Part 17

The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and Materialism seem very readily to prevail. {371} After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it even their refuge. These different social facts, and the influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy, manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or taciturn.

Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very general--impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious perplexity.

I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single way. {372} Others there are where different currents cross and combat one another, and impel society at the same moment toward different objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the different principles and elements of our society, good or the reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I have made, either as to that important movement or as to the confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time, believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind.

{373}

In our days impiety is spreading, and assuming serious development, more especially among the operative classes, and in that young generation that issues from the middle classes, and is destined to follow the liberal professions. Not that the infection is universal even there; on the contrary, those classes show also the most different tendencies; among them, too, the progress of the Christian awakening has made itself felt, and religious belief is treated with more respect. There, however, it is that the evil of impiety has its focus and its center of expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under gross and cynical forms, sometimes with a pretension to thought and learning; now by the brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by the arrogant yet embarrassed expression of its opinions. {374} Last year I received an invitation to attend the great congress of students assembled at Liège; an invitation which, although I expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a real and a sincere interest, I declined. When I learned what the ideas were that had been there loudly expressed--when I read that the question had there been put as one between God and man, and that the idolatry of man had been proclaimed in the place of the adoration of God,--I experienced two sentiments the most contradictory, a lively satisfaction that I had held myself aloof from such a scene, and a profound regret, at the same time, that I had not been present to protest against such an invasion of Pantheism and of Atheism into young souls, upon whom my thoughts only rest with sentiments of affectionate hopefulness. I have grown old, I have had to undergo painful disappointments, but in spite of all, my first impulse has ever been to believe in the prompt efficacy of truth when it knocks unhesitatingly at the door of the mind; nor is it without reluctance that I bring myself to wait for time and experience to unvail what is error. {375} Of the two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded to, the impiety which is gross and cynical, which springs from immorality and which produces immorality, is undoubtedly the more fatal to the human soul, to its dignity and its future lot; but systematic impiety--impiety that establishes itself into doctrine--is the more dangerous for human societies; for, enamored of itself, it takes its pride in self-glorification and self-propagation. The ambitious ones of impiety obtain more credit than those, the chief characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness. Recklessness in religion is in our days a more widely spread evil than impiety. I do not here speak of that indifferentism with respect to religious subjects that the Abbé de la Mennais so eloquently attacked; that sentiment may be profound, and it may be frivolous; it may spring from Materialism, from Skepticism, from a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross forgetfulness of the paramount questions which exercise the human mind. {376} The recklessness now so common gives no thought at all to these subjects, does not picture to itself that there is any ground for so doing; where this tendency prevails, man's thought confines itself to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business and the interests of this life alone occupy him, alone content him; there is, as it were, a sleep of all those instincts and requirements of the human soul which go beyond this low region, and if not a complete abdication, at least a sluggish torpor of the heavenly part of our nature.

Let not the friends of a religious life and of the Christian faith deceive themselves; it is here that they have the greatest obstacles to encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to remove. Aggression provokes resistance; a struggle leads to the marshaling of the different hostile forces; nor does the learning of the believer dread to enter the arena with the learning of the incredulous. {377} But recklessness in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no being lives, an immense barren desert in which no vegetation pushes. It is, if not the most revolting, at least the most formidable evil of the day. It is against this evil that Christians are bound, more especially, to direct their energies, for there are a world and an entire population here to be conquered.

Nor will _points d'appui_ or means of action fail them in this great work. For if religious recklessness is in our days deplorably common, neither is perplexity as to religious matters a stranger among us. It springs from sentiments and out of interests very different in their natures, sometimes merely on the surface, sometimes in the depths of the soul. There is a kind of perplexity founded upon the dictates of common sense, and entitled to every respect, but to which I do not accord, nevertheless, the epithet of religious; this perplexity is generated by the instinct or the experience of the utility of religion for the maintenance of order in society, not merely in the great public society, but also in the smaller domestic societies, that is, in the state as well as in families. {378} A man of distinguished mental capacity and of an honorable character, "elève" of the "Ecole politechnique," and "ingénieur en chef" in one of our great departments, was one day speaking to me with sorrow of the attacks leveled at Christianity. "It is not," he said, "on my own account that I regret these attacks; you know I am a 'Voltairean;' but I ask for regularity and peace in my own household; I felicitate myself that my wife is a Christian, and I mean my daughters to be brought up like Christian women. These demolishers know not what they are doing; it is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our houses, our homes and their inmates, that their blows are telling!"

