable of solving them”—such is metaphysics.
This definition is excellent, but for those who make no preparatory studies in philosophy it would present itself rather in this form. If certain questions are of necessity presented to the mind which it finds it impossible to solve, it follows that the mind would necessarily contradict itself. Thus this succinct definition of Fouillée requires to be itself defined.
Noiré, whilst giving more details, is also more exact. “Metaphysics is only explained on the condition that we understand the nature of our power of understanding, in so far as, on the one part, this power is actively manifested in experience, and secondly, in so far as it possessesanteriorly to any experience, and to anything observed, certain ideas without which there could not possibly or even conceivably, be any impression made in the human mind.” I am afraid that this explanation of Noiré will also be lost upon those who are not experienced in the subject.
The explanation of Schopenhauer is not less definite, and is more concise than the two preceding. The foundation upon which all our knowledge and all our science rests, is the incomprehensible—I fancy that the uninitiated will be equally unable to understand this.
It is not surprising. Philosophers speak a language of their own, which must be learnt before it can be understood, which is the case with all languages.
Kant develops this thesis with greater simplicity and clearness. “As long as the human intellect moves in the sphere of the senses and of experience it is safe; this sphere is very vast; it is there that all phenomena may be known which appears in space and time, that is to say, all belonging to the phenomenal world in which we live. But if the intellect rebels against the gaoler which holds it captive in the magic circle, breaks its chains and enters into the region of ideals, it will err.”
Kant relates the following anecdote: “A dove, which found great pleasure in spreading its wings, was troubled because this pleasure was of short duration; the simple bird was ignorant of the fact that its structure did not admit of its taking flights such as the swallow enjoys; not divining the real cause of its inability, it blamed the fluid ether whose resisting power it had felt, and thought how much better it would fly ‘in vacuo.’” The dove was mistaken.
Kant’s crowning merit is having discovered the object of metaphysics not only in the categories of the understanding, without which, as Noiré says, no impression on the human mind would be possible, or even conceivable,but chiefly in the power, inherent in our nature, of resisting or yielding to impressions. It is this power, according to Kant, which constitutes the transcendental side of our knowledge.
The empirical school of philosophers is tried by Kant’s recognition of the transcendental principle in man. Its members accuse the spiritualists of seeking to raise human nature beyond its proper level, and of wishing at the same time to open an inlet for other truths which claim a mysterious character and a superhuman authority. But Kant is the very last person to encourage the thought; on the contrary, through the whole of his philosophy he insists that theseà prioriforms, or antecedent conditions of knowledge, have no authority whatever “except in and for experience,” and to use the category of causality, for instance, in order to establish the existence of God is, according to Kant, a philosophical blunder.
“If only we could always remember the first intentions of our words, many philosophical difficulties would vanish.” In Greek οἰδα meant originally, I have seen, and therefore I know. In a court of justice the witness who says, “I saw” can hardly say anything more convincing. To apply such a word to our knowledge of causes, forces, and faculties would be a solecism—to apply it to God would be self-contradictory.
Each of the abstract definitions of metaphysics given by Alfred Fouillée, Noiré, and Schopenhauer contains the leading conception of the subject; if presented in more simple language it would be within the comprehension of all; our understanding is blind to all with which it is not made acquainted by intuition derived from experience. Those things for which we have a strong desire, of which we have a certain conviction, but which are outside the sphere of our actual life, “for these,” as Max Müller says in this connection, “we want another word which should mean—I have not seen and yet I know, and that is—faith.”[64]Our senses may not always authorise us to affirm their reality. God and the future life are not made the subjects of phenomena.
All that I have said as to what distinguishes knowledge acquired by the senses from that which is anterior to all experience (Kant was the first to make this distinction), might seem simple to those heedless minds which are surprised at nothing, but complicated and confused to minds however little attentive, and quite useless to the rest of us. There may be something of truth in each of these primitive and superficial estimations, but the whole truth is that all this is very scientific, so scientific as to require a Kant to enable those who reflect to give a lucid account of it.
It was by the help of this learned science that Kant broke the serried ranks of his antagonists. Confronted by two philosophical opinions, both of which he considered erroneous, he proved to the materialists Condillac, Hume, and Locke, that there is something within us which could never have been supplied from without, which therefore belongs to our ego, that is to say to the subject thinking and not to the object thought of, or matter; then turning against the Idealists of the time of Berkeley, he shows that there is something without us which could never have been supplied from within; and when he proved that intellect and matter are correlative, that they exist for each other, depend on each other, form together a whole that should never have been torn asunder, two streams of philosophic thought, which had been running in separate beds, met for the first time.
