Part 14

The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from his system. The respect which he felt for the method of observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and for man's science. {299} But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works--more especially in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"--the most solid and consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles--he sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty, and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty, that natural consequence of individual free will and of the responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of the material world; and when he explains his views as to the government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is, in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a theocratic domination than instituting any liberal _régime_.

[Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, p. 251.]

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After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws of that external world which is the theater of man's existence. The first two states are, according to him, essentially irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the _régime_ of science is the end and the summit.

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It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte regards as three successive states in the history of the human race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity, agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of those that the study of physics supplies. These different yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very essence--the indestructible and indivisible essence--of human nature. {302} At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals, in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical and the natural sciences--Aristotle was the contemporary of Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the theological state, Monotheists. {303} In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses; but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter--of its forces--of its laws.

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Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself undertaken--he alone--to furnish me with this proof. This intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the successive stages of the human race. He had placed the theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own _début_ by the scientific state, it was as impossible for him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that, and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical tendency." {305} He had separated with _éclat_ from the Saint-Simonians, "for they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree, that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real, new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61]

[Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M. Littré, p. 173.]

And some years after holding this language, and while still in the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, M. Comte in his turn launched into a theological career; he took it upon him to transform Positivism into a religion. By the most violent of all personified abstractions, he made out of humanity the great being, the real being, sovereign and adorable, and he placed that being in the place of God, declaring himself at the same time to be his chief priest. {306} He had more than once proclaimed that all religion was essentially founded upon the supernatural; and yet a religion all natural--the religion of humanity, the worship of humanity, the church of humanity, were summoned by him to succeed to the Christian religion and to the Church of Christ. On the 19th of October, 1851, when terminating his third philosophical course on the general histories of humanity, M. Comte summed it up in these words: "In the name of the past and of the future, the theoretical servitors and the practical servitors of humanity are about to assume worthily the direction of the general affairs of this world, in order to construct, at last, the true providence, moral, intellectual, and material, at the same time excluding irrevocably from political supremacy all the different slaves of God--Catholics, Protestants, or Deists--as being at once in arrear of the age and its perturbators." The positivist religion thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a positivist calendar--these last both composed by M. Comte--reduced his principles to practice. {307} In a series of conversations between "The Priest and the Woman," the catechism first establishes and explains the dogma, then the worship, of the new religion, its internal order and its external order, its private worship and its public worship. And the calendar, by a retrospective chronology, determines for any given year of thirteen months, and for the seven days of the week, the names of the grand servitors in every department of humanity, who are to replace the Christian saints: three hundred and sixty-four names, men and women, with one hundred and sixty-five additional names, are inscribed upon this list, which begins with Moses and ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare, Descartes, and Frederic the Second!

A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into chaos. {308} Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness. {309} Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity--at the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other, not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and although his observations were superficial, inexact, and incomplete--although he fell into the strangest inconsistencies--the fundamental principle of his system, and the coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have given him more importance and more influence than were really his due.

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Fifth Meditation.

Pantheism.

No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar--I should indeed say more contradictory--than Pantheism and Positivism. What Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]

[Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p. 39. French translation by M. Saisset.]

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I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is to Pantheism, properly so called--to the sole system that merits the name--that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite, suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie, d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should spare it that name of Atheism--a name, unfortunately, of ancient date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals--an assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to occupy itself. {312} With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a system, nevertheless, with two very different forms--the one, where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]

[Footnote 63: Histoire générale de la philosophie, p. 433, ed. 1863.]

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I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and at bottom, there is here but one and the same system, but in appearance, and I say besides, in the opinion of its authors, the difference is great, and requires to be noticed. I postpone for the subject "Materialism," all that I have to say upon the subject of the so-called Pantheism, which admits no other existence than either that of the individualities that people the visible universe, or that of the primary matter whence they have issued. I occupy myself, at this moment, solely with the idealistic Pantheism.

Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how weak the human mind really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a void in quest of what they call "Being!"

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Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably, still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and the passionate longing for universal unity--feelings noble both, but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction.

"I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it shall have rejected all the rest--in a word, a Good that gives the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal and supreme happiness. ... Man is essentially a being that thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the highest degree of human felicity. ... My sources of enjoyment consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. Emile Saisset, vol. i, pp. 15, 16.]

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What obliviousness of man's nature and of man's life! Man is not merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment. Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human knowledge." Man is more exacting than the philosopher, and it requires infinitely more to satisfy the most modest human soul than to satisfy the proudest mind. Infinitely more in respect of happiness, infinitely less in respect of science! Not that I would make their intellectual ambition a reproach to philosophers, even when it leads them astray. {316} It is an honor to the human mind that it aspires higher than it can attain, that it torments itself in the struggle to carry its science into that invisible world, which it instinctively feels by anticipation, just as it does into that visible world that it sees. God granted to man this privilege; he implanted in his soul the ardent desire to know him and to possess him fully. But at the same time, God granted to men in general certain instincts and spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy this desire without the necessity of any profound study. What would have become of the human race if, in order to believe in God, to hope in him, and to pray to him, man had been obliged to wait until philosophers had resolved the problems which still weigh upon _their_ genius? As God, in creating man free, took care that the maintenance of the general order in this world should not be completely abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he provide for the spiritual nourishment of mankind, without denying to the great ambitious ones of the earth either the prospect of a satisfaction more complete, or the right to search for it.

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Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's mixed nature--an indication of a destiny in store for him superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and upon earth than philosophy--than even the philosophy 'of the absolute'--can explain. ... To comprehend God, it needs to be God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of Hegel. [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 366, 341. 1864.]

Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

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Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by receiving no being as God but man.

The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That truth is one--that is to say, that all truths, whatever their object, are in harmony with one another--the very word truth implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the void.

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By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so rigorously philosophical?

Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems, invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the Pantheists by similar means proceeded--nay, are proceeding--to explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite. The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences themselves--I may at once call it by its proper name, the scientific method--was formerly, and remains still, strange to the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to Spinoza. {320} Whether Plotinus plunges into an _ecstacy_ to arrive at and comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of contemplation; or Spinoza, defining _substance_, makes it the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of _idea_ in order to arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his term _substance_--it is the same defect that appears in the labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their development, but in the very point from which they start; for observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction, logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.

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They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts, themselves evident, indestructible.

Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves may lead to questions and controversies.

1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality. He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and distinct from every other being.

2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations which precede them, man has an intimate and assured consciousness.

3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the experience of the human race.

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