{379}

There is a perplexity more serious and more profound--a perplexity really religious--one suggested not merely by the necessity of social order, but by that of moral security, of harmony, of confidence, and of intimate hopefulness in the presence of the problems and of the chances that weigh upon man. This perplexity takes place not merely in the minds of thinking men--of men who render to themselves an account of their internal troubles, and who avow them undisguisedly; it causes agitation and spreads desolation among multitudes of single-minded, modest, and silent men, who suffer from the antichristian _malaria_ spread around them. What framer of statistics shall count their number? what philosopher minister successfully to their disease?

I go further still. I listen to contemporary philosophers themselves, and I find in the cases of some of the more eminent an intellectual perplexity, showing itself clearly through opinions the most systematic, and the furthest removed from the Christian religion. I shall name but two--M. Vacherot and M. Edmond Scherer. {380} I have no intention of entering here into a special examination of their ideas; I seek only to show the state of their minds and of their souls, as it results from the tenor of their works.

I have read, and read over again, with scrupulous attention, the two principal philosophical treatises of M. Vacherot, _La Métaphysique et la Science ou Principes de Philosophie Positive,_ [Footnote 79] and the _Essais de Philosophie Critique_. [Footnote 80]

[Footnote 79: Second edition, three vols. 12mo., 1863.]

[Footnote 80: One vol. 8vo., 1864.]

M. Vacherot does not desire to be, nor is he really, in his conscience and in his own eyes, an advocate either of Materialism, or Positivism, or Pantheism, or Atheism, or Skepticism. {381} He analyzes and he refutes successively these different systems, as conceived and expounded by their most distinguished representatives; he defends himself, and with warmth, from the charge of adhering to them: "a man," he says, "is not an Atheist, a Materialist, a Pantheist, an Idealist, because he does not believe in God, soul, mind, matter, world--in all these metaphysical words taken in a given acceptation. The true _Atheist_, if such a one exists, is he whose mind is grossly empirical, and wanting in the sense of what is intelligible, ideal, and divine. The true _Pantheist_ is he who identifies truth and reality, God and the world, whether, like Spinoza and Goethe, he deifies the world, or like the Stoics, he materializes God. The true _Materialist_ is he who degrades man to the beast, either by denying him his superior and really human faculties, or by deriving these from animal faculties. The true _Idealist_, like Berkeley, is he who rejects all external reality as an illusion, whatever the conception of that reality; whether it be as a thing made up of forces and of laws, or as consisting of extended matter. ... All these words require to be defined and explained, or they necessarily occasion mysteries, contradictions, and absurdities. In their vague complexities they do not express ideas of sufficient simplicity, nor do they answer to ideas sufficiently precise for science to adopt them unreservedly and without distinction. ... {382} A chosen few exist whose sympathy is dear to me; I remain profoundly attached to all the truths which they, with reason, regard as constituting the strength, life, and honor of philosophy. I remain, like them, a Spiritualist, an Idealist, a Theist, although with other methods, another language, and also, beyond a doubt, with notable reservations." [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: La Métaphysique et la science; in the Introduction and the Preface, vol. i., pp. xvi, xxxiv.]

Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than of a Materialist and a Pantheist; he believes firmly in absolute truth, in scientific metaphysics, and in the universal and essential principles which form their bases. "Metaphysics," he says, "have nothing to dread from analysis; it is a test from which they can only issue with honor. The truths _à priori_ upon which the science rests, will inspire no more doubt so soon as it comes to be well understood that those truths are founded upon the ordinary principles of demonstration, like all the truths _à priori_ of the other sciences. {383} Metaphysics have, and will ever have for their object, the Being infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. Now the ideas of being, infinite, necessary, absolute, universal, are so involved in the notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative, individual, that it is impossible for the human mind to separate them. Accordingly, in order to be entitled to deny Metaphysics, and the truths which are peculiar to them, we must first mutilate the human mind, and reduce it to the pure faculties of sensation and imagination which are common to it with animals. From the moment when the reason, the thought, the faculty peculiar to the human intelligence, enters the field, it brings necessarily with it the object of sensation and of imagination, under the categories of quantity, quality, being, relation, unity. {384} Then it is that appear to the mind the distinction, and afterward the logical connection, of the two terms corresponding to each category, of the finite and the infinite, of the contingent and the necessary, of the individual and the universal, of the relative and the absolute, of appearance and being. The thought enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of it or not, upon the peculiar ground of Metaphysics. Nothing but a gross and, so to say, an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the conceptions and the truths of this science, and the denial is a denegation of the higher faculties of the intelligence." [Footnote 82]

[Footnote 82: La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i, p. xlviii.]

It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism, Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their consequences. But after all these declarations and these disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn, undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths from which he proposed to escape.

