Part 8

Comte's life has been written by friend and foe. For fulness of detail the right book is by his disciple and executor, Dr. Robinet, who has just figured among those who rule in the Commune of Paris. Robinet is very interesting, for he thoroughly believes in his master, and accepts the whole Comtist religion, calendar and all, which Littré and others reject. No reproach this to Comte's biographer, for that same worship is celebrated in our cooler atmosphere of England. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ has, by its notices, made the celebrations widely known. There is an account of the grandest yearly solemnity which will suffice many, and excite the curiosity of more, in its number for January 7th, 1868. It is not hard to see that the worshippers differ from the recusants by a strong feeling that they cannot live upon axioms sounding like negatives. They want sentiment, emotion, excitement to sustain them. Let us observe how Comte caught the first glimpse of this requirement.

His life was sombre--a boy delicate and fractious, disliked by his masters, turned out of the Polytechnique, repudiated by his great socialist teacher St. Simon. His family relations not happy, his marriage least of all. We cannot wonder at vagaries, for he had a real fit of rampant insanity, and after release from an asylum had nearly drowned himself in the Seine. His wife found him intolerable, and left her home. Mr. Mill speaks of her respect for him;--it was oddly testified after his death, for she pleads in law that he was a madman, an atheist, and immoral; repudiates his will, and seizes the consecrated relics of his dwelling. Littré supported her against those who, like Robinet, thought her little less than blasphemous. If she had appeared in an English law court, we should have known more truth than we do.

Let us now look at such facts as we have from the more favourable side. The man lived a lonely life, as became a sort of conceptual alchemist, sustained by a belief that he was turning men's leaden thoughts into his own pure gold. One brilliant projection of his has made him the idol of Positivists. I confess it puzzles me, among many others, to imagine how a qualified critic can treat such a philosophic solvent either as true or as original. It supposes the history of all human thinking to pass necessarily through three stages, theology, metaphysics, positive truth; and that the world makes progress accordingly. We will hope that the thing called theology, a benighted belief in the government and intervention of supreme will, is not altogether extinct in this age of progress; if it be so, Mr. Froude encourages us to look for a revival. Among lesser matters, the hypothesis of metaphysical cookery is an idea one fails to realise. Was it a banquet with joints cut Laputa-like, after some fashion of concepts, or syllogistic figures? Was it a "feast of reason and a flow of soul," or, more probably, an abstraction pure and simple, as if a man could

"Cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast"?

Comte's comicalities strike most people all the more because he writes on, always utterly insensible to his own comedy. If any one wishes for a serious critique in small compass, I may mention Stirling's appendix to his translation of Schwegler's Handbook; Whewell in his Philosophy of Discovery, and elsewhere.

Comte was most confiding in his own theory. Littré is not so confident, for he has another theory of his own. But, putting aside the question of its verification, we may remark that in the rough idea Comte showed himself before his age. Positive thinkers have busied themselves with physical evolution; for example, the development of a brain from an oyster or an eozoon; but Comte was intent upon mental evolution.[172] Man need not much care about the congeners of a body sprung from earth; but soul is another thing. We trust our own spirit, as carrying some image and superscription of God; we feel and conceive it to be different in kind from sensitive life; we love to think of it in its finality as a spark flowing out from Divine Light; a breath breathed into body from above. In the reverse of this belief there is doubtless an element unfavourable to happiness; it makes some men cynics, some pessimists, some simply victims. Comte's infinite self-satisfaction probably saved him from self-torture. But we judge that he felt his condition deeply, from the rapture with which he hailed a new and brilliant discovery!

Yes, it was the most wonderful of all his discoveries; he one day found an unsuspected law of life within himself; he discovered that he had a heart.

To many, this is the black spot on Comte's memory; they cannot receive his love, nay, his frantic adoration, of the lonely wife of a convict, absent in the gallies, as a piece of pure Platonism. Had Madame Comte's allegations been sifted fully, we might have known all. As it is, I for my own part like to think him innocent; he was mad from disease, and perhaps from conceit; a conceit, says Mr. Mill, too colossal to be believed without reading him up; but I trust he was not immoral. His letters are against it, the lady's face is against it, and above all, there is against it the lasting effect upon himself. After a year's happiness to Comte, she died and left him, as he thoroughly supposed, an enlightened and a religious man.