The existence of the phenomenal world being proved by the irrefragable testimony of the senses, is admitted also by reason, and, as a necessary consequence, another, not only in appearance, but whichwill be, assuredly; as sound is independent of our hearing, as material objects are independent of our sight; for though Kantdeclares our inability to know objects as they are in themselves, he does not deny their existence, since he says, “We should be capable, if not of knowing things as they are in themselves, at least of knowing them as they are to us, otherwise we should arrive at the irrational conclusion, that there may be appearances without something that appears.”
Kant undertook to make an exact science of the necessary and universal ideas of the human mind, such as logic and mathematics, which are parts of human knowledge; to this end he wroteCritique of Pure Reason, afterwards he composed another work, theCritique of Practical Reason. Practical reason may also be called pure, in as much as it does not allow itself to be influenced by anything but what proceeds from itself, and reason becomes practical when it seeks an independent principle which determines the will. This principle is formulated by Kant in the following terms: “Let each individual follow commands which may be considered as a universal law imposed alike on all human beings.”
This law, which man possesses in his conscience, does not stop half way in its exactions from man since it aims at perfection, it commands man to love his neighbour, and to do good even to his enemy. To love and to do acts of kindness when pleasant to oneself is natural, and requires no command, but, otherwise, a law is required to coerce the will, the man who submits is free, since he can choose to infringe or to obey it; obedience to the moral law constitutes duty, which must be accomplished because it is our duty, and embodies the satisfaction felt in its performance.
Man is under an obligation to be moral and to do his duty, but not necessarily to be happy, yet he demands happiness. The union of virtue and happiness being thesummum bonum, we must acknowledge the existence ofa power external to ourselves, endowed with intellect and will, which makes this union possible; this power is known to us by the name of God. The perfect good is holiness; this life is too short to enable us to attain to it in its perfection, it is therefore a necessity that our life should be prolonged beyond the term of years spent on this earth, thus we are assured of the survival of the soul after what we term death.
Thus Kant speaks in hisCritique of Practical Reason.
I may now be permitted to speak and give my own opinion. I hear the Positivist perhaps say: “This result might be considered conceivable if all that has been previously said were true; but to infer from the desire for happiness that a supernatural power must infallibly satisfy it might be a hallucination, or at least a hypothesis.” If this were so we need not deride hypotheses; in the domain of human knowledge reason would not be itself if it never made ventures in scientific discoveries; its path starts from the possible in making excursions from the known to the unknown, in going from darkness to light—hence then hypothesis.
There is also this fact to notice, some of the most important of our acts are not guided by reason, it acts as a spectator; for instance, reason is not active when we have perception of an object, and intuitions occur in us without the intervention of reason.
This was well understood by certain men who have come forward from time to time from the multitude, the bearers of inspired messages to the world; they have spoken of those things which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard,” and they were hard to be understood of the people; but each one alike said: “I give no proof of the truth of what I assert; do as I say, and you will know the truth of my words.”
There remains little more to be said on the subject ofKant. There is a serious omission in the system of this profound thinker.
Nothing has so stopped the progress of Darwin’s great conception as the injudicious efforts of his so-called disciples to bring it to perfection. Instead of correcting their chief, they should have weighed thoughtfully all Kant’s arguments against the materialism of his adversaries, and have sought to refute them; if they had succeeded in proving that Kant makes a mistake when he admits that there is in man a principle quite distinct from his body, they would have been authorised in replacing Darwin’s theory by their own; if they had not succeeded, Darwin and his theory would have remained unshaken, but they would be annihilated.
Max Müller examines the question from another point of view. “We admit that as we know nothing, except by analogy, of the mind of animals, we could not with the weapons that Kant has placed in our hands, make head against the assertion that they might possess, for all we know, the same forms of sensuous intuition and the same categories of the understanding which we possess. Nothing, therefore, could have been said from a purely philosophical point of view, against treating man as a mere variety of some other genus of animals.”[65]But as the origin of language was to Kant less than a secondary question—it might almost be said to have no existence for him—it belongs to the science of language to show, what Kant had never shown, that for all human knowledge not only were percepts and concepts necessary, but also names. How was it that it did not occur to Kant since he perceived that there were mathematics of the forms or manifestations of sensation, namely, time or duration and space? He said well: Each object of which we think is attached in time or space to another; this can only be done by the use of such indications asnow,then,here,there; and hesaw in this gradation of perception, the first step towards the act of counting, that is to say of reasoning, and consequently of speaking; all of which was comprehended by the Greeks in their word Logos. As an instance the wordcentexists in every language, butcentin French consists only of four letters placed side by side one after the other, and would never be anything else to us if we could not count; but to count is to add and to take away, that is to say, addition and subtraction, thus to conceive and name; in order to possess a hundred objects, it does not suffice to see them only, it is necessary to count them up to the hundred.
