Part 12

"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. {253} 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.]

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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.]

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"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 her _näiveté_, 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; _it_ also may enter into a struggle with religion.

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"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. {257} 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. {258} 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 a _caput 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? {259} 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?"

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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."

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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. {262} 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.

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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. {264} 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. {265} 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. {266} 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!"

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Fourth Meditation.

Positivism.

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. {268} 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. {269} 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.]

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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.

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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. {272} 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 a _denouement_ of the actual situation. {273} 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. {274} 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.]

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