Poor Comte! His sweeter life was buried with the dead, who to him could never rise again. His religion was no more than a funereal cult; a veil thrown over it, no hope, no thought of reunion! The episode of Clotilde was, in itself, one of those touches of nature which make the whole world kin; the brief, bright, and long sad experience the solitary had of his heart; the love, the loss, the unforgetting sorrow! But, did it not prove, beyond the force of reclamation to disprove, that Comte's system ends, at last, in what is commonly called materialism? its faith (or negation of faith) being in effect this, that we look for entire human dissolution coincident with bodily death. And the end flows naturally from the beginning; all we think is phenomenal, all we know is phenomenal, first and last. Our life is only a phenomenon; and death, death joins us to the unreturning past. We are absorbed, all that is good of us, into general and generic humanity; an Eidolon, called the Great Being for our comfort; as if a name (what's in a name?) could console us! The race we may have tried to serve is to be our Euthanasia, our sepulchre, I had almost said our cenotaph!

Strange thought, not without a kind of serpent-fascination! Epidemic in England now, gaining force from its unhallowed audacity! The consistent pessimist, who rates men at the worst, thinks the worst in himself, and does the worst by all others, and by himself, if he is but fixed in this unbelief, need not fear what the world, man, or God shall do unto him. It is the old whisper, "Ye shall be as gods!" 'Tis superhuman to sit and watch the storm; to have our strong sensations, illusions they are called in France; blood-poisons which circulate in our life, working hot passion and mischief; sorrow to many a loving, many a confiding heart; passion, mischief, sorrow, what matters it? there comes an opiate by-and-by! The man of overwrought brain, used up, worn-out feelings; the distempered dreamer; the reckless worker of wrongs; the disappointed striver for an earthly crown, all shall have their common slumber at last; unconscious, impervious, unbroken. I will read you three stanzas from a longer piece written by one not unknown always where that tree of knowledge grew:--

"Cessation is true rest, And sleep for them opprest; And not to be,--were blest.

Annihilation is A better state than this; Better than woe or bliss.

The name is dread;--the thing Is death without its sting; An overshadowing."

If such be the thought to them whose natural heritage stands strong, fringed with luxurious hope to live beloved, to die regretted; what will the "overshadowing" be when it passes, like a plague breath, over the children of toil and anxiety, over them whose life is at best hard, and their lot depressed and without "illusions"? Will they not want their strong sensations? Will they respect any law, human or divine, which stands between them and their enjoyments? Will they not crush all who bar their pleasures, aye, choke them in their own blood? Why not? The opiate comes to all at last. 'Tis an act of oblivion! The overshadowing will cover all.

And this is the coming creed of the 19th century. To return to Comte, about whom I might say much, but must not;--of course, he had no foresight of anything worse than an immediate realization of his crowning ideas--sociality, fraternity, Positivism. Europe split into small states; women made incapable of property, but held objects of religious worship; men worked on a communistic principle; an oligarchy of rich; a spirituality of Positive believers, with a supreme infallible pontiff at their head; Paris the seat of infallibility and of order. Clotilde had shown Comte a principle antagonistic to, and predominating over, all egoism; Altruism was to burn out of men all selfish aims, nay, the ordinary feelings of a man! A rigorous rule of life was to aid, and a religion without a God to enforce, this new law. Two hours a day, divided into three private services, were to be spent in the adoration of Humanity under the form of a living or dead woman. The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything was to be brought distinctly to mind; and the whole soul to be prostrated in her honour. Comte, it has been said, gave woman everything except justice.

There is a grave moral in this tale. Theology was extinguished; but the desire to worship burned on--a fire unquenchable. Is that desire, or is it not, a broad reality, an inalienable truth of our nature? Comte accepted it for himself, and not for himself alone, but for our whole human race. Along with it he accepted the only principle which could bestow universal validity. Our moral intuitions were acknowledged safe guides, and something more; the rulers of an intellectual world, the revealers of truth higher than all beside. Often and often he asserted the dominion of heart over mind. Probably, if Comte had lived longer he would have acknowledged other revelations of our moral nature. Moral causation, for example. That strange phrase of his--"a modifiable fatality," self-contradiction in words, suicide in sense, what did it portend? Was it the first sound of a marriage-bell, freedom and duty once again united? A change of his system wonderful to contemplate, yet not more wonderful than the state in which he left it.

One cannot help here asking how matters would have stood if Comte had died without knowing his Clotilde. How incomplete according to his own account his philosophy! how wanting in that which perfected the whole! A notable fact this, throwing great light on the value of such-like systematization which, after all, much resembles secretion from that interesting viscus, the system-maker's own particular brain. And there is another fact quite as notable. How curious that Comte should have lived so long without discovering whatever truth his own heart and a strong human affection disclosed to him! Hence we might illustrate and confirm a previous remark, that any one not living a truly human life--call him undeveloped, uneducated, dwarfed, or immature--is no typical man; and if we believe ancient maxims, scarcely a learner in philosophy, certainly not a judge of its highest and widest problems.