These two works of Kant’s, theCritique of Pure Reasonand theCritique of Practical Reasonappear to emanate from two different pens; in the first, whatever is asserted is proved. The second work is dictated by a personal experience; Kant affirms that thus it is and that it cannot be otherwise. But here again I perceive a lack, a want, if not from the believer’s point of view, yet from that of those people who ask what could be the religion of our primitive ancestors; personal experience is not expressed as Kant expresses it, unless it is the result of a long series of meditations and examinations of conscience; in a word, experiences which have been transmitted from generation to generation. This is a religion that has achieved much, it is not that form of it which would be found amongst the generality of men, and still less would it spring to life in the heart of primitive man.
But here are two positivist philosophers who undertake to solve this great problem: they consider reason as ready with a reply to those who seek to know the meaning of God and of religion, two concepts which are inseparable, the one from the other; and even ready to explain how these two concepts have penetrated into the consciousness of all human beings. These philosophers speak no doubt from experience, for having questioned their reason ithas replied to them: God and religion form one conception.
The first explanation is—man is conscious of his condition; he is possessed with the desire of happiness, and is unable to realise it; but his imagination represents to him another state in which the desire of happiness will exist and in which there will be no obstacle to its realisation; the first of these states is real, the other visible to the mind’s eye; they are therefore not identical; to will and not to have the power is to be man; to will and to be omnipotent is to be God. Little by little man understands that these two states of conditions having been conceived by the same mind, have the same origin; the notion fixes itself firmly in his mind that the two states seem gradually to approach each other, and are not always distinguishable; the union of desire and power is the Divine essence; the growing consciousness of this union is religion, which dawns and increases in man.
Man does not desire immortality because he believes in it, nor because it is demonstrable; but he believes in it and demonstrates its existence because he desires it. The sentence, “God sees all,” does not mean, so we are told, what it appears to mean; it expresses the feeling God knows all of which man is ignorant, but which he fain would know; and the sentence, “God is beneficence,” is the cry of man who desires happiness. All the predicates applied by man to the Deity in the course of history and humanity have never, in the opinion of philosophers, had any other origin than the representation of our wishes.
But the inner combat, which has been long and unhappy, with no truce, has exhausted man’s powers, and when the despondency checks, and at times almost paralyses his flight after happiness, the instinct of self-preservation leads him towards religion; as this instinct with the incapacity of satisfying it is inseparable inman, motives of religion are renewed continually in each individual and consequently in the multitude.
God and religion,i.e.the outward sign of our union with God, yet emanates from ourselves. This system, of which Feuerbach is the exponent, has many followers amongst the Positivists.
The second explanation comes from a learned member of the extreme Positivist school in Germany; but, as Max Müller says, it would be impossible to represent religion in a worse light ... “and it would be difficult to take a lower view of it.”[66]According to Dr Gruppe, religion exists simply because it satisfies certain selfish instincts of man. He notices two. The first instinct is common to all organic beings; it tends towards the preservation of the individual, and consequently to that of the race; it is elementary, and acts from within outwards. The second instinct belongs only to man taken collectively, and has vitality only in numbers; it belongs to a more advanced stage, and acts from without inwardly. Man instinctively grasps the greatest amount of happiness possible; he therefore seeks that which he considers his greatest good, not after the fashion of the beasts, but in his own way.
“We call religious belief,” says Dr Gruppe, “a belief in an indefinable state or being which we strive to bring into our sphere, and to render permanent by means of sacrificial ceremonies, prayers, penances, and self-denial.”[67]
This indefinable something, the professor considers, would never have appeared in the world without an impulsion, however light; an accidental movement, a casual combination of a disordered brain, and a personality endowed with a certain amount of energy, would have sufficed to make a single individual the author of an idea totally opposed to man’s good possession common sense, and the originator of a movement which must find in thesurroundings in which it came to life, all facilities for its indefinite perpetuation. It is of no consequence whether this mental phenomenon has been produced in one individual or in more; figures are of little account in the matter. If this disease called hallucination[68]had remained confined in the circumscribed sphere of one individual or a few, a personal intelligent effort might have overcome it, but being contagious and spreading amongst the people it became impossible to conquer it. The natural laws of reason once violated, the perturbed mind created a succession of sophistical arguments which appeared to satisfy the ineradicable desire for happiness in man; and an incredibly tenacious opposition on the side of error assumed menacing proportions. If the belief that the sun, instead of disappearing each night below the horizon, would continue to shine during the night could in any way contribute to the happiness of mankind, men would slowly but surely have accepted it.
