Part 10

I see there manifold associations, enterprises supposing a long duration of existence, unremitting efforts for the moral development of men; for the bodily solace of their earthly condition; for the propagation and the defense of freedom of opinion in religious matters; for the support and diffusion of the faith itself: all these objects, at once so various and so analogous, are being laboriously worked out both by the independent Protestant Churches, and by the Protestant Church established from the State. M. Edmond de Pressensé and M. Eugène Bersier devote their talents and their zeal to the same forms of Christian belief as were advocated by M. Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod. In spite of the free divergence of sentiment and the diversity of ecclesiastical government in French Protestantism, we may observe in its bosom a progress of Christian Faith, a progress in works of Christian Charity, a progress in Christian Science, and a progress in Christian Influence. {206} I use the same terms employed by me in speaking of the contemporary Catholic Church of Rome, because I find before me similar facts. These facts do not announce the reconciliation of the two Churches--profound differences of opinion continue to separate them; but these facts are, in both Churches, signs of the Awakening of Christianity.

III. Awakening Of Christianity In France.

But the world has not changed since God at its creation delivered it up to the disputes of mankind; nor have the diversity and conflict of ideas and of passions ever ceased to be the condition of humanity. By the side of the movement of Christianity to which I refer, a movement in the contrary direction is manifesting itself, and is pursuing its course. Christianity at its Awakening is challenged to ruder combats. Philosophy refuses to its fundamental dogmas the marks and the rights of rational truth. {207} An erudite criticism contests its historical evidence. The natural sciences proclaim that they do not require its aid to account for man and for the world. It is affirmed as a principle, and maintained in learned societies, that morality is entirely independent of religion. Man in his aspirations for liberty, that generous passion of the age, retains a profound resentment for the chains and the sufferings which, under pretext of Christianity, human conscience and human thought have so long been made to endure. The influence of these bitter reminiscences is manifesting itself in the different Christian Churches under various forms, and with different effects. Many liberals so dread the prospect of the Church of Rome obtaining power over civil society that they hardly accord to this Church the rights of common liberty; or, if they do so at all, they do it reluctantly and little by little.

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Among the Protestants, some push the pretensions of liberty so far as to insist that in religious society a community of faith should count for nothing; that a man should be entitled to remain a member of a Church, and even to remain its minister, although he profess respecting the essential facts and dogmas of the Church the most contradictory opinions, and opinions the strangest to its traditions and its texts. With respect to Roman Catholics, the dominant question is that of liberty. Are the liberties of civil society to be accorded to the Church? Are those of the Church to be allowed to remain intact in the bosom of the State? In Protestantism, on the other hand, the complete liberty of religion in the midst of civil society, the right of every individual to avow his belief, and to solemnize his own forms of worship--these are all privileges already acquired, and contested as little by any orthodox believer as by any freethinker. The questions really here agitated are questions of faith and of discipline. Are a common faith and a uniform internal discipline essential to the Church? Here is the debate. {209} But above all these special questions and these different situations of the various Christian Churches rise, for Romanist and Protestant alike, the general question and the common situation; it is Christianity itself which is engaged in the contest, and its awakening spirit confronts the antichristian movement.