The most notable fact and greatest surprise of all is, that Comte's prayer without petition, his passionate self-mesmerizing adoration, his religion without a God, should have taken any hold on men. No one can transfer to others his private sorrow or his private joy; it is hard for a man to get his thought understood, harder still to make common pasture of his heart. But Comte devised extraordinary propagandist expedients; those who consider his developments mere madness, should explain why sane people have accepted them. Comte set no value on Protestantism in any shape. The religion of his own country he carried back to mediæval forms, and then travestied it. There were many festivals, a calendar of saints, nine sacraments, and a horrible caricature of the Christian Trinity. This idea crowned his sociology, which I need hardly say was communistic socialism, enfolding (as socialism always must enfold) and scarcely veiling the most iron of despotisms, both temporal and spiritual. His mind delighted in contemplating a synthesis of the great Fetish, Earth, with the great Being Humanity; which last somehow assumes on occasion a feminine gender.

To Clotilde, symbolizing that supreme object, Clotilde, his noble and tender patroness, he transferred Dante's homage of Beatrice; addresses to the mother of our Lord; and stranger than all, the prayer of Thomas à Kempis to Almighty God, "Amem te plusquam me, nec me nisi propter te"--"May I love Thee more than self, nor self at all except for Thee." Now consider: when Comte died, sixty-four years had not quite elapsed since goddesses of Reason were worshipped in the cathedral and other churches of Paris. Upon each high altar a fair woman, chosen for her faultless beauty, sate enthroned, her feet resting upon the consecrated slab. Gaily clothed in tunic and Greek mantle, she was so displayed by a torch behind her throne, so elevated above her worshippers, as to attract from Phrygian cap to Italic shoe their passionate gaze and adoration. Low down beneath her footstool lay the broken symbols of a faith then declared effete and passed away; just as half a century afterwards Comte declared theology passed away. Music sounded, incense smoked, Bishop Gobel, who assisted at a parody of sacred rites, wept tears of shame, but in fear and trembling he assisted. The object of this mad mockery of religion, this empire of heart over mind, this woman-worship, was to proclaim afresh Fraternity, Progress, Sociality. Sociality, for the supposed law of which final development Comte worshipped humanity and Clotilde--but disowned immortality and God.

These two madnesses, how near akin, how far apart were they? The world is not really made young by destroying old things; yet the path of 18th century madness lay through fire and blood. Its deeds are sometimes spoken of, even now, as great crimes; but no great crime is criminal in the sight of men whose life is godless, dark, and unsubstantial. Horrors pass before them like unrealities. "The world," writes Mercier on the trial of Louis XVI,--"The world is all an optical shadow." In our 19th century life, 'tis a skilfully prepared overshadowing, beneath which men beat their brows till their blood-shot eyes see red. "I see red," exclaimed Eugene Sue's ruffian, "and then I strike with the knife."[17]

Let me end by telling you a dream, which is not all a dream.

A company of _savans_ were seen in the visions of the night, busy with a new scientific invention. Earth, they argued, earth has her volcanoes, her burning exhalations; men have electric lights, fires, gas lamps, furnaces. These make up the world's proper illumination. The effect intended was, therefore, to darken the air we breathe, so that no rays from the upper sky should pass through it. The inventors hoped that a district, a country, nay, even a world, might thus be overshadowed by a gloom impervious to moon and stars by night, to sun by day; and the human eye see no changes, save those which the earth's activity, or human power and skill, might produce. Terrestrial and artificial alternations excepted, all was to be changeless as winter midnight--deep impenetrable darkness! It was seen slowly, very slowly, to descend. In thirty years the men of science hoped and purposed its perfection.

Did those who had previously known the beautiful light of heaven, who had bathed and basked in the life-giving sunbeam, feel happy, or even calm, when they saw their children and children's children robbed of celestial glory and gladness?

Yet there is one thing worse than a world without a sun--you know what I mean--Humanity without a GOD.

POSTSCRIPT.

The Lecturer purposely abstained from reading Professor Huxley's acute critique on Positivism until this Lecture had gone to press. He now strongly recommends his auditors to read No. viii. of the Lay Sermons.

Should any reader find difficulties in pages 23-25 of the foregoing Lecture, he will do well to peruse Littré's "Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive," chapter iii., particularly pp. 42, 43.

SCIENCE AND REVELATION.

BY THE VERY REVEREND

R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D.,

DEAN OF CANTERBURY; LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, OXFORD.

SCIENCE AND REVELATION.