{385}

"What do you understand by God?" says he; "the perfect Being? He is the God of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz; he is the God of all the theologians with whom _Divinity_ and _Perfection_ are synonyms. That God is our God too. But if, of this God, immutable in his perfection, elevated beyond time, space, the movement of universal life, you make anything else than an ideal of the thought, I confess I no longer comprehend him. ... These ideas, all equally reducible to the idea of the _Perfect_, as understood by Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Fénélon, Leibnitz, can have no _objective reality_, and only exist in the ideal order of pure thought; absolutely in the same manner as the figures of geometry do, which lose all the vigorousness and all the exactitude of their definition elsewhere than in the domain of the understanding. ... {386} Perfection exists, can only exist, in the thought. It is of the essence of perfection to be purely ideal; and the remark applies as truly to the Perfect Being of Descartes and of Leibnitz as to the 'intelligible world' of Plato and of Malebranche. A 'perfect God,' or a 'real God?' Theology must make its choice. A perfect God is only an ideal God." [Footnote 83]

[Footnote 83: La Métaphysique et la science; vol. i, pp. xii, 1, vol. iii, p. 247.]

That is to say, that for Metaphysics to admit God, the _Being_ God must vanish, and remain only a conception, a notion, an idea. It may be that to a philosopher or two this may seem still Theism; to the human soul, and to the human race, it is Atheism, and nothing else.

God thus made to vanish, what becomes in its turn of the world?

{387}

Here God reappears. "As for the _real_ God," says M. Vacherot, "he lives, he develops himself in the immensity of space and in the eternity of time; he appears to us under the infinite variety of forms which are his manifestations--he is _Cosmos_. ... The world _thought of_ is something else than the world _imagined_. Imagination represents to us the world as an immense mass of dispersed matter, as an infinite collection of forces disseminated in the vast fields of space. The idea does not occur to men of vulgar minds, nor even to our men of learning, that this image of universal life cannot for an instant support the glance of reason; they do not perceive that _void_ is synonymous with _nothing_, that the atom is an unintelligible hypothesis; that _being_ is always and everywhere, without any possible solution of continuity, either in time or in space; that the universal life is one in its apparent dispersion; and finally, that the world is a _being_, and not merely a _whole_." [Footnote 84]

[Footnote 84: La Métaphysique et la science, vol. iii, p. 247; vol. i, p. lii.]

What is this if it be not Pantheism?

{388}

And these incoherences, these contradictions, these relapses of M. Vacherot into systems that he disavows, and that he has just combated, what are they but striking evidences of the vanity of his efforts, like those of so many others, to explain, unaided by God, God and the universe?

Of another nature is the perplexity of M. Edmond Scherer; his is the disquietude of the critic, not the embarrassment of the metaphysician. M. Edmond Scherer was a believing Christian, a believer zealous in his faith, and active in its cause. The examination of systems and of facts, historical criticism and philosophical criticism, impelled him to skepticism; not to that skepticism which is indifferent and strange to all personal conviction. M. Scherer believes in truth and in the rights of truth; but where that truth? He seeks it, he finds it not; he wanders among systems and facts as in a labyrinth, discovering at each step that his path is the wrong one, and from it nevertheless finding no issue. He is still aware that humanity cannot live in a labyrinth, that it requires--nay, absolutely requires--to issue forth, to behold, or at least to catch glimpses of, the light of day. {389} He has a sentiment of the moral requirements of human nature, of man's life; and he sees well that the negations and the doubts of the different systems of philosophy can never satisfy those requirements. I have already cited, in the course of these _Meditations_, some of the passages in which this perplexity strikingly manifests itself; a perplexity full at once of pride and sadness, which, although it does not shake M. Scherer in his convictions, makes him nevertheless see their vanity. [Footnote 85] He knows that its own thought suffices not for the human soul; perhaps it is his own soul suggests to him that knowledge.

[Footnote 85: See particularly the passage cited in the Third Meditation (Rationalism) of this volume, p. 256, etc., and in the "Meditation on the Essence of the Christian Religion," (Third Meditation, the Supernatural,) p. 119.]

{390}

Why is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in review? because it fills up the void that those systems either create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts man higher to the fountain of light? Question paramount, to which these _Meditations_ are intended as the prelude, and which I shall essay to solve, by confronting, as I before said, [Footnote 86] Christianity with its opponents, and by showing that, if it succeeds where they fail, the reason is, that, sprung from a higher source than man, it alone has the right to succeed, for it alone knows man rightly as he is--as one entire being; it alone satisfies man by furnishing him with a rule for his guidance through life.

[Footnote 86: First Meditation, p. 200.]

The End.