Let us not delude ourselves as to the character, the force, or the danger of this antichristian movement. It is not merely a feverish excitability in men's minds, a simple revolutionary crisis in the religious order. No; we have here earnest convictions at work, and the prospect of a long war. Impatience of an ancient yoke, a spirit of reaction, a love of innovation, frivolous instincts not a few, as well as evil impulses, may claim a share--and a large share--in the attacks of which Christianity is in these days the object; but what gives to these attacks their most formidable character is a sentiment far more serious, one that has made heroes and martyrs, the love of truth at all risk and in despite of consequence, for the sake of truth and for its sake alone. {210} The feeling that makes man thirst for truth is an honor to human nature. If he fancies that he has found that truth, man abandons himself with transport to the satisfaction of his cravings, and does not scruple to drink even to intoxication at this pure source. But here he is incurring a great danger: man is not merely an intelligence whose vocation during his brief transit through this world confines him only to study and science: he is an active, responsible being; a being engaged in a life full of labors, with a future life before him full of mystery; a laborer in a career having a particular interest for himself, and yet forming part of a general scheme, of the design of which he has but imperfect glimpses. Very incomplete and very imperfect is that man's state of intellectual action, who restricts himself to that which appears to him to be scientific truth, who does not, at the same time, submit his thought to all the tests to which he is himself subject, and who does not examine whether that thought be in harmony with the laws of his nature--whether it respect or transgress the limits imposed upon his means of knowledge. {211} The danger of falling into error becomes greater in proportion as this incomplete and imperfect state of his mind is in itself a noble state, a state that satisfies noble impulses, and procures noble means of enjoyment. The most eminent among the actual adversaries of Christianity believe themselves the interpreters and the defenders of truth; some of philosophical truth; others of historical truth, others again of the truth of the facts and laws of the physical world. They are all proud of belonging to the department of pure science, and of making of scientific truth the sole object, the sole rule of their labors; but they are also all forgetful of some conditions--nay, the most indispensable ones--to which science is bound to conform; some tests--and the most legitimate ones--to which science is obliged to submit.

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They claim, too, the honor of bearing the banner of a grand and noble cause, the cause of Liberty. That Christianity alone restored to man, as man, and for no other reason, his rights to liberty, is a fact that the comparative histories of the world, whether Christian or Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront these two histories, and name the nations among whom the idea of the dignity of man's liberty became a general idea, powerful in influence and fruitful in consequence! Another fact equally historic and certain is, that Christianity knew how to adapt itself, and did readily adapt itself, to the different states of society, and the different forms of government; that it set itself up and maintained its rank in republics as well as monarchies, under constitutional regimes as well as in despotisms, in the midst of democratical as well as aristocratical institutions; and, beyond doubt, it was not in free states that it displayed least vigor, or met with the smallest success. {213} These two great facts are nowadays lost sight of. Christianity is accused of being hostile to Liberty and incompatible with the spirit of modern societies; and this is, indeed, the chief charge laid to its score. True it is, that the charge is not without deriving countenance from the history of Europe in modern times; worldly interests, selfish passions, events complex and obscure, in which moral order and social order have been compromised, have as it were suspended in certain countries the liberal action of Christianity, and enlisted momentarily the cause of Liberty under a banner not Christian. The error is profound, but transient; the traditional influences of ages will resume their empire, the grand events their course; Christ's religion and man's liberty will once more remember that each stands in need of the other, and that their alliance in the bosom of order is their natural and necessary condition. That they do misunderstand each other occasions the most serious crisis at this moment in modern society.

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Here, too, is the gravest peril which the Christian religion has in our days to surmount. Appreciate the force of the two sentiments to which I just now referred, the love of science and the love of liberty; understand through what phases of degeneration and of deceptive transformation those sentiments may, in the ardor of pursuit and of combat, have to pass; reckon up, if reckon you can, all the false ideas, the chimerical hopes, which they may suggest; and then add to the amount, and as their consequences, the immoral and anarchical passions which may make those sentiments their pretext and their tools; and in doing this, you will find that you have passed in review the forces of that enemy now waging an implacable war against Christianity, although a war to which Christianity is called upon to put an end.

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I do not in any respect underrate the forces of that army. I disparage no more their quality than their numbers. To maintain the combat worthily and efficaciously we should, at the onset, accord to our adversaries the whole amount of their merits as well as of their strength, and then attack them in their strongest entrenchments. I have charged the enemies of Christianity with puerile presumptuousness when they refuse to see the energy and the progress of the awakening of Christianity. It is of infinite importance to Christians, on their side, not to be blind to the ardor and the effects which that Antichristian demonstration is producing, of which their Faith and their Church are the aim. I am firmly convinced that in this war Christianity will conquer; but it will leave its enemies with arms still in their hands. It will no more gain over them any complete or definitive victory than it will be able to conclude with them any serious or durable peace. In the actual state of men's minds and of society, the struggle will go on between the followers and the opponents of Christianity; the two armies will continue to deploy their forces in the face each of the other; and that of the Christians, in order to defend and to extend its domain, will be incessantly called upon to watch and to combat the movements of its enemy. {216} While combating them it will be also obliged to comply with the terms that truth exacts, and the conditions that liberty imposes. From these exigencies and these conditions Christianity has nothing to dread--that is, if it accepts them boldly, and in its turn imposes them upon its enemies. Let man's science, labors, and systems be submitted to the same tests, and handled with the same freedom of examination, as are being applied to the foundations and the doctrines of Christian faith; this is all that Christians are entitled to, all that they need to demand.