The duty which has been imposed upon me to-day by the Christian Evidence Society is, I conceive, to state as clearly as I can, what is our ground for believing that a revelation is not only possible, but is a necessary part of the system of this world. As the programme further joins science and revelation, I conceive that I am debarred from any but a strictly scientific proof. We may reasonably infer the probability of a revelation from God's necessary attribute of love. We may ourselves feel morally sure that a creature, approaching so nearly to the spiritual world, and capable of so much good as is man, would not be left by his Maker in that miserable state of vice and misery in which we find ourselves. There are many good and weighty reasons for believing that God would give us a revelation, and that the Christian religion is God's revelation--reasons drawn from the nature of God, from the actual condition in which man is placed, and from the direct teachings of Holy Scripture--all these, like a cord of many threads that cannot easily be broken, serve to confirm the faith of the believer, but I must forego their use. In confining myself to what I conceive to be the strictly scientific basis of a revelation, I would, nevertheless, beg you to remember that the evidences of Christianity are cumulative. They cover a vast field, and it is in their united force that their strength lies. The very vastness of the field often invites attack. Some outlying work seems capable of overthrow. Some discovery in the domains of history, of philology, or of physical science, seems to provide new weapons for the assault. Possibly not all the arguments used in defence of Christianity will endure the test of close and accurate examination. Possibly, too, in our views of the nature of Christianity, and in our exegesis of the Scriptures, we have arrived only at partial truth, and do not distinguish with sufficient accuracy between what is certainly revealed, and what is nothing more that a possible explanation of the Divine word. There are, moreover, I will candidly confess, difficulties in the way of faith. However new may be the form of the attack, and however modern the materials which it uses, yet the strength of the attack lies in real difficulties, which are no new matter, but have ever lain deep in the minds of thoughtful men. I do not believe that belief is a thing easy of attainment, any more than virtue is. I believe that both are victories, gained by a struggle--gained over opposing forces.[173] But as certain as I am that this present state of things was intended to train man to virtue, though I cannot answer all the objections brought against the system of the world being exactly what it is, nor solve all the doubts and difficulties, moral and metaphysical, which surround us: so I am convinced, in spite of similar difficulties in the way of religion, that belief, and not unbelief, is the end at which man ought to aim. I believe that man was intended to attain to a higher and more perfect state than that in which he now finds himself, and that he can only attain to it by virtue and faith; but as the very value of these lies apparently in their being won by an effort, long and earnestly maintained, I am not surprised at the existence of difficulties, least of all of such difficulties as arise from our ignorance. Still belief would be unnecessarily[18] difficult,[174] and we may even say, morally impossible, if the sum of the arguments in defence of a revelation did not largely exceed the sum of the arguments against one. With these arguments I have to-day nothing to do. The evidences of Christianity, external and internal, will be treated of by others. My business is to show that a revelation was to be expected; that it was probable, or at all events possible, and, therefore, that the evidences of Christianity have a claim upon the consideration of every right thinking man. In showing that a revelation was to be expected, I shall at the same time show what is the exact position which it holds, and in what way revealed knowledge differs from all other knowledge, scientific and unscientific.

Now the argument which I shall use as my proof of the possibility of a revelation is simply this, that in the present system of things we find no being endowed with any faculties without there being also provided a proper field for their exercise, and a necessity imposed upon that being of using those faculties. In this statement I assume nothing. I do not assume that there is a God who made these beings. I do not assume that they were made or created; still less do I assume that they were intended to use their faculties. I put aside all theories of design and causation, not because I do not believe that they possess force, but because the actual facts which I see around me, or which I am taught by scientific men, are enough for my proof. The only thing which I assume is, that the laws of nature are universal; and I assume this simply because it will be readily granted me. The universality of nature's laws compels us to admit that a law which holds good in all known cases, will necessarily hold good in all cases whatsoever.

Our whole language is so essentially based upon religious ideas that it would be very difficult for me to use only neutral words. But in using religious words, I wish them to be understood in a neutral sense. If I speak of creatures, I mean only beings, things which exist now, or have existed. If I speak of them as endowed with faculties, I merely mean that they possess them. By nature, I mean simply the present state of things, whether designed by an intelligent mind, or a mere come-by-chance. I look simply around me at what is--or at all events appears to be--and I find myself in a world in which there is a very exact correspondence between the endowments and faculties of every existent being, and the state of things in which it happens to be.

So exact is this correspondence, that if you give Professor Owen a bone, he will tell you to what order of animals its owner belonged, what were its habits, the nature of its food, of its habitat, and mode of life. Nature works out this correspondence even to the most minute detail. By looking at the bone of a quadruped we can tell, not merely great things about it, but such trifles as which leg it used first in getting up from the ground. For nature is so undeviating that the outward habits, even in things of no apparent moment, correspond to the internal conformation.