The man who isolates himself from his fellow men and becomes self-absorbed is peculiarly apt to create for himself mental pictures which give him pleasure; if, then, joy is indispensable to man’s existence, the religion which gives it, or the illusion of it, enables him to forget the tangible world, and substitute an imaginary one peopled with phantoms. But the solitary man is a rare phenomenon, and we judge favourably those men who live in the midst of their social surroundings, and whose community of ideas and sentiments has made a homogeneous whole, during many centuries. Each one will find means to develop his personal faculties, and to strengthen his power of resistance in the struggle of all against all, and the good which is illusive in the solitary man becomes a benefit to the members of the society.
Religion might possibly cease to exist, in Gruppe’s opinion, were it not for the inequalities of man’s condition, and for the troubles which follow him; but the action of religion is helpful to society.[69]It tells the poor not to hanker after riches which are not lasting. It mirrors for them images of future compensations, thus the rich and the noble here are enabled to enjoy their pleasures on earth in safety. In its name bright hopes are built up for the wretched, and it takes its stand in front of the palaces of the rich; sedatives are prescribed for incurables, and rich foods for those who can pay for them. Charity is preached to the compassionate, and persecutions to the fanatics: at times it encourages the use of arts and sciences; at times it warns its followers not to love overmuch the beautiful in art, nor to seek too earnestly the truth in science. But the outcome of this religion, whether good or the reverse, is of small importance compared with the benefits it renders to society. It is the support of the civil and moral law, and in lighting the hymeneal torch it adds to the sanctity of families.
Without attributing selfish motives, in the lowest sense, to the founders of the various religions and sects which flourish in our midst, Gruppe considers all of them unconscious egoists; he thinks that had they been calm psychologists, which sincere prophets are not, they would have recognised in themselves the attraction that glory had for them; but in that case they would not have remained faithful unto the death, and the power of communicating their own spirit and force to their adherents would have failed them. Gruppe distinguishes with great keenness the reflex action of our desire for happiness, which is no other than the instinct of self-preservation, from the motives which are sufficient to inspire certain enthusiaststo found new religions; these two things are in reality quite distinct, although they may act in concert; the desire for universal and permanent happiness paves the way for the manifestation of individual enthusiasm; he asserts that religions, while professing to found a new kingdom of heaven, only succeed in inheriting the kingdom of this world.
The struggle between an extreme positivism and a true idealism is a sight that energises earnest men. Evidently impressed by the exposition of the spiritualist doctrine, the learned doctor remarks: “The first perception of the infinite, of law and order in nature, communicated an impulse to the mind of man; but this force, when once in movement, did not slacken before having called forth in our ancestors the conviction that all is right and good, and the hope—even more than hope—that all would be right and good. Such is the celebrated system of Max Müller. It is not only the great personal worth of the author that obliges us to give it close consideration, but also the fact that this system is the most eloquent exposition of an idea which has also been expressed by other writers in some remarkable works on the history of religions. The position in which Max Müller has placed himself for a starting-point is, from a positivist point of view, impregnable.”
This commendation, which is particularly striking, coming as it does from one of Max Müller’s fiercest adversaries, I have quoted word for word.
Gruppe is not only a positivist philosopher, but also learned in Eastern languages and literature, and a clever mythologist; it would have been better had he confined himself to fields of labour with which he was acquainted. But as he admits that there is psychological and spontaneous thought in man, side by side with the rational, he cannot but acknowledge the right of humanity to say what it thinks. There are certain literary documents whichshow us what the human mind has thought in all ages and in all places, and we are of opinion that these sentiments have not varied.
It is said that an universal belief in any fact is not a proof of the existence of this fact, and that consequently the conception of super-sensible things need have no real basis; the observation is just; I shall reply to it by a question. Is it possible to demonstrate that this belief in things that cannot be proved is not only universal but even inevitable? If it were possible much would be gained. In geometrical calculations it is sufficient to know that three dimensions only exist,—at least in this world—that the straight line is the shortest, that two parallel lines never meet; it should suffice to know that in this world belief, whether rational or illusory, in one or more divinities, is inevitable for men constituted as we are.