Thus far I have explained the actual state of the Christian religion in France, the sources of its strength and of its weakness, its awakening and its perils. It is my intention now to examine the actual state of those doctrines and systems which repudiate, or which more or less deny and combat Christianity. {217} When I have passed the hostile army in review, I will once more confront Christianity with its adversaries, and endeavor to distinguish, by contrasting them, on which side the truth is, on which side the right, and on which side the hope of future success.

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Second Meditation.

Spiritualism.

I witnessed the birth--not, certainly, the birth of Spiritualism, for this was, like its twin brother Materialism, born in the cradle of Philosophy, and while the steps of Philosophy were still those of an infant--but the birth of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century. This birth was a national reaction against the Sensualism of the eighteenth century--just as the Christian Awakening was a reaction against the impiety of the same epoch. Theories do not escape the influence of events: after the ideas come the facts, to pour upon those ideas floods of light, and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy or of policy, in all their practical consequences. {219} The Sensualism--that is to say, to style it by its true name, the Materialism--of the eighteenth century, did not pass triumphantly through this test: it still reigned in France at the commencement of the nineteenth century, but it was the reign of an antiquated sovereign in decline--a sovereign of whom the public know the defects, and whose successor is at hand.

M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed to take up with systems--he observed, he read, he studied and reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound thinker. {220} His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment, circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented themselves step by step, each on its own account, without troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth; and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34] characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism, scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the results that the inductive process discovers in the facts themselves.

[Footnote 34: In his "Traduction des oeuvres complètes de Reid," vol. iii, pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 273-451.]

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He had been a great reader of the writings of the Scotch philosophers, held them in high esteem, and walked in their steps; his views were, however, loftier, and his footing firmer, although not less prudent. He had in his short philosophical career two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that he had a friend in M. Maine de Biran, a profound and enthusiastic observer of the human soul in his own soul--a subtle metaphysician, almost a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, name the Saint Theresa of philosophy; his other advantage was, that he had for his disciple M. Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent interpreter of the great philosophers of all ages. M. Cousin, in his turn, has been fortunate in having for his disciple M. Jouffroy--a disciple, of mind original and independent, following a master accomplished in the art of observing intellectual and moral facts, and of describing them and ordering them, without altering their essential character. {222} Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin yields to the ambition of his thought, or is swayed by the intellectual current of opinions in vogue; but very soon his common sense checks, or at least sets him on his guard--a common sense that finds lucid expression, and is distinguished by probity of intent. Such are the founders and the glorious chiefs of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century.

Nor have they failed to find disciples and heirs worthy of such predecessors. For some years past it has been the custom, in certain regions of the learned world, to demand, frivolously enough, and in a tone not free from irony, "What has become of the spiritualistic school--what can it be about?" I will not answer for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, "We are only of yesterday, and we are everywhere--in your domains, your cities, your isles, your fortresses, your communes, your councils, your camps, your tribes, your 'decuries,' in the palace, the senate, the forum; we only leave you your temples." [Footnote 35]

[Footnote 35: Tertullian Apologet., ch. xxxvii.]

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The modern Spiritualists had no such conquests to make, and it is fitting for philosophers to be more modest; but however short my experience may have taught me that the human memory may in similar cases sometimes be, I am astonished that men should so forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and patent. What school of philosophy ever furnished in half a century so many men and so many works, some of eminence, all of them of distinguished merit? I will cite only a few names: MM. de Rémusat, Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire, Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévêque, Bouillier, Janet, some of whom have scarcely disappeared from the stage of the world, and others are only just arrived there--they belong all to the spiritualistic school, to which they have all done honor by important works on philosophy, whether speculative, historical, political, economic, or practical. {224} Their doctrines, it is true, have now been for some time hotly attacked, and the wind of the day does not blow into their sails. They have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this respect, that they have not directed sufficient attention to these polemics; that they have combated in a manner too indirect, or with too little energy; the ideas in whose name their own have been assailed; a certain share of languor and of embarrassment is at this moment the malady of the best minds and of the sincerest convictions. But in spite of the blows which it receives and returns, although with insufficient sturdiness, the spiritualistic school, if we judge it by the names and the works which belong to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains in our century in possession of the domain and of the banner of philosophy.

Its merits will present themselves still more clearly if we examine closely the results of its labors.

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The first and the most important result, in a point of view purely philosophical, is, that the Spiritualists of our days have given to their researches and to their ideas a character really scientific: they have introduced into the study of man and of the intellectual world, the method practiced with so much success in the study of man and of the material world--that is to say, they have taken the observation of facts as the point of departure and the constant guide of their investigations. Are there in man and in the intellectual world, as there are in man and in the material world, facts capable of being observed, seized, described, classified, generalized? This is the question which the spiritualistic school proposed and discussed at the outset. I have no hesitation in saying, that it resolved it in the affirmative, and that, thanks to this school, psychology has assumed its rank among the positive sciences, just as physiology did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, psychology has its special object, its determined domain, in which it proceeds absolutely according to the same method observed by the physical sciences in their domain. {226} That this method, the observation of facts, of their value and their laws, is in psychology more difficult to be followed than in the physical sciences, is certain; but this certainly does not deprive psychology either of its domain or of its scientific character. It is a science by the same right and upon the same conditions as all the others are so. The labors of the spiritualistic school, and particularly those of M. Jouffroy, have given it a solid foundation: and this has been formally recognized by several even among the adversaries of this school, among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot. [Footnote 36]

[Footnote 36: I read in the Métaphysique et la Science of M. Vacherot:

"_The Metaphysician:_

"In his denial of psychology, I stop at once the author of the 'positive philosophy,' and I demand of him by what right he thus banishes from the domain of the experimental sciences a science of observation.

"_The man of learning:_

"It constitutes in effect 'hiatus' in this philosophy, and a hiatus which all the sound minds of the positive school are beginning to admit. M. Littré, for example, may make his reservations of opinion as to the manner in which our psychologists understand psychology, and as to the method which they apply to it; but he has too much sense not to admit that the intelligence--all that constitutes man's identity, the moral man--is the object of a peculiar study, of which many previous works have shown the possibility, and many practical results prove the high and vital interest."-- Vacherot, la Métaphysique et la Science, vol. iii, p. 181.]

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It is in the name of science and by the processes of science that the Spiritualists of the nineteenth have combated the Sensualists of the eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, absolutely crushed Materialism, that child and legitimate heir of Sensualism; but while dethroning the parent, they have compelled the child sometimes to avow himself boldly, sometimes to transform himself, and to assume other features and other arms than those of his cradle. I will only cite the lecture of M. Cousin on the "Sensualistic Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century," and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on the "Existence of the Soul," [Footnote 37] written on the occasion of the work of M. Broussais: "De l'Irrritation et de la Folie."

[Footnote 37: This essay, first inserted in 1828 in the Revue Française, has been reprinted in the "Ecrits et discours divers" of the Duke de Broglie, collected and published in 1863.]

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Whoever, after having read them, would still persist in maintaining the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in refusing to see the consequences to which Sensualism leads, would prove, in my opinion, that he has not understood either the question put, or the doctrine combated and refuted. We have here a result acquired for the science of the intellectual world, and we owe the result to the polemics of the spiritualistic school.