Our first fathers no doubt pictured a large space situated on the further side of all that they could see, and we know how their imagination peopled it with confused images, either hidden, or seen in the visible phenomena.
These flights of fancy, which may have lasted thousands of centuries, became crystallised at last in the mythologies of all peoples, and it is these mythologies by which we gain access to this initial stage in the life of humanity, and which preserves for us the traces of this eternal truth amidst many extravagances of the fancy misled by language, which guided their first steps. There is a petrified philosophy in mythology.
Since history and legend, in one form or another, have voiced the feelings called religion, these feelings, variously interpreted, have changed their aspect from age to age, and from country to country; as long as we have not traced the stream to its source, the question, as to the manner in which the conception of God had birth in the human mind, will always be before us.
We take man at the time when he had recently appeared on the earth, his sole possession being his five senses, which place him in contact with the external world. We must distinguish between two classes of senses; those of touch, scent, and taste being more evident; from the evolutionist’s point of view the sense of touch has the largest share in the building up of the human edifice which arose later; its use is chiefly connected with the hands, and has thus given us the wordmanifest; that which we call certainty hardly exists for us apart from what is manifest. The two other senses, sight and hearing, are less sure, and have frequently to be verified by those first named.
The objects of which we obtain knowledge by means of our senses can be divided into tangible, semi-tangible and intangible. The first are, for instance, a stone, a bone, a fruit, the skin of an animal, these can be touched as it were all round, and we are able to assert their reality. The second, the semi-tangible, might be a river, a mountain, the earth, a tree. We stand by the banks of a river and dip our hand in the small volume of water passing away before our eyes; we can also touch the ground on which we are standing, also the trunk of the tree beneath which we are sitting; but it is only an insignificant part of which we assert the reality by touching it, all the other parts remain unknown to us; for the river itself consists of a large mass of waters springing from a source which is not seen and flowing towards a spot which we may never see; we are told that the earth is in the shape of a globe, and that this globe is suspended in air, which fact it would be difficult to verify; the tree is small in comparison with the river and the earth, and yet how little we know of it, whence come its buds, and its leaves, and the sap which rises each spring in the branches? We say of a beam that it is dead wood, but of the tree we say that it grows and lives; what is thislife of the tree? We are in the presence of the unknown. These are samples of semi-tangible objects. The sense of touch has no place with regard to the sky, the stars, the clouds, the winds; those are intangible objects, which we see and feel without knowing them by personal grasp; the proof of their existence is also in the fact that years of work are required to know astronomy and meteorology.
We now have primitive man provided with fine senses, in presence of these natural phenomena, and the problem to be solved is this: How is it that this man is able to think and to speak of things which are not finite, finite things being the only ones of which his senses make him cognisant?
“I have before me,” says Max Müller, “a school of philosophy adverse to my views; I am warned that nothing I say will be accepted, unless I submit to the conditions imposed on me. I am told: ‘You pretend to prove that man can know that God exists; whereas we affirm that the great triumph of our age is that we have proved that religion is an illusion. All knowledge must pass through two gates, the gate of the senses and the gate of reason, consequently religious knowledge even can enter by no other gate.’ In this way does positivism bar the entrance which Kant left open, who in his definition of religion considered morality the basis of it, which with him presupposed the existence of God. Positivism refuses to hear a psychological and historical explanation of one of the greatest psychological and religious facts—namely, religion; it stops its ears when we sayNihil est in fide quod non ante fuerit in sensu; but we are not discouraged by the absurdity of imagining that by shutting our eyes, we can annihilate facts; we accept the struggle on the common ground on which the positivist and we have decided to fight; we also agree to use the weapons chosen for us. Let us inspect the battlefield and measurethe ground. Both sides seem in accord that all consciousness begins with sensuous perception, with what we feel, and hear, and see; what is likewise granted is that out of this we construct what may be called conceptual knowledge, consisting of collective and abstract concepts. The conditions of the combat are fixed; at the two gates of the senses and reason we take our stand; whatever claims to have entered in by any other gate, whether that gate be called primeval revelation, or religious instinct,[70]must be rejected as contraband of thought; and whatever claims to have entered in by the gate of reason without having first passed through the gate of the senses, will equally be rejected, as without sufficient warrant